Down and Out on Murder Mile (3 page)

Airports hold a
special sense of horror for me. They rank in my top five least favorite places in the world. They are especially awful if seven days ago you kicked heroin cold turkey in a shithole motel called the Deville—you and your junkie wife puking into the toilet, the sink, the shower, watching reruns of
The Golden Girls
and
Judge Judy,
curled into agonized balls in opposite corners of the room, masturbating and crying to pass the time.

 

Airports rank alongside the post-OD ride in an ambulance, pumped full of the Narcan that has ripped you from the mouth of endless white light and deposited you into that instant, chemically induced cold turkey so severe they had to strap you down to the gurney. Airports rank alongside the East LA crack house where, at seven in the morning when the money and the rock have
run out, you sat twitching with a bunch of coke-crazed lunatics, terrified to exit into the unforgiving LA sunlight and figure out just what the fuck you are gonna do now, hopelessly combing the filthy carpet for a rock of crack you are convinced you must have dropped earlier in the session.

 

I find airports THAT awful.

 

It's the brightness and the sterility of them. The way everyone looks so fucking STRAIGHT and HEALTHY, like they have never so much as experienced a minute as awful and degenerate as your last year has been. The insinuating way the airport security staff talks to you and look at you: like they KNOW you're up to something. It's almost like they think they are doing you a favor by letting you travel to another country. The unspoken question of “Why should we let a scumbag like YOU cross international borders?”

 

That edge of twitchy paranoia is increased a thousandfold when you feel as raw and as fucked up as I felt that day, preparing to return to London from Los Angeles. Out of options, we had decided to flee to England's friendlier climes. At least there we could receive treatment for our addiction. In the United States we were thrown to the lions: even the “free” methadone clinic on Hollywood Boulevard expected its clients to show up with twelve dollars a day, for each dose of methadone. When heroin is only seven dollars a bag downtown, and the clinic won't even provide enough methadone to keep you out of withdrawal…well, you can do the math. Susan's
mother was eager to see us leave the United States, even paid for our plane tickets. Susan and I were convinced the airport cops were gonna pounce on us before we even made it to the plane.

 

“There the bastards are!”
they'd yell.
“Trying to skip the country!”

 

They'd hold us down and read the litany of crimes: my being in the country illegally for over a year. Possession and use of controlled substances. Thousands of dollars in bounced checks, ripped bank accounts, unpaid rent. The $15,000 stolen from Susan's old job. Maybe they'd even show up with every heroin and crack dealer we still owed money to in LA, for a bit of summary street justice. That bill alone had to amount to tens of thousands of dollars—double, triple the amount worth killing us for. Holy fuck, the sweat was running off me as I handed my passport over. Dripping from my nose. Soaking through my shirt and onto the crumpled suit I wore in an attempt to look inconspicuous. Only the suit was red sharkskin and had dark bloodspots on the trousers from shooting up. I don't think it had ever been cleaned since I bought it, high on crack, a year ago. I was the most conspicuous person in the airport, almost comically noticeable.

 

“You have nothing on you,” I told myself. “Calm the fuck down.”

 

“But wait,”
my paranoia piped up.
“You packed in a hurry. What if you left something in your clothes by mistake? A balloon? A rock? An old syringe?
And do you really trust that junkie bitch? What if she slipped something in YOUR luggage? She's done dumber things! They have sniffer dogs…X-rays…. They'll bust you before you can get out. You'll never leave this fucking city. It WANTS you. In a crack house or in a prison cell; doesn't matter: it'll HAVE you.”

 

I bought a book waiting for our flight to be called. Why the fuck didn't we score some smack before we left? One balloon to make the flight bearable? Bullshit bravado, that's all it was. We were terminal fools. The book was a trashy paperback about—what else?—a couple who sinks into heroin addiction. I figured it would pass the eleven hours until I hit London.

 

We made it onto the plane. Right up until takeoff I expected the pigs to rush onto the plane and bundle us off. The pilot to announce:
“Ladies and gentlemen…do not panic. We have fugitives on board and they are about to be removed…. Do not interfere with the apprehension of the suspects.”

 

When the plane picked up speed on the runway I had the sense of the Devil itself chasing the jet, snarling and slobbering and snapping in frustration as we climbed just out of reach. The sky, though, provided no sanctuary from my toxic thoughts.

 

The fat American businessman next to me took up half of my seat as well as his own. Susan was anxiously looking out the window. Even with her hair washed and clean clothes on, she looked like
a junkie whore. Aw Jesus, I had to tell my parents that I was married again. This time to a fucking junkie! The crash from the cocaine was dwindling to a throbbing sleep-deprived headache and the relentless hum of post-heroin-withdrawal anguish was returning, as I knew it would.

 

Jesus, it was hot.

 

Aren't planes supposed to be air-conditioned? I tried to get comfortable but either hit Susan's bony elbow if I moved too far left or the businessman's hammy arm if I slithered too far to the right. My squirming and jostling for position was obviously irritating him. He stared at me, round and pink and disgusted for a moment, before returning his attention to some banal magazine aimed at men. Cars. Gadgets. Women with big tits and white smiles. A world as alien to me as that of ecosystems at the bottom of the ocean. I smelled. I smelled like a man who had been shitting and vomiting and sweating out the heroin for a week and cleaned himself quickly in the sink of a motel with a ratty-looking washcloth before he left for the airport. I smelled like a man whose last act before leaving that dark cave was to take one final hit from the pipe and watch his face carefully in the mirror as he exhaled plumes of white smoke, while a cab honked outside in the parking lot. A man who had vaguely considered just staying there and trying to rustle up more credit for crack, just stay in that room and just
be
. To simply wait until the cops or death came and put an end to the whole sorry mess.

 

He cleared his throat, irritated. The fat pig was irritated by my presence. This tub of fucking lard that was taking up half of my Goddamned seat with his flab—flab no doubt put on over expensive business lunches and good brandy—was irritated by me! Self-righteous anger bubbled up inside of me.

 

Who was the real monster? M or this self-important cocksucker? This businessman? This evil corporate dick-sucking bastard? WHO WAS THE REAL MONSTER?

 

Calm down. Breathe. You're crazy right now—you're sick. Keep it together. Order a drink and shut the fuck up for the next eleven hours. You need to make it home without getting arrested.

 

Suspended somewhere in the sky I sat in the tiny toilet and looked at myself. I looked as if I hadn't slept in years. I jerked off quickly and brutally—it was over in seconds, one of the odder effects of heroin withdrawal. The climax sent a small rush of serotonin to my brain, giving me relief for a few seconds at least. I knew in a few hours I was going to arrive at Manchester airport to see my parents for the first time in over a year. Then I was going to return to London in an attempt to somehow insinuate myself back into the music industry. Beyond that, I had planned nothing. Especially here, absurdly suspended in a toilet thousands of feet in the air, I knew the idea was ridiculous. I wondered vaguely how long it would be before I fucked up again.

 

Someone rapped on the door, agitated.

 

“How long you gonna be in there?”

 

I stood up and washed my hands.

 

“Not long,” I replied.

We hit London
with two thousand pounds and a bank account with an overdraft limit of a thousand. We had spent a few weeks in Blackburn with my parents trying to get ourselves oriented. The town was much as I remembered it when I left and never looked back at seventeen years old—small, dull, and entirely without charm. It was just another one of the increasingly ghettoized towns on the outskirts of Manchester that stagnated without any effective rail links to the big city to sustain any kind of cultural exchange. Life in Blackburn was insular and suspicious. The only entertainment on offer was a crumbling cinema in the center of town with four screens and sticky brown carpets from the mid-seventies and the endless succession of pubs and clubs in which the townsfolk drank and drank until they collapsed, vomiting, into the gutters.

 

The money came from my parents, who desperately wanted me to get on my feet. The first two days at my childhood house we were too sick and too depressed to talk to them. The shock of my sudden return, coupled with the appearance of a new wife, must have nearly killed them. They had a vague idea that I was using drugs, but when I staggered off the plane, still sick and unsteady and with a thirty-two-year-old wife—who looked at least ten years older—in tow, all of their worst fears must have been confirmed with interest. Susan at least made the effort to cover her track marks with makeup, but succeeded only in making herself look like a burn victim. I had to remind her to wear trousers or jeans at all times, because her legs were such a fucking mess. We both looked like the ideal “Just Say No” poster children.

 

Feigning jetlag, I slept the days away with the curtains drawn, emerging only to eat, stare at the television, and return to my room. Awake at three in the morning in the silent house, I fretted that I would never have the strength to emerge and talk to them. I stood at their door and listened to their frenzied whispers and my mother's stifled sobs. I also knew that I would eventually have to, in order to get back to London, where at least I would be granted the anonymity I so desperately needed right now. I crept down the stairs and into the darkened kitchen to get some water. I still felt like shit. I wondered vaguely if I could find some heroin in Blackburn. I had looked at the local paper, the
Lancashire Telegraph,
for stories on drugs and found mention of a few arrests
of heroin dealers. I knew then that it was around. But I also knew that in a town as parochial and shut off as this one I would have a hard time scoring from people I didn't know. Nobody just shows up in a place like Blackburn from out of town and tries to connect for drugs—they grow up here, stay here, work the same dead-end jobs for years here, and buy drugs from the same small-town, small-time drug dealers.

 

Rifling through the drawers in the kitchen I found one drawer full of various medicines. I had, of course, already made the medicine cabinet in the bathroom for drugs, but found nothing. Here too it looked like I would be similarly disappointed: nothing but a lot of over-the-counter remedies for everything from sleeplessness to upset stomachs. The few prescription bottles in there were mostly blood pressure related. Then I came across a plain white box with a green-and-white prescription label affixed dead center.

 

“Dihydrocodeine Tartrate,” the label read, “30 mg. Take one to two tablets for moderate to severe pain.”

 

They were meant for my father's arthritis. He had a phobia of doctors and medication though, and obviously had never even so much as opened the box. The label dated the pills to July 2000. All one hundred tablets where still encased in their foil blister packs.

 

“Thank you,” I whispered to the God who watches over junkies and fuckups.

 

I slept that night with the box under my pillow, feeling like a child with its favorite teddy bear. For once my sleep was relatively peaceful. The dreams still persisted, of course, how could they not? But when I jerked awake, I slid my hand under the pillow and felt the comforting smoothness of the box of tablets and was asleep again, almost instantly. I wondered about keeping the box a secret from Susan, but I knew that she would sniff out the fact that I was high immediately. Unfortunately I would have to split the drugs with her.

 

The next morning I was all business. I went downstairs and took my first three tablets with a cup of coffee. I was long enough off heroin that even 90 mg of dihydrocodeine—something that would previously not have even stopped my nose from running—now gave me a pleasant, woozy kind of high. I shaved, brushed my teeth, and showered for the first time since I had arrived in Blackburn. Then I set about the careful business of convincing my parents—and myself—that everything was all right, and that Susan and I needed to get to London to kick-start my ailing career. Of course, for the move I would need some kind of capital, a loan maybe, and then I could start getting it together and finally make them proud of me.

 

I could see it in their eyes:
He seems so happy. He seems at peace. He seems to have a plan.

 

Our flame-out in Los Angeles became the subject that dare not speak its name. I ran errands with my mother, had drinks with my father at the
barfly joint he hung out at every night at the end of their street, my jangling nerves coated with opiates. It was there I realized why I could never be anything but a junkie anymore.
It's only when I'm on opiates,
I reasoned,
that I know how to act like a normal human being. Like a normal son.

 

“Why don't you stay here for a while?” my father asked over his pint of bitter in the Stop and Rest, while around us the old drinkers coughed phlegmy coughs and smoked and laughed.

“There's nothing for me here, Dad,” I told him as gently as possible, “You know that.”

“I know,” he said sadly, “Sure there's nothing here for anybody….”

 

That was true. Looking around the pub, the smell of decay was palpable: the yellow-stained ceiling and walls, the faded and ruined 1960s carpeting, the single, lonely fruit machine, the air thick with smoke from cheap cigarettes. There was no attempt to create a pleasant atmosphere to drink in. This was a working-class drinker's pub, nothing here but alcohol and a smattering of other boozers. It was hard to say how a pub so small still managed to look so empty and so sad, but this place managed both of those things. It reminded me in atmosphere of the crack houses dotted around MacArthur Park that I once frequented—the same lonely, furtive atmosphere—the same sense that this was a place for achieving oblivion, nothing more.

 

The clientele was almost entirely male (apart from the pudgy, big-permed barmaid) and mostly
made up of cirrhotic old men. Even the young people who sometimes came in looked prematurely old—they looked worn out, ashen, and used up: ground down into premature agedness by lifetimes of boredom, booze, and drudgery. The smell of Sunday afternoons, gray skies, stifling hours dragging by in dusty sitting rooms and parlors. The place was a museum of soul-death by inertia.

 

Once I had secured the loan from my parents, I went to the bank to get an account. I figured that having been out of the country for so long and having no real credit history I'd be lucky to get a checkbook. However, when I was taken into the room to fill out the paperwork I lucked out and ended up with a young, hyperactive closet queen as my advisor. When he asked about my lack of a work history and I told him I had just returned from LA his eyes lit up.

 

“Oh,” he said, “I've always wanted to visit America. What were you doing over there?”

 

“Writing music videos.”

 

“Really?” he gasped, “How glamorous. Why on earth did you come back here?”

 

“Well,” I told him, “I wanted to get back into playing music. My old band was pretty big here but no one had heard of us in the States. So I decided to come back to where people remembered us. You remember the Catsuits?”

 

“Oh yeah—I have a few singles of theirs!”

 

“Well, that was my band.”

 

And that was all it took. I played the big music star returning from Los Angeles, and this idiot lapped it all up. It was that easy. Every time the computer flashed up LOAN RISK!!! in big flashing red letters he just muttered, “Okay, we can bypass this…” and clicked a button. In thirty minutes I had a checkbook and a bank card with an overdraft. I made up stories of seeing celebrities at fictitious restaurants in Beverly Hills and the poor sap bought it all. When I was done and the guy approved me, I walked over to the train station and bought a ticket for London Euston: it was that simple. I had a sense that once I hit the capital, everything would be all right. I popped some more painkillers and stopped at one of the dozens of bars dotted around the station to get a drink. Things were finally coming together.