Miskatonic Biscuits One - At The Mountains Of Madness

At the Mountains of Madness By H. P. Lovecraft

  I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic—with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-cap—and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left. The hitherto withheld photographs, both ordinary and aërial, will count in my favour; for they are damnably vivid and graphic. Still, they will be doubted because of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried. The ink drawings, of course, will be jeered at as obvious impostures; notwithstanding a strangeness of technique which art experts ought to remark and puzzle over.

      In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific leaders who have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of thought to weigh my data on its own hideously convincing merits or in the light of certain primordial and highly baffling myth-cycles; and on the other hand, sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in general from any rash and overambitiousprogramme in the region of those mountains of madness. It is an unfortunate fact that relatively obscure men like myself and my associates, connected only with a small university, have little chance of making an impression where matters of a wildly bizarre or highly controversial nature are concerned.
      It is further against us that we are not, in the strictest sense, specialists in the fields which came primarily to be concerned. As a geologist my object in leading the Miskatonic University Expedition was wholly that of securing deep-level specimens of rock and soil from various parts of the antarctic continent, aided by the remarkable drill devised by Prof. Frank H. Pabodie of our engineering department. I had no wish to be a pioneer in any other field than this; but I did hope that the use of this new mechanical appliance at different points along previously explored paths would bring to light materials of a sort hitherto unreached by the ordinary methods of collection. Pabodie’s drilling apparatus, as the public already knows from our reports, was unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity to combine the ordinary artesian drill principle with the principle of the small circular rock drill in such a way as to cope quickly with strata of varying hardness. Steel head, jointed rods, gasoline motor, collapsible wooden derrick, dynamiting paraphernalia, cording, rubbish-removal auger, and sectional piping for bores five inches wide and up to 1000 feet deep all formed, with needed accessories, no greater load than three seven-dog sledges could carry; this being made possible by the clever aluminum alloy of which most of the metal objects were fashioned. Four large Dornier aëroplanes, designed especially for the tremendous altitude flying necessary on the antarctic plateau and with added fuel-warming and quick-starting devices worked out by Pabodie, could transport our entire expedition from a base at the edge of the great ice barrier to various suitable inland points, and from these points a sufficient quota of dogs would serve us.
      We planned to cover as great an area as one antarctic season—or longer, if absolutely necessary—would permit, operating mostly in the mountain-ranges and on the plateau south of Ross Sea; regions explored in varying degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, and Byrd. With frequent changes of camp, made by aëroplane and involving distances great enough to be of geological significance, we expected to unearth a quite unprecedented amount of material; especially in the pre-Cambrian strata of which so narrow a range of antarctic specimens had previously been secured. We wished also to obtain as great as possible a variety of the upper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life-history of this bleak realm of ice and death is of the highest importance to our knowledge of the earth’s past. That the antarctic continent was once temperate and even tropical, with a teeming vegetable and animal life of which the lichens, marine fauna, arachnida, and penguins of the northern edge are the only survivals, is a matter of common information; and we hoped to expand that information in variety, accuracy, and detail. When a simple boring revealed fossiliferous signs, we would enlarge the aperture by blasting in order to get specimens of suitable size and condition.
      Our borings, of varying depth according to the promise held out by the upper soil or rock, were to be confined to exposed or nearly exposed land surfaces—these inevitably being slopes and ridges because of the mile or two-mile thickness of solid ice overlying the lower levels. We could not afford to waste drilling depth on any considerable amount of mere glaciation, though Pabodie had worked out a plan for sinking copper electrodes in thick clusters of borings and melting off limited areas of ice with current from a gasoline-driven dynamo. It is this plan—which we could not put into effect except experimentally on an expedition such as ours—that the coming Starkweather-Moore Expedition proposes to follow despite the warnings I have issued since our return from the antarctic.
      The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our frequent wireless reports to theArkham Advertiser and Associated Press, and through the later articles of Pabodie and myself. We consisted of four men from the University—Pabodie, Lake of the biology department, Atwood of the physics department (also a meteorologist), and I representing geology and having nominal command—besides sixteen assistants; seven graduate students from Miskatonic and nine skilled mechanics. Of these sixteen, twelve were qualified aëroplane pilots, all but two of whom were competent wireless operators. Eight of them understood navigation with compass and sextant, as did Pabodie, Atwood, and I. In addition, of course, our two ships—wooden ex-whalers, reinforced for ice conditions and having auxiliary steam—were fully manned. The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, aided by a few special contributions, financed the expedition; hence our preparations were extremely thorough despite the absence of great publicity. The dogs, sledges, machines, camp materials, and unassembled parts of our five planes were delivered in Boston, and there our ships were loaded. We were marvellously well-equipped for our specific purposes, and in all matters pertaining to supplies, regimen, transportation, and camp construction we profited by the excellent example of our many recent and exceptionally brilliant predecessors. It was the unusual number and fame of these predecessors which made our own expedition—ample though it was—so little noticed by the world at large.

 As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbour on September 2, 1930; taking a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama Canal, and stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania, at which latter place we took on final supplies. None of our exploring party had ever been in the polar regions before, hence we all relied greatly on our ship captains—J. B. Douglas, commanding the brig Arkham, and serving as commander of the sea party, and Georg Thorfinnssen, commanding the barque Miskatonic—both veteran whalers in antarctic waters. As we left the inhabited world behind the sun sank lower and lower in the north, and stayed longer and longer above the horizon each day. At about 62° South Latitude we sighted our first icebergs—table-like objects with vertical sides—and just before reaching the Antarctic Circle, which we crossed on October 20 with appropriately quaint ceremonies, we were considerably troubled with field ice. The falling temperature bothered me considerably after our long voyage through the tropics, but I tried to brace up for the worse rigours to come. On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly vivid mirage—the first I had ever seen—in which distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.
      Pushing through the ice, which was fortunately neither extensive nor thickly packed, we regained open water at South Latitude 67°, East Longitude 175°. On the morning of October 26 a strong “land blink” appeared on the south, and before noon we all felt a thrill of excitement at beholding a vast, lofty, and snow-clad mountain chain which opened out and covered the whole vista ahead. At last we had encountered an outpost of the great unknown continent and its cryptic world of frozen death. These peaks were obviously the Admiralty Range discovered by Ross, and it would now be our task to round Cape Adare and sail down the east coast of Victoria Land to our contemplated base on the shore of McMurdo Sound at the foot of the volcano Erebus in South Latitude 77° 9'.
      The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring, great barren peaks of mystery looming up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the still lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope. Through the desolate summits swept raging intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry, later on, that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library.
      On the seventh of November, sight of the westward range having been temporarily lost, we passed Franklin Island; and the next day descried the cones of Mts. Erebus and Terror on Ross Island ahead, with the long line of the Parry Mountains beyond. There now stretched off to the east the low, white line of the great ice barrier; rising perpendicularly to a height of 200 feet like the rocky cliffs of Quebec, and marking the end of southward navigation. In the afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound and stood off the coast in the lee of smoking Mt. Erebus. The scoriac peak towered up some 12,700 feet against the eastern sky, like a Japanese print of the sacred Fujiyama; while beyond it rose the white, ghost-like height of Mt. Terror, 10,900 feet in altitude, and now extinct as a volcano. Puffs of smoke from Erebus came intermittently, and one of the graduate assistants—a brilliant young fellow named Danforth—pointed out what looked like lava on the snowy slope; remarking that this mountain, discovered in 1840, had undoubtedly been the source of Poe’s image when he wrote seven years later of

“—the lavas that restlessly roll Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek       In the ultimate climes of the pole— That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek       In the realms of the boreal pole.”

Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked a good deal of Poe. I was interested myself because of the antarctic scene of Poe’s only long story—the disturbing and enigmaticalArthur Gordon Pym. On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the background, myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins; while many fat seals were visible on the water, swimming or sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice.
      Using small boats, we effected a difficult landing on Ross Island shortly after midnight on the morning of the 9th, carrying a line of cable from each of the ships and preparing to unload supplies by means of a breeches-buoy arrangement. Our sensations on first treading antarctic soil were poignant and complex, even though at this particular point the Scott and Shackleton expeditions had preceded us. Our camp on the frozen shore below the volcano’s slope was only a provisional one; headquarters being kept aboard the Arkham. We landed all our drilling apparatus, dogs, sledges, tents, provisions, gasoline tanks, experimental ice-melting outfit, cameras both ordinary and aërial, aëroplane parts, and other accessories, including three small portable wireless outfits (besides those in the planes) capable of communicating with the Arkham’s large outfit from any part of the antarctic continent that we would be likely to visit. The ship’s outfit, communicating with the outside world, was to convey press reports to the Arkham Advertiser’s powerful wireless station on Kingsport Head, Mass. We hoped to complete our work during a single antarctic summer; but if this proved impossible we would winter on the Arkham, sending the Miskatonic north before the freezing of the ice for another summer’s supplies.
      I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about our early work: of our ascent of Mt. Erebus; our successful mineral borings at several points on Ross Island and the singular speed with which Pabodie’s apparatus accomplished them, even through solid rock layers; our provisional test of the small ice-melting equipment; our perilous ascent of the great barrier with sledges and supplies; and our final assembling of five huge aëroplanes at the camp atop the barrier. The health of our land party—twenty men and 55 Alaskan sledge dogs—was remarkable, though of course we had so far encountered no really destructive temperatures or windstorms. For the most part, the thermometer varied between zero and 20° or 25° above, and our experience with New England winters had accustomed us to rigours of this sort. The barrier camp was semi-permanent, and destined to be a storage cache for gasoline, provisions, dynamite, and other supplies. Only four of our planes were needed to carry the actual exploring material, the fifth being left with a pilot and two men from the ships at the storage cache to form a means of reaching us from the Arkham in case all our exploring planes were lost. Later, when not using all the other planes for moving apparatus, we would employ one or two in a shuttle transportation service between this cache and another permanent base on the great plateau from 600 to 700 miles southward, beyond Beardmore Glacier. Despite the almost unanimous accounts of appalling winds and tempests that pour down from the plateau, we determined to dispense with intermediate bases; taking our chances in the interest of economy and probable efficiency.

 Wireless reports have spoken of the breath-taking four-hour non-stop flight of our squadron on November 21 over the lofty shelf ice, with vast peaks rising on the west, and the unfathomed silences echoing to the sound of our engines. Wind troubled us only moderately, and our radio compasses helped us through the one opaque fog we encountered. When the vast rise loomed ahead, between Latitudes 83° and 84°, we knew we had reached Beardmore Glacier, the largest valley glacier in the world, and that the frozen sea was now giving place to a frowning and mountainous coastline. At last we were truly entering the white, aeon-dead world of the ultimate south, and even as we realised it we saw the peak of Mt. Nansen in the eastern distance, towering up to its height of almost 15,000 feet.
      The successful establishment of the southern base above the glacier in Latitude 86° 7', East Longitude 174° 23', and the phenomenally rapid and effective borings and blastings made at various points reached by our sledge trips and short aëroplane flights, are matters of history; as is the arduous and triumphant ascent of Mt. Nansen by Pabodie and two of the graduate students—Gedney and Carroll—on December 13–15. We were some 8500 feet above sea-level, and when experimental drillings revealed solid ground only twelve feet down through the snow and ice at certain points, we made considerable use of the small melting apparatus and sunk bores and performed dynamiting at many places where no previous explorer had ever thought of securing mineral specimens. The pre-Cambrian granites and beacon sandstones thus obtained confirmed our belief that this plateau was homogeneous with the great bulk of the continent to the west, but somewhat different from the parts lying eastward below South America—which we then thought to form a separate and smaller continent divided from the larger one by a frozen junction of Ross and Weddell Seas, though Byrd has since disproved the hypothesis.
      In certain of the sandstones, dynamited and chiselled after boring revealed their nature, we found some highly interesting fossil markings and fragments—notably ferns, seaweeds, trilobites, crinoids, and such molluscs as lingulae and gasteropods—all of which seemed of real significance in connexion with the region’s primordial history. There was also a queer triangular, striated marking about a foot in greatest diameter which Lake pieced together from three fragments of slate brought up from a deep-blasted aperture. These fragments came from a point to the westward, near the Queen Alexandra Range; and Lake, as a biologist, seemed to find their curious marking unusually puzzling and provocative, though to my geological eye it looked not unlike some of the ripple effects reasonably common in the sedimentary rocks. Since slate is no more than a metamorphic formation into which a sedimentary stratum is pressed, and since the pressure itself produces odd distorting effects on any markings which may exist, I saw no reason for extreme wonder over the striated depression.
      On January 6, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Danforth, all six of the students, four mechanics, and I flew directly over the south pole in two of the great planes, being forced down once by a sudden high wind which fortunately did not develop into a typical storm. This was, as the papers have stated, one of several observation flights; during others of which we tried to discern new topographical features in areas unreached by previous explorers. Our early flights were disappointing in this latter respect; though they afforded us some magnificent examples of the richly fantastic and deceptive mirages of the polar regions, of which our sea voyage had given us some brief foretastes. Distant mountains floated in the sky as enchanted cities, and often the whole white world would dissolve into a gold, silver, and scarlet land of Dunsanian dreams and adventurous expectancy under the magic of the low midnight sun. On cloudy days we had considerable trouble in flying, owing to the tendency of snowy earth and sky to merge into one mystical opalescent void with no visible horizon to mark the junction of the two.
      At length we resolved to carry out our original plan of flying 500 miles eastward with all four exploring planes and establishing a fresh sub-base at a point which would probably be on the smaller continental division, as we mistakenly conceived it. Geological specimens obtained there would be desirable for purposes of comparison. Our health so far had remained excellent; lime-juice well offsetting the steady diet of tinned and salted food, and temperatures generally above zero enabling us to do without our thickest furs. It was now midsummer, and with haste and care we might be able to conclude work by March and avoid a tedious wintering through the long antarctic night. Several savage windstorms had burst upon us from the west, but we had escaped damage through the skill of Atwood in devising rudimentary aëroplane shelters and windbreaks of heavy snow blocks, and reinforcing the principal camp buildings with snow. Our good luck and efficiency had indeed been almost uncanny.
      The outside world knew, of course, of our programme, and was told also of Lake’s strange and dogged insistence on a westward—or rather, northwestward—prospecting trip before our radical shift to the new base. It seems he had pondered a great deal, and with alarmingly radical daring, over that triangular striated marking in the slate; reading into it certain contradictions in Nature and geological period which whetted his curiosity to the utmost, and made him avid to sink more borings and blastings in the west-stretching formation to which the exhumed fragments evidently belonged. He was strangely convinced that the marking was the print of some bulky, unknown, and radically unclassifiable organism of considerably advanced evolution, notwithstanding that the rock which bore it was of so vastly ancient a date—Cambrian if not actually pre-Cambrian—as to preclude the probable existence not only of all highly evolved life, but of any life at all above the unicellular or at most the trilobite stage. These fragments, with their odd marking, must have been 500 million to a thousand million years old.

The first story of Lovecraft's that I read was At The Mountains Of Madness.  I'd been reliably informed again & again by those 'in the know' that Herbert West - Reanimator was one of his less-wonderful stories and that there were many others I should eagerly seek out - though ( curiously ) none of these self-styled cogniscienti were able to provide me with either a loan of one, neither were they able to suggest any firm titles either. 

So, disillusioned by the experts [ and not for the last time ] I did what one did in pre-Google/internet days; I took the Northern Line to Goodge Street & paid a visit to the University Bookshop on Mallet Street, another to Foyles on the Charing Cross Road & now armed with some titles took the Central line to Notting Hill and the Record & Tape Exchange Bookshop.

This was an ideal place to begin the acquisition of these mythic tomes. If the search in the Exchange were to prove fruitless then one direction would take me to Portobello Road, and the other to Shepherd's Bush & the sleazy book 'exchanges' on the Shepherd's Bush Road down towards Hammersmith. Dusty, ill-lit dives with second & third-hand copies of Mayfair and Whitehouse and a back room with coloured hangings obscuring the view.

Sounds more fun than a quick Google followed by a dry, joyless purchase via Amazon doesn't it ? Wonderful though the interweb is, it has taken some of the adventure out of the hunt for your books, records and such trophies - de-valuing its very presence in your collection, but I digress.

I returned through the bustling, dim wood and steel tunnels of the old Metropolitan line clutching a pair of short-story collections in an attractively packaged pulp paperback complete with suitably alien-looking monsters on the cover, shock-horror admonitions of spine-tingling horror on the back ; At The Mountains Of Madness and Dagon & Other Stories.

Best place to begin, the beginning.

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mm.asp

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Second Part of the ( as yet ) incomplete memoirs of a former drug addict.

“I called you on the phone / sayin’ hey, is Dee Dee home ? / You wanna take a walk ? / You wanna go cop ? / Wanna go get some Chinese Rock ?”
The Ramones  - Chinese Rocks.

Doesn’t matter where you look.  Its always there, somewhere.  All through ‘popular’ culture all the way back to Culture - I must have my little joke, there.  Even Sherlock Holmes was an advocate of the 7% solution,  Coleridge had some serious Opiate-inspired dreams ( Khubla Khan ) and Rudyard Kipling was fond of chasing the dragon before other pleasures.  In fact, if you dig deep enough you could argue that when Britannia Ruled The Waves she was fuelled in no small part by Opium.  Whether you’re on the ship or tied to the mast, it makes little difference & drug use followed by impecunious addiction has been there somewhere.  Its interesting to note that every civilization throughout history has, at the very least discovered the intoxicating powers of fermented grain water & I think this has many eloquent things to say about the human condition. To whit,  we can’t but want to get out of it.  For want of a better phrase.

I wonder why ?  But then, these are the self-same societies and empires that have also invented gods and all manner of ethereal powers so maybe the answer lies somewhere in the history of both.  I’m not here to answer such lofty and fundamental questions, though.  I’m not even asking ‘why me ?’, partly because it’s a bit late and partly because I cannot.  The point here, the salient one at least is that for all the wealth of knowledge and experience the human being is painfully subject to the need for oblivion of some sort ofr another.  And maybe, just maybe its in the details that some kind of evidence can be found for the forensically inclined & they may distil an answer out of all the detritus this sad condition washes up.

I’m constantly amazed at the lengths to which I would go to keep the Lotus flowing.  To the point of starvation, as I think I have mentioned before.  It just doesn’t make sense, either to the uninitiated nor even to the now-sober.  To be in full awareness, it seems you must be in the grip of it. And that’s why I’m here vacillating, dealing in jokes and ephemeral what-ifs ? where the facts become difficult in their telling.

Because it is supremely difficult to impart the force of that grip, the sheer unadulterated need that goes way beyond mere need to be well, as opposed to sick and tired with the pain of withdrawal.  There is an element of that pain that never leaves even when long sober.  Its why the fellowships and all the other little empires that have grown around the idea of ‘recovery’ talk in terms of one day at a time.

Its all we can, realistically deal in because it matters not how many years between cravings - the one you’re having now is every bit the siren-call it ever was, & those years don’t mean shit if you fail to remember the first lesson learned in sobriety;  not now, not this minute.  And then the slow mark of time measured out in minutes.  Its an appropriate word, minute.  You measure out the struggle in the smallest of increments, turning the twenty four hour day into an eternity.

Anyway, back to the narrative.  Back to the testimony.   In retrospect,  I decided that my description of that first hit of amps-plus was too elegiac & painted too good an advert, & resolved to change it.  I didn’t,  however.  I think that impact was in truth so literally blinding that it blotted out quite successfully all the logical pros-&-cons of exactly what I was proposing to do.

Which were ;  I was going to go to a crooked doctor and buy my drugs in dubious legality,  and they were going to cost me.  In monetary terms, yes but also in terms of self respect and more crucially, almost my life. I was going to cheat a perfectly legal support system by double-scripting. That is while I bought the private scripts from the dubious Doctor Tchaikoffsky, I was still taking my NHS methadone from my GP - a criminal offence in itself.   I was going to get enough surplus on the private script that the sale of this surplus would cover the monthly cost etc  I would get high for free ! It all seemed so easy and so straightforward.

But, while I was firstly unaware of the practical pitfalls of this plan, I was also unaware of the attendant society around this modus operandi.  Because there was one, of course.   And one very jealous of its precarious niche, thus willing to be particularly ruthless with any unsuspecting neophytes.  None of my plan was particularly original in detail,  but I failed to see anything other than good times to come.

So lets start at the beginning.   The first thing I had to do was find the doctor.   Cart before horse, really.  Apart from the one contact from whom we had bought that fateful dose, I had no recourse to this scene myself. Add that to the fact that the aforementioned ‘partner’ in crime had little interest in changing his regular poison for this one, I was on my own.  So I went looking.

Firstly, look for the ‘frontline’.  This meant a great deal of walking the streets in conversation with the underclass.  They’re on every street in the city both salubrious and otherwise, if you know where to look.  There’s always a park where the jakies mix with the street punks ( or crusties as they were beginning to be known ) & they know the squats where this-or-that may-or-may-not-be-available and so on.  It’s a case of do your research,  just like anything else and you will get some leads.  Eventually these added up into recognition and directions and in due course I found myself in darkest Maida Vale, at Shirley’s.

The address may shock you a little,  after all  W11 has its upmarket areas but its no-longer the area it once was.  Maida Vale sits with one end abutting St John’s Wood but the other borders are Queen’s Park and the Harrow Road, which have always been hinterland.  Rat-runs for commuters who never really see what goes on either on the pavements they speed past, or in the various estates and ghettos the facades hide.  What Shirley’s turned out to be might surprise you, however.  From what I’d been told on my mission, it was a chemist’s where you could go & find someone who’d sell you pretty much whatever you wanted.  I’ll admit I was dubious, but it turned out to be a fairly accurate description.

The Pharmacy itself was a drab-fronted affair on a less than well kept parade of shops on the far-end of Shirland Road near the square that backed onto an estate of high rises, the estate itself full of squats drugs & violence.  South Kilburn, in other words.  Bandit country, for sure but my self-preservation radar wasn’t exactly functioning & in I went.  The lyrics of a few Clash songs were all I really knew about the area - & they weren’t far from wrong, so it turned out.

You couldn’t, however just walk into the Pharmacy & go about finding some gear.  People would congregate in various areas within sight-line of the place, particularly those with scripts in & needing funds to avail thereof - a position I would all-too soon be in myself.  The irony was lost on me, then if not now anyway.  I surmised that this was the chemist of choice for people to bring their private scripts, whether for the open market going on or the service of the Pharmacist herself I wasn’t yet aware.  Any readers who recognise whereof I am speaking here may afford themselves a small guffaw - & I hope there are some survivors, but as the years pass the fewer I am aware of.  It was a war, too.  A constant battle with avaricious & bent doctors, sycophants and thieves, the violent, the dying & those trying desperately not to become one of the former.  The fact that it was a self-inflicted war makes little difference.

In a way there was something almost comical about the dance people went about.  The recognition factor was easy enough ; if you turned up & hung around looking furtive you’d be spotted by someone looking for a buyer. There was little problem in this case in ponying up the cash up-front. There was no other way of getting the goods from the chemist without and there was no second way out for someone who wanted to leg it.  Some did try, but that was desperation in a desperate place and if it had come to that then you were really in the shit.  As time went by there would be more familiarity with the MO as well as the faces, so the peculiar ‘alliances’ of the drug world would form.  I had two regular suppliers, both of them selling to pay for their scripts and their times spanned the week nicely so it wasn’t often I was left looking on spec.

Trouble was, they were incredibly shy of sharing “an intro” to the bent quacks themselves - economics being the obvious problem.  One more ‘supplier’ would mean a division in demand.  On the street there are no need for complicated x/y-curves or models needed for maximum economic productivity.  But, by the same token when my demand increased there was only one way to go ; an intro for a favour - say, half your first script.  I got this down to a third and agreed a day.  All in all this whole process from first visit to this negotiation took a scant three or four months.

Naturally,  in the meantime my social activity had dwindled to nothing.  I only really ever saw those I dealt with,  even the friend who was collecting my dole cheques only ever saw me once a fortnight but he knew what was afoot and was, I now realise grateful for the sparse contact.  Unfortunately my behaviour eventually led to us falling out, and as I found out fifteen years later he would pay for my stupidities rather than shop me - a loyalty I feel too far, he should have just pointed them in my direction & been done with it.  But that’s another story completely.

So, as far as many of the people with whom I’d shared my social life with for a decade or more I just vanished.  In many cases I am grateful for this. I hope they have infrequent but good memories of me, and never had to equate the wreck I became with the man they had known.  For small mercies, that they are I must be thankful.  To those that knew the truth either via rumour or from evidence all I can say is I knew what I was doing, & didn’t care. Not then, anyway.

That’s the sorry truth, though. At some point I did become aware of what I was doing, and I really truly didn’t care one jot.  The anger, the disgust - the whatever - had all turned inwards & I could no more stop the internal rot than I could feeding its Frankenstein.  I was all caught up with guilt I either owed or at least felt I did - and all other questions went with the same vision that heard ancestral voices prophesying war. But that’s to dignify it a touch too much.  I had given up, and felt that the world might as well do the same.
For a while, it did.

So one day, I met with this man called John.  I once knew his surname,  I know for a fact that he’s long dead.  He took me to meet  Doctor Tchaikoffsky -  I’m not making this up, that’s what his name sounded like & I never did manage to decipher the signature on the blue-tinted scripts he doled out.  He was Polish, I guess and his office was at that time over a jeweller’s in Ealing.  I gave him a load of flannel about my addiction & he made the pretence of checking my bona-fides but really all he wanted to know was that I could pay him - on a regular basis. I flashed the five-hundred quid I had and that sealed the deal ;  five fifty mil ampoules of methadone,   twenty five mil Dexedrine tablets and two five mil valium ampoules daily on a two-weekly prescription at £35 per week.  Of course I would have to pay the chemist for the drugs as well so my weekly outlay was looking at about £150 - not an inconsiderable amount on drugs alone. I thought is was a great deal.  But, then I have said I was being remarkably stupid & if nothing else, this deal-with-the-devil proves my capacities weren’t fully functioning.

I think I managed to keep this up for a few months before I lost my job.  I’d been doing timed-run despatch for the government courier IDS but, now with my drugs on my person all the time things began to slip badly and I really wasn’t all that surprised when the axe fell.  In retrospect its almost that I courted it.  I was injudicious about who I told, probably left paraphernalia in stupid places - either way of the why I was done & it would be six long years more before I would work again.

Let me take stock, here.  I was now faced with finding ( just to start with ) £70 merely to take possession of my prescription.  Thereafter, to liberate at least some of it from the clutches of the pharmacist I would need to find at least another £50. So very quickly you begin to see the problem.  Each and every week I was robbing Peter to pay Paul.  In those days, your Social payments came in a book of counterfoils that you cashed on the printed date every fortnight.  So that gave me £160-odd to play with, which was fine for a visit to the quack ( who never gave out the script without payment. Never. ) and would get some if not all that weeks gear out. Fine - but that always left the fallow week to deal with.

Oh I spent hours hanging around the frontlines sick and hungry waiting for punters who would pony up the cash then wait for me to go to the chemist. It was no picnic, but it had to be done. Even then there would always be a day or two at the end of a two-week period where all my script had been taken out and sold, leaving me sick and holed up in bed watching the slowest of clocks marking the time when money would once again be available & I could spend a few precious days able to function before the inevitable would again arrive.  It was a miserable existence. If indeed you could dignify it as such.


If the toll this took is unclear, let me be brutal.  I had shed, by this time every gram of spare body fat & I looked cadaverous.  My diet was catch-as-catch-can and was made up of shoplifted sandwiches and tins of rice pudding or Mars bars.  I could barely pass a stool and often had to resort to using my fingers. Feeling ill, yet ?  In an inspired piece of cocktail-fuelled stupidity I had established a sexual relationship with the girlfriend of a man I sold to and bought gear from.  Naturally this didn’t manage to be kept clandestine & said gentleman had set about me with a baseball bat, a bout in which I lost most of the visible portions of my front teeth and sustained a nastily broken nose.  To say I wasn’t visually attractive wasn’t really cutting to the chase.  So you need to read this to any idiot who ever tries to sell you the idea of drug-addiction as glamorous.  A previously vain soul,  I had let myself get into this state in pursuit of oblivion.  A pig in a poke was what I got, magic fucking beans.

The saving of me came in what usually comes as saviour to the needy.  Someone else is similar need.  Whilst trawling the streets for loose change and/or someone looking I met a Big Issue seller to whom I had once sold an amp or two.  He looked as sick as I felt and so, pooling our assets & with a little ducking and diving managed to liberate my last two amps for that week from Shirley’s.  It was at this point where serendipity showed its hand.  Bemoaning the fact that the next day I had a week’s prescription available but another six whole days to wait for cash, my new friend happily informed me that he was script less but in receipt of his giro at the same time. Awesome, & thus was entered into the beginnings of a comparatively long partnership.  Although it did need some work, considering that a single prescription wasn’t going to last both of us for very long.

However, in that first week we managed to put some work in on remedying the shortfall in prescriptions.  During a night-time prowl around Soho I uncovered a flat-twin BMW 800cc motorbike from under a pile of shop-boxes.  To this day I have no idea what it was doing there, nor why I even looked in the first place.  Providence,  it seems had its shining eye on me that week.  In many ways it didn’t really help in the long term but it was a shining week in an endless succession of dark ones & you took what you could get considering I wasn’t really in a position to negotiate.

Anyway, showing an hitherto unknown talent for hotwiring ( its quite simple if you have any idea whatsoever how an ignition works ) I parked it elsewhere, went home for a helmet & then rode the unstable beast back to the flat I had in Kensall Rise.  Over the next few days I managed to sell it for cash twice before taking it back - giving us enough cash for another script.  There was a new Clinic taking self-referrals but their drawback was you had to cough up nearly £300 to register.  I rode the bike around with impunity for another few months before actually selling it for real to a doorman I was friendly with still.  In another rather unfortunate footnote, the chap in question was nicked for being in possession of a stolen vehicle the first time he rode it - without leaving his own cul-de-sac for gods sake. He was aware of its dubious provenance prior to agreeing to the sale.  So I wasn’t dodging him as well as the other two …

At the end of this uncharacteristic upturn in fortunes, things went back to a semblance of the former chaos if not its actuality.  We never had enough to go through a whole week but sometimes managed to squirrel away some green juice to stay the rattles so things went from awful to manageable. Even so, its hard work being in any relationship that has a certain vampiric or symbiotic necessity attached to it and this proved to be the case, here.
I’ve often wondered after the fact whether he or I would have formed so intimate a bond without the overbearing need for drugs, and the conclusion I came to is maybe the same as he has subsequently;  I’d never have let him past the front door, but desperation makes for strange bedfellows - just like politics, I’m told.

As for Doctor Dodgy, well I maintained our Shylock’s bargain for nearly four years.  In the end I went to him at the end of my tether, told him I was giving up - not gradually, but there & then.  He showed me his true face, said I’d never make it, said I’d be back. I took great satisfaction & solace from the fact I never crossed his threshold again.  He remained in business for a few more years before the Medical Board pulled his licence. I had some way to go, still but that part of the stupidity was done with.

___________________________________________________________________________________Note :   This ends the chapter which I first published an extract of last month.  There are further additions to the project & I will discuss with the author any possibility of further instalments.

Jarboe - Mahakali (2008)

                                         


JARBOE - Mahakali
JARBOE is a uniquely expressive voice—a musician, an artist, a personality. She draws from a variety of charged sources: her early exposure to snake-handling revivals in the Mississippi delta, parents who were in the FBI, her participation in a lounge act, experimental performance in gallery & live radio settings, and her 14-year career with critically acclaimed New York post-punk pioneers SWANS.

A primary objective for JARBOE is to close the gap between audience and performer via complete submission and vicarious experience through her performance. Her visceral vocals range from a shy schoolgirl to sultry seductress to downright demonic; her delivery can be at turns innocent, knowing, seductive, and vitriolic.

'Mahakali' sees JARBOE collaborating with a wide range of musicians including Phil Ansemlo (Pantera, Down), Attila Csihar (Mayhem, Sunn O)))), Colin Marston (Dysrhythmia, Behold...The Arctopus), Josh Graham (Neurosis, A Storm of Light), and many more to create an alluring and provactive listening experience that has to be heard to be believed!

“oozing a strange mixture of sex and menace… her vocals… are simply stunning” – Rock-A-Rolla

“Her shrieks and roars… are too scary, too open, too evil. Black Metal has not gone anywhere near this...." – Terrorizer

“[Jarboe] pairs the visual flair of performance art with a fiercely eclectic arsenal of styles, and she never shies away form the aggressive and the extreme.” – The New Yorker

"The Lon Chaney of disconsolate electrometal, mad, moody Jarboe has a thousand voices: a quivering curious cackle, an accursed coo, an unholy caterwaul.” – Philadelphia City Paper

         

http://www.thelivingjarboe.com/index_mahakali.html         http://swans.pair/

                           
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_q8ONtNW4U






                         

From Amps to amps ; this is a section of an unpublished work written by an ex-addict about his life. It started as a piece of Occupational Therapy & seems to have grown out of that. Whether it will see light of day as a complete work remains to be seen.

I think I referred to the 1970s as the decade where “ everything went to Hell in a hand basket “  & in many respects this was true but in an abstract sense - politically, socially.  Not personally.  Not really,  agreed some of the ground-work was laid,  but beyond that I have to admit to looking at the late-70s ( in particular ) as a golden era.  The end of childhood,  the music was great and the world looked like the oyster its always claimed to be.  Daft image if you ask me,  after all a pearl is simply a bit of grit with shell round it right ?

So the Fall came not then ( minor skirmishes not withstanding ) nor even immediately after the loss of my father.  In fact, for six long years I held things at bay with a grim determination & not a little success.  Trouble is,  the more plates you leave spinning at the top of that pole sooner or later your kitchen is going to resemble a Greek Wedding.  And with a bang rather than a whimper - maybe crash would be more appropriate, but the simile is hackneyed now.

Also, they say that Pride comes before the Fall don’t they ? [ I’ll have to deal with the “They” at some point but not yet ]  And maybe they’re right about that because I did begin to believe my own hype and that’s never a good idea - even as a first-star blagger there are limits & going to bed with your own ego isn’t recommended as a long-term exercise.  But don’t take my word for it, suck it & see - the fallout is never pretty.

I’ve dealt in some vague terms about the breaking up of the Scream Scene ( for want of a better sobriquet ) because its difficult to put any kind of timeline on it.  Or specific events,  really but in general terms long-term haunts began to come to the end of their shelf-life.  This was partly due to musical paradigm shift - the so-called Second Summer of Love at the end of the exciting Acid House/Goth crossover years heralded the travelling north to Madchester of the cognescenti - very closely followed by the ‘rock scene’ invasion from Seattle or all-points west.

What happened to the various characters remains largely unknown, and those that are known merely performed a remarkable chameleon-like trick & re-invented themselves to be able to blend unnoticed into whatever a particular ‘night’ required.  That is to say those that maintained any sort of social integrity vanished completely, and those of us less abashed by such rapid alteration of personal style made the comparatively short transition into the aforementioned ‘rock scene’.  Which had available plenty of appropriate haunts, well-run nights & a certain regard for ‘established’ scenesters - for we were now old hacks.  The ‘been there, got the shirt & scars’ type of second-echelon ligger that told a good story, could afford to spread the wealth in beer or whatever & looked good on the arm.  Plus, it’s a short cut (haha) from hair extensions to actual long hair & leather duds look pretty much the same everywhere.

Don’t get me wrong, here I’m not putting any of it down.  Times were still to be had,  but our control had slipped slightly out of focus trading on times past as opposed to stuff we were to do - although we did a bit of that as well.  Enough for the kudos, but nothing requiring any actual effort.  Decadent sounding, yes ?  Well that was the role that those of us who made the change went for & it stuck well.  After all,  the nights & the sounds may have changed but the door staff remained the same, as did the bar staff etc etc  Familiarity makes for a good reference & there were a few of us that had learned well enough to do good.

So, whereas on the back-burner ( somewhere in that highly private and most compartmentalized of places in one’s soul ) there was stuff cooking the open to the world face was shiny with health & wealth & party.  Its interesting to note that there was one haunt that made a similar transition from post-punk and Goths to the new status quo of Rock Scene Hangout, and this was Wardour Street’s very own spit and sawdust alt-hangout The Intrepid Fox.
On the kitchen wall in Ibrox Court there still hangs a 7” single called “Upstairs At The Fox” by Max & the Losers, an independent single release made by the pre-rock brotherhood that made it first stop on any given night out way back in the early 80s.  Now that the ‘Fox has been uprooted from its spiritual home ( ie just down Wardour from the other uprooted mecca The Marquee Club ), the denizens from Upstairs all had identical Fox-head tattoos to celebrate their time there & these are good examples of the sort of loyalty and reminiscence the place still holds to this day.  Refusing to be packaged into a ‘theme’ or anything so trite, even now on any day of the week you can walk into its current location on St Giles Circus ( historically a part of London populated by miscreants and ne’er do wells ) & see faded Punk Rock Stars, up-&-coming Deathrock bands with all and sundry in between.  A monument, therefore to what was and what should never have been - to blatantly paraphrase Led Zeppelin.

But it’s the last of its kind.  Other late-80s into-the-90s famous hangouts like the Astoria or the Limelight Club & even the W>A>G ( a point for anyone who can tell me what WAG stood for ) have all succumbed to the developer or ( in the case of the Astoria ) the RE-developer.  Another set of holes to go with the t-shirts and scars, I suppose and all part of the ever-changing face of life. But it saddens me somewhat.  In the sense that nothing is sacred, for want of a better term and that everything tends to entropy in the end.  Its depressing, and I wonder whither have all the ghosts of drunken high-jinks and equally drunken lows have dissipated ?  To haunt unrecognised & unloved as much as the memories and lives buried even further underneath ? It seems we as a race are all too hurried to turn our pasts into something else, a new totem of a hoped-for and brighter future,  our pasts into mere memory and the archaeology thereof.  It seems almost desperate,  and very neatly encapsulates a society that seems to have lost its core identity, its very soul. But I digress.

In a way, anyway because I’m at that point where to put the inevitable crash into some kind of understandable context begins to show the limitations of my grasp.  Because there is no single definite point or event to which I can point and say “There,  that’s where it started.”  I don’t suppose there ever was one, no matter how many of the therapists you go to seeking sufferance or absolution wish there to be.  I will,  however sift through the evidence.

The most obvious point to start is the day - and to this day, I still cannot bring to mind what logic led me there - the day I went and bought some heroin for the first time in about five years.

On the face of it, nothing was that bad.  Stuff in the hurt-locker piling up, I guess.  I was single again for the first time in quite a few years & that wasn’t sitting well  ( although I’m a dab-hand at it now, have it down to a fine art thank you very much ) but equally I was sick of all the bullshit that being in a relationship entailed.  It seemed to me that as soon as some kind of stability was established then the magic, too went winging its way onto the next “ honeymoon-period proto-couple”  & an all-too-familiar domesticity of day-to-day ritual took over before the inevitable “ where are we going ?” conversations.  We all know only too well where those go.  So, finally sick of it all,  I had ended the affair and gotten rid of all the superficial hangers-on that I had acquired over the previous two or three years.  Selfish free-loaders who lived under my roof free to criticise my lifestyle but not to put their hands into their wallets apparently -  & of course this kind of catharsis always has some kind of fallout.  I became periodically solitary,  something I maintain to this day.  Now its for healthier reasons but then I think, disillusionment had set in.  I seemed to work all hours God sent for a couple of days/nights to get all dolled-up and worked-up & go … well, nowhere new.  Hearing nothing, seeing nothing new.  Talking the same-old shite to the self-same idiot you told it to last week.  It had become a sorry merry-go-round of ritual, merry-making by rote and doing a poor job of it to boot.

So I had knowledge of gear available in the area ( Colindale/Burnt Oak - hardly a shock ) & after having the idea in my head for a few weeks, eating away at my resolve I suppose I upped and went for it one cold February night in ( I think ) ‘94.

For those of you not aux fait with the protocol of heroin buying I’ll explain. Once you’ve chased the Dragon you are forever marked by the experience & thus recognisable to anyone else who has also done so.  Even with years of abstinence behind you,  you can pass a stranger in the street and catch their eye to pass an un-spoken bond.  You know a ‘user’ when you see one. They also know you for one.  This is useful when negotiating your way into a first ‘buy’ after a period of abstinence.  It makes the necessary initial-approach far less perilous than it might otherwise be,  but not without its pitfalls completely.  You have to be pretty resolute,  unless you wish to risk a trip to the various ( & notorious ) ‘frontlines’ that pepper the capital.  You can end up with a bag of curry powder at best,  or skint and badly hurt as easily as score at a ‘frontline’ spot.  But people still use them, as I have on many an occasion.

This time, however I had an address at which ( I had been reliably informed ) that gear may be acquired.  Foolhardy as it may seem,  I went straight to this front door & after a little negotiation ( read- bullshitting ) was invited somewhat (belatedly) furtive within & after only a minor wait ( the wait is another thing, it can last for hours. This tests resolve, & ‘reliability’ ie if I’m not followed in by the Drug Squad five minutes later … etc ) left with a twenty-quid wrap of brown heroin.  If this sounds absurdly simple, then you’d be right.  When it comes to this area of life I have ridiculously big cojones & can front myself anywhere - its necessary to my continued existence and relative well-being, trust me.  Doesn’t mean I didn’t allow myself a huge grin of relief & a few shakes once I’d negotiated the short walk home.  It is that simple, though if you are so inclined & on that particular night it seems like I was.

Now this is before the days that I used a needle.  Things hadn’t quite got that out of hand but in retrospect this was most certainly the first step along that road.  I’m being candid in this way for two reasons ; one, it seems there’s an awful amount of rubbish perpetrated by media & what-have-you about the sordid world of drug use.  The so-called rules of having to seek out dodgy middlemen in spit & sawdust pubs, of waiting in alleyways & ‘sampling’ packets of white powder with the tip of a knife are all images from Hollywood or thereabouts.  Yes the world is populated by criminals, prostitutes etc etc but at the bottom line there is the supply and the need. And two, I want folk to know that it is that easy should the fancy take & that there really aren’t any hoops to jump through before the dragon jumps up that tube & things will never be the same again.  I want you to see how a reasonably intelligent & capable person can push all common-sense aside and do this all too easily.  Because the other bottom line is that there is no simple answer, and its not just heroin. Its everything, everywhere.  Anything can do the damage, you just need to need enough. After which shame & the need for secrecy begins to do the rest of the damage.

So off home I went,  attended to the very familiar ritual of rolling a tube and laying the powder on a foil-chute before chasing the bubbling brown liquid up and down with a lighter, judiciously applied underneath.  I fell into a reverie,  then woke & repeated this process for the best part of the rest of the night.  When it was finished I crashed out & got up for work cursing and vomiting a few hours later.  And … and nothing.  This is probably the scariest bit; the next day, you don’t wake up pale and thin, teeth missing & rattling the bones you can see for a ‘fix’.  The next day starts with a hangover, just like a night out on the ale.  So its easy to see why, and how so many do the “I can handle it, no bother. Just dabble.”-dance for months on end.  No thunder & lightning, no mark of Cain.  Simple as … Scary, huh ?

It takes work to pick up a ‘habit’.  Which can mean ‘once a month/week ‘etc down to an hour.  But when the countdown starts, the only person that knows its started is you.  So the clock of the habit just keeps ticking.  In which meantime the rest of life rolls on oblivious.  In fact, it seems to me now - working from memory, at least - that ‘life’ as far as I knew back then continued to be lived in much the same way.  That is, working for five or sometimes six days a week, then the going-out ritual of the weekend days.  Nothing on the surface to betray any symptom of the real process at work underneath.  Except there are signs, if you know where to look and what to look for.  For instance a sudden cessation in drinking.  Especially someone who habitually drank quite a lot.  That’s a good sign to look for,  if you’re of a mind to look.  The two don’t really mix, but if the person is still using the usual amount of stimulants - well that’s strike-two.  Usually a speed user will drink to first control the buzz and then to avoid the come-down.  So put two & two together it gives you enough for a suspicion, no more.  And besides, if its only somebody you’d see for an evening or two out of seven then you’re probably not paying such close attention. I mention it only as an interesting point.

I managed to maintain a positive image for a long time after the cracks were showing elsewhere.  Naturally my work suffered,  particularly as I was taking time out each morning to pick up before going out on my runs but I managed to survive any problems there by making excuses about my health. I was known to be asthmatic, so I used that card whenever something was said.  Your finances begin to suffer, too.  The first thing to go are the habitual nights-out.  Then when the bite to keep mind and body together in enough shape to work every day you need to make a decision.  Do you ‘get registered ‘ & take the methadone ?

I’ll have to explain a bit.  Getting a ‘script nowadays is a lot easier than it once was.  Before the data-protection act there was always the possibility of various interested bodies being able to access your medical records, so being a ‘registered’ user of narcotic substitute Methadone wasn’t something you engaged in lightly.  But you did it because you had to.  You ouldn’t just google-up your nearest clinic, either.   General Practitioners who were ‘known’ to be addict-sympathetic were generally difficult to get registered with for obvious reasons,  and because they were few they were often over-prescribed if you’ll pardon the joke.  Luckily ( or unluckily depending on your point of view ) there was one-such sympathetic GP very near my home & I successfully registered and started my first regimen of ‘juice’.

Some addicts, & I for one have never really understood this behaviour,  would pick up their weekly supply of Juice & promptly go sell it in order to buy heroin with.  This is really stupid, & I’ll take a moment to explain the other reason as to why this is daft.  The going-rate for methadone linctus/mixture is ten mil/ £10.  Now while fifty miligrams of methadone will ‘hold’ an addict from being ill from withdrawal for a good twenty four hours,  fifty quid’s worth of street-level smack won’t get you much past ten if you’re lucky. So do the maths.  I never did this, preferring to look upon my dose as enough hours to do the graft & get the cash for my gear without complications.  But its this kind of thinking that can get you equally into deeper shit.  As in,  why waste all that money on street crap when there’s pharmaceutical gear out there you can mix judiciously and stay higher for longer, for cheaper ? !  I think you can see where this is going, and you’d be right.

One fateful evening I was out with one of my regular partners ( ‘friend’ just isn’t the right word,  it lacks a certain sense of the intimacy of drug-taking as well as implying too much of the other facilities of friendship -loyalty, for instance ) looking for a fix, but of that was there none. Nish, nowt. Nowhere.  Now logically we were physically ok, but after a few hours on the ‘look’ one does begin to feel the bite of the need irrespective of whether you’ve had a substitute.  So we knew a fella who instead of selling powder sold ‘amps’.  These are ampoules of methadone, usually 50mg a pop.  It was a scene all on its own - addicts who, eschewing the uncertainty of street drugs went to private doctors and paid for prescriptions ( perfectly legally ) of meth-amps plus valium and dexys ( dexamphetamine sulphate ).  So any port in a storm, we paid this man a visit and came away with a goody-bag of exactly as I have just described.

The other thing here, of course is you can’t smoke an ampoule.  This was strictly intravenous fare, but that particular rubicon had been passed some months previously with not a blink of thought, or regret.  This was to be a red letter day, for me at least.  I mixed the three as directed and without qualm shot a pretty good dose, into heaven - or a reasonable facsimile thereof.  This was something else entirely. Clean & high & long, I rode that for about forty-eight hours. Thereafter nothing would ever be the same, and the mere thought of going back to the grubby habit of mixing unknown powders into a brown liquid and putting that in my arm was a no-no.  I could get to the place I wanted, legally (ish) and without the usual risks of overdose and poison … The top of the horribly precipitous, very slippery slope had been reached.

It was 1995.

http://www.urban75.com/Drugs/methadone.html

Different Diners - On the same Road

Every journey has mapped a thousand and one roads.

All roads lead to the same destination.

This last stop has two doors, and your travels will open the one or the other.

Upon opening, you will see in both rooms a huge banquet.

Upon the tables, laden with fruits and the most delicate of meats, the headiest of wines.

Each soul sat at the tables has a knife and fork. They are strapped to each guests arms,

Too big to feed yourself.

There is but one difference.

One banquet, the guests struggle to taste of the fare.

In the other, they are feeding each other.

In much the same way, the roads offer either the high pass or the low track.

Each fork and crossroads, every hill and every tunnel,

The minor path and the glorious highway,

Offer the same destination.

It is impossible to turn back.

There is only forwards.

There are deserts and jungle.

Endless cities and barren wastelands.

There is but tomorrow, yesterday only your tracks soon blown away or filled.

Often lost beneath the footprints of others.

Some follow, some pursue.

You can travel alone or choose your company.

After all, everyone finds themselves at the same doorway in the end.

This is the same adventure you have had many times.

It is a journey that is undertaken time and time again.

It is possible to follow your own footsteps.

It is also possible to change the route.

There are many maps.

So many choices.

Many signs are accurate but lead you astray.

Beware of the hitch-hiker.

Beware of the backseat drivers.

But most of all ; Beware of your self.

Amen.

THE COLD ROAD

And so we come to where it all began.

As with many things, the story always fades in as opposed to starts suddenly. The Story is a continuous river and, as it meanders its way from the source is fed and swollen by many and varied tributaries. A birth is the well-spring and those first, hard hours of life cascade from the safety of the womb over precipitous falls to land on jagged rocks drawing the primal scream of shock and pain from the infant lips and untrained throat.

The very essence of fear and shock, those cries. With some of us that cry forever echoes within our heads, often drowning ( and there, if ever is an apt phrase ) the gentler music of early life that soothes the passage from the memory of the last one, via the calm waters of death and the reassuring rhythm of your mother’s heartbeat.. The precipitous falls, carried in the freezing water of renewed awareness mark the first memory that is nothing you wanted. Far easier to have remained between, but you cannot make that choice. There is no betwixt - only the road, the cold road.

Just another part of the Road

Lights - & why they go out

It could've been an airport. A station. 

Anywhere, in a city - in any country.

Doesn't really matter because they're always there. The Ghosts.

Maybe its because of the shee-crush of humanity that passes through hour by hour.

Better company than the rest of the departed. Who knows ?

On this day, in this city a woman ( her name makes no difference, but we'll call her Rachel, yes ?) - this Rachel was on the yearly-journey from where she called home back to where she lived & worked.

Nobody really likes these journeys & from the anticipation of being reunited with loved-ones, perhaps family the old resentments have made their visit ( also yearly ) so the return is usually part-relief, part hell. But you just do it, because to just stay put would solve little.

Today is different. As Rachel fights her way, half politely & half with an appropriate expleteive forever on the verge of being voiced the crowds of the faceless parts and a few metres away is someone she recognises. A face from many years ago. From another life, another her. He has aged, as has she but the face is unmistakable. Same slightly hooded eyes, often mistaken for a frown. Same cheekbones, maybe more sallow around the jaw - the lines & scars of battles lost, struggles won. The hieroglyphs etched upon every face that has faced day after day, year after year in the apparently endless conflict rather inadequately called 'living'.

Then there are no rushing masses, no clammour - just a flood of half pefect memories, moments, fleeting action-replays of that time, that place when she & this man had been friends. This brings a certain joy, but joy tainted by ... by what? 

She shrugs the feeling aside - we were close, we had some great days, greater nights - happy to be in this impossible ( why ? what was it ? ... its ) but very welcome chance encounter she walks up to him & feeling a little stupid and more than nervous says to him,

" Excuse me ?  Hey, you're [   ] right ?  Its me ! Rachel, I'm so happy to see you. Its been years, how are you ?" Giggles like a nervous girl & thinks " Oh, yeah - real cool, girl !".

He turns towards her, looks down and fixes his eyes straight upon hers sending a cold shock of ice-water through her. Grey eys with flecks of lapis, very very black pupils as cold as the void pin her to the moment as if she were little more than an insect, impaling her on a slide ready for the scalpel. 

" I'm sorry. I'm not [   ]."  Doesn't turn away. Just maintains the stare. 

Briefly she remembers the fairy tales of the Basilisk, & stupidly thinks this is just how being rendered a statue by the mythical beast must feel. Can't look away, though. Trapped in this moment so much longer than years yet less than a heartbeat.

" You see, [  ] is dead.  He died on an operating table, a surgeons hands trying to stem the tide of life. Not long, maybe a few years after you last saw him."

This makes no sense. Its a cruel joke, surely ? Somebody's idea of a joke, it IS [  ] & in a second he'll laugh, become human again, smile that oddly dry smile she remembered so clearly. And she'll tell him he's an asshole before letting that anger vanish so they can go for a coffee. Catch up. Maybe exchange phone numbers. You know, what you do when past friends meet again. Numbers unlikely to be used but the litttle salves to the soul that such meaningless exchanges provide. 

The heartbeat still hasn't even begun.

" The last time [  ] saw you, do you remember ? No ?  It was outside this very station. He said hello to you, then. Just as you did now. "

What ? Oh ...

" He'd fallen some way, by then if you recall. His looks were ravaged by poor living & drugs. No longer the well-dressed, well-heeled rakish man who would make you laugh, buy you drinks, get you past any entry queue. And you, you were with someone far more important right then, correct ? Didn't want to be thought of as knowing such as he. Somebody you once told anybody who'd listen how much you loved him, how he would always be there as you would for him. 

So what did you do, Rachel ?"

Oh fuck ...

" You walked on, right ? As if  [  ] was invisible. And as you did, one more light went out in him. We all have many of those lights inside us, and together they brighten & light our way. Even if all but one go out, that one is still enough. All you really need is the one. Maybe when you passed [  ] that day & your light went out - maybe it was the last one. 

I can't say. But it doesn't really matter which light went out first or last. What matters is you let the one you were responsible for go. 

If you had given just a few seconds of your recognition. A smile, even. Certainly a minute fraction of the time [  ] put into you, well maybe it would've been enough to keep the path lit. It matters not, not now."

And then that paralysis was past. The cacophony & crush of people were around her once again. The heart beat.

She drew breath, as she watched the man turn and with the ghost of a wry smile at the edge of his lips walk away.

Like the sea parting for Moses the awful crush gave him no trouble, as she watched him carry his shouldered bag through the barriers towards the train, plane ... or whatever. Was gone.

Still, every hour, every day millions of souls pass through a place on their way somewhere else. None of them really ever pay their fellow-travellers much heed except to wish that they weren't in the way. ElseWhere. 

Which begs the question;  Who are the living there, & who are the Ghosts ?

"For if we clearly mark the furthest deep, we should be dead long years before the grave "   Molly Drake - The Shell