Authors: Phil Shoenfelt
Being an addict in London was a far more mundane and depressing business. For a start, there were no real drug-dealing zones as such — maybe the Frontline in Brixton, and some areas of West London, but it just wasn’t the same. The street dealers in these places sold marijuana, maybe a little cocaine, but that was about it. If you wanted to score some smack, it was a case of having a personal connection, telephoning first to make an appointment, then going around to the dealer’s flat to make the transaction in the safe and pleasant surroundings of the lounge or kitchen. On the face of it, this was all very civilised, and terribly English, but in reality it was a pain in the arse and there was always some hitch or complication to slow things down. Typically, you would phone a dealer to see if anything was happening, and if the answer was in the affirmative, then you and your money would be invited to visit the residence, usually a flat on some crumbling and God-forsaken council estate in Camden Town or King’s Cross. On arrival, you would notice with sinking heart that there were several other disgruntled characters sitting around — smoking, reading newspapers, drinking cups of tea — and you would realise that, yes, once again, you were part of some fucking pyramid deal: the owner of the flat was, in reality, fresh out of drugs, and was merely waiting for a sufficient number of cash-bearing customers to arrive. He or she could then go off with a sizeable amount of money to another dealer’s house, buy in quantity and cream enough off the top to stay high for a week. Many of these small-time dealers I knew were single or divorced women with
children. As the hunt for drugs usually involved one or more taxi rides across the sprawling expanse of London (quite often, the small pyramid deal would evolve into a larger pyramid deal), and as these women didn’t get out very much, I often found myself called upon to act as babysitter for one or more weeping infants, while the mother disappeared for anything up to eight hours at a time. I can think of many things worse, but few more depressing, than being cooped up in some damp, garishly painted council flat along with a couple of screaming kids and five or six other dopesick characters. Breathing air thick with perspiration and cigarette smoke, listening in vain for a returning taxi, you live in hope that every footstep on the stairs heralds the return of the dealer and deliverance from this intolerable sense of time suspended, the endless and futile wait for salvation that is the essence of junkie life.
The people I would meet in these places didn’t interest me either. Usually clerks, civil servants and secretaries who hated their jobs and their lives, they were totally different from the hyped-up, vivid characters I’d hung around with in New York. With these people, it was a case of: come home from work each day, cop, then nod out in front of the
TV
with the wife and kids, the smack being just a way of further numbing an already numbed existence. I hated everything they stood for and everything about them, I wanted nothing of their ghost world and ghost existences, and eventually I decided upon a drastic, but worthy, course of action: I would kick drugs once and for all, clean myself up, get a good and personally rewarding job and (impressed as she would be with this new-born paragon of civic virtue) win back the favours of my wife, who had kicked the habit months previously and was now living with someone else.
Fired with this vision of myself as Regular Guy, I went cold turkey and was over the worst of it in eight days. I stayed clear of methadone, or any other palliatives, as these just prolong the process and make relapse more likely; and besides,
in typical junkie fashion, I was now just as obsessive and extreme about being free of drugs as I had previously been about getting the maximum amount of them into my system. It’s a curious thing, this junkie mentality, this ability to become neurotic and extreme about almost anything. Many ex-addicts find religion, or compulsive sex, or become incredibly ruthless and successful businessmen, transferring their single-minded, obsessive energies away from drugs into some new and apparently unrelated area. I have known ex-users who can’t walk past a pub without making the sign of the Holy Cross, and who regard cigarette-smokers as social reprobates who need to be made aware of their hopeless addiction. In fact, you tend to see everything afterwards in terms of addiction whether it be food, drink, sex, money, work, material possessions, sport, love — ultimately, life itself.
Most junkies I have known seem to suffer from a very fluid sense of personal identity, too, often verging on the schizophrenic: there is something fractured in them, something not quite solid. Maybe you see and feel too much; maybe not enough; maybe it is born into you, genetic; maybe it is acquired. Whatever the case, you are always acting out roles, or putting on a front, and you are far more acutely aware than most people of the transient, shifting nature of character and personality. The contrast between the snivelling, cowed, frightened, sick junkie and the one who has just taken a shot is quite amazing to behold, and it is this psychological aspect of addiction that is most difficult to come to terms with when kicking. The physical effects of withdrawal, unpleasant as they may be, are limited and finite, and in their most extreme manifestations they only last for a period of seven to ten days, even though it may seem an eternity at the time. When the sickness has left your body, though, you still have to cope with the all-pervasive feeling of low self-respect, even self-loathing, that got you into the mess in the first place. You have to build up
a whole new existence, fuse the free-floating atoms of your personality into something tangible and strong, find hope and purpose in a life that is even more overwhelming and alienating now that you have been divested of the security blanket of heroin. Suddenly, you are out of this artificial womb, and up to your neck in ice-cold water, with every cell in your body screaming, “but I don’t want to wake up!” And there are no more little rewards, either: after years of drug-taking, your system will have accustomed itself to expect compensation for every little trouble or difficulty you have experienced during that day, and learning to live without this system of pain and recompense is one of the hardest things about staying clean. You are like a baby whose sweets have been taken, you always feel cheated and empty somehow, that something which was yours has been cruelly snatched away — addiction being, in any case, a puerile state, a kind of regression to infancy.
Gone, too, is the sense of excitement, the anticipation of escaping from the boring world of everyday existence into a totally sensual state — which is, I suppose, the junkie’s compensation for never being satisfied, for the feeling that none of life’s accepted pleasures are ever enough, and that really, there has to be something more. Looking always for some kind of self-transcendence, and unable to control the restless, nervous energy that runs like fire-water through your veins, you soon discover that heroin enables you to ride this energy like a wave — to control and ride it up to heights of self-love, aggrandizement and inner calm that you could never hope to attain in any other way. When all this has gone, somehow you have to trick yourself into believing in life again, into working in mundane ways towards objectives that you are not even sure are worth reaching in the first place. Maybe, after all, you see too far ahead, are too aware of the ultimate utter hopelessness of it all and of the proximate whirling vortex of black space that presses in from all sides, reducing human concerns and endeavours to an absolute nadir of insignificance.
• • •
I soon discovered that my opportunities for employment were strictly limited, possessing as I did no recent qualifications or training. In truth, I had no real burning desire to become the solid citizen, and in my heart I was as alienated from the system, and all it entailed, as I ever was. I was trying to change my life for all the wrong reasons, for some strange notion of atonement and contrition for past sins, when really I was still drawn to the seedy and exciting side of life, to the fuck-ups, sleaze-bags and outcasts who would never fit in. And although my wife applauded my efforts, it was with the disengaged enthusiasm of a teacher encouraging a backward child, hardly the ecstatic and welcoming return that I had hoped for. She felt that she had moved on in her life, now, and saw me as part of her past with that mixture of rancour, indulgence and pity that women reserve for men who have blown every last chance that was given to them in a relationship, and are now suffering the consequences. I was alone and adrift in the cold, unwelcoming world, but at least — as I repeatedly told myself — I was clean.
I managed to get a job in a factory, folding T-shirts and doing conveyor belt work, and stayed there for over a year, almost managing to convince myself that I was happy. I would get up at 6:30 a.m. each day, shower, eat breakfast and walk the mile and a half to work, where I would slave until six or seven in the evening, catching the freshly-printed T-shirts as they came out of the drier. This could be dangerous work. Periodically, the mechanism driving the conveyor belt would break down, and the T-shirts stuck inside the drier would burst into flames as they over-heated. This, in turn, would lead to a fireball which would shoot down the length of the immobilised conveyor belt and explode in your face, if you didn’t know the idiosyncrasies of the machine, or weren’t paying attention. In fact, some of the
old hands at the factory were not averse to switching off the machine in mid-cycle, when some new and inexperienced employee was on the other end, just to see how quickly he would react, and for their own amusement — it was that type of place.
At the end of each day I would be exhausted, my clothes drenched with sweat from the intolerable heat in the place, and I couldn’t get the smell of the dyes they used out of my nostrils. But in spite of all this, I felt good: I was paying my own way at last, and I wasn’t dependant on someone else’s weakness or stupidity to get the money I needed to live. It was also an incredible relief not to wake up sick each day and straightaway have to start thinking about how to get money for that first shot. (I was never able to save anything from the previous day for my wake-up fix, although I have known several disciplined junkies who were able to do this. As long as there was smack anywhere in the house, I just had to do it, compulsively and obsessively, until it was all gone.)
I began to regain a little of my self-respect. Somehow, it felt good to be working at such a boring job, to get up in the morning at roughly the same time as the millions of other lost souls across the grey, concrete expanse of London, and to do the kind of pointless, repetitive work that I had previously tried to avoid at all costs. I even went so far as to take a perverse delight in it, and this being mistakenly interpreted by the boss as enthusiasm on my part, I was soon taken off the infernal drier and promoted to the position of company van driver. This involved delivering boxes of T-shirts to all the far-flung corners of the city, even to environs beyond, and it meant that I got out of the factory for hours at a time. It was a positive pleasure to ride around the city on a warm summer’s day, with the windows down and the tape-deck blaring, ogling the pretty girls on the street and generally acting the part of the happy idiot: three square meals a day, money in my pocket and the possibility
of further promotion (Line Manager? Clerk In Charge Of Dispatches?) in the not-too-distant future.
As I said, this happy state of affairs lasted for a little over a year. Yet each night I would return to my lonely attic room where the emptiness of my existence would overwhelm me so completely that I began to entertain morose thoughts of suicide and death. I became introverted and nervous, and soon the only way I could deal with the loneliness was to drink myself into a state of oblivion every night, aided by liberal doses of downers and tranquilisers such as Temazipan and Rohypnol. I listened obsessively to dark, depressive music and read a lot of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and gradually these claustrophobic images took over my nights as I wallowed in a maudlin morass of drunken self-pity and endless self-examination. Sure, I had kicked the habit and was off the hard stuff at least, but the emptiness, the weakness, in other words the sickness, was still there at the root of my being, eating away and poisoning my soul until I didn’t know if there was any way that I could change this state of affairs. It’s the hardest thing in the world to change aspects of yourself that have become distorted and twisted after years of bad living, that in some cases go back to childhood, maybe even the womb. To paraphrase an old Zen proverb, it’s like trying to scratch the back of your hand with the fingers of that same hand, and it became obvious to me that, clean of smack as I might be, nothing inside had really changed at all. I was as empty and bereft of direction as ever, still at the mercy of self-destructive urges that I failed to comprehend or control.
(Looking back, though, I don’t regret these “lost” years of drug addiction at all. I believe that in my particular case, and for a variety of reasons, they were somehow necessary. My nature was in such a state of turmoil and inner chaos, dating from my early years, and in such a state of unconscious and unrecognised pain, that my first encounter with the drug was
something like a religious experience: all my troubles and self-doubt fell away, as if by magic, and I experienced a sensation of calm, visceral warmth, an inner wholeness that I had never felt before. Of course, this sensation only lasts for a short time, the first couple of months of daily use at the most. After this, addiction with all its attendant woes rapidly closes in, and every problem you thought you had before becomes magnified a hundred times. Being addicted to heroin for so many years, with all the things that this particular vocation involves, is like seeing yourself under a microscope: you are forced to confront the weakest, most unpleasant aspects of yourself (and of others), and you become highly aware of all the mental strategies and self-evasions that most people are either unconscious of, or take for granted as part of so-called Human Nature. After years of heroin abuse, you either die or something changes in you, seemingly of its own accord, and you pull out of this spin, taking with you a level of self-knowledge that in other circumstances might take a lifetime to achieve. It’s like a sickness that you inoculate yourself with in order to kill the sickness that was already there, and it is for this reason, and not only out of perversity, that I can say I am grateful to heroin — though of course, I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone.)