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.