The Debt of Violence

Somebody will pay for what has happened here. Somebody always pays. That's for sure. It's the only sure thing.

He's not dealing any more. His phone's dead. He showed me the bullet wound; the gauze. Rolled down his sock and lifted his trouser leg as we waited at the lights. A hole right down low, by the ankle.

Fired seven shots, he said. Seven fucking shots! They'll kill a man for nothing today. They'll kill a man for nothing!

And I could tell by his voice: he would as well.

Somebody's gonna pay for what happened here. That's for sure. He's already scheming. Working a way out. Preparing to get more than just get even.

The Police are watching him now. Victim turned loose turned suspect. They want to know WHY? They ALWAYS want to know WHY?

People don't just get shot, he said they said to him.

I did, he said he said to them. I just got shot!

He's moved his garage; changed apartment; is laying low; biding his time. He's working a way out. I could see the cunning in his reptilian eyes, the knotted tension in his jaw. I watched him scheming as he drove; going through his options, the angles. Something eating away inside of him, something that only feeds on men, some loss of something that is hard to define.

Somebody’s gonna pay for what happened here. That's for sure. Somebody always pays.

Tailgating – following right up tight behind. His frame widened; pushed forward; looming large in his windscreen; his face twitching with anger.

The law of Increasing Returns: the debt of violence. On his upper lip a scar, like he's had a hook ripped up out his mouth. It glistens as he drives, as he schemes; it widens as he moistens his mouth, as he works a way out.

Comment ça va, mon ami? He suddenly asked. How are you, my friend?

I replied with a face like I was bored, like nothing ever changes. He nodded his head like he understood, only with a menacing air about his despondency.

Then he said:
The shooter’s in prison.

And:
That's not justice; that's a reprieve!

And:
I'll do all I can to have him released.

Staring ahead into nowhere he grimaced a smile at some sadistic ending he had in mind.

Somebody will pay for what happened here. Oh, somebody will definitely fucking pay!

He's completely turned now. It's like his face is on inside out. Nothing hidden. He really is what he is. And he always said he was an animal.

The first time I hooked up with him alone he told me that.

I'm an animal, he said, laughing. Then he made out like he was gonna punch me in the liver. He pulled up centimetres short, his wrist curled his fist clenched, and made a restrained, frustrated noise like he was biting down on rope.

Urrrrgghhhhh!

He drove me miles out of town that day to one of his small illegal businesses. He showed off the Games Room, bounced a ball around the pool table. He showed me his office, nothing but a rickety partition room with a dusty desk and phone. He walked me around the garage, showed me the empty oil stained pits and two engines hanging from hoists. Then he opened a door right out back to reveal a man in an empty room, bound to a chair, beaten and bleeding and dribbling blood. He allowed me just a peek, a warning to play it straight with him, even if he wasn't to play straight with me. After showing me what he wanted me to see of his life he gave me five grams of the best heroin I'd had in France and then left me stranded miles from nowhere, loaded, to make it back alone.

But that was then, before he had been baptised by the bullet… before he had finally became what he was to become.

So we're in the car, now, three years later. He's driving me to some third party dealer. He's got money, he's successful, has property, eats out, but he's gonna rob me. I know because he does nothing for nothing. The old adage: Time is Money. He only moves for profit even if it's just a gram he would not otherwise have had.

He believes in the dollar. He lives by the dollar. He's been wowed by the dollar. He worships the dollar. He drives by the dollar. He's driven by the dollar. He's been claimed by the dollar; chained by the dollar; bent over by the dollar; fucked by the dollar. He took seven bullets for the dollar, and he'll take seven more.

His foot slams on the brake peddle and the wound in his ankle seeps through his sock which is over his tracksuit bottoms. He's all twisted up with hate, barely keeping it inside. He screams something in Bulgarian, gives an offensive hand gesture to a car behind which has horned at us. He slows to let the car overtake and as it does, he picks up the same speed, keeps alongside and leaning across me he forms his fingers into a gun and starts unloading imaginary bullets into the drivers face. Then he slows and lets the culprit car slide on past. The car's tail lights go on, it signals and then takes the first turning off the motorway.

Emil rips the gearstick back, slides it sideways, pulls it back again then shoves it forward hard. The car makes an horrendous grating sound, jolts, then catches the road and rockets forward the momentum pinning us back. Emil's face is crazy, like he's on a fairground ride, caught between enjoyment and fear. I can see his bottom teeth. He's holding the steering wheel straight with both arms; the muscles tensed and prominent. It's like he's heading for a wall and he's made his mind up not to stop. I think this may be the last time I see him. I think all business is just about done here.

Somebody will pay for what happened. That's for sure. Somebody always pays. I paid today. Two grams short of five. Robbed. The debt of yesterday at my door today. When he was done, in profit, he dropped me off home. I shook his hand for old time sake, and maybe for tomorrow. I clapped him around the shoulder, like how you'd pat a fine dog or horse.

Merci, Emmy, I said... Merci.

He smiled and resembled a memory of the summer to come, something that won't be here in the future. He looked up and around and nodded to the clear blue sky. Then he moved his shades from his head and dropped them down over his eyes.

The future from here looks dark, he said.

That's not the future it's the distance, I replied, and if the distance is anything it’s the past.

Whatever it is it's fucking dark, he said. And those are maybe the final words to be had from a man sunk down deep in debt to himself.


[Audio version to follow shortly]

The Man Who Looks Like Life

And then you are down. And you realise you’ve been hit. There is warm blood trickling from your nose. And then someone is pushing your face in the gravel while another puts the boot in. Hard, brutal, ruthless boots to the head and stomach. And then your ribcage rattles and all the oxygen in your body bursts out your mouth. You are defenseless, choking for air as a flurry of blows knocks your head this way and that. And then you lose a tooth... And then your sight... And then consciousness. Only when all is black does the pain stop. And then you wake up.  Your assailants have gone - just a white van driving off in the distance. The skin from your knuckles is scraped raw from the struggle. You sit there, in the wet and cold, the cuts and blows stinging more than when you took them. And as you push the blood away and dust yourself down, you ask yourself: “Why? Why me? What did I ever do to deserve that?” And then it comes. You remember. Once again, you had broken all the rules.


My time in France is coming to an end. Five years here have taken their toll. I have lost one tooth too many and the invisible sculptor who chisels with a scathe has began hollowing out the flesh from below my cheekbones. The history that I have tried so long to hide is now unhideable. I’m beginning to look like The Man who looks like life.

But that has not always been the case. In London I was vibrant and full of energy. My face was clear and youthful and sweet. Sometimes I even charmed myself. But looking in the mirror now I feel unrecognisable to the man I was then. And not just physically. I feel something has changed below the skin. I feel I have died a little more.

France has not helped. In fact she has accelerated my decline. My existence here has been a constant struggle. There has barely been a week passed without some kind of drama or worry. If it wasn’t the police knocking down my door, or days spent waiting for my dealer, then it was relationship troubles, exploding ovens or apartment fires. Only the other week I was knocked up at 11pm and informed that my then partner of six years was in hospital after swallowing a belly full of her mother’s Xanax. It seems that life can never just pass, she always insists on leaving a calling card.

Two weeks ago I commiserated my 34th birthday. For the occasion I received one card and one death threat. That put my life here into perspective and I’ve had enough. Enough croissants, enough pain au chocolats, enough random police searches, identity checks and bureaucracy. I am tired of the language, the people and the bars. I can no longer queue quietly for an hour to buy tobacco on a Sunday. I can no more hang around for eight hours in stairwells scoring obscenely cut heroin. I am sick of it all. It’s five years that I have been here, five years that will not tick into six. I am preparing for the exit, ready to flee the country and flash my arse at the last copper I see.

But it’s not time to moon at the law just yet. I am in no position to do it. I’ve barely enough money to put a roof over my death, let alone flee the country. There are also medicaments and repeat prescriptions to think of. Until I can either transfer my script elsewhere or reduce and stop my medication altogether, I am once again constrained to my immediate environment - bound on an upside down cross. Even without the drug worries, five years leaves a lot of attachments. And so before I make my exit I must make certain things good, or at least plug the holes.

One of the latest holes to plug and something which has now become critical is finding a new apartment. A broken relationship and a wandering heart have left me with less than a month to find a place to stay. My habit of not protecting myself and trusting in others humanity has shot me in the foot again. My decision never to officially put my name to the joint property we shared has left me at the whim of another. And that is not a good position to be in, especially when that ‘other’ spends their days wishing upon you a violent and painful death. I should have learnt by now that humanity disappears with love. That if one goes west, one goes west alone. But I suppose I do not want to believe that. The world becomes too sad if that is the case.

My search for an apartment began full of hope and confidence. Me believing that within the same afternoon I’d be in a new place with my own keys. But France doesn’t work like that, there are no simple transactions here. “Six weeks, minimum,” I was told, “that’s the timeline you should realistically plan to.”

"Six weeks! No, that’s impossible. I’ve money for rent and deposit and have an income. How can it take six weeks?”

Eight weeks later I am still nowhere closer to finding a place. In fact,  I am even further away friom it. My deposit I blew on four weeks in a hotel and 15 grams of heroin.

But I don’t regret that, money wasn’t the real problem. The real problem is that France is a country of bureaucracy... your money counts for nothing if you don’t have the correct papers. People live in fear of it. There’s no screwing up your payslips and overarming them into the bin here. That would be tantamount to administrative suicide. No, in France people tiptoe down the halls of bureaucracy, praying to all 5495 Gods that they have the correct papers. But you NEVER have the correct papers. And if you do, they’ll invent another one just for you. It is soul destroyingly frustrating, and if you are as disorganised as me, it’s impossible.

So, I didn’t post my dossiers off, I didn’t even fill them in. Instead,  I holed myself up and spent my time numbed by opiates, telling myself:  “something will turn up... a solution will come, it always does.” Well, that solution hasn’t come yet and now I am in the position where I have three weeks left at my current abode and then it’s shop doorways and pillows under the sky.

But it’s unfair to blame France for my woes. She is another country with a different language, protocol and laws. It’s me who is at fault, refusing to do the things that are demanded of me and trying to busk through the unbuskable. It’s me that will quote laws that do not exist and then stand there to a shaking head and the words “Well that’s not the information I’m in possession of Monsieur. Desolé.” All the little tricks that I had perfected and relied on in England do not serve me here. It seems impossible to get what I want, even what I need. And it’s now too late to backtrack. It’s too late to fill in the dossiers... too late to put my applications through. I’m down to the cardboard, burning my lips on the roach.

The time for property agencies, guarantors and carefully worded contracts has gone. That takes too long and is too long term and legal. No, what I require now is an unscrupulous businessman, someone with absolutely no morals and a nose for money. A person who’ll take my readies and then put me in a rat infested hole that is only worth a third of it’s price. I need that. This is no time for flat hunts and cosy apartment views. It’s a time for handshakes and notes in the top pocket, the oldest contract there is.

And that is me... that sums it up. Nothing is ever quite legit, but always on the edge. I sneak along the line of illegal activity, always something in my pocket which could get me into trouble. I break the rules and I take the consequences for doing so. And the consequence is stress and worry which leads to heroin which leads to sacrifice, unpaid rent and bank loans. This in turns instigates relationship failings, brothers, white vans and bruised ribs. And this, all of it combined, is the real consequence, because it shows on the face and under the eyes. It marks you for life with life and leaves one looking like the Prime Minister after eighteen months in office.

And that is the debt I pay to be able to write these words. They are not just there... they are not free of charge. I acquire them at a 50% interest rate. I will die closer to forty rather than eighty. I have surrendered more than just a few teeth. The truth is, the marks I wear are not the marks of living but the marks of dying,  and that is the paradox of The Man who looks like life.

Take care All... Thanks and Best Wishes, Shane.