Prayer

The dowser wand twitches. Junk is close.
(William Burroughs)

I’m swimming in alcohol and music. The function room is half full and a cover band plays a number by Babyshambles. People collect around flimsy tables, they mingle by the bar and extroverts twirl in front of the stage. But I don’t know anyone.

It’s more like a wedding reception than the gigs I’m used to. In the City strangers made love before they even knew a name. It was a cacophony of individualism to the point where conformity was the only rebellion left. Out here, the people have known each other since primary school.

I had gone to this tiny country town as part of a geographical cure. To get away from the City, the dealers and the glorious piss-stinking alleyways I scored in. Out here, I could reinvent myself as a human being without a serious drug problem. As the drink flowed and my lips loosened a familiar driver took the wheel, Dyou know where I can score ‘round here? I hear myself say.

There are probably a few smackheads living around here like woodlice under crumbling council houses. But penetrating that circle would be the work of weeks. The one dealer in a town like this would have watched the eyes of his clientele turn grey over many years. And anyway, I wouldn’t expect to find junkies here at a gig in a country hotel. More likely, they would be at home, nodding in solemn rhythm, a glowing cigarette caterpillared between their fingertips.

I sip another drink and enjoy the wooze and rush of alcohol. But underneath it, the pressure in my guts worsens. I spy the crowd and try to make out the telltale signs of drug use. I see drinkers, laughers, female screamers, footballers, rugby boys, young farmers but no disheveled junkie, no rambunctious cokehead, no sweating speed freak – just country folk boozing.

So I pray. I pray to the god of High. In my mind’s eye, I take the black hole in my guts and place it in the alter of my heart. The craving becames a black crystal ball and I shine my inner light through it like a distress call – a spiritual bat signal for drugs. The gods is soon here, let me score tonight, I say silently as the band finishes a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Fire.

Outside, cigarette smoke curls in the cool evening air. My consciousness clears a path through the jungle of alcohol as I talk to people. I’m not really sure what I am saying but I am convinced it is hilarious. Then I catch words coming out of my mouth, I hear certain people can get certain things in certain towns…I was too drunk for subtlety. The overweight farm replies, what doya want fella? At this point, I am too drunk for smack. The combination of alcohol and Heroin at this point would only lead to belly-wrenching sickness. So I go for the next best thing – Coke? I venture, yeh I’ll call him he says.

A delicious tremor tingles behind my skin – the coke powers my body into a dance. I am with the extroverts in front of the band – my arms flailing, body turning, bum wiggling. I dance to destroy the shell that separates me from others, me from the world. The dance is my ritual and the drugs are my sacrament. As I slow down, the guy approaches me and says into my ear, we’re going back to mine if ya want.

Smell of ammonia stings my nostrils. I am in a damp caravan with my new friends. The light is dim and the coke fizzles in a spoon. We sit around a plastic table on brown cushioned seats. I watch the cooking process. The coke is subliminated into crack and within minutes and I have the pipe to my lips and draw down the smoke that unfurls white flowers in the pipe.

Behind my eyes…dawn breaks over numbed lungs. The gods will take their toll. But for that moment… it was worth it.

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I am about to go away on a meditation retreat for two weeks so I will not be posting for a little while. Enter your email address in the box at the bottom of this page to be informed of each new post as soon as they happen.

Thanks for your support

xxx

Poem

You are the cross
tattooed on my wrist
and the smoke
that burns my throat.
You are the sting
in my stiches
and the neglect
in my faith.
You are the beautiful poison
and I am in waiting.
You say:
‘strike a match
and let’s make heaven’

Low Down in a Public Toilet

I retired to a public loo to do some coke. I had recently met a girl just as fucked up as me. It was a blessing to find someone else who was crazy about drugs. Our plan was to keep getting high until we run out.  We got a taxi to go meet my dealer in Barbican in Central London because he was threatening to go home (it was around 3am). Having grabbed more coke we got a taxi back to Hackney in East London where we had started. Earlier that evening I had introduced her to the wonders of smack and she had done the usual newbie trick of puking her guts up. Generally she seemed quite happy with the overall effect though.

I left her doing an awkward pole dance and briefly left the club to use the public toilet which was a short walk down a filthy and depraved side street. The toilets in the club had eagle-eyed toilent attenders employed. They demanded extortionate bribes if you wanted to use the cubicals for the only thing club toilet cubicals are good for and I couldn’t afford 20 quid every time I needed to sustain my giddy mania.

As I picked the wrap out of my pocket I dropped it. Swearing audibly, I looked down and noticed a caged floor. It had dropped through one of the holes into the ugly muck below. I tried to reach it with my fingers, I tried to reach it with my keys, I ended up pulling the fucking floor off the toilet. It came up with a rusty ‘screetch!’ I grabbed the wrap. It was soaked. Feeling like a newly orphaned Bambi, I scraped the coke mush off the wrap and put it in some foil to dry out.

I looked at the wrap. It didn’t look that dirty. I knew that coke dissolves very quickly in water and that wrap would have been soaked through with cocaine. I gagged it down, toilet water and all. After all, the acid in my stomach would kill anything on it right? Luckily I woke up the next morning with my usual feeling of depression and worthlessness. I reached for the brown lined foil as my dissapointed lover stirred gently.

You know the drill

@HeroinBlogger

Sharing Needles

After my last relapse I asked David to be my sponsor. In Narcotics Anonymous your ‘sponsor’ is another ex-addict who supports you and teaches you the way of the 12 Steps. Usually, the only qualification they have for this is religious fervor and prison time. David was five years clean which was something of a record in the group I attended. He was completely bald and had a face which looked like it belonged on the body of a much larger man. He spoke with a wide Mancunian accent and wore a green anorak and shorts all year around. David was one of the more stable members in a group of tracksuit trainwrecks that met every Wednesday night in the canteen of a homeless shelter. None of the homeless residents ever turned up no matter how loudly we bellowed the NA refrain, ‘keep coming back it works if you work it so work it you’re worth it!’ like a L’Oreal advert for smackheads.

In my short career at NA I had already gone through two sponsors. Both had ‘fired’ me for not being ‘serious’ about recovery. I disagreed. I wanted to get clean. I just hated being told what to do.12 Steppers like to believe that they give addicts a free choice whether to follow their path to recovery or not and, to be fair, they do. Except that choice tends to be ’12 Step Program or Insanity and Death’. This scared the shit out of me. So, driven by fear, I asked David to be sponsor number three.

After a couple of weeks he called me at home. I had a studio flat in a very cheap area of England which I paid for with my government support allowance. I had worked from the age of 13 so claiming benefits was something that was new to me. Rehab taught me that I could be happy without being high. It also taught me that I could collect free money and live in a free flat if I sent the benefits office a doctor’s note every six weeks which confirmed I was a smackhead and incapable of working. As I write, this system is being changed. And no wonder. My experience of the benefits system was that it supported the lifestyle it claimed to solve.

My flat was a tiny, dust-choked affair where the weak light of Northern England filtered through a row of bare trees outside my window. My laptop, which served as a TV and a phone, was placed on a cardboard box against a wall next to piles of homeless paperbacks. I couldn’t afford a hoover so my kitchen floor was a mess of crumbs. My flat was in a block of five. In our shared hallway and corridoors, behind closed doors, there lived one girl who looked like a Guinea Pig, a guy with agoraphobia, a slutty blonde, two Hungarians and a Bangladeshi man with depression. A mountain of junk mail and unopened final demands was piled by the shared front door. The hallway windows were touched with a sickly mildew. I saw David’s taxi cab pull into the car park from my first floor window and put the kettle on.

‘Alright Nathan let’s get started’ he said after I handed him his tea.

This time I was prepared to do what I was told. To make a real effort. I was not about to be fired by another sponsor. So I brightly produced my copy of  the ‘Big Book’ of Alcoholics Anonymous.

‘Right now follow me’ David said, ‘turn to page 568’.

Feeling uncomfortable already, I opened the book at the page. It was an appendix entitled ‘Spiritual Experience’. As we read it together David pointed out certain words to be highlighted and made me write phrases in the margin:

where the text read ‘…he can only be defeated by an attitude of intolerance and belligerent denial’

David had me write the words, ‘know it all attitude’.

I guess the point of this exercise was to clarify the message of the book. We read on.

Where the text read, ‘the essentials of recovery’ David had me write

‘ I’m a looser without them’.

At the bottom of the page, he told me to write the words

‘if I stay here, I will die’.

My skin shivered slightly. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to believe David and the message in the ‘Big Book’ but I couldn’t. I reacted automatically against the labels it forced on me; ‘alcoholic’, ‘addict’, ‘helpless’, ‘powerless’. Words have power. As a writer I know. Labels can change a person. I had never been alcoholic but I felt I was being turned into one. . Words can become a self-fulfilling prophesy and, while these labels might help some people, I found their effect detrimental to my confidence and self esteem.

Furthermore, I felt that I couldn’t voice this concerns to David. People who become AA or NA sponsors often have their own recovery on shaky ground. In some groups, if you are struggling to stay sober yourself, you are encouraed to become a sponsor as a way of helping yourself. So to question the program is to prize a finger from your sponsor’s own shaky hold on recovery. And David was my last shot at sponsorship. I didn’t want to loose him so I kept my mouth shut while my resentment did a little dance inside.

By the end of the session I had admitted that I was an alcoholic as well as a heroin user; that I was mentally and bodily abnormal and I had to follow the instructions in the book lest I die. I didn’t believe any of it. I had been told time often that my negative feelings to the 12 Steps was a result of denial. This troubled me. And in a triumph of cricular reasoning, I was told again that if I reacted against being labelled a powerless addict and alcoholic then this proved I was definitly a powerless addict and alcoholic.

I showed David from my flat. By now it was early evening and winter’s dark pervaded. I lived in a suburban area and inbetween the streetlamps, trees protruded. The air was cold. I had to get high. I needed to escape. I need to get away from the 12 Step Program and the terrifying thought that I would become a self-flagellating teller of woe like them. Or carry on like I was – a lonely young man hooked on smack. I couldn’t stand it. I hated the way the Big Book was written in turgid, pseudo-religious prose. I hated the 12 steppers for blindly accepting whatever they were told. I hated the fact that their main prescription is the terminally ineffable ‘spiritual experience’.

Outside my flat, in the hallway of my block, stood my bright blue mountain bike. It was full-suspension and rode with the soft click-click of well oiled gears. It was stolen. My smack contact in nearby Manchester had spotted it unlocked and pinched it. Later that day, as the crack I had bought him ran out, he sold it to me for 15 quid. Now I had run out of money and I needed someone to buy it from me. Cursing my short-sightedness I stepped around the latest deluge of junk mail and pulled open the front door.

I cycled around the deserted suburban maze. A fine rain hanging in the air. No one around. I saw a couple of people and skidded to a halt next to them on the dark road,

‘wanna buy a bike?’ I asked manically. They quickly declined.

Next time, I tried a bit of salesmanship, showing it off, explaining that it had 24 gears, V-brakes and a light aluminum frame. No luck. Even though I was selling it for at less than 10% of what it was worth, something must have spooked them. Maybe it was something to do with the unusual experience of a desperate man accosting them on a dark road demanding they immediately purchase an expensive mountain bike. It was a flawed plan.

By now my thirst for drugs had become a raging torrent that demanded satisfaction. Sobriety was not an option. I cycled to the train station and heaved my bike onto the next train to Manchester. The train was warm and old. My dim reflection stared back at me in the black window. I avoided eye contact.

I hit Manchester with anticipation in my stomach wallowing in the sights and smells of the city: car fumes and take away food, rich couples leaving the theatre, drunk students in cheap bars and a homeless man on one last hustle. I could feel heroin in the air. Through the dregs of the city centre, past hotels and under bypasses I cycled to where my contact lived.

He was much shorter than me and had the barreled ribs and rough features of a long time alcoholic/junky. Nowadays, the only way he could get a rush was from injecting crack straight into his groin. The groin is the last resort of a junky who has collapsed all their reachable veins. It is dangerous to inject there because if you miss the blue wire and hit the red one an explosive hemorrhage will kill you.

His flat was surprisingly neat and tidy. He lived alone and had been on methadone long enough to have a degree of stability in his life. The kitchen/living area had a couple of sofas, a coffee table and French windows. He had an excitable puppy which he constantly bawled at. The dog, Suzy, was now so used to being addressed at high volume that she didn’t respond to any command that wasn’t screamed at her.

‘Ah, seeya bought it back didya?’ he said, referring to the bike. His Irish accent was delivered at a speed designed to confuse and disorientate the listener. A trick of the crook. I listened extra carefully, picking out relevant information from his deluge of syllables.

‘Do you think they’ll swap it for a bag?’ I asked,

‘T’aint swapping nuthin less I tick ma rock from daman’ he replied fiddling with his mobile. The dealer picked up,

‘whasa crack?’ Bryan said, ‘ya couldna find a rock for me wouldya?’ the conversation was short and contained further incomprehensible promises and warnings until Bryan seemed satisfied.

‘Our man’s gotta bike forye’ he went on, looking over at me.

‘Ah it’s sound it is’ he said poking the bike with his foot

‘yeh, alrightthen see ya soon’ and hung up.

‘They’ll be doinit for ye’ he said ‘jus one bag mind’

I was relived and started getting impatient for the dealer’s arrival. We watched TV and I advised Bryan what phone to get. Suzy ran and jumped on and off my lap while Bryan shouted at her

‘down Suzy!’

It was with a degree of poignancy that I watched the hooded teenager take my big blue bike away with a smirk leaving in exchange a small bag of heroin.

The bag looked tiny. I usually smoked three times that amount. I bit the tight knot tearing the polyethylene wrap open with my teeth and tipped the brown powder onto a square of foil. I had made foil tube for sucking up the evaporating fumes while I was waiting for the dealer to arrive and it hung in my mouth like a silver cigarette. Three lungfulls later and I felt better. But it wasn’t enough. I needed complete oblivion, I wanted reality gone, blocked out for a good 24 hours. I couldn’t bare the thought of going through all this to get high and not getting high enough. It was a tease without full satisfaction. The rage was still inside me and was not going to get quenched with this shitty amount of gear. I looked around and called to Bryan,

‘Hey’

‘Wha?’

‘can you shoot me up?’

‘sure’ he replied.

No hesitation or moral wrangling or recommendations about ‘not going down this path’ he already had the needle ready.

‘That’s clean right?’ I said looking at the needle nervously

‘coursitis’ he replied absently, engrossed in cooking process. And I believed him because if I believed him, I would get high.

I examined the veins that lay beneath my virgin skin. I asked him for a tourniquet but he dismissed the idea saying I didn’t need one. I gave him my left arm, pale with blue lines running the length of it, Bryan took aim,

‘gotta be at 45 degree yusee’ he said, the painful insertion of the needle was deadened by the heroin I had already smoked

‘Then ya tilt it like this’ he went on before falling silent with concentration.

He expertly emptied the barrel into my arm. My mouth watered and a feeling oozed up my neck covering my head in a bath of infinite golden light; wooze and ecstacy. I half-sat, half-collapsed down;  gasping with pleasure.

‘Stay there fa 10 minutes makesure yalrioit’ Bryan said, returning his kit to the cupboard under the kitchen sink. That night I floated home, remembering little, in love with everything.

That was the only time I ever shared a needle and it was over a year later I got a call from a doctor telling me I had Hep C. I felt shipwrecked. My life is now part of the statistics they use to scare school children with. Now, when I register with a new doctor, instead of proudly ticking the ‘No’ box for every available health condition, I mark the box marked ‘Hepititus’; one bruised box on someone’s white medical form.

On Ruby Moon

‘Hard work good. Hard work fine. But first take care of head’
(Sublime – ‘Smoke Two Joints’)

I grew up in a very conservative area in England known as the ‘Home Counties’.
So called because these counties contain beautiful towns and villages near enough for people to commute to London.  Amid the little delis, boutiques and luxury car dealers there was a mysterious cave of a place called ‘Ruby Moon’.
It was a head shop.
I had never exeperienced anything like it before. It was the days when fresh magic mushrooms were legal and the caps I bought from them changed my life. What follows is a short tribute I wrote for their ‘Google Maps’ page:

Ruby Moon is an incense-smoked Aladdin’s Cave of status-quo destroying items and books.
Not so much as shop as an Oracle,a teacher of rebellion and mystery. A degree from the University of Ruby Moon is a degree in free-thinking.
When I was just another puffed-chest rich kid,it gave me a syntax through which I could express my dissatisfaction and alienation.It provided a language for my peers and I to express our growing contempt for the world of fast cars, big houses and fake tits.
It facilitated us to go through our own sexual and psychedelic revolution: teenagers tearing down the walls of government-issue reality and experiencing vibrancy and meaning beyond what brands you wear or how much money you have.
It fed the embryo of my future self so now I can look back with those images ringing in my mind as if they were yesterday and say, thank you Ruby Moon! You showed me the way to the rabbit hole.

Opportunities and Missed Buses

By Helen Belton, welsh-based landscape artist http://www.helenbelton.com/hb/home.html

The bay was vast and the tide was out. The flat sands glowed gold in the afternoon sun. Enormous cliffs bared like Dragons teeth surrounded us on all sides except where the blue-grey sea rushed at the shoreline.
Her in a Bikini, pale, English skin and long rosewood hair.
Me in navy swimming shorts.
It was late September in Wales and the weather was the warmest we had since July. And this Friday afternoon, when everyone else was at work, gave us a canvass to explore our lust and friendship. There were, perhaps, six other people on this square mile of sand. Each couple had a private cove.
Light blazed from wet sand in the heat-wobbled distance like Apollo’s own footprint and the air was heady with sea salt.
We lay near-naked and kissing curtained by rocks. My fingers probed indiscreetly, borrowing in-between her tight bikini and skin. She aroused me to a state of painful hardness and, more than once, I had to stop myself just as I was pulling aside the crotch of her bikini pants and about to throw all decency to the wind. There were other people around. They moved across the glare of sand in the distance like typed characters. A running dog was a semi-colon.
It ran a sentence out into the sea and bounded back out again, shaking semantics from its coat.
Inviting as the water seemed, it was cold enough to cause hyperventilation and, in prolonged exposure, death. She had challenged me to get in; splashing ahead of me and windmilling her arms in the spray. I went in as far as the tops of my thighs; my lower legs numbing as the soft sand squeezed into the gaps between my toes. And when I held her after that her skin felt as cold as refrigerated Coke.

We had walked back to the deserted country road and had been waiting at the ancient stone bus stop for the over an hour. I was bored, angry and afraid. I had never learned to drive and was sure she would be internally admonishing me for not being able to take us home quick enough.
She was going to get rid of me.
A man needs four wheels and a cock. We all know that. And here I was waiting for a bus that doesn’t turn up like a chump.
The best way I could express my insecurity was by getting angry at the absent bus, baring my teeth at the windy road and fading light. I walked over and studied the timetable again and again. She had tried to engage me in a game of ‘I Spy’ which I had found intensely annoying. It didn’t last long.
We spent time in silence.
Her sat on the dry concrete floor and me arranged on the waist-high wall by the entrance; my legs swinging aimlessly either side. She stood up, her svelte figure made an S shape from ankle to head; a wisp of sarong around her legs and a vest top,
‘Take your frustration out on me’, she said. I knew what she meant. I was excited and fearful at once.
Parting the curtain of my thoughts, I stepped towards her. I took her in a kiss,
placing one hand protectively around the back of her head and shoving her against the cold stone wall. I pulled aside her skirt and eased my cock inside her. My frustration was a swell in my testicles and a wave at the base of my cock. I moaned, pulled out of her, gasped and shot ejaculate up the wall of the shelter
just as the bus passed by with an old lady, her mouth making a perfect ‘O’ shape, staring at us from the inside of the last bus home.

Transformation in London

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
(Dylan Thomas)

Antipation

The code to the combination lock on the customer toilet door is given to customers only. It is printed on the bottom of their receipts for coffee. It is not regenerated daily or weekly for that matter. The message is clear, if want to fix in our toilet you’d better have a good memory or buy some coffee first. Too wasted to remember the code? To broke to buy coffee? Denied. I wait for my dealer’s ’15 minutes’ to be up drinking coffee and drafting lines to pass the time. My anticipation is aimless and frantic like a lost dog trailing a limp lead. At the table ahead of me curly-haired men murmur foreign words in the space above their empty espresso cups. Probably Turkish. The background noise of the busy coffee house suddenly gets overpowering. I had forgotten I was ill with a fever. Sweat on my pale brow. That was actually today’s excuse for getting high, so I can feel better. I watch a non-paying customer enter the toilets with the waitress keying in the code for her. A mild sense of indignation arises, passes. Outside nimble police cars shoot by wailing neon blue. I hope they are not on their way to intercept my drugs. The song from Intervention twangs through the coffee shop stereo. I call my dealer and his phone is off. My coffee tastes bitter. I am so close. I pray silently to the patron saint of smackheads. There is always the chance he has failed to score and turned his phone off rather than have to tell his addled clientele there will be no drugs tonight. It’s happened before. I call back and he answers. Relief. 10 minutes later I re-enter the coffee shop holding my drugs like a child holds onto a balloon on a windy day. The toilet code is on my receipt. I key in the code. Engaged. The constipated bitch occupying the toilet incurs wrathful thoughts. I sit and wait for her to be done. I notice an empty cooker, soiled filter and needle packet on the floor of the cubical when I enter. Says it all really.

High

On my way home I draft these lines – my consciousness fraying and unraveling. My handwriting seems much nicer now. On my way to my connecting train a pretty Somali woman (there is no other type) drops her shopping bag. I swoop in and return it to her grasp. She returns my smile. I sit in the last carriage which tends to be the emptiest. The worst carriages on the London Underground are the ones that are empty when you get on but are the nearest to the entrance to the platform. So every late-comer rushes straight into the nearest carriage so as not to miss the train. ‘The Running Carriage’ is always disproportionately full. I remove my coat and bag and place them on the empty seat next to me hoping the train does not get busy enough to render that decision unjustifiable. The train’s heating is powered to offset a much harsher climate than this mild evening. I relax and itch – a side effect of the H. Apart from the scratching not a lot betrays my illegal state of mind, just another Leisure Pirate riding a train, happy to write everything and nothing. Through my pleasure-fogged head I notice a pair of shoes to my left; slightly high-heeled, light purple with glitter, tanned skin above a small ribbon above a pointed toe. Her face is hidden by a partition so all I see is a slim body leaning backwards. A whisper of lust passes through my groin. I fantasize about showing her these lines and her falling in love with me. On my right a man answers his phone with a short burst of foreign syllables like machine gun fire. My pen-hand starts to ache but I love my sullen art – ah, who could ever name it better? I am not looking forward to returning home. I am bound to end up smoking crack which I will cook from the baggy of coke in my draw. But that will be then. In the meantime I have the simple joy of writing words, watching rush-hour suits, hooded youth and newspaper rustlers. Cruel, sweet London passing by.

 

Like a Wet Spongecake

I spent months in a dream chasing brown trails across a foil landscape while my life collapsed like a wet spongecake. My days repeated in monochrome. Each following the same formula: wake up, go score, come home, try and take a shit, fail, take more drugs, squint at a computer screen, eat bags and bags of sweets, take more smack, possibly some crack, regret taking the crack, go out, score again, come home, go to bed, sleep 3 hours, wake up, stumble around the house, swat imaginary demons, go back to sleep, wake up. Repeat. In the beginning this wide range of activity happened around my professional life. But soon my professional life began to disappear into the drug-fug twilight. I did have a job – quite a good job – and the majority of my work was done at home. It was a smackhead’s dream really. In the mornings, when I was least fucked, I managed to get a report together and email it to my boss. I could then spend the remains of the day engaged in the activities listed above. And when my boss needed me in person, I would cut down my heroin intake, shave and possibly switch to less powerful alternatives: Buprenorphine, Codeine. That said, it wasn’t always easy. A lot of my engagements were in Edinburgh. Which was unfortunate because you can switch the name ‘Edinburgh’ with ‘Junky Central’ without too much factual inaccuracy. And I had an expense account. The temptation to hang a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on my hotel door, recline in a bath and suck up trails of stupefying vapor was too much. Not to knock Edinburgh, it’s a beautiful city, but I did manage to score within half an hour of stepping out of my hotel.

My professional life was always on thin ice. My employers didn’t know about my addiction and my work hovered at the ‘just barely adequate’ level. People were starting to use the word ‘concerned’ around me a lot. The word haunted my exchanges like Banquo’s ghost – a reminder of all the false expense claims and stolen time. They were ‘concerned’ about the standard of my work, ‘concerned’ about my appearance, ‘concerned’ about my diet (as if  subsisting entirely on sugar was a bad thing). In Edinburgh, I unpacked my suits and shirts in a wood-paneled hotel room. I scored from a homeless man called John. I had trouble sleeping properly. Apparently, regular smack-induced comas don’t count as sleep. The next day, at work, I struggled in a barely real world. The corporate world is quite unreal anyway. A weird dystopia where motivational slogans hang on the walls and the empty hallways are haunted by things called ‘appraisals’. That afternoon my boss and I had a meeting with the CEO. We walked into the executive suite: glass-paneled rooms and beautiful secretaries – men in rude health and expensive suits. The CEO gave me a bonecrushing handshake and he and my boss sat down to business. I took a seat in the corner of the spacious office to take notes.  My eyes started to cross, pupils drawn to some ocular Mecca in the internal corner of each eye. My eye muscles seemed to be mostly involuntary. I somehow pulled my pupils back to centre. And then the retreat would begin again. It was a loosing battle but I battled on gamely. Then my lids joined in: slowly traveling downwards, blurring all in their path. I pulled them back – my eyes wide open. Rather then capturing the thoughts of leaders of industry I now looked like I was watching some particularly exotic porn. And then, finally, like a sinking ship, they closed and I fully nodded out. My head hung low, one spider’s thread of drool making its way towards my French Connection suit, hands dead on the keyboard, my curser tearing across the screen leaving a single line in its wake: mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
I jerked awake, wiped my mouth and started typing again. How long was I out for? They were still talking. Thank God they were still talking. Everything seemed normal. The big swinging dicks continued to swing and I continued to make notes, poorly. To this day I don’t know if anyone noticed. Some things are not worth knowing.

Smoking

I pick my cup off the garden table. The coffee smells rich and strong. I sip it, feeling the caffeine start to power-up my nervous system. Replacing it, I gently crumble sleep from each eyelash, blinking. The neighbor’s dog trots into our garden, looking for a morning toilet. I growl aggressivley. It jumps, yelps and flees back through the hole in the fence. Crystal blue sky, cool air and autumnal smells. Leaves, sweet with decay, have started to litter the grass. Cigarette smoke unclenches in the morning stillness just like it did every school day at the bus stop. I entered adulthood with dissident lungs and a 20-a-day habit. Years of cigarette butts squashed underneath the soles of my Converse. The  taste of tabacco turns my mouth stale. I consider brushing my teeth. Must remember to buy mints. It’s about 10 degrees out here and it looks like this is as warm as today is going to get. Summer is on the turn

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