tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91933168194994463172024-03-14T20:05:52.365+01:00- Memoires of a Heroinhead -Writers addicted to heroin. Artists addicted to heroin. Heroin constipation. Memoirs of heroin addiction. Journal of a heroin addict. Substance abuse. Drug addiction. Diary of a heroin addict. Memoirs of a Heroinheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17401281805284793756noreply@blogger.comBlogger158125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-27562990068206879532020-06-15T23:43:00.000+02:002020-06-15T23:43:18.660+02:00The Trauma of Beautiful Things Audio Recording<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>(Dedicated to long time reader & friend Soc Priapist... XxX)</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Trauma of Beautiful Things</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I feel it so profoundly that it comes through me as a sadness. But it is not a sadness; it's a beauty, a beauty so dramatic of all the sensations whipped upon me. It feels close to an insanity. Either the most perfect insanity or the most cur'sed. And I see it and feel it and smell it in all things, in every step and every breath and every shattered day or brilliant morning. It's in brick and concrete and metal and flaking paint, in leaves and bush and trees and plant. I come across it in the shade of hidden places, amongst the tiny European lizards that dart upon the walls and scurry down into the undergrowth. It is on the wet of dogs' noses and in the smell of their coats, sheen or soiled. It romances me in piss and beer-soaked telephone booths as I'm carried away on the whiff of metal and polished copper and coin. It's in the methadone clinics, the hospitals; in the cancer patients who stand outside, held up by IV drips, smoking and looking so wistfully at the dew dying in the grass. It's in the crunch underfoot and the chaffing of fabric on fabric; in gravel and snow and ice, in car tyres scrunching over grit. It's in the wild of overflowing gardens, in rose bushes in early autumn. It's in the long shadows of first summer days, in the haze of the distant roar and city spray where the Now feels like a memory and you smelled of fresh soap and water and it was something more than sex and skin and blood. I hear it in the sounds of builders and cries from up on high, in the afternoon drilling and the clink of scaffolding poles. It's in the dust and slop of freshly mixed cement and, way up high, in the isolation of great cranes stranded in the devastating blue of the sky. I smell it in the molten tar when the roads get relaid, in the uncovered bottles of tincture and ointment in Victorian dumps and Roman fares and paths. It's in rusted rakes and spiders' webs and sodden pines and cones and leaves; in the treated wood of garden fence and damp and dampened earth and mossy stones. I feel it in pine needle lawns in small southern Italian towns in the sand and ruins of Pompei and stretched out across the Bay of Naples. In the ghettos of Mermoz Pinel and Villerbaune and far into the distance yonda, Grenoble and then off to nowhere and early dreams of Europe and fiesta and dancing all around. In the scent of old books and printed ink the words themselves are blood in me and I've only ever looked at them in Georges Bataille and Dirty: gazing out at London we [almost] wept. In cherry blossom snow and terraced housing and fragrant streets, in parked cars exhausted under the beating sun, in sap and milk and milky grass as great days blow in and the city is a-bustle and the radio says it's clear skies across a beautiful London town. In the bushes in the thickets in the tramped and trodden porno mags on Hampstead Heath in bodies fucking through the trees and you wanted to swim in the lake while from the hill I watched the suburbs and we rolled in the glade and hooked ourselves on Scottish thistles while they screamed and splashed and played. In the alien nights in Soho, in the acrid smell of amphetamine, in the smoky bar of the Intrepid Fox in the broken bottles and indiscriminate violence in the faces gashed by jagged glass. In the spoon in the cook in the draw in the pin in the passion for life and desire for death in wide open eyes in your desperate climax in the soft of your breast in our myth and obsessions alone on the bridge in the black scorch of river which snakes through the heart of this murderful town past the point where I said "So leave if you can" in the "I'll walk you some more" in the "arrived all too soon", in the decision to sleep, holding each other, on the bench in the common in the freeze of the night in the healing of wounds and the beautiful trauma of young damaged lives. In the cafes in the coffee in the stir in the cup in the harsh bite of winter in the sulphuric night of millennium eve when the world came together and life was no good. It runs through me as a sadness. But it's not a sadness, it's a beauty. A beauty which clings on, stalked me around Europe and European towns and left me screaming for quit into polluted foreign air. It arrived one morning and stood standing five foot nine outside the Perrache railway Station. In the bare room of the St Michel hotel it was there. It lay with us in the carved wooden bed, lingered in the melancholy of deep night. It flickered outside the window in the blue neon gas of the vacancy sign, illuminated briefly her sexual fantasies of sirens and bullets, wept as she narrated the story of our failed heist, holed up suicidal awaiting the loudspeaker and armed police, two people dead and two more to follow. It drifted out those cheap black-market cigarettes, twirled like ribbon and dissipated in the dark. It sat warm in the earliest boulangeries and cafés, could be found in the fumes of the 6am pernod of the loneliest bars. It rang out from the church every hour and was in the funeral knell of Sunday afternoons. O My Love, let me ruin your life for just one more day. But she was gone, and it resided so terribly in the gone. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">O it came and it pooled out of me as a sadness. It came through youth and I didn't know what it was. It was there in my sick bed during long fantastic days off school; came in on the drone of helicopters and the mid-afternoon screams and whistles from the schoolyard opposite. It passed by the window as a millipede of children, cruel and unruly, looking in and laughing as it made its way down to the local swimming baths. It was in the smell of chlorine, in pruned skin and warts and verrucas, in the hideous stench of changing rooms and sour milk, humid feet and prepubescence. It was in me and I don't remember a time when it was not. It roared by in the whoosh of freedom, expanded in my eardrums as I freewheeled downhill for life. Come each dusk I would feel it, would stare out as the sun collapsed and the city died, would want to cry over nothing I could fathom. It came in with history and it overwhelmed me and made me mute. And those were the first lashes from the whip and it was in the whip and in the lash and in the rhythm and the meter and the crack and the yelp of youth. It circled by overhead in the traumatic squawkings of seagulls, sounded in the high winds and arctic skies. It frothed out from my mother's mouth in the back of an ambulance and spread out in the bruises across her chest in intensive care. It comes through ugly and then turns beautiful, comes beautiful and ugly again. On a terrible night I wrote. It was the first time and it made me ill and she nursed me better. It was in me then and in the bright cold healthy morning. I woke up freshly damned and I wanted nothing more. X</span></div>
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Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-87515716274586842972018-12-04T06:34:00.001+01:002018-12-04T06:47:27.377+01:00One Day a Summer<br />
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Back in the days when we still had dreams, when Gabriel Garcia Marquez was God, we'd stare out over the sprawl of London town and fantasize of a great and joyous sorrow when the scent of bitter almonds would come our way too. As yet unwise to the three-card trick and the sleight-of-hand, we accepted magic and marvelled over where things went and the mysteries of death and the universe. And that's how we were, in that break of youth, in a time of magic, when Gabriel Garcia Marquez was God.<br />
<br />
I didn't know who she was. She'd sometimes just appear, be stood there, smoking and looking out to the farther world. “Imagine all those lives going on out there,” she'd say, closing her eyes and blowing her smoke through the evening. “All the fuck-ups and those with nothing but the distance to keep them going. O, I want to be something, to do something. The beauty of this life is too terrible to do nothing. We've an obligation... A duty.”<br />
<br />
And we all felt like that. Like life branched out from there in a thousand different directions from a thousand different tributaries. With every book we read and every name we learned and every word we mastered, it all seemed to be leading somewhere, to some thing, to a changing of the guard. There was an excitement and a fervour in everything we did. Our own thoughts excited us. England and what lay beyond excited us. Music and art and literature and philosophy excited us. And most of all, the cyanide of love and its promise to come excited us. It was as if we could build something impossible together. That if only we had someone to hold onto through desperate nights then the morning would always come and tomorrow would be an antidote to yesterday. For a while back then, even poverty felt kind. We grew and became more complex and more brilliant with the less we had. We fostered fantastic lives and adopted fantastic roles within them. If we had no coffee to wake up to we'd make homemade lemonade. And we were happy to wake; to see the world through newborn eyes, to make sure our folly was real.<br />
<br />
- - -<br />
<br />
“Read to me,” she would always ask through those great hot stuffy nights when the moon wasn't long enough in the sky to cool the city. “I've great dreams,” she would say, “and I know you do too.”<br />
<br />
And so I would read, and the words would transport us to holy places and each night promised some mighty breakthrough that filled us with a queer kind of hope that we had no right to feel. On occasions we'd play music in an unknown language, close our eyes and imagine a carnival of life.<br />
<br />
“What do you see?” she would ask. I would tell her of men on stilts in top-hats and Union Jacks, singing foxes and black midgets with muskets. I'd tell her of the longing sound of a ship's horn and the crashing wild of the sea and of flying fish and a journey to strange lands of rituals and death. “We're gonna get out of this place,” I'd say, and she'd smile and silently weep and look up at the moon and dream along.<br />
<br />
“It's all bullshit,” I'd tell her.<br />
<br />
“What? What's bullshit?”<br />
<br />
“The moon. That we went to the moon. But it's a nice story.”<br />
<br />
“It is,” she would say. “It is a beautiful story, isn't it... it's one of the very best.” And then she'd break down from some unknown melancholy and we'd both be lost then.<br />
<br />
Nights like those did something to us. They brought in an all-knowing and savage poetry. They let us know, without a doubt, that we were prisoners to so much more than the economy and our little slither of town. We understood that we could be ripped apart by our emotions, by our lovers, by our mothers and fathers, by unrequited love, unrequited anything. We understood that the pursuit of the dream is often the death sentence and that romantics die such terrible deaths, always.<br />
<br />
Lord Byron – septicemia<br />
P B Shelley – drowned<br />
Huysmans – mouth cancer<br />
Oscar Wilde – syphilis<br />
Lermontov – shot through the heart <br />
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***</div>
<br />
Well, the winters came and the winters went and once in the middle of March it snowed. For a while I lived with a lover in a room with no windows, with nothing but an old hairdryer to defrost our fingers and toes. We tee-pee'd the covers on our bed and spent most of our days sitting under there, reading and talking and inventing a world outside that appreciated art and repaid suffering and was waiting for us to emerge. We believed these things. We collected the rotten, discarded fruit from the market and we drank black tea and that is how we passed the bad days and convinced ourselves that those to come would be so much better. And then they came.<br />
<br />
- - -<br />
<br />
He had lost his mind and he used to tell me this terrible story, the only story he could remember to tell. He was on the Falkland Island, running across the flat peatlands of Goose Green with a hundred kilos of kit while being peppered with machine gun fire. He told me of the early morning sun and the burning gorse and of his escape from the anarchy and madness of men and countries. When he was finally free of the bullets, collapsed down into the safety of shelter, he spoke of this great melancholy that descended upon him, of how safety and mortality had not saved him, but had left him looking back and yearning to run the lottery of that machine gun fire once more. His comrades had been cut down and his Commanding Officer taken out in the first steps. He had lost too much to ever be able to celebrate survival. He was ashamed of his survival, had lost himself in that desperate race across burning terrain, screaming for sanctuary and life and the comfort of his mother. <br />
<br />
I'd repeat that story to people and choke up as I told of those last words, that the truth is that the summer will kill us and rob of us of our essence. Escaping the war is no success, and being rewarded for words will not guarantee there'll be more to come. Our art and romance is safer in the doldrums, is more sure when you’re starving and drug-sick and your lover hangs on to your dreams and madness only because it's too hard to turn back. And our summer will come... Our summer is on its way. It is bleeding into the last of the winter and I tell you now, the heat will roll in soon and our skins will brighten and our minds will heal and we'll have a blast when she's finally here.<br />
<br />
“It's a beautiful story,” she would say. “It's one of the very best.”<br />
<br />
“It is,” I'd reply. "It is." . And then I'd quench the candle and we'd hunker down and the winter night would do its thing and there was not a trace of bitter almonds anywhere, just the stench of unwashed bodies and the fading scent of melted wax.<br />
<br />
- - -<br />
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<i>Thanks as EVER for reading... One Day a Summer, Shane. X</i><br />
<br />
<a href="https://thelostpostsofhh.blogspot.com/2018/12/one-day-summer-lines-for-joe-m.html" target="_blank">Lines for Joe M</a><br />
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<br />Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-49832354963468709042018-06-27T15:47:00.001+02:002018-06-27T15:47:12.977+02:00 The Bastard Sea of Life - Part 2<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 22.79px;"><a href="http://memoiresofaheroinhead.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-bastard-sea-of-life-part-1.html" target="_blank">Part 1</a></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.79px;">On his first day back, Grayson turned in to work two hours late. We'd crashed out with the back doors open and had woken up stone cold, and Grayson's veins had all retreated into the warmth and safety of his body. The bathroom looked like a slaughterhouse by the time we had finished. We rushed out, dressing as we strode down the road, Grayson calling in to say his alarm had frozen and me phoning any dealers to see if we could get an early score. It would be the mold for the next fortnight: falling even further behind what we were chasing and rarely having the time to wash our faces before we had to leave. That was when we started waking in our sunglasses, rarely doing too well first thing, cleaning out crack pipes and cooking up filters just to get us out the door. Grayson's savings were also running low and where I was back using every day, I had missed numerous deadlines for the little paid writing I had going on and had sent in other texts that were rejected out-of-hand due to not making any kind of sense. In our rush to make each day work, we were forgetting some things and abandoning others. And then there was Serena. Her latest move had been to turn up at Grayson's work and cause a huge domestic in front of his bosses. Ejected out the Arts Centre, she was now threatening to turn up at Grayson's flat, which would mean coming face-to-face with me.<br />
<br />
Grayson's work disciplinary meeting neared ever closer. If ever he was concerned, it never showed. I had asked him to let me take control of it, warning that his work Union would not be able to defend him in the correct way. He agreed with everything I said, acknowledged the strategies I laid out and said that was what we would do. But once the crack had worn off, he just didn't seem to have the energy or volition to get the papers or contract I needed, nor record his conversations with his bosses, nor back-up his work emails. He just let his case fall more and more towards the Union and fully believed that they would work in his best interests. The dilemma was that doing things my way would have involved a lot of effort, and Grayson just didn't have the effort to do anything but get back home to the waiting drugs.<br />
<br />
In the brief calm that preceded the actual hearing, Grayson would often return home in a positive mood, singing his bosses' praises and saying how kind and understanding they were being.<br />
<br />
"You do know they're only being nice because they're gonna have to sack you?"<br />
<br />
"Stop being so fucking pessimistic! I've a good feeling about this disciplinary... A very good feeling. It's not just my managers... Everyone's being so supportive. They just want to see me get back to my old self."<br />
<br />
"They're going to fire you, mate. Mark my fucking words. They're being nice because they know come next week, you'll no longer be their problem. You've been late just about every day since you returned, had another unauthorised absence last week. You're taking two-hour long lunch breaks so as you can get home and get topped up and get back. You're smoking crack and shooting heroin in their toilets and having domestics in the public foyer! They're protecting their own asses so as you can't go for a constructive dismissal or put in a harassment or bullying complaint. They must tread very carefully due to your mental health status. It's why it would be so easy for us to fuck them. But their decision is already made. What you need to do is spend the next few days gathering up everything from your work: contracts, handbooks, copies of warnings and emails, the minutes from your previous disciplinaries... Everything. Also, the names of other colleagues who have previously been disciplined for unauthorized absence. If we can find a precedent that has already been set, we can fuck them on a discrimination charge once they sack you. But you need to get these things before you're fired – after, it'll be too late. They'll lock down all access to your records and kill your mail address.”<br />
<br />
"Okay... Okay. Quit it, will you! You'll ruin my high with all that. I'll do it. Tomorrow, I'll seriously begin gathering all that shit up.”<br />
<br />
Tomorrow came and went, and Grayson didn't move a muscle to help protect himself. Instead, he left it with the Union rep, who he said would die fighting his corner.<br />
<br />
The problem was that Grayson needed someone who was prepared to lie and cheat and pervert the cause of justice for him. Someone who'd willingly falsify records, create fake evidence, whip up the support of his colleagues, break the law and risk jail time. He needed someone who would advise him in what to do and say, regardless of the truth or the law, or who was right and who was wrong. He needed someone who detested the conservative art market, someone who had a grudge against business and management... Someone sadistic enough who would relish taking on the creeps who run such places. A Union rep is not that kind of a person. They generally support the truth and justice, and this just couldn't be about that. If it were then Grayson would be fucked, as he was as guilty as hell. If he'd have listened to me I would have either saved his job, or, even better, made sure he got fired and then put the company in a position where they'd have had to pay compensation in an out-of-court settlement. But it was too late for any of that. Grayson's fate was in the hands of a good-meaning but truthful union rep, and that just about guaranteed his fate would be a rotten one.<br />
<br />
During that week, the good ship really started to take water. On the Monday, Grayson mentioned something about hoping his bank card would work. On Tuesday, he could only withdraw £100. And, on Wednesday, he left without his wallet and so I had to tap my mother for £200 which I promised would be paid back the next day.<br />
<br />
The next day was the day of Grayson's hearing. I walked him to work. We were almost an hour late and we both looked like shit. I was wrapped up in a heap of scarves, shades tight over my eyes and limping from an injection I had missed in my ankle. Grayson was soaked through with a drug sweat, his suit was crumpled and stained, and his white shirt was black around the collar. Every few minutes he had to stop as he needed to vomit. He had already tried to withdraw cash at the ATM machine but it had rejected his card. The plan then was that he'd use his credit card to draw out £400 from the ticket office cash register at his work. With the 400 I'd repay my mother, score 200 worth of crack and heroin, and be back at his work with the drugs for the outcome of his hearing. On reaching his work, Grayson rushed on in while I lit a cigarette and waited outside. When he returned he could hardly speak. He was soaked through with perspiration and there was dry, crusted vomit on his lips.<br />
<br />
“Din't work, mate... We're fucked! Bank's cancelled my card... We're sunk. I ain't even got your mother's money... Nor money for your tube fare home.”<br />
<br />
“You sure your card's cancelled? It's not just because you've no money?”<br />
<br />
“I don't know! All I know is it didn't work! The fucking bank's done us! I have to contact them. It says I have to contact them!”<br />
<br />
“But there's money in the cash register? If you had a card it would work?”<br />
<br />
“Yea, it'll work. Why? Do you have a card?”<br />
<br />
“No. I don't even have a bank account. Not responsible enough, apparently.”<br />
<br />
“Then what's your point?”<br />
<br />
“Just take the money from the register. You'll be paid either tomorrow or Monday and you can pay it back then. How often do they count the tills?”<br />
<br />
“Every day. I'm the cunt who counts them.”<br />
<br />
“Well, count them wrong! We can make good the discrepancy later.”<br />
<br />
“If I'm here later. Don't forget: my hearing.”<br />
<br />
“Your disciplinary. Shit!”<br />
<br />
“What should I do? Should I just take the lot? We could bunk off with everything... At least 4K. Have one last major blow out?”<br />
<br />
“No! Do NOT take the lot! The police would be onto us before we've even blown out the first pipe. Take £400... It's all we need. 400 isn't so bad.”<br />
<br />
Grayson lifted his glasses and stared at me. It was his way of saying we were losing our souls. God, he looked awful. I lifted my own shades, and staring deep into his eyes, I said: “Just fucking do it.”<br />
<br />
Grayson took a huge intake of breath, knocked his shades back over his eyes, straightened himself up, then strode forward back into his work. He returned just a few minutes later, neurotic with nerves. He came right up to me, closing out the light, and with the security guards pacing about in the foyer, he started taking notes out his pocket and forcing them into my hands like he couldn't offload them quick enough.<br />
<br />
“Take it, quick... Just take it and get the fuck outta here. There's £600... and a little more.”<br />
<br />
Stood outside like that, too close to each other to be doing anything innocent, we stuffed and pushed the notes into my bag. “I've gotta go,” Grayson said. “The Union rep is waiting for me... Wants to go over a few things before the hearing. Try and get back ASAP... I feel like total crap.”<br />
<br />
“I will do,” I said. “An' good luck... Fingers crossed they fire ya!” And with that, I left and made my way to the Underground to get a ticket and travel across town, repay my mother and score.<br />
<br />
- - -<br />
<br />
Exiting the tube station at the end of my outbound journey a text buzzed through on my phone. It was Grayson.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><b>evrything alright? u got us sorted yet??<br />
<br />
I'll have it in 15. Just walking to pick it up now. What time's your hearing?<br />
<br />
Bin n passd. Bastards fired me. Bang Bang!!!<br />
<br />
Shit.<br />
<br />
can I come 2 meet u? need a pipe.<br />
<br />
Go home and wait. I wont b long. R u OK?<br />
<br />
I will b<br />
<br />
yeah you will. I'll cya soon.</b></span></span><br />
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<br />
When I got back to Grayson's, he had been drinking. And not only that, immediately after being fired he had phoned Serena, and she had jumped at the chance to travel down and console him.<br />
<br />
“She asked if she can come around for an evening... Cook me up something to eat and talk. I said yes. She's been so good and she at least deserves that.”<br />
<br />
“When?” I asked.<br />
<br />
“Tomorrow .”<br />
<br />
“I'll ship out then. Give you two some time alone. What about gear? We'll need to score. How we gonna work that.”<br />
<br />
“Fuck. She'll be around at 7.30 PM. You could head on down and score, and by the time you return I'll have gotten rid of her. It'll work out perfectly."<br />
<br />
“What happened with the Union rep today? How come he didn't die fighting your corner?”<br />
<br />
“Turned out he was a piece of shit. Hardly said two words, and what he did say only dropped me further in it.”<br />
<br />
“You should have let me take that on. We could have had them by the bollocks.”<br />
<br />
“It's over, mate... It's all over. The Southbank Centre is history.”<br />
<br />
- - -<br />
<br />
On the morning following Grayson's dismissal, I woke up to a queer sensation of sea-sickness. Grayson was in the room, wearing just his red shades and a pair of lipstick-printed boxer shorts. He was spidering around, filling bin bags with rubbish and collecting together the dirty dishes and cups and glasses of the past few weeks. The back doors were slung wide open. The buildings opposite seemed out of kilter, like they had been built on an incline. Way out over them, in the farthest distance, sat an ominous-looking band of dark rolled cloud.<br />
<br />
“Serena,” Grayson said. I nodded. He gave a pained smile. “Just tidying up a little. If she sees the place in this state, she may refuse to leave."<br />
<br />
I lit a cigarette. “Do you need any help?” I asked.<br />
<br />
“No, there's not so much to do. Just cap and bin your needles when you're up and get rid of any old crack pipes.” I closed my eyes and smoked my cigarette, and as I did, I listened to Grayson as he cleared the room and freed it from its recent memory.<br />
<br />
“What you gonna do about the money from work?”<br />
<br />
“Fuck 'em. Anyone could have taken that money. How they gonna prove anything against me?”<br />
<br />
“Cameras?”<br />
<br />
“Till cameras don't work.”<br />
<br />
“The exterior cameras? Recording us stuffing their cash into my bag?”<br />
<br />
“Nah, we were too close together. We could have been doing anything. And, if it did all come on top I'd just say I lost it after being sacked and wanted to take revenge. I'll feign a breakdown. Stand there and piss my pants if I have to... Give them the money back trembling and sobbing.”<br />
<br />
“Still, if in the meanwhile there are any knocks on the door, hold your breath and don't answer.”<br />
<br />
The day drifted by slowly. Out back, the spring grass was being harassed by a strong wind and as the light began to fall it looked like ruffled black seaweed. Then the smell of the river came in and rested over it, and as the shadows gradually filled in every last bit of space we sat in the quiet still of the room, and we kept to our own thoughts, and a great silent but malevolent melancholy slowly descended upon us. At just gone 7, I gathered up my phone and the cash, ready to head off across town.<br />
<br />
“How long will you be?” asked Grayson.<br />
<br />
“The usual. An hour and a half... 2 hours.”<br />
<br />
“OK. I'll make sure she's well gone by then.”<br />
<br />
- - -<br />
<br />
When I arrived back around Grayson's area, it was gone ten. The night was in proper. I called Grayson to check if it was clear for me to head on back.<br />
<br />
“Ten minutes,” he said. “You get sorted OK?"<br />
<br />
“Of course.”<br />
<br />
“Thank fuck... I'm half sick here.”<br />
<br />
Twenty minutes later, having received no news, I phoned Grayson once again.<br />
<br />
“It's cool. You can come back,” he said.<br />
<br />
“Has she gone?”<br />
<br />
“Yeah, it's cool. See you soon.”<br />
<br />
I walked the small walk back to Grayson's and let myself in. In the hallway, I was accosted by the heavy fumes of a potent form of weed - the kind of weed that grounds people in the same place for days. It trailed away down towards the living room, into the distinct silence of a room waiting to greet someone. Grayson came out in the hallway to meet me.<br />
<br />
“Serena's here,” he mouthed. “She wants to meet you.”<br />
<br />
I knew it. I knew it from the phone call but had given him the benefit of the doubt. I made to do a U-turn and leave. Grayson tugged me back and whispered, “Please, mate. She said she wouldn't leave until she had seen you. She'd have waited all night if I hadn't told you to come back. And I need some brown. Please. She'll only stay ten minutes." I pushed him aside and entered the living room.<br />
<br />
“Hello Serena," I said, offering my hand. She stared at it like it was the hand of the devil wanting to waltz her around hell. After a moment, I withdrew it.<br />
<br />
“So, we meet at last,” she said, taking the last drag of a joint. Then, very deliberately she scrunched the roach out in the ashtray. I watched her index finger, the unvarnished nail bitten down, twist it out like she was screwing out the body of a bug. I cast my eyes at her. She was looking at me. She was tall and thin but was one of those women who hunched into themselves like some kind of mad, gnawing rodent. She had a long, thin nose and there were dark brown depression rings beneath her eyes. She looked worse than us.<br />
<br />
“So Shane,” she began, emphasizing my name in a condescending way, “Grayson tells me that you're this great writer?”<br />
<br />
“Just as many think I'm the worst. Depends what you like or what you're after.”<br />
<br />
“Hmm. Indeed. Well, I've had a good look over this writing of yours and I don't think much of it at all. It's vacuous, narcissistic crap... Nothing there at all.”<br />
<br />
“As I say, not everyone can like it. If everyone likes it then you're doing something very wrong.”<br />
<br />
She let out a cackle. “Doing something wrong? You really do think you're something, don't you?”<br />
<br />
“That's not for me to say. What I think has no value at all. It's not how it works.”<br />
<br />
She sat nodding and smiling, shaking her head in disbelief. “Cigarette,” she said. “Give me a cigarette.”<br />
<br />
I took out my packet, opened the top, and held it out for her to take one.<br />
<br />
“You're a bit fucking generous with Grayson's cigarettes!” she said. “Grayson, are these your cigarettes Shane is offering out? You're not fucking keeping him in smokes as well, are you!?” Then, back to me: “Don't you think that taking him for your scummy drug money is enough? How much a day? £300? You're smoking and shooting up £300 of my family's money every evening? Have you no scruples?”<br />
<br />
“Blame me If you need to. I'll carry it. But Grayson is 42 years old, and he contacted me, and he wanted heroin, and my job isn't to question or try to stop him. Whatever life he had led him to me. A happy man would never have reached out.”<br />
<br />
“So it's my fault? Are you fucking saying it's my fault?!”<br />
<br />
“No. I'm saying it's Grayson's fault. Like my choices are my fault. No one's to blame.”<br />
<br />
“You're a right one, aren't you? Think you have the answers to it all.”<br />
<br />
She sat there in silence staring at me, smoking and blowing the smoke my way.<br />
<br />
“Well, I'm sorry anyway," I said. "If it's affected your life in a bad way, I'm sorry.”<br />
<br />
“I don't need your fucking sorrow! You should have maybe thought about that before taking money out of my child's mouth! You realize that's what you've done? Turned a little girl's father into a fucking junkie and coerced him into spending the money which would have helped to feed and clothe her?!”<br />
<br />
Grayson, who had been standing in silence over near the door, now spoke. Of all the things, he said:<br />
<br />
“Give us the gear, mate... I need some brown.”<br />
<br />
I went in my bag, took out the tissue I had the drugs wrapped in and gave it to him. Serena bowed forward with her head in her hands, rocking as Grayson took the drugs and made his way out the room to straighten himself up. Once he was gone Serena rose and left the room too. I stood staring down at her handbag, a packet of thin menthol cigarettes sat right at the top.<br />
<br />
It was a weird night. The grass out back was still being splayed by the wind. It felt like there was something out there, some force hanging in the dark city air that weaved through lifetimes. From out the bedroom I could hear Serena and Grayson screaming at each other, another domestic ringtone sounding out across town.<br />
<br />
Grayson returned alone. “Sorry mate,” he said. “She's leaving now.” He collected her handbag and took it out. I followed him. Serena was standing in the hallway. Under the dull lighting, the dark under her eyes was even more pronounced. She stood staring at me until tears slowly overspilled the bottom lids of her eyes. I wanted to hold her, somehow grip her into me, let her fight and scream and kick and spit and then give in and sink into the darkness of comfort that another body offers. I didn't move. She wiped her eyes and she took one of Grayson's hands and she said, “Fucking sort it out! Sort it out!"<br />
<br />
When Grayson next joined me in the room he had been crying himself.<br />
<br />
“That was hard, putting her out like that,“ he said. “That was too fucking hard.” He fell down onto the sofa, in the exact same spot where Serena had been sitting. He stared at the floor and outside the black sea grass blew and I knew - it was all coming to an end.<br />
<br />
The early hours of that night were imbued with a great sadness. Grayson was reflective and knew his life had collapsed around him. He was out of a job, almost out of cash, and the only thing in the world that still loved him unconditionally and could help had just left in tears and was probably vomiting up her disgust into the river. We smoked our crack in silence, and when it was gone Grayson asked if I could hit him up with a fix of heroin. As I probed around his forearm in the bathroom, I could feel him staring at me. I had a hard time finding anything in his arm and there were lumps and marks bearing up on both sides. He didn't wince nor make a single complaint, just stared at me until he felt the drug reach his brain. I tossed the syringe in the sink and left him there, slowly going over, folding into himself as his last place of retreat.<br />
<br />
The next day it was the the official first day of summer. The money we had stolen from Grayson's work was all gone. At 10 AM we were down outside the bank, waiting for it to open. Grayson withdrew the money from his final paycheck along with the small overdraft he was allowed. It would kept us going for another few days, but no more. During those days, as the tide that had pulled Grayson out slowly washed him back ashore, we made the first moves to enrol him in a methadone program. It would take a week, but he was taken on and given the date his first script would be scribbled out. To bide him through, we travelled back and forth across town buying up as much methadone and useful opiates as we could. The next days would be tough. I told Grayson that I'd stay there with him and we'd suffer the worst if it out together.<br />
<br />
And, with the money gone and having slipped into overdraft we could do nothing but drag a hand down our heavy faces, take a deep breath, swallow, exhale and prepare ourselves for a period of sober living. So, in a flat in Lambeth, as the first hot, carnival days of summer rolled in, we slept and watched films and sweated it out on a diet of methadone, paracetamol and slow-release morphine tablets. And, after four days in surrender we came to and found our feet, and for a moment, in the ageing middle of our lives, the bastard sea of life sat still.<br />
<br />
</span></div>
- - -<br />
<br />
My Thanks for Reading as Ever, Shane. X<br />
<br />
<br />
Lines for Joe M ---> To Follow Shortly....<br />
<br />
<br />
Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-90082661767861978392018-05-24T20:36:00.000+02:002018-05-24T20:36:03.621+02:00Souls of the Goldhawk Road<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;"></div><span style="line-height: 22.79px;"> </span> <div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="line-height: 22.79px;"><br />
It was one of those tawdry summer evenings and all I could think about was the heat. It was everywhere, stuffy and humid and crucifying even at that late hour. Then there was a woman, looking older than she was, sat outside the closed Estate Agent's, pickled drunk and burnt out as if she’d lived in that oven since forever. And with the heat, on top of the drink, she was in an uncommon daze, like the madness in her mind was cooked in for good. She was scrunching up her face and moaning, pushing away the arm of a man who was trying to tell her something, trying to get through, pull her up and take her off someplace.<br />
<br />
<br />
“Fuck off an’ away, Bobby!” she kept saying. “Just leave me alone.”<br />
<br />
<br />
Every now and again her eyes would lull back in her head like she was about to go out. Then, just as slowly, they would recentre and refocus and she would return once more to the hell of her immediate reality. O, the heat was cooking everyone up and the city was all set to catch aflame. That was the summer of my return to London, when for a brief moment something felt like it could really happen.<br />
<br />
“Man, this heat just makes yuh lazy… Reeaal lazy. Not wannin' uh do uh ting about nuttin' yet plenny a tings tuh do.”<br />
<br />
“Yeah, plenty of things to do,” I said. “And if they'd give me a break, I might just get on and do them.”<br />
<br />
“Brother, yuh doan got two coin furruh couple uh beers, huh? Dis heat’s juss 'bout dried me out an' uh need sum liqwid refreshment.”<br />
<br />
“Sorry, I don't.”<br />
<br />
“Man, doan tell me dat. Juss 'bout evrywun got two quid in today's day. Tis for uh drink, bruvva.”<br />
<br />
“If I had it you'd already be drunk."<br />
<br />
“Ahh, Yea, Yea. So, what'is it dat be bringin' ya'ere? Yuh waitin' fuh sumwun? Is dat it? Ahh, me shoulda re-Ah-lized. Yea. Now me spies dat serpent in yuh. Wha'tit'is yuh afta, Bruvva? Duh sweet Brown or a lick uh da White?”<br />
<br />
“Maybe a tickle of each... You never know.”<br />
<br />
“Ahh, me hear dat, Bruvva... me hear dhat well an' trew. An' dyuh gunna spare ol' Yankee ‘ere uh rock-uh-bye White? Juss uh small rock, Bruvva. I'm De-Hy-Draytid 'ere. 'Ere, look...” he said, lifting up his arms and showing two huge wet patches of perspiration under the pits of his shirt. “Me needin' sumting or dis eve'nin will stew me right on down intuh muh boots. Ya can spare uh White for an ol' black comrade, can't yuh?”<br />
<br />
“Maybe. Let's see how things stand once it's here.”<br />
<br />
“O, fank yew Bruvva, fank yew... Yew'v saved me. Me sed tuh muhself, lookin'on down at yuh while me was over d'ere... Me sed: Now dat's a decent kinda felluh right along d'ere. I knew it! Me could sense duh goodniss in yuh. Man, I can't tell yuh what me'd do fuh a rock uh white... Two beers an' uh rock uh white, an' that'll be me juss fine tuhnight. Man, you be belongin' round'ere? Ain't never sin yuh before, is all. Me aRlways good fer uh face, but uh name... O, yuh can forget dat! Me can't even remember duh names uh me own childrin. How wicked is dat, Bruvva? Me own spawned brethrin, an' I doan even know duh names nor how old dey even be. Grown up now, uh bet. Grown right on up an' out hustlin' juss like I was at dat age. O, man... Summer wasn't like dis back d'hen. Yuh cud breathe when we were young. Now the world has juss gottin heavy... Weighs right down on uh man like uh sack uh cement. An' round'ere too, I mean. O, duh Bush wuz uh place tuh be back den... An' den dis happened: We grew up an' once we had an' we opened our eyes, uh whole generation had lost itself... lost sumting. We din't come in from afar, Bruvva... We wuz aRlways 'ere, only yuh'd never 'ave noticed us before.”<br />
<br />
<br />
I stared at the man, this black ragtime prophet. And as I stared, his yapping went mute, and for some moments I watched the silent animation of his mouth as it twisted and contorted into horrendous shapes, his words being formed in that masticating orifice, pushed out on the tip of an indecent purpled tongue.<br />
<br />
<br />
“Bobby FUCK OFF!!! I'm stayin' 'ere. Fuck off, an' away Bobby!”<br />
<br />
“We've gotta move on, Doll. We can't stay here. I can't leave you here like this... You'll have us both fucking collared."<br />
<br />
“Ahhhh Fuck'off an' leave me a bit alone, Bobby! Bobbbbby....”<br />
<br />
“Mate... Mate... Ya waitin' fer Jamie? Give ’im a call, please. He's given me the right ol' runaround today.”<br />
<br />
I turned to confront this latest spectre on the scene. He stood before me thin but broad, his arms out and hung at the elbows like he'd been pegged out on a line to dry. His face was pale and not quite white, and his eyes were large and mad.<br />
<br />
“Didya hear me? Said the cunt's given me the right ol' runaround today. Please mate, just give him a bell an' tell him Dave is 'ere.”<br />
<br />
“I'm not waiting for Jamie. I don't know any Jamies.”<br />
<br />
“Who you after, then? Silver? The Somalians?”<br />
<br />
“Could be.”<br />
<br />
Nah, mate... Don't score offa that lot. Them are fucking robbin' Somalian cunts. Won't see them unless no one else is on... An' I mean NO ONE. Buy offa my man, Jamie. Come on. Whatd'ya want? Jamie's are twice the size. Here, give us ya dosh and we'll see him together... Right now.”<br />
<br />
“Get outta here. I'm not giving you my money!”<br />
<br />
“What, ya don't trust me? Ya think just because I'm a junkie I'm a thieving cunt? Is that it? I don't need to be fucking slyin’ people, mate. Am doing just fine as it is.”<br />
<br />
“I can see that. Now, leave me alone. This place is hot enough as it is.”<br />
<br />
“Mate, will ya just phone him, for fucksake? Just a quick call?"<br />
<br />
Before I could answer, he had given up on me and was scampering off, wraithlike, up the road, stopping people and terrifying them, rattling his jangling neurosis along his stricken path.<br />
<br />
“Bobby, Fuck off.... Just let me be. Fuck off an’ away, Bobby. Fuck off an’ away...”<br />
<br />
There it was again: that voice and those words, the sound of a cracked and corrupted lullaby. It was a bawl that carried on through generations and told the tale of every such summer evening there ever has been. I watched the woman once more, and wondered what the hell we were all doing.<br />
<br />
The road was busy now. The fast food shops had started serving in earnest and a few more drinkers had congregated on the corners. The men in the late-night gambling shop came out for cigarettes and in moments you could hear the greyhound races being called and the hullabaloo as another favourite lost its legs around the penultimate bend. That was another man's hope gone right there. I watched the man who then stood outside the Bookies. He smoked his smoke and pondered, and it looked like he had finally found the answers to his problems in those long, drawn-out drags he took of his tobacco. It's a well-known fact: The gamblers like the drunks and the drunks like the gamblers, but no one likes the junkies.<br />
<br />
The man cast his eyes my way. He took the last inch of smoke from his cigarette and, still staring at me, flicked the smouldering butt into the gutter as if that place held some importance for me. I wanted to say something to him, stare him straight down the barrel and tell him something crazy. But I said nothing. I kept my silence and let him return in peace to the safety of his losing hub to flagellate himself in that way.<br />
<br />
“Aye aye,” a voice said.<br />
<br />
I turned around to see two community police specials trotting themselves into the scene. One was tall and sticking up as straight as a pencil, and the other was shorter and well-built with a bright red face that looked like he was being strangled. They both wore their half-sleeved summer uniforms. Their radios crackled and chirruped away like insects in the warm, late evening. They approached the drunk woman sat outside the Estate Agent's. Slowly she raised her drink-laden face and squinted them into view.<br />
<br />
“What you want? I ain't done nothing wrong. I've had a drink is all but I din't do nothing to no one.”<br />
<br />
“Madam, we've reason to believe you was in Hammersmith this afternoon, and we need to ask you a few questions about what you did there.”<br />
<br />
“Hammersmith? Questions? I din't fucking do anything!”<br />
<br />
“Madam, let's do this somewhere a little more private. I'm sure you don't want your private business spilled out onto the street?”<br />
<br />
The two police specials helped her up. When they let go she stood swaying, tottering like that until her body decided on the vertical. Then she looked around.<br />
<br />
“Bobby! Bobby!!!” she called. But Bobby was gone, just a hunched back walking briskly away and turning off down the first street he arrived at. The police escorted the lady a little ways down the adjoining residential street. They lowered her to a sitting position against a garden wall and stood over her, looking in and wondering what to do.<br />
<br />
<br />
The heat was getting to everyone. The workers in the furnace of the Kebab house were standing outside, fanning themselves down with damp cloths. The drunks at the bus stop sat bemused and dehydrated. And the junkies waited and some sweated because of the heat, and others because of their poison. That's when the wraithlike addict returned, screaming on about Jamie again.<br />
<br />
“Reel it in a bit, mate. The police are down there.,” I said.<br />
<br />
He looked down the street at the police with the drunk woman. He waved them off.<br />
<br />
“They're not fucking police... Just community workers! They've got fuck-all powers of arrest and wouldn't dare bust us. They can't, mate.... Not allowed. Imagine one of them daft cunts busting a dealer for a few bags and fucking up a 6-month long surveillance op? Them cunts are used to sweep the drunks along, kick the beggars' teeth out and jump in to break up bottle fights. One got himself killed the other month and it wasn't even in the paper! Even their own lot don't like ‘em. Fuck ‘em.”<br />
<br />
At that he stood astride, right on the corner, facing the police officers, and screamed “Waaaankers!” while gesticulating the act with his hand.<br />
<br />
“Fucking waaankers. Leave her alone. She's innocent!”<br />
<br />
The tall wooden officer warned him to stay back.<br />
<br />
“Yeah, an' what you gonna do if I don't?”<br />
<br />
“Just stay where you are, Sir; I'm asking you for the last time!"<br />
<br />
“Stick your final warning up your arse! I wouldn't wanna be any closer. And I'll tell you what: If I was doing a little better I'd have your fucking badge! Harassing bastards and no one does a thing about it.”<br />
<br />
For a moment there was a brief stand-off. Then the officer turned, and the wraithlike addict cursed, and the evening went on and the heat was just as persistent as ever.<br />
<br />
The commotion he introduced to the road preceded him. The sudden screeching of braking cars, the bleating of horns and the shouts of irate drivers. He wheeled himself on like it was nothing, and I knew he was heading my way.<br />
<br />
He had no legs and he said he was a poet. He parked up a small meter opposite me and sat sweating away in his cheap government-issue wheelchair. He had oily grey hair pulled back into a straggly ponytail and a wooden beaded necklace hung down around his bare, bony, sun-scorched chest. Beads of perspiration rolled down over his abdomen and soaked into the top band of his trousers.<br />
<br />
"D'you like poetry?" he asked.<br />
<br />
"No," I said. "I hate everything to do with reading and writing... Bores the shit outta me."<br />
<br />
"Well, you're missing out there, then. Good poetry is better than any drug you can get... Better than this shit we're pumping into ourselves. When great poetry hits it fucking transports you to another dimension, man. Serious, you don't know what you're missing."<br />
<br />
"And what am I missing? And, more importantly: You... Are you any good?"<br />
<br />
"Good? Me? I'm the poet... THE Poet! I've invented a whole new expression, a new type of poetry altogether! Everyone knows me. Used to sit outside the Broadway and write my verse on the fucking pavement in different coloured chalks. You must've seen me? If you live around here you'd have seen me?"<br />
<br />
"What's your name?"<br />
<br />
"Already told you: The Poet."<br />
<br />
"O, I didn't realize that was your actual name. You up for reciting a line or two?”<br />
<br />
“Of course. Always on the lookout for an eager audience.”<br />
<br />
He reached down inside the crutch of his trousers and withdrew a damp, rotting notepad. He began leafing through it like it were his life savings, pulling faces as he looked over his work, like that one wasn't quite right and the next wasn't him at his best, etc. When he had settled on one he was happy with, he kinda wriggled up straight in his chair, cleared his chest, before gobbing out a huge grey hunk of phlegm down on the pavement to the side of his wheelchair.<br />
<br />
“Hhh Hmmmm.... This one's called, er, ‘My Monkey’.”<br />
<br />
“And is ‘My Monkey’ rhymed up with the word ‘junkie’?” I asked.<br />
<br />
“You best believe it is. Seven fucking times, if you want numbers!"<br />
<br />
“Then I've heard it. You're right, you are known.”<br />
<br />
“Yeah? You've really heard that one?”<br />
<br />
“I have. And more than once.”<br />
<br />
“Huh! Then how about my much revered, anti-festive ditty – ‘Cold Christmas Turkey’?”<br />
<br />
“About withdrawals, isn't it? Being junk-tied over Christmas?”<br />
<br />
“It is! See, you know more about contemporary verse than you think.”<br />
<br />
“Look over there,” I said. “Do you see that green telephone connection box?”<br />
<br />
The de-legged junkie poet looked over to where I was pointing and nodded.<br />
<br />
“Well,” I said, “I know what's behind it... the years' worth of dust and smog and grime which has settled there. I know the piss and the dampness and the weeds at the bottom and the fat brown slugs which slither out by night. I know the scrunched-up cigarette packets, the pigeon's shit, the rusting empty beer cans and the 'Black Nurse with a Cock' Call-Guy flyer stuck upon the side. That's what I know about contemporary verse, right there.”<br />
<br />
"Well, that's nice... Very nice. But that's not poetry. It's what us fellas in the writing game refer to as 'prose'."<br />
<br />
"But I never said I was a poet. You said that. You said you were a poet... The Poet."<br />
<br />
He looked at me like Doubting Thomas would have looked at Jesus. Then he took a huge lungful of air and, with his chest inflated, began booming out verse in a majestic voice:<br />
<br />
<i>And like Abas a mocker be<br />
<br />
O pig, O boar, O trundling swine<br />
<br />
I name you as a Philistine!</i><br />
<br />
<br />
I couldn't help but burst out into laughter, almost sucking my lit cigarette down my gorge before finally spitting it out in a spluttering guffaw. At that, the legless poet started pointing and booming:<br />
<br />
“Philistine!!! Hey O, I name it a Philistine! Philistine! Philistine for all to see!!!”<br />
<br />
People in the street turned to stare, saw a wheelchair-bound amputee gesturing and screaming out poetry and insults, and waved him off as some kind of nut. When he had finished, his hands gripped ahold of each wheel of his chair and he slowly set himself in motion. He wheeled himself right up to me. I thought he was going to spit at me or ride his stump of a leg into my knee. He did neither. Rather, he parked his chair an inch from my toes and said quietly: "Why are people like you such fucking Philistines?"<br />
<br />
"Because it's easier and more fruitful than being a poet... Much more a bad one," I said.<br />
<br />
At that, he took up his soiled notebook of verse and for a moment looked like he was going to rip it in two. He didn't. He held it aloft and he shook it like it were a Bible. Then he screamed: “These are mine! These are all fucking mine!!!” before shoving his life's work back down into the humid fermenting underworld of his pants. He chugged himself into motion once more and headed off down towards the gambling shop. He made it clear that he'd prefer to wait out the wait next to a gambler who despised him, rather than linger anywhere near me. As the Amputee Poet pulled up, the Smoking Gambler slid his eyes discreetly down upon him, then moved a large foot aside. Every now then, as we continued our wait, the amputee would look over at me, all the while muttering and shaking his head in disbelief at one man's total ignorance.<br />
<br />
There were now at least six heroin addicts waiting to score. Two were sat across the road drinking a coffee outside the cheap Chinese café, another one was down at the bus stop, I was right on the corner, the amputee was outside the gambling shop and the young wraithlike addict was still approaching and harassing anyone who came down the road.<br />
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"Told ya I din't do anything. I like a drink is all but I ain't no thief. Do I look like I could get out a shop with anything? Most shops won’t even let me in! Nah, like I said, I ain't sin Bobby! Not for over a week. I thought you was Bobby... That's why I was calling him. Thought it was him kicking me awake again."<br />
<br />
"Well, if you do see Bobby, you need to tell him to come in and see us. He's breached his licence and it'll be better he hands himself in than he gets picked up kin the street – like that he'll almost certainly be going back to prison."<br />
<br />
<br />
"Nah, I won't be seeing Bobby. I told ya: ain't seen him for over a month now... Not since he clumped me one and knocked two of me bottom teeth out. Will have nothing to do with him after that."<br />
<br />
The two police specials stood and listened to the woman's contradictions. They pondered over her even after she had stopped talking. Doll plonked her beer can down on the step of the Estate Agent's and then fell down to a sit with about the same force. The smaller policeman tapped his colleague. “Come on; let's go.” The tall police special nodded a knowing nod and pulled a resigned face – there was nothing they could do. He looked around and then looked down towards the wraithlike addict, who was still going from person to person. “Yeah, let's go,” he said. Whether he saw the tragedy that I saw, or just a people who had slipped into a state of daily lawlessness that legislature couldn't deal with was unsure. Whatever his thoughts, he kept them to themselves and the two police specials walked away with no arrest. Barely were they out of sight when Bobby returned.<br />
<br />
"Doll, did they ask about, me? You didn't tell ‘em nothing, did ya? Doll... Doll...." But for the moment Doll was gone, taken by slumber and left to cook, helpless in the throbbing murder of the evening sun.<br />
<br />
- - -<br />
<br />
It was gone 9 pm when the amputee poet suddenly spun his wheelchair around and made off down the road at full speed, his arms going like the main rod on an old train wheel. The two addicts who had been at the Chinese café were also on the move, beelining across the street, both in faded black and wearing dark shades, one holding his jacket over his shoulder. And they weren't the only ones. Another came from the bus stop, and yet another cycled past wearing no top and self-inked tattoos up his arms and over his torso. I headed up the tail-end, purposely keeping a distance in case some bitter gambler had rung in a call to the police.<br />
<br />
"Man, wait up... Wait fuh me, Bruvva. Dontcha be goin' an dispeerin' on me now.” It was Ol' Yankee, trying to keep apace with me in case I scored and took the back street doubles home. I could smell his body odour, the very particular odour of an old black man whose last wash was months before mine.<br />
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“Qwik, Bruvva... Hurry it up. Thuh fool uh 'ave no food leff if all d'hese vultures get tuh him first. Doan worry 'bout me. I be d'ere or d'ereabouts... You go'oRn up ahead.”<br />
<br />
I ignored Yankee's pleas for me to hurry up and lingered quite away behind the main body of users hobbling and wheeling and cycling up to score. The only addict who was not chasing up the dealer was the wraithlike kid who was waiting on a different crew.<br />
<br />
“If you need something, you better get it while it's here,” I said to him.<br />
<br />
“D’ya think he'd do me credit? I'm good for it. One thing I always do is pay my debts off.”<br />
<br />
“I doubt it. Depends on how well you know them and what business you bring.”<br />
<br />
“Mate, please, phone Jamie for me. Ask him where he's at.”<br />
<br />
“Cathnor Park, Jamie?”<br />
<br />
“Yeah, that's the cunt.”<br />
<br />
“What's your name again?”<br />
<br />
“Dave. Crazy Dave. He'll know who you're talking about.”<br />
<br />
Just as I went to call Jamie, my phone went. It was my dealer.<br />
<br />
“I've seen ya, Bro.... Don't come up this way. Go back and wait down near the cafe. I'll be five minutes.”<br />
<br />
As I made my way slowly back from where I had come, I phoned Jamie. There was no answer and that wasn't good news.<br />
<br />
“Dave, he's not answering, mate.” Dave lent far back and with his mouth to the sky he screamed, “Cuuuuunt. Cuuuuuunttt!!!” And for a moment his despair echoed throughout the area, like a wild dog that was grieving and howling out to unknown forces in the night.<br />
<br />
I left Billy, and with Yankee I headed down towards the cafe.<br />
<br />
“Stay away frum d'at one,” Yankee said. “He's not right in duh head.”<br />
<br />
The sun had almost set by the time the Somalian came down with my order. The heat had lessened a notch but the night was still muggy and humid and the city's shadows were stretched large and dark and were sinister and cool. The old Chinese owner of the cafe was out sweeping his shop front for the last time that night.<br />
<br />
"Coffee? Tea?? Best coffee in Bush jus' one pound, one cup?” he said.<br />
<br />
“Not tonight,” I replied.<br />
<br />
“Warm warm night,” he said , looking on up to the darkness that was coming in.<br />
<br />
“It's been a hot one,” I agreed.<br />
<br />
“Yes, very hot. My God, where this heat come from? That's what I wanna know?”<br />
<br />
"Yankee," I said, discreetly pushing a small bag of crack into his hand, “where does the heat come from?”<br />
<br />
“Oh man, yuh wouldn't believe me if uh told ya. T'is comes in frum far far away... Another place entirely. Yep, d'hats where d'at heat come from. Oh my. O yes. Oh so it does.”<br />
<br />
Yankee tightened his fist around the rock of crack and the old Chinese café owner stopped sweeping. He stood and he leant on his broom, and he looked out with longing into the deep dark mauve of the sky. And I was looking too, and so was Yankee, way out into the wherever, to somewhere far from here, to a place we could never return.<br />
<i><br />
- - -<br />
<br />
Thanks as ever for reading. The World is ours, Shane. X</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://thelostpostsofhh.blogspot.co.uk/2018/05/souls-of-goldhawk-road-lines-for-joe-m.html"><b>Lines for Joe M</b></a><br />
<br />
<br />
</div></span>Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-41228881454410416852018-04-20T11:00:00.000+02:002018-04-20T11:01:53.548+02:00The Bastard Sea of Life - Part 1<br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.79px;">Spring had come to London. From out the death and rot of winter came forth the fragile green beginnings of life, and from the tips of the hard, seemingly extinct branches of the city's trees appeared the first ugly knots of beautiful growth. I was down to the lunula of my fingernails, had been steadily eating myself away in an effort to survive and not bury myself in debt. I had buried myself in debt. Among the few people who cared I had relinquished my pride and accepted their generosity, had used it to paper over the ever-widening cracks of other, more pressing debts. But then, <i>Came the Spring Came Hope.</i> It showed in the broken plastic chairs that reappeared outside the cheap Chinese cafe, came with the far-off squinting sun and the blue and wet of fresh days. I didn't dream often just then, but when I did I dreamt of love and tenderness and loyalty; of light summer dresses and romance, of a square of room, any room, where we could retreat, lie together and talk out words into the night. And that was how it was in that year, when spring came to London, during my first spring back in town. </span></div>
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A message emerged from out of that blue. It flashed through on my phone early one morning and sat there for three hours waiting for me to find it. I read the words and then I read them again. It didn't help. They made even less sense second time around. All that I could determine with any degree of certainty was that his name was Grayson and he was in some kind of trouble. </div>
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Must be wriggling some bait to put the bite on me, I thought. Strangers were always doing that, imagining that I was doing well and would leap out of bed at the chance to wire them across some money. As I was deliberating over what to do, a second message buzzed through.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Soz 2 msg like this. not doin 2 good. Plz msg back.</span></div>
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So it is money, I thought. It's rarely anything else.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">What'$ the problem? I sent back.</span></div>
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Grayson's response was immediate, this time emotionally cryptic and worrying: </div>
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<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">im just so angry m8. U no like so fuckin angry n i dont have any1 2 turn 2. feels like sumthing real bad is gonna happen. </span></div>
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I understood that whoever this Grayson fella was, that he was certainly struggling to keep ahold of any beauty in life, was maybe floundering in the junk tank or was possibly even quite seriously ill. I quit messaging and called. He didn't answer. Then he messaged.</div>
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cant blieve u foned. fucka! was 2 spineless 2 answer. call again.</div>
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I did call. And from that call Grayson would be drawn out and pinned wide open, the old junk train would chug, loaded back into the station and, for another year, spring would be abandoned and the trees would bloom alone. </div>
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I turned up to meet Grayson with a large kitchen knife stuffed down the band of my trousers. Too many psychos out there to rely on luck and intellectual reflexes. If he tried to pull any crazy shit on me, I'd vowed to pin his guts to the inside of his back. Over the years my words had secured quite a number of death threats. One guy, whose daughter had died from an overdose, had journeyed over to France to track me down and even up the score. In his penultimate email he wrote, 'People like you are a cancer on society.’ His mail included a picture of the apartment I had abandoned just a month previous and a warning that he'd find my new address within days. He never did, and I never heard from him again. And now, there I was, waiting to meet a stranger who had been saying some real weird stuff that made no real sense apart from "I'm just real fucking angry." It was that logical, almost placid acknowledgment that he was finding it difficult to cope which unnerved me. So, I stood waiting for him with a knife digging into my groin, purposely positioned on the opposite side of the road and a little way down from where I had arranged to meet him. I wanted to give myself as much room to manoeuvre as possible, be in a position to observe and weigh Grayson up before deciding whether or not to go through with the meet. </div>
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It was a fine spring afternoon. The overground tube grabbed ahold of its track and lurched on over the iron railway bridge. It headed on down its line and left an echo of its entire history in the day. I could smell treated wood and boiled tarmac, dusty stones and the black engineering grease of faraway days. Surely this wasn't an afternoon that would be pierced through with psychotic melodrama. With the train then just a faint rumble in the distance, a man appeared outside the station. He wore red-framed shades and had wavy, greying hair which was finger-combed through with wet gel. His nose was very slightly upturned. He stood there holding a large bouquet of bright yellow daffodils. It was Grayson. I recognized him from the pictures I had seen online. I eyed him closely. He made a phone call. As he spoke he observed himself in a shop window, made an attempt to tidy himself up a little, like he cared what kind of an impression he would make. He didn't seem obviously troubled. I unfolded my own shades, placed them over my eyes, crossed the road and approached him from behind. “Grayson?” I said, gently touching his arm as I came around. For a moment he seemed taken aback, lost for words. Then he found himself. "Ya Fucka!" he said. I could smell alcohol off him. He was slightly taller than I and stood in front of me looking as awkward as I have ever seen any man look. Then he said: "Well, give us a hug then, ya Fucka!" He opened his arms and, being careful not to crush his daffodils, he embraced me and squeezed tight and he was full of warmth. </div>
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Grayson seemed no more prone to violence than most people with borderline psychotic tendencies. If anything, he seemed kind of sorrowful and lost, reflective, still speaking in half riddles.</div>
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"I just bought these shades,” he said. “You know, had to cover my eyes to commute... To stop people looking in at me.” </div>
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I didn't have a clue as to what the hell he was talking about. I nodded as if I did. That's when I noticed his shirt, yellow stains down the front and two large patches of perspiration spread out from under each armpit.</div>
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"Excuse the shirt, I didn't have anything clean."</div>
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"I've worn worse,” I said. “It's nothing. Right, shall we grab a coffee and talk? You can explain a little of what's been going on."</div>
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"A coffee? Er, we can, but I was thinking I could maybe shout you something a little stronger? I didn't want to ask over the phone. "</div>
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"Stronger? Like gear stronger? Can I score for ya?"</div>
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"Gear... Score… Yeah. Can you?"</div>
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"D'you even need to ask? How come, though? Is there some kind of blockage your end?”</div>
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“I wouldn't know, mate. I've not used for six years... Deleted all my numbers when I quit.”</div>
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“Six years?! Fuck. That's something. I've never even gone six weeks."</div>
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"I know. It's one of the things I admire about you. You seem to have accepted what you are. I wish I was more like that. I'm just fuckin' dishonest... An absolute fraud."</div>
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"Nothing to admire in me. I only burnt my bridges so as I could never sneak back across. Now, are you absolutely sure you want me to score? It's six years, don't forget."</div>
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"I'm sure. I'm more sure about that than just about anything else right now. Give your man a call and order like 300 quid's worth from him. What'll we get for that?”</div>
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"It's three for twenty... The white and brown. 300 would be 45 bits."</div>
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"Three for twenty? Fuck! Then order 200 in white and a 100 of brown... might as well make a proper day of it. Will it be cool to go back to yours?"</div>
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"It's right where we're headed,” I said. “Though I see you've already lost a yard of pace."</div>
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“I'll get it back, don't worry. I'm not all shot through just yet... And I won't slow you down."</div>
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- - -</div>
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Grayson looked uncomfortable sitting within the confines of a room. It was like the walls and ceiling were exerting an undue pressure on him. He was sweating, and his clothes appeared suddenly too tight. He sat there like that, on the edge of the sofa, counting out his money by dealing each note down onto the table in front of me. When he was done, he asked how long I'd be.</div>
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"Five minutes. You can come with me, if you like?"</div>
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"Nah, I trust ya, mate."</div>
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"You'll get badly stung trusting people round here. You may even get badly stung today!"</div>
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"I know the scene, don't worry. If I'm honest I'd expect nothing less. Worse, if it were me I'd probably fuck off with the cash myself. I've just about given up caring either way."</div>
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“O well, I guess we take our chances. Just don't steal the fucking windows while I'm gone.”</div>
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“Huh???”</div>
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“The windows. Don't steal 'em or jump through 'em! I'll see you in five.”</div>
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- - -</div>
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£300.</div>
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45 bags.</div>
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3 extra. </div>
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32 white. </div>
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16 brown. </div>
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A handful of holiday. </div>
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I unclenched my fist and let the bags fall out on the table in front of Grayson. He barely even acknowledged them. Instead, he took a small puff on the cigarette he was smoking and after blowing out a little chortle of smoke, he said:</div>
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"Help yaself, mate. Go ahead. This is my treat.”</div>
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"Not how it works, I'm afraid. First pipe's yours. You look like you need it much more than I do."</div>
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I set up a pipe for Grayson. It was a little homemade number, a small plastic methadone bottle run through with the stem of a biro and crowned with a skin of tin foil. It looked like it was just about ready to go out jousting. Grayson raised the pipe to his mouth. I lit it for him. Through the wavering flame, Grayson trembled. And then he sucked, and the flame swamped over the crack and ash and was taken down through the perforations in the foil and disappeared into the top of the bottle. Grayson inhaled. When he'd taken his fill, he raised a hand to signal for me to cut the flame. He rested motionless for a second, holding the sweet smoke in his lungs. Then he exhaled, sending ghosts of smoke tumbling and expanding out into the room. I watched him with a tenderness of soul, took a strange pleasure in observing the effect that the pipe had on him. As the drug hit his brain he made a deep, low groaning sound, like he was being relieved of a tremendous burden. It made me sad. And, for a moment, before my turn on the pipe, I sat in the silent, smoky spectre of a life that had fallen into an unnamed tragedy. </div>
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Alone like that, free from the distraction of the day turning on around us, it was the first proper look that I got of Grayson. Sat down and hunched over into himself, unwrapping a second rock of crack, he seemed much broader than he had appeared while standing outside the station. I also became aware of his facial stubble, at least a week's worth and a few years greyer than the hair on his head. Whether down to nerves or some kind of mental distraction, his eyes were fast and jittery. At times they lost focus and glassed over and seemed not to want to settle on anything in the past. Maybe the only constant was his sweating – an itchy uncomfortable perspiration of the type that rivers toxins out the body. I was still looking out for any sudden changes of mood or personality. There was nothing obvious, but there was something. Underneath, below the moist skin, it felt like his soul was wound like rope and knotted up. I let him drain his second pipe. As he tapped the dead ash clear from the bottle, I probed him for his story. </div>
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“So, what was the problem this morning? You said you were angry?”</div>
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“I did. I am. But fuck... How to explain it? Like, you've never felt angry? Pissed with the world? The present? The past? It's like I'm tied in place, caught in a web and the fucking spider is creeping slowly in to finish me off. I've got a job. Oh, I'm so fucking dishonest. They think I'm Mr Grayson... Clean and tidy and responsible. Always telling others how to get back on track and I'm so far off mine that I no longer know which track it is. Everything's like that. Like I'm a fraud to everyone. This is me. This is me right here! Getting fucked up and enjoying it! I've been made an outcast. I became someone I'm not... Became ashamed of who I was and proud of the man I wasn't! That's fucked up. Real fucked up. And that's my life. That was my life. Things change. I've been drinking. I knew I really wanted junk, but I drank instead. It's OK to be a drunk. Except in the shop where you buy your liquid. There they look at you like shit. Treat you like it. Think that you can't see them through the fog of alcohol! They begrudge having to take 89p for their cheapest can. They sell it at that price! They price them up! And you know what? If you buy their weakest beer at twice the price they treat you differently... Even if your fingers are just as brown and your nails just as dirty. As they say: there's levels. There's even levels to being a drunk. I never got off the first level. That's why I'm angry. I lost myself in trying to be sober. I seethe as I talk, feeling that dishonesty inflating within me with every word. That's why I admire you. You just are what you are and rather than hide it you unhide it. I need to do that, but I can't. Small town mentality? Maybe. There it's so different. You've gotta keep secrets if you want a friend round there. Pull this shit with the curtains open and you'll come round to a very lonely world... If indeed you come round at all. “</div>
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I listened but never replied. In parts it made a kind of sense. But there was something dark surrounding his words, something dangerous. Like he said: something seething.</div>
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I must have been staring at Grayson, as I next became aware of him looking at me looking at him.</div>
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"Give us a hug then, ya Fucka!" he said. He always said that, 'fucka', whenever he expressed anything soft. It was as if I were such a Fucka that him feeling the need for a hug was my fault. "You're brilliant, you are,” he said as we unclinched. “I hope ya fucking know that? Fucking admire what you do so much."</div>
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"I write... That's all. Nine-tenths of the time I don't even do that."</div>
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“Nah... that's not all you do. You don't understand. Right now, the world needs great artists and writers more than ever. I work at the Southbank Centre, ticket manager. The performers – O God! Not one of them has anything to say. Either they're all 'darkly comic' to make up for any real depth to their work, or they're so middle of the road that they get mistaken for the fucking lines! It’s one of the reasons I wanted to meet you... Talk to you... Make a business proposal to you. Shit, ya Fucka, you're making me lose my words. The thing is this: I'd like to be your manager.”</div>
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“My manager??? Fuck. Where did that come from?”</div>
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“Well, you need a manager, don't you? Or you will do. That's my thing, what I'm good at: organizing stuff, meeting deadlines, getting the drugs in... convincing people they need things they really don't! I sold a bald guy a crate of shampoo once... anti-dandruff shit as well!”</div>
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“That certainly makes you something... But a manager? My manager??? I mean, let’s just weigh this up, soberly:</div>
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We've only just met.</div>
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You're in a bit of a state, freshly wired after six years on the wagon.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
You say you're suffering from anger management issues. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
You've never managed an artist before.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
And, maybe our biggest problem: ME... I've nothing to manage!</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
So, I really don't know what else to tell ya…. Of course you can be my fucking manager! Though there is one condition: No more shampoo to bald guys. We don't need that... Yet.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
And so, not even an hour in, Grayson had had something a little stronger than coffee, had fallen off the wagon and landed on the horse; I was stood opposite, sucking the entrails out of a dying pipe which I hadn't paid for. And, to cap everything off, I'd landed myself a manager. It was pretty decent going. Especially considering we'd only blasted down a couple of rocks apiece and the day had barely made it out of 2 o'clock.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Grayson stayed on late that night. By the time he eventually left, he was in much better spirits. Still not everything made sense, but enough made sense to know that he wasn't completely off the rails. I walked him back down to the tube station, said goodbye and listened to the tired chugging of the last westbound train as it clattered off like music into the night. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
- - -</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
I didn't hear from Grayson for three days. Then his face appeared in my messenger. This time he got straight to the heart of things:</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">not doing 2 good. u up 4 a sesh?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Come on down. It'll b fine.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
And so Grayson travelled down once more, scored another £300 of gear, divided it in half and opened up a little more. He told me more about his ticket manager job at the Southbank Arts Centre and how it had led to him being signed off with acute mental stress and depression. He also mentioned that he was due up on a disciplinary for an unauthorised absence. That wasn't too serious in itself, though it transpired that it was the last in a long line of offences and had happened only weeks into a final written warning. The Centre seemed hesitant to take a decision while he was signed off sick. I asked Grayson if he had suffered a mental breakdown, to which he reluctantly answered 'no' and then even more reluctantly answered 'yes'. Then, with no reluctance at all, he called me a Fucka.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Aside from his work, the night revealed another part of the Grayson puzzle: Serena. It wasn't the first time that the name had been uttered, only now he spoke of her freely and did so as if I knew her. Yet every time he mentioned her name, revealed a new anecdote of conjugal hell, he would suck down a fresh pipeload of crack as if to force her right out the back of his mind.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"I'll always fucking love her, in some context," he said. "Only now it isn't really love... not like it was. It's different. She's more someone I'd protect with my life and never want to hurt. But I do hurt her... I am hurting her."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"Are you still together?"</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Grayson trembled an outheld hand in the air, as if that status was somehow still in the balance. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Well, who left who? Who caused the rupture?” I asked.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“That was me.... Well, me by consequence of my behaviour. She said I either had to stop drinking or stop seeing her. I went for a walk to figure things out and returned home too drunk to talk. I told you, I'm a coward. I've not seen her since. But she's not in a good way. I'm worried she may hurt herself... I mean, seriously hurt herself."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
After listening to some more details it was quite clear, at least to me, that this Serena defaulted to a position of self-harm and outlandish threats of suicide whenever she couldn't get her way with a lover. She seemed determined to get Grayson back by whatever means necessary. And like most people of that persuasion, the more desperate she became and the more frustrated she got, the more extreme her behaviour became until she finally lost all care and pride and would end hysterical, screaming down the phone with a knife to her own throat. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"And, does she know you're back using?"</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Grayson nodded as he sucked hard on a pipe and inhaled. He carried on nodding until he could speak.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"She knows. I told her first day."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"Did you enjoy telling her?”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“I did, yes.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“How'd she take that?"</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"She collapsed to her knees screaming and pulling her hair and cursing God. She's Italian."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"Fuck, I must be popular with her!"</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Grayson wagged a negating finger. "Uh, no... She thinks nothing of you. She knows about addiction... knows about me. This is my choice."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
"Well, I'll take your word for it. But if I know people half as well as I think I do, especially people predisposed to emotional blackmail who believe in God and learnt how to mourn in Italy, she'll blame me all right, and what's more: she'll be hellbent on clearing me outta your life."</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Grayson froze staring at me with his mouth slightly ajar. His eyes were watery with a certain kind of universal dread which came through understanding and disappointment. He knew I knew, that blame had already been portioned out and I was the devil-in-the-wilderness.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
- - -</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Grayson started scoring on a daily basis soon after that. It wasn't so much a conscious decision, more a natural reaction to a life that suddenly seemed to be caught up in a retreating tide. Looking at it objectively, every aspect of his life that held any importance was in turmoil and heroin and crack cocaine were the only means he had of reining them in. And it wasn't even especially the effect of the drugs, but more how they totally occupied his every waking moment. Whether it was planning to buy them, getting ready to buy them, sorting out the finances to buy them, redialing dealers when they wouldn't answer, scrambling into clothes to leave that very second, sprint walking for the train station after scoring... It all combines to stop you thinking about life and whatever nasty trick it is halfway through at that moment. Our entire day was then, in some way or another, a direct result of making sure our evenings were full of the drugs we craved. Then even our habitual usage took on habits. It was like one long ritual devised to stave off falling back into the sewage of daily living and all the domestic and social problems which slowly screwed in against us. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
It was around that time that we stopped using my room at my mother's as a junk den. Instead, we crossed the length of the city and went back to Grayson's flat in Lambeth where we could get high in peace and not have to worry about hiding syringes or care about what time we woke the bathroom up to hit a late vein. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Our evenings also merged into a kind of routine. On arriving back at Grayson's we'd divide up the drugs, steady ourselves with a shot of brown, and then get the crack pipes struck up and smoking away. Once we'd got our bearings Grayson would take up a position, cross-legged, on the floor, in the middle of the room. He'd sit like that with his pipe to his right and his little bags of crack laid out like pebbles to his left. I would stand, my pipe up on the mantlepiece alongside a glass of water. From my phone I'd narrate a single text to him each evening. At random moments Grayson would spring to his feet and duck out the room in tears. I understood so much more about him from the blankness he left behind in the room than from what I ever felt from his physical presence. When he returned he would invariably say, “Fucka!” He was ashamed of those tears, certainly ashamed of showing them in a man's arena. He couldn't cry and carry on, whereas I could. I could walk the streets crying or turn up for work in tears. And some part of Grayson wanted some of that too. Some honesty. Some way of being human without feeling like he had lost all self-respect in the process. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
After the storytelling, the conversation would invariably turn to Serena. Grayson remained adamant that the relationship was over and that it was now just a matter of disconnecting and untangling from a life together. But it was never that clear-cut, and from what I could make out, Serena was being pulled along on a chain of evaporating hope, kept at a safe distance while being soothed by the idea that things would one day be better. And with each passing day, as the different tensions in Grayson's life stretched ever tauter still, I could feel Serena's dark and brooding presence nearing closer and closer to our world. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“About Serena, I need to ask you something and I'd like you to be honest.” </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Ask away.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Are you sure you've not created this split just so as you can have a blowout on drugs in peace? Generally, when relationships end there is a coldness of detachment somewhere... at least for a while. But I hear you reassuring her, calming her... taking private calls... jittery if you miss a call. It doesn't sit true with many things you have told me.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“I've thought the same. Maybe at first I did cause an argument because I wanted to get high, but things are really over now. Bt, I just can't be that cold a person... I'd die if she ever did anything stupid because of me being intentionally heartless.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“The problem with that is that she then keeps an emotional hook in you. How could you ever really move on with your ex attached like that? But, even more serious: you're giving her hope and like that she blossoms and dies afresh each day. Hope is the worst in these situations... You're peddling dreams – dreams you tell me are dead.” </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
He didn't respond, and I left it at that. Sometimes we hurt people more with our kindness than anything else. What Grayson was doing was either taking the easy way out or creating a situation that he could profit from, keeping tensions high so as he had the courage to tell Serena that she couldn't come home again, and like that his place was free for me to occupy and fill the air with the toxins of narcotics. But Grayson wasn't a terrible man. He had a certain honesty. At least around me he did. And there were things in him I greatly admired. Like his unwillingness to have anyone fuck with him or take away an inch of his personal space. No matter what shape or size, if someone encroached upon him he'd have none of it. That's when you'd get glimpses of his rage. He wasn't a brawler, had probably never learnt how to throw a punch in his life. But what he had was anger and rage, and it was that combination that would made him a very formidable and difficult opponent for anyone.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
After a few weeks, Grayson asked if I'd like to move in with him. I told him I wouldn't move in as I had some concerns but that I'd stay there for an undisclosed amount of time.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Concerns?”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Serena.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“That's finished, I told you. I want some proper passion... not that... Not what I had with her. I love her, in a certain way, but we can't be together.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Grayson, I'm gonna tell you the blunt truth: I still think you have cleared Serena out just so as you can go on a mammoth drug binge. That's how it looks to me... Like you're being very selfish.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“You're wrong. And you're even more wrong if you think I could be selfish like that. We're through... finished. I'm finished.”</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
“Well, time will tell. Nothing can be known here between two great fools.” </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Grayson didn't reply. Instead he gave me a spare set of keys to his flat and said the place was mine too.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The spring moved on and by. We hardly noticed it but did remark that the trees were starting to fill out and that the subway ride across town to score had become claustrophobic and muggy down in those deep tunnels. That subway ride, an hour each way, that constant and monotonous jerking and chugging, became synonymous with how our days had become. Hardcore daily addiction had crept back in and we were always now a step behind time – rushing to get to the bank, to score, to pick up clean rigs, to buy extra methadone and then to get back home and forget about everything but that which was in front of us. But some things just couldn't be swept aside so easily. Firstly, there was the question of Serena and then, quite out the blue, Grayson was passed fit to return to work and was then just a weekend away from full-time employment and the disciplinary hearing that would commence the moment he returned...</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
- - -</div>
<i><div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i>Part 2 coming very soon.. X</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><br /></i>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh76lC3BOphJGMQe-1eMiBNrC8mSF07M3GR5cirRgcRkvL6jPFMz9FsTjGPgBQLF8DDwJncN17PGG03f9m1KjzXEAs2L6v_sBvE_i8RGiXfqoRlh7TuMbTtCS8VZhA4k5ZGpn7U_uijRC0/s1600/bsol+part1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="591" data-original-width="592" height="319" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh76lC3BOphJGMQe-1eMiBNrC8mSF07M3GR5cirRgcRkvL6jPFMz9FsTjGPgBQLF8DDwJncN17PGG03f9m1KjzXEAs2L6v_sBvE_i8RGiXfqoRlh7TuMbTtCS8VZhA4k5ZGpn7U_uijRC0/s320/bsol+part1.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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</i></span>Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-27310962040617347262018-02-25T15:50:00.000+01:002018-02-25T15:50:29.121+01:00And What Moved Over the Dying Sun<div class= text-align: justify;"><span style="line-height: 22.79px;"><br />
<br />
At just gone seven my heart darkened. She heard me stop typing, waited for some minutes, and then asked “What's happened?”<br />
<br />
“I need to score,” I said.<br />
<br />
“You're kidding, right?”<br />
<br />
“No.”<br />
<br />
“You must be! It must be a fucking joke?! You spent all day telling me of how you had had enough... How you were going on at least a week's break.”<br />
<br />
“I know, and I meant it... Then. But now, now I want to score. Something's happened.”<br />
<br />
“What? What's happened?”<br />
<br />
“Just something in the air. Did you hear the rain? Did you smell it when you opened the window? That's what happened. Something blew on in.”<br />
<br />
She didn't speak for a moment after that. I sat staring at the words I had been writing on the computer. The light was fading and there was something sulphurous out there in the night, like the city had a whole life going on that I was missing out on. When she next spoke the room was in darkness and I was camouflaged by it.<br />
<br />
“Well, how can you score? You've no money. You've never any money.”<br />
<br />
“I know, but I'll have money one day. I have an article that will be ready for Monday and a few bits to collect from a few people.”<br />
<br />
“So, you want me to pay for it?”<br />
<br />
“No, that's not what I want. I never want you to pay for it. But you could lend me the cash until my cheque comes through.”<br />
<br />
“And what if I don't want to? What if I ask you to just go two days?”<br />
<br />
“Then I'll do it. I'll have no choice. But it won't change anything and those days may bring in hell.”<br />
<br />
“You're a shit... a real fucking shitbag! I was so happy watching you write, thinking of tomorrow...”<br />
<br />
“We'll still have tomorrow. We'll always have tomorrow. But today I'm sorry.”<br />
<br />
She took her purse up out her bag, counted through whatever money she had in there, then closed it again and sat like that, in the dark, hoping the horror would somehow end. I pretended to be editing, but really I was staring at the clock on the computer, hoping she'd give in quickly and not make this any more difficult than it needed to be. After half an hour I broke the silence.<br />
<br />
“So, will you lend me it or not?”<br />
<br />
“Do I have a fucking choice?”<br />
<br />
“You always have a choice. Come on... Get yourself ready and come with me.We can run through the rain and get a coffee up on the hill. We can look at the lights and be thankful for all the success we never had.”<br />
<br />
“You go. I'm not going. It was so peaceful here. You keep your dreams to yourself tonight.”<br />
<br />
“No, you've got to come. We'll ride the metro one last time and tomorrow will come so much quicker like that.”<br />
<br />
She rose, slowly. She smoked a cigarette and she stood near the window. She scrunched her cigarette out until every ember was done cold. She went into the bathroom and she pee'd in slow motion and then washed her hands and creamed them and changed her clothes at a thread a time. She did everything slowly, wanted to run time out and to somehow stop the unstoppable. When she was finally all out of things to do she came in and took up her purse and, without making eye contact, she gave me the notes and another little piece of her waning love. I wanted to die and I wanted to laugh. I took the notes and I held her, like the first time and like forever.<br />
<br />
- - -<br />
<br />
<i>A full Memoires text coming soon... X</i><br />
<br />
</span><br />
</div>Memoirs of a Heroinheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17401281805284793756noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-80239003135734283852018-01-10T21:39:00.001+01:002018-01-10T22:05:41.441+01:00One For The Lungs<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
One For The Lungs - A Vaper's Tale<span style="line-height: 22.79px;"><br />
</span> <span style="line-height: 22.79px;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 22.79px;"> <br />
1. FETISH<br />
<br />
Forty Euros and it doesn’t even kill you? No, thank you! I've invested a lot of money in lung cancer and pulmonary heart disease and I'm not about to blow my investment now. E-cigarettes! Fuck! What's gone wrong with us when we want all the allure of smoking without the consequences? The Marketing of the Self. That's what it is. It's why chewing-gum or nicotine patches rarely work. They look over the fact that smoking is mostly about image, that smokers are just as addicted to the personality which holds the cigarette as they are to the additives within them. Cigarettes allow us to buy further into the persona we want to project – our internal hero. And because we figure it’ll take at least 30 years of smoking to even begin killing oneself, it’s become the safest, least reckless way to advertise a sense of self-abandon. Cigarettes are fetish and I‘m as guilty as anyone of using them as accessories. <br />
<br />
One for the lungs and one for the fashion! <br />
<br />
Oh, my beautiful words. The poetry of reckless and idiotic youth. A Marlboro poking out my breast pocket and another behind the ear. Sweeping onto the underground with my scarves aflap, smelling of snuffed dog-ends and some other perfume from some other lover. A wildness in my eyes, my gait. The last vestiges of smoke still drifting from my mouth. Standing tight up against the doors, impatiently flicking my lighter to a spark, revealing a person out to destroy himself, someone in a hurry to suck down another lungful of youthful demise. I've never known a heroin junkie who did not smoke; I wouldn't trust one who didn't. I don't even trust the ones who do. The flirtation with death and stunted living starts there. An infatuation with self-image, style and attitude, all pulled in from a searing, smoking stick, sucked way down and blown back out as your fantasy persona clears into view through clouds of your own myth. <br />
<br />
The cigarette. <br />
<br />
My first erotic love. <br />
<br />
Lying back, breathing heavy, her legs open, waiting that my tongue tastes her for the first time. Me. Between her thighs. 3am. Bare apartment. Single mattress on the floor. No electricity. Rats in the loft. Kissing up her thighs. Pushing her legs still farther apart. Her sex tingling. The entire universe and all existence collapsed down into a bud of pleasure. I take a long, slow drag from a B&H and funnel a fine flute of smoke against her swollen clit. And with the air and the warmth she groans and quivers and pushes forward, suddenly clenching her stomach for the first steep drop of the death ride. 21 and discovering ourselves, taken over by an insanity we didn’t know we possessed. An intense mournful and desperate erotic longing, pupils dilated, tears from an unknown emotion, mouths biting words of unrepressed madness and honesty.<br />
<br /><i>
We must die together… I can’t live without you now. <br />
<br />
I know, My Love, I know. I’ve wanted to die so badly, but in you I want to live. <br />
<br />
I want to live so badly too. Tell me that you'll save me, that you’ll save all of this… that tonight will never end. <br />
<br />
Ssssh, My Darling, Sssssh… This hell is ours eternal.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
2. CREDIBILITY<br />
<br /><i>
Oh no, not you as well,</i> I said. <br />
<br />
The local shopkeeper pressed a button on the side of his e-cigarette and, looking at me, sucked in and blew out, letting clouds of vapour pour from his mouth before swallowing the last of the heap down. <br />
<br /><i>
Voila, mon ami... That's how you evade the law, </i>he said.<br />
<br />
He pulled the e-cigarette from his mouth and showed it to me, pointing at the graduation marks printed up the top side. He said that he had filled it up only that morning, had been vaping away all day and still had 0.4ml of nicotine left. It meant nothing to me, but I read the reaction he sought and pulled an incredulous- looking expression like I was greatly impressed and what a shrewd investment it was.<br />
<br /><i>
Does it feel like smoke or is it like swallowing air?</i> I asked<br />
<br />
The shopkeeper wagged a demonstrative finger at me, then put the e-cigarette back in his mouth. He pressed the button once again, only this time he kept it pressed. I watched him curiously. He watched me back, his eyes open wide, the e-cigarette between his lips, button held, taking in vapour, the seconds passing and his face becoming more strained and more ridiculous by the moment. Finally he removed the device from his mouth and inhaled, instantly falling into fits of coughing, a shock of smoke sputtering out his mouth and nose. Through watery eyes he looked at me and forced a smile: <i>It's just like a cigarette,</i> he said. <i>It's real smoke... Only, NOT smoke! </i>Then he coughed some more before making a horrendous wretching sound like a bird regurgitating food for its chick.<br />
<br />
For the first time I was kinda impressed. I'd imagined a variety of politically correct smoke that didn't touch the throat on the way down.<br />
<br /><i>
Fuckin' good them things and I’ll tell ya wot for as well,</i> said a new voice behind me. <i>I quit with mine. Smoked 50 a day for 25 year. Stopped just like that. Amazing! Has turned me life right around and I feel so much better for it.</i><br />
<br />
I turned around to confront the owner of the voice. It belonged to a new customer who had entered, who then whipped out his own e-cigarette, mouthed it, pressed the GO button and sucked down a lungful of steam himself. I eyed his sallow, bloodless complexion, his tea-stained teeth and oiled back grey hair. He stood there in a full-length woollen coat, yellowed from years of tar perspiration and nicotine-filled bars. A real smoker here, no doubt. A definite potential stiff for the cancer ward. I could see him there now, his last days spent dragging around an oxygen canister as he shuffled out the lift to stand in the hospital grounds in his pyjamas and smoke himself off in style. This was no three-a-day weakling but a hardcore, lifelong smoker, all attitude gone, someone who had smoked out of habit, through the night, coughing up phlegm and lighting another and not a slither of coolness left about it. He blew his vapour over me and the shopkeeper. The shopkeeper took a drag of his own e-cigarette and returned the gesture. I stood in the middle as these two local characters blew misty kisses at one another. The vapour didn't smell much like tobacco smoke but rather of some sickly perfume you would never want clinging to your clothes.<br />
<br />
When I was once more alone with the shopkeeper, I questioned him about his electronic stick. To each question, the shopkeeper would present me with a different part of his device, excitement lighting him up as he explained away how it worked and the genius of progress. It seemed like it was a piece of technology that he finally got better than the young. Twisting off the stem of his e-cigarette, he showed me how easy it was to refill and how to recharge it. <br />
<br /><i>
USB, he said, USB key!? </i>As if asking me if I knew what one was. I nodded. Then he started going into the mathematics of the money this new-age cigarette was saving him. <br />
<br /><i>
Hmm, interested now aren’t you,</i> he said, supposing everyone was as calculating with money as he. <i>That speaks to you, don't it?! </i><br />
<br />
It didn't, but I nodded as if I did, as if I was now open to the idea of an e-cigarette myself. <br />
<br />
Standing as close to the shop counter as I could comfortably be, the shopkeeper took up his traditional position behind it and beckoned me still further forward, secrets abounding in his eyes as he leant in and whispered.<br />
<br /><i>
Listen, if you want an e-cigarette DO NOT buy it from the tobacconist. No, no. 50 euros from them dirty criminals. If you want an e-cigarette, my friend, come and see me. Look...</i><br />
<br />
From below the counter he pulled out a package that looked like it contained two quality pens. E-cigarettes.<br />
<br /><i>
From me only 40 euros... for the TWO. Plus one 12-miligram refill. Brand-new best quality, </i>he said.<i> Just 40 euros for you, my friend.</i><br />
<br />
So that was it: The Hard Sale. This mule was so het up about e-cigarettes because he was flogging them. The other goon who had come in tinged the colour of morning piss was probably his stooge. <br />
<br /><i>
40 euros? I'll think about it,</i> I said.<br />
<br /><i>
Don't think too long, </i>he replied. <i>Every second with them other foul things is killing you... And your wallet! E-cigarettes: all the pleasure of the real thing without the death sentence! </i><br />
<br />
He sounded like a programmed advert. God, how it sickened me. For a moment back there I thought he was genuine. This man, this little independent shopkeeper who had plead poverty over the years, who had kept me supplied in chocolate and cholesterol, who I'd remained loyal to despite his inflated prices, was now trying to sell me any old junk he got his bartering hands on. Why, only three days previous, he had sold me half-priced Albanian cigarettes. I took a carton of cheapest orange juice he sold, paid, and walking home wondered what the hell was in it.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
3. A CONVERSATION<br />
<br />
You should at least try it before you condemn it, she said. I thought you were more open-minded than that... That you‘re into everything e-dash and smart?<br />
<br />
Not everything. And I don't need to try one. I'm sure they work just fine and that the vapour is as good as everyone says it is. But that’s not where it falls down: it's the thing itself. E-cigarettes just aren’t attached to anything or anyone or any image. That may sound ridiculous but everything nowadays comes down to that: not the practicality of the thing but what it says about us, the consumer. The Marketing of the Self, capitalism's greatest success and hold over us. It sells us fantasy and individualism through association. With all the choices we have we can construct a personality around ourselves, be whoever we want to be, except, ironically, ourselves. Some people construct that character around an empty husk, become what‘s cool and fashionable, and others construct an outward representation of their internal self, that hero they imagine they are and want the world to perceive them as. But it's all marketing and we are all victims, no less the people who claim to have escaped modern life, who live in tents and shit under trees. I can spot an eco-warrior miles off! How? Because he/she dresses in a certain style... Keeps their hair in a certain fashion. They market themselves to the image of who they want to be. We project who we are, who or what we want to be and what we're into by our clothes and accessories. Do you think modern books are designed to be read? Well, they’re not. They're designed to be shown off. It's why e-books haven't completely taken off just yet, because no one can see what you're reading. Give Kindle a back screen which displays an image of the book you're reading (even better an image of the book you're not reading) and sales will rocket. People could then show off an appetite for Jean Paul Sarte while reading of the wizardry of Harry Potter. Do you imagine there's one person on the bus or underground who is not conscious of what the cover of their book is and what they imagine it says about them? I'm sure I'm not the only one who has chosen books especially for my journey, going so far as pretend-reading the same words over and over for the eyes of others. One woman even once pulled me up on it.<br />
<br />
Sat on the underground opposite me, smirking and looking over like I was a simpleton, she said: I say, you must be a terribly slow reader... You've been on that same book now for almost four months and you're not even a third of the way through! I smiled and said: Every great book's worth at least one half-decent fuck and this one hasn’t paid its dues yet! <br />
<br />
And it won't today, she replied, standing up and moving away before she caught whatever stupidity it was I had. I’m telling you, it's all about image. Westerners have become obsessed with being someone in this life. It comes with the loss of religion, which is a good thing of course, but the transient period, the intermediate search for meaning and acknowledgement, is not so good. God needs a replacement. Without an omnipresent peeping Tom to distinguish ourselves to, it's only natural we become more and more extrovert as a people.<br />
<br />
Fuck, Christ what has any of that got to do with anything? How does that stop you from at least trying an e-cigarette? They’re revo-fuckin-lutionary!<br />
<br />
They could very well be once some rockstar takes up the habit while shooting dope or a bunch of vaping gangsters hold up a casino in some film or other. What they’re lacking right now is sex appeal. That's what will really make the e-cigarette: an identity. And even more importantly: If it can help get you laid or not. And that, that search for company, this 21st century isolation, brings it back once more to the loss of God. <br />
<br />
Huh! Well, I think you've thought way too much about this. What a sad man you really are. There you are writing on about living such a decadent life as you do, when really you're sat at home alone, pondering over all kinds of nonsense. And, by the way, not everyone is into dead rock stars and sex appeal. Not everyone is so superficial and self-conscious as all that! <br />
<br />
You think so? It's not important if it's a dead rock star or a sport's personality, whether it's people power-dressing for work or a 50-year old biker with no bike: it's all the same thing. And before you say it, it's nothing to do with adolescence or being immature or anything like that. And we rarely wise up, ever. We just age, shrivel up, and pass onto another marketing image. We modify who we project as we get older. We steal from what we feel are wiser, more sophisticated sources or those that will benefit better what we want from life. But it's not really about the age we are, it’s much more about the age group of the people we’re looking to attract. But, back on subject, for the moment the e-cigarette adds nothing to our marketed persona; it may even detract from it. Imagine a different scenario, one in which our paedophile cousins adopt the e-cigarette as theirs, in which vaping is known as an accessory of child molesters. In that instance, how many adult males do you think would take up vaping? Not many, I tell you. It's where anti-smoking campaigns have always fallen down in the past, by showing black lungs and hideous neck tumours. They made smoking seem even more dangerous, even more rebellious. What they should have done was associate smoking to a very uncool image, an image that'd have had kids ridiculed and bullied and young adults mocked off the streets. Instead they sold death to the young, and the young are infamous for wanting to die.<br />
<br />
Oh, come on now, stop! Not one subgroup will ever have exclusive rights over a product. That's really fucking simplifying it.<br />
<br />
Of course it's simplifying it. I agree it's much more complex than that but we'd never get there if we didn't simplify it. But still it happens. Look at how rubberwear is, associated to taboo and S&M, or how a certain haircut can define what music someone likes. Look at the swastika! If I were to wear one tomorrow I'd be branded a fascist and probably be beaten too.<br />
<br />
Let’s leave swastikas well out of this. As to someone’s hairstyle or clothes, it all depends on what and how they wear them. Something as practical as an e-cigarette will maybe find its niche markets in colours and shapes??? It could be that a certain style of electronic cigarette comes to be associated with a certain type or group, but not the entire product itself.<br />
<br />
Yes, but that’s exactly it : that's what the Marketing of the Self is. It’s exactly that! And once we've marketed ourselves right down to a specific type and colour, right at that point where we believe we've attained true individualism, that's when we've been done over completely, pigeonholed into small denominations with tastes so refined that we’re sitting ducks for specific products and ideas. At that point, as a sub-sub-sub group, the market knows exactly what to sell us and what magazines and websites we'll most likely visit or buy. It knows our morals, sexual perversions and our politics. It's why all these sub-genres exist in everything from music to art. People think it's individualism but it’s not. We're being divided up into ever smaller subgroups so as our choice of products becomes ever more defined. With a large enough wardrobe, you could go out and masquerade each day as a completely different person. It already happens: multiple interior personality disorder! People, terrified of loneliness, taking on multiple interior personalities according to the set circumstances or what people they’re with on any particular day. The phrase ‘I'm gonna let my hair down’ is a symptom of such a phenomena. What it really means is: I'm gonna abandon my serious and professional self and instead lose myself in someone quite different for some time.<br />
<br />
Yes, yes… I understand what you're saying, but I’m wondering whether you do? On one hand, you're criticizing such association and on the other, you don't want to be seen with an e-cigarette because it's not 'rock n' roll' enough. You seem highly confused… Even more than usual.<br />
<br />
It's not confusion. It's saying I'm as much of a victim as anyone. That I've nowhere near escaped the capitalist system. But I don't ever pretend I have. For me, the ultimate victory over capitalism will not be if you were used by it or not, but if you were conscious of being used by it or not: If you were duped or not duped. To undermine any system or order you must first become a part of it, use it against itself. A revolution is that... It's all a part of the same circle. Whatever our society becomes in the future, the free market will have played an important role in getting us there. In that way, if you believe in and strive for a fairer social and economic system, you must ultimately celebrate the role capitalism played in getting us there. You can't love the human and hate the monkey. <br />
<br />
If you're evolution I certainly don't love the human.<br />
<br />
Well, now you're sounding just like that bitch on the train, and I suppose you'll not let me fuck you either... E-cig, paperback or not?<br />
<br />
And she didn't answer. She just shook her head like there was no hope left for me. Then she pressed GO and swallowed down another lungful of steam.<br />
<br />
4. WEAKNESS<br />
<br />
I could feel myself cracking from a long way off. I'm so familiar with that dual inner tension of desire and restraint that I now often give in immediately just to save time. I caught myself watching people with e-cigarettes, searching out any potential types, some malleable and corruptible characteristic that I could clutch on to, possess and make my own. But I saw nothing. Just idiot after idiot, holding these things like Irish whistles and sipping at the vapour like someone trying to make a single shot of whisky last an entire lifetime. When I came across a group of young clerks stood outside a bank, looking like an advertisement for menswear fashion, I knew there was little hope for me to be able to ply my sickly trade in this newly-emerging market. One of the clerks, a tall, slim, rosy-cheeked young man with blond hair, even seemed to goad me. Taking a pip-puff of his tin whistle, he blew the smoke out as if he were blowing his fringe out his eyes. Then he smirked as if I were the punchline of some joke. As I passed I heard his little crowd of cohorts chortling away with amusement, like they maybe would at a hated client who'd just lost his house and car and family on a bad investment. I was the bad investor. And lighting a fresh cigarette with the butt of my old one, I surely was. <br />
<br />
Fucking bank clerks! I spat, looking at my reflection in the storefront window of a tobacconist’s. I'd prefer to be dead at 40 rather than have the misfortune of being one of them until the age of 60! And as my spite receded and my reflection disappeared in the glass, they came into sight, dozens of them, some dressed in black with white tops, others in sparkling pink, another in army fatigues, polka dot, glitter, gold, some fat, some thin, some long, others short, some sculpted and slender, some straight and some sober. Laid out, on display right in front of me, e-cigarettes of all shapes and sizes. I stood there staring at the wares, trying some more to figure the product out while fighting off an inner yearning to try it. My stupid head went so far as to start making deals with itself that I could smoke real cigarettes in public and take things a little easier on my body in private. I went through my options and each time opted for a death I didn't want. God, smoking is so unremarkable that it hardly matters anyway. Am I really so superficial it matters? Probably. Surely. Scratch my skin and you'll find nothing underneath. I'd probably disappear if I grazed myself badly enough. I eyed the e-cigarettes with great suspicion, thought of the bank clerks, and then eyed the cigarettes some more. Then taking a breath and swallowing my soul, I entered the shop for a closer inspection. <br />
<br />
5. CAPITULATION<br />
<br />
I took my first puff on an e-cigarette two days after Christmas. It had a weird sweet taste, not at all like a cigarette, but not unpleasant either. I did not buy it from the Algerian shopkeeper and neither did I opt for anything fancy or anything which resembled a real filter cigarette. It was plain black, 22 euros, and I bought the strongest liquid nicotine available. I felt like a fraud. I crept home and I charged it and I vaped covertly and mourned the sale of my bartered soul. To my surprise, it worked well. Over the following few days I went from smoking forty real cigarettes a day to no more than five. By the end of the week, as long as I was inside, tobacco had lost much of its importance. Outside, however, my cigarette fetish was as strong and as hellbent as ever. I started buying cigarettes expressly for that reason. But then two things happened, one by accident, and the other by design: The first change came when I cooked up a small fix of heroin and instead of shooting it in my veins I mixed it with my nicotine liquid and filled my e-cigarette with it. It wasn't strong, wouldn’t have killed a novice, but I could taste it and it seemed to keep me stoned without doing much more. I spent the day traveling the city and openly smoking heroin on the metro, in the street, alongside police officers, in shops and just about everywhere that hadn’t yet outlawed vaping. And it felt good. And in my mind the e-cigarette changed. It was then something subversive and secretive and I felt quite sure that everyone could tell that my e-cigarette wasn't quite smoking like any other around. Ha! It became not only a pleasure but a duty to vape outside, blowing out feint heroin fumes around the most unsuspecting of people. After such bastardization, I was no longer ashamed to be seen with such a thing. The second event came by way of complete hazard. Standing at a packed tram stop a tall young man came bouncing along, knocking into anyone who didn’t step aside. As he neared me I tensed my upper body and stood my ground. He knocked right into me and was duly sent veering off his line. He must have felt the resistance in my body as when he had regained his course he stopped and spun around. <br />
<br /><i>
Mind where you’re fucking walking!</i> I yelled at him. The young man approached me with his arms flung open like he wanted some business. <i>Or what? Or WHAT?</i> he said as he came right up to me. With my e-cigarette pushed into the tender side of his neck, I leant in to his ear and snarled, <i>Or I’ll empty you out right here.</i> He must have seen some madness in me which he wanted no part of. <i>Cool down, man, </i>he said.<i> It was an accident… Just an accident. </i><br />
<br /><i>
Well, mind your fucking accidents next time and never accident into me again.</i> He backed off with his hands slightly raised. Go! Be off! I said. When he was far enough down the road he turned once more and screamed some insult at me in a foreign tongue. I just stared, all the while chugging on my e-cigarette. When he was finally gone, I heard the other people at the tram stop discussing what had happened and how he had either bumped into them or had made them step aside. And as listened I vaped, and for a moment I felt like a dangerous man. <br />
<br />
On the short walk home from the tramway that evening I decided to pass the little corner shop. As I turned in off the road, there stood outside was the shopkeeper sucking the entrails out the arse of cigarette. When he saw me he quickly dashed the dog-end aside before putting an arm around me and shepherding me into the shop in such a way that I wouldn’t have seen the smoking butt on the floor. The man was a cloak of absolute deceit.<br />
<br />
Were you just smoking? I asked.<br />
<br />
He was all set to lie, then must have remembered that he believed in an all-seeing God and so made a confession.<br />
<br />
Ah, yes, yes, he said. You’re a very intelligent and observant man! But I always have one cigarette in the evening and one after breakfast each morning. Sometimes you just can’t beat a real cigarette.<br />
Yes, I agreed, pulling out my e-cig so as he couldn‘t help but see. Sometimes a real cigarette just cannot be beaten.<br />
<br />
When he saw my device he washed over with a very distinct strain of sorrow, like I had caused him a great disappointment in his heart. O, but why? Why this cheap vulgar thing and not one of my beautiful vaporizors? Did you lose your mind over the New Year? Why, why, sir?<br />
<br />
It was a present, I lied. And besides, yours don’t seem to work very well. I just caught you out there smoking away in shame.<br />
<br />
<br />
O, but I explained all that, he said. It was just one… My allotted transgression, if you will. But never mind that— I’ve a little gift of my own for you, for your much appreciated custom.<br />
<br />
The shopkeeper went behind his counter and bent down out of sight. I heard him rustling about and open some kind of carton. When he rose he handed me one of his electronic cigarettes and a quite devilish smile to accompany it. Here, for being such a good reliable customer. I instinctively reached out to take it. He pulled it back from out my reach. There’s just one condition, he said. If mine smokes better than yours, you must agree to buy the other one?<br />
<br />
<br />
Oh no, I said, I don’t like such agreements… I’d not be comfortable with that.<br />
<br />
Take it, Sir, please... It’s a gift. It’s yours. No conditions if you don’t like. But please accept it. Will you?<br />
<br />
Under such duress I agreed. The storekeeper visibly lit up, dropped the-cigarette in a small paper bag and said with great excitement, You will see… Now you will see how much better mine are.<br />
<br />
I took the small bag containing the e-cigarette and without buying anything, I left the shop.<br />
<br />
Back home I took the e-cigarette out the bag ready to put on charge. As I unscrewed the vaporizing chamber from the battery, a thick dribble of saliva ran out the mouthpiece and over my hand. The sly old bastard. The entire mouthpiece was not only clogged with spit but was also heavily chew-marked. All that bending down behind the counter while making out like he was opening something was a complete charade. This wasn’t a new e-cigarette at all. It was his old one that either no longer worked or was so sodden with spittle that the vaporisor needed replacing. No doubt the shopkeeper now felt like I was in his debt, that I would find it difficult to worm out of buying the other e-cigarette without offending him in one way or another. That’s how the world often works. It pushes things our way and taxes us for them later. <br />
<br />
<br />
That night the New Year was brittle with cold. The windows of the apartment frosted up through the night and the ice creaked and cracked and at times it was like there was no life out there at all. In the dark of the room the charger for my e-cigarette emitted a single green light. It was charged and ready to get me through until the morning. I laid on my side staring at that little light and listening to the wheezing of my lungs. Technology had come too late, and anyhow, I missed the orange glow and the magic patterns of a lone cigarette burning through the night. And with a certain resignation I reached across for my Gauloise Reds, shook one out, placed the firm filtered end between my lips and lit her up. It was a lonesome old world and my lover tonight would kill me tomorrow. But that was fine, and what‘s fine is good, and I puffed some more and sealed my rotten fate. <br /><br />
- - -</span><br />
<span style="line-height: 22.79px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 22.79px;"><a href="http://thelostpostsofhh/" target="_blank">Lines for Joe M</a><br />
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Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-66514175018521633582017-08-22T01:58:00.000+02:002017-08-22T10:31:03.097+02:00...<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="line-height: 22.79px;"><br />
</span> <span style="line-height: 22.79px;"><br />
</span> <span style="line-height: 22.79px;"> THEY CAME along in unison, building-sized and on their sides, past the cheering crowds. They played military music and fanfare, and because everything was choreographed it reinforced our ideas of uniformity and comradeship that little more. Even those who didn't buy into the Western bullshit and propaganda looked on with fear and concern. <br />
<br />
"This is a direct fucking message to us," said Joe, sucking down the smoke from a rock of crack.<br />
<br />
"More like a reply," I said. "Why should anyone keep quiet?"<br />
<br />
"To not rock the boat? To not risk reducing this world down to fucking rubble."<br />
<br />
"That'd take more than one lunatic and there are more than one out there. Don't think that just because someone speaks the same language as you that they're not a fucking psychopath."<br />
<br />
"This is pre-war, man... I'm telling ya."<br />
<br />
"It's always pre-war. Every moment before the next is PRE war."<br />
<br />
"Not like this it's not. This is pre-imminent-war. Damascus up in flames and now North Korea and Russia and China... All the big boys. This is a terrible and macabre dance we're watching."<br />
<br />
We watched President Kim Jong Un. He was dressed in a black suit that didn't seem to fit. He had a body shape that was impossible to tailor for. As the troops and missiles passed by he held his right hand angular to his temple in a stationary salute.<br />
<br />
"Doesn't look insane to me," I said. "Looks just like any other guy I could pass in the market."<br />
<br />
"Another guy in the market??? The guy's stood there with a weird fucking haircut saluting warheads... What fucking market do you go to?"<br />
<br />
"Same one as you: rotten fruit, cheap porcelain and leather and stomach churning lingerie. Kim Jong's not a man who wants to die... Look at him. I'd be much more terrified of someone sold to an apocalyptic religion, who believes he can be nuked into paradise. It's them idiots, obsessed with tenor voices singing Revelations from the sky, who are the real crazies. And anyway, why shouldn't North Korea and Mr Jong have nuclear weapons? Who ruled the West to be the voice of all reason? Judge and jury over who is responsible enough to have them and what justifies bringing them into play? It's a fucking craziness that has led to anyone stockpiling such weapons at all. A real fucking insanity."<br />
<br />
"Fuck, man, look at that! D'ya see that missile? What the fuck is that?"<br />
<br />
"It's sad, that's what it is: sad. Now pass that pipe over. I'm starting to suffer from sobriety and it's all making me quite sad."<br />
<br />
I loaded that pipe and fired it up and sucked the contents way, way down. When I was quite done I blew the smoke out towards the sun that shone in from high up through the window. I thought of nothing but saw images of missiles and tanks and red stars on white and cheering crowds beneath a crisp blue sky. And through the smoke and through the crack that late afternoon sun was the colour of champagne. <br />
<br />
"Do you think this is the start of a nuclear war? Joe asked, interrupting the thoughts in my mind. <br />
<br />
"Nuclear war? No. I'm sure people won't allow America and its whores to bring us to that catastrophe. I think pure public opinion and fear, demonstration and revolt, will oust any president who seriously threatens to bring us to that."<br />
<br />
<br />
"I think you're wrong, man. I think an awful lot of people are secretly spun out on the idea of all out nuclear war. I'm telling ya, a hell of a lot of people wouldn't mind dying."<br />
<br />
<br />
I thought about the great power and false promise of capitalism, of how the collecting of material possessions and wealth affect a man... How we've become too comfortable in our own lives, have too much to risk losing to want to go to fucking war. Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and Snapchat, Youtube, iPhones, Chrome Books and cheap foreign travel. It all means too much. It's created a generation which does not feel the need to run out screaming in front of machine gun fire... A generation who source their thrills and gamble with existence in other ways, safer ways. I thought of the crack pipe and scoring heroin outside the 24hr chicken shop, of the rags of men salivating over fortunes in the gambling houses. I thought of alternative and underground political discussion groups and Cute Dead Guys and all those billions of smiling selfies people post while giving their lot back into the system. "I'm not sure I agree with that," I said. "Have rarely ever met anyone who wants to die... Not even when the drugs are gone."<br />
<br />
Joe blew out the smoke from his latest pipe. He closed his eyes over as if meditating while the tickling creep of the rock hit him. "Hey, do you think it's possible to score crack in North Korea?" he said, still with his eyes gently shut and holding the pipe out like it were a candle.<br />
<br />
"Don't think they need it. I don't think they live based on promises of great success only to sink into despair at 35 from the failure to have realised such impossible dreams."<br />
<br />
"Bullshit! Everyone needs crack. The whole fucking world would benefit from a decent fucking pipe. Hey, imagine Kim Jong sucking on a Martell bottle!"<br />
<br />
"Kim Jong on the fucking pipe? Cut the crap will ya. "<br />
<br />
"I bet he is! I bet he's a right fucking crack fiend, piping away from sun-up to sunset, those sexy fucking Korean babes sucking him off between toots. Bet he's into diaper play! Dressing up as a fucking baby, being put in a cot and left to cry and crap himself! He looks the type alright, what with those short fucking arms and dimpled fists."<br />
<br />
"You do know what that is, don't you?"<br />
<br />
"Huh? What what is? <br />
<br />
"You, putting Kim Jong Un on the pipe and in a diaper? Having the poor guy crap himself?"<br />
<br />
"Yeah, I know what... Er, No, what is it?"<br />
<br />
"It's the propaganda maggot having burrowed right down deep into your skull. You may not think they've got to you but they have. They get to all of us."<br />
<br />
"They ain't fucking got to me, mate. Was just fucking with ya. I couldn't give a shit about Kim Kong or whatever it is they call him. Was just pondering shit is all."<br />
<br />
"Well pass that fucking pipe while you're pondering... My lungs are getting wet."<br />
<br />
Joe made to hand the pipe over. As I reached to take it he pulled it back. "Oi, I know that face," he said.<br />
<br />
"What face?"<br />
<br />
"Your thieving writer's face... That one! I fucking bet all this about Kim Jong crops up in one of your texts. I fucking bet it does!"<br />
<br />
"Kim Jong in a nappy and smoking crack? Shit like that will never make it into my writing."<br />
<br />
"And what about me? Will I?"<br />
<br />
"No."<br />
<br />
"How are you so sure?"<br />
<br />
"Because I never write about people who want to be written about, or worse, people who try to get written about. They're never genuine."<br />
<br />
"Who the fuck would purposely go out their way to be written about?"<br />
<br />
"You'd be surprised, Joe... You'd be very fucking surprised."<br />
<br />
- - -<br />
<br />
The girl who was commentating on the military parade sounded like she was hosting some weird Asian game show. God knows what she was saying but she was saying an awful lot of it. Every now and again the program would cut to Kim Jong Un. He stood there, just as he had from the start, admiring his nation's weapons and personnel. <br />
<br />
"What do you imagine she's saying?" Joe asked, referring to the excited commentator.<br />
<br />"I think she's saying ugly words. Ugly words of how great Kim Jong is and what unique weapons he has commissioned and what brilliant science was involved in the making of them. Yeah, ugly stuff of fact and horror, not an ounce of poetry anywhere."<br />
<br />
"You're probably right. Though, I'm thinking maybe she's just speaking random words, like a nonsense commentary to work everyone up into a kind of wild hysteria."<br />
<br />
I watched Joe curiously. He always said stuff like that, like his mind was slowed down somewhere between insanity and stupidity. He knew I was watching him but made out like he was unaware. Instead, he grinced his teeth down on the small knot of a fresh bag of crack, twisted it with his thumb and forefinger as his incisor put on the pressure. In that light, with the crack smoke heavy in the room and the afternoon's dust glinting in the sun, it felt like I was watching an old movie. Joe looked beautiful and well and full of life, even if he was almost rotted right through to the end of his film.<br />
<br />
“Why do you do that?” I asked<br />
<br />
“Do what?” said Joe, before spitting out a small fleck of cellophane he had finally gnawed off the bag.<br />
<br />
“Bite your bags open like that and pull that face when the crack gets in your mouth.”<br />
<br />
"They're my fucking bags. I'll open them how I like. What's it to you?”<br />
<br />
“Just a waste is all. You won't put 47p toothpaste on them teeth of yours and yet here you are coating them with crack.”<br />
<br />
“Shit! You saying that reminds me of Micky Mouth. He used to eat his crack. No joke. He'd chew it up into a foul paste and swallow it down. Then he'd act all nuts. Start screaming on about his football team, pulling his pants down and flashing his arse and slapping himself in the face. Was fucking mental he was.”<br />
<br />
“Did anyone tell him you can't get high eating crack?”<br />
<br />
“Seemed to work for him. Poor fella fell out the back of a moving taxi one night and rolled head-first into a lamp-post. Ended up in a coma for weeks and was never quite the same after. Retarded. Even stopped using, I think. Last time I saw him he was parked up outside the post-office with bright pink lipstick smeared all over his lips. Some cunt had thought it funny to doll him up and leave him sat out there like that.”<br />
<br />
“Jesus. It's incredible, isn't it? This miracle of existence... Us humans, supposedly the most highly evolved animals on the planet... a bio-illogical marvel, and yet there we are running around daubing lipstick on invalid folk. Really... it's fucking astonishing. Weren't you was it, Joe?”<br />
<br />
Joe went to laugh but instead controlled himself until he had finished sucking down the fresh hit that he was in the middle of piping. As he blew the smoke out he said, “No it weren't fucking me, you Cunt... It was my mate."<br />
<br />
= = =<br />
<br />
Back in Kim Il-Sung Square military battalions now marched by. As they passed their leader, they would turn their heads in order to keep their eyes on the great Kim Jong Un. It made me think of the Imperial Russian Guard, chins raised and ever so slowly turning their heads to follow the passing President. It's the mechanics of such behavior which is so terrifying, like the human is no longer in the soldier. <br />
<br />
“Hey, would you ever fight for your country?” asked Joe.<br />
<br />
“Doubt they'd let me. They certainly wouldn't give me a gun and directions! But yes, I would... Though it'd have to be for a very special cause and under the right leadership. Any war you could think of right now, no, I wouldn't. Why d'you ask?”<br />
<br />
“Just curious. Sometimes you seem like you'd die for this land.”<br />
<br />
“I have died for this land. But I don't love the nation... I don't care for that kind of stuff. I'm in love with the physical terrain... The bricks and concrete and shop shutters. All the things we know so integrally and yet have absolutely no appreciation of. The people too, I guess. Though they're mostly assholes. O, I don't know. There's just something isn't there... Something here that gets to the heart of everything. I learnt that this place is me... that my existence is intertwined with this city. Though of course, it can go the other way. Some people learn to despise their homeland and miss nothing of it. I should despise London and yet, by some freak twist of whatever, I don't.”<br />
<br />
“You see, I don't get that. I hate this place. I hate the country, the traditions, the history. And I especially hate the people. Only bad things happen in this place. I don't feel any romance at all. Roads of endless tragedy... x2.”<br />
<br />
"That's because you've never been away. We all despise things when it's all we have. You SHOULD hate it because it's led to nothing... Led just to this dying day and these last crumbs of crack."<br />
<br />
Joe stared forlornly at the TV screen. Brass bands passed and played but for the moment Joe was somewhere else.<br />
<br />
"Hey, what you saying over there?” I said after a while. “What you got left?"<br />
"This pipe and another rock," said Joe. "And you?"<br />
"A rock less. Though I've a decent last pipe to save my soul with."<br />
"So what, d'you think we should call your man then?"<br />
"Wouldn't be a bad move. Though work your fucking order out first this time."<br />
"Hang on... Let me see."<br />
<br />
Joe shuffled up in the red armchair he was perched on. When he was sitting erect he kinda keeled over on his left buttock, raising the right, and began furrowing down and around in his back pocket. He pulled a scorched face like his arms weren't quite long enough. Finally he withdrew a handful of screwed and scrunched up bank notes and began straightening them out and laying them down on the table like he were playing solitaire. "Gotta keep 40 squid back, mate. So yeah, order like, er... 12 white and 6 brown."<br />
"If I were you I'd order a few less white and a few more brown."<br />
"Nah, I'll be OK."<br />
"You sure?"<br />
"Yeah, fuck it, 12 and 6."<br />
<br />
I made the call and on receiving no answer I made the call and then again. <br />
<br />
"No answer?" asked Joe.<br />
"Nah. Not a good sign, mate."<br />
"So what, are we fucked?"<br />
"As good as... We've gotta do some cardio! Get yourself ready we'll have to go for a trot."<br />
"A walk? How far, man? I really don't feel like walking."<br />
"That's because you've got a rock left! Stick it in your pocket and grab the pipe and let's go. Any later and we really will be screwed."<br />
"Can't we just wait a little for the Somalians? See if they turn back on?”<br />
“They'll be off all evening, I know them too well. If they were even as much as two hours away they'd answer."<br />
<br />
Joe quit protesting. He rose and visibly tried to compose his mind. He was a mess of a thousand different frequencies. His jittery forgetful fingers collected up a few things he needed and forgot a couple more. <br />
“Fuck, where's my lighter... Cigarettes? Ah, I got em. Keys... Need my keys. Shit, you seen my keys?”<br />
“Leave your keys. We're coming back here anyhow. Just get the pipe, that's all. You got the pipe?”<br />
“Yeah, yeah I got the pipe.”<br />
“Well, give us it here.... We need a little blast to get us on our way.”<br />
<br />
<br />
- - -<br />
<br />
The fading evening was warm and quiet. The sky stretched on way out, mysterious and haunted by the coming darkness of night. The very last of the sun cast tragic shadows deep into Joe's face. We walked in silence until our leaving pipe wore off. I listened to the chaffing of Joe's jeans and his occasional coughing that had birds scatter and take off for places new. <br />
<br />
“It's a lonely old world this evening,” I said to Joe. “Can you feel it?” <br />
“When it comes, it comes a-creeping,” said Joe. There was all the beauty in the world right there in that moment. Everything any man has ever wondered over was in the air as Joe spoke those words in that gone and going evening. <br />
“Surely we wouldn't destroy all this,” I said, looking out. <br />
"All this??? What the fuck are you talking about? If any-where could do with being destroyed it'd be this place. It's one big fucking shithole!” <br />
<br />
Joe's words made me laugh. Sometimes poetry is something else. It wasn't the place I was speaking of, but it didn't matter. <br />
<br />
“Right, you gonna phone this guy?” asked Joe. <br />
“No. You can't phone this guy... He ain't got a phone. He's one of us. He serves up out the Bookies on Oakley Road.”<br />
“Oakley Road?! That's a good way away.”<br />
“I know, that's why I told you to bring the pipe and that last rock of yours. Now keep an eye out for a quiet place or a bench... Even an old telephone box. We'll get there just fine.”<br />
"Nah, fuck that shit. I'm good. On the way back, maybe. Lets just get there first and hope he is too."<br />
<br />
It wasn't a night for scoring disasters. Before even turning onto the Oakley Road I spotted Caleb serving up some long-haired rock-looking guy. I whistled and Caleb saw me and hung on where he was as the rocker shuffled off with his goods. <br />
"What ya saying, Bruv?" he asked as I approached.<br />
"You holding both, mate?"<br />
"Course, Bro... Course."<br />
“Then sort us out 12 light and 6 night."<br />
"6 night! I like that! No-one ever called this shit Night before."<br />
I took the bags and quickly counted them up as Joe handed over the readies. As Caleb verified the notes his next customer pulled in, a short man with a large rounded torso and a plump face that looked like it had been pinned on by mistake. Topping off that head was a sculptured thatch of thick satin black hair, swept back and fanned out like he'd been hit by a supersonic blast wave. Joe shot me a look of astonishment, like he could hardly believe what he had just seen.<br />
<br />
“Did you just see that?” Joe said, once we were away.<br />
“I did see it, Joe. I did.”<br />
“And you noticed the fucking shape of him, right?”<br />
“I noticed Joe... Was impossible not to.”<br />
“And the haircut? You saw that too?”<br />
“I saw it, Joe...Didn't miss a thing.”<br />
“So tell me: when have you ever seen an Oriental scoring crack?”<br />
“I never have, Joe... It's a first for me too.”<br />
“And it did remind you of someone, yeah?”<br />
“It did Joe... It seriously fucking did.”<br />
“Ha! I told you so! Didn't I tell you?”<br />
“You did tell me Joe, but I just wouldn't listen.”<br />
“That's right: you just wouldn't listen! Now, as sweet as any music to my ears, tell me: who have we just seen scoring?”<br />
“Looked like Kim Jong Un, Joe... Looked insanely like Kim Jong Un.”<br />
“Like Kim-Jong-fucking-un! Scoring crack from the last fucking stop in town! Awwww!!!!”<br />
<br />
Things had turned good; sometimes they do. Light from laughter and carrying an evening's worth of escape, we turned off the Oakley Road. With the sun behind us, drowning beneath the horizon, shadows stretched on so far we were walking in them. The echoes of the day were now just a faint memory in the declining evening. We walked in silence, out of step and at good pace. When the sun was finally done, gone down behind the Western edge of the world, Joe took out his shades and placed them on his face. He looked at me and I looked at him and he smiled. And then his lips went, ruffled out and vibrating, as he mimicked the sound of a trombone. And then his right hand found the beat and he began swinging and waving an invisible conductor's stick through the night. It was fanfare, <i>Pomp and Circumstance of a Crackhead in Bmajor</i>. And as we marched on home I kept a look out for a hole, a little doorway or recess, some place we could slip into unnoticed and ignite our world once more.<br />
<br />
</span></div>
<br />
<i>Thanks as ever for reading... Shane. X</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Lines for Joe M to follow...</i></div>
Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-58012876598948982072017-07-27T11:17:00.001+02:002017-07-27T23:42:01.760+02:00The Night That The Storm Came In<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="line-height: 22.79px;"><br />I want to tell you of the night that the storm came in. Of how I was out on my feet, wandering around town and hoping for an act of God to prevent me from ever making it home again. I want to tell you of the night the storm came in, how I saw all my pasts and futures at once and felt like screaming out about something so terrible in the present. I need to tell you of that storm, of how the light collapsed into yellow and hung overhead, of that strange mood that made the world take notice and of the silence which allowed single leaves to be heard in the little swirls they'd been caught up in. I want to tell you of how the sky lost its mind, and of the haunted song that that first rebel wind sung as it snaked its way through nothing streets. The storm touched me that night. It whipped up grit around me and stung me, and it was hard not to weep in the pause of that great foreboding. I have to tell you of that storm, of our storm, a common storm... of a beauty that came in from the distance, rolling like the furious sea and churning up blues and silvers and golds. I want to tell you of the eyes I saw, how lost they'd become and how I knew we'd never survive another. It was like that for so many that night, half the city, running in fear for their lives while being chased down by a darkness they hoped would never arrive. And I was walking around town, miserable with life, a rotten heart, poor lungs, circling the old square and thinking about young whores and young love and how I had no money to rent or keep either. And that was when the first splodge of the great wash arrived... Thick and singular: SPLODGE. Just like that. Just the one and then a pause and then nothing and then just another. O, CLACK! A cracking whip somewhere out there, fathoms deep in the nowhere. And then the sky shattered and lit up and gave light, and the old bastard was upon us, running us down and raging away through the heart of our town. Through the haze of that violence I watched the destruction play out, wanted to fall into it and be consumed by it. The trees around me bent and swayed, those with weak roots were pulled right on up and carried away. What was not nailed down and what had no heart was taken too. Some roofs collapsed and others slid right off; the old school became a hollow, whistling spirityard of tragedy and horror, all the children from all the years screaming in unison as the terror finally came. The city took it hard that night, took one hell of a beating. And I was out and I watched it happen and I never wanted to make it home again.<br />
<br />There were fires up on the hill in the distance. Sheets of lightning, jagged too, explosions and flames and dragons' tongues. Smoke rose off that thing like water sizzling on hot stone, and all around, O great hell had broken loose. There was some fury out in our world that night, something that we all understood but which noone could explain. The first of the city's rivers burst her banks and after that the second too. Cars trying to out speed the storm were washed across the road and into each other, a great skidding opera as the water rose, spinning with the fish that looked out into a strange new world. And that was the storm, the thrashing we had been waiting for all these years, the test of who we were and what we had left. In that force people were crucified, went down without a murmur and even less hope. For once you could do nothing but surrender, give yourself up to a greater power and be thankful that kicking back was no option at all. I was stopped still, in that old square, being whipped by winds and stoned with hail and staring out into the whirr that had come to greet me then. And I'm telling you, and I said it before, there was gold out there... Gold and silver and pewter and yellow. And it was like a place I'd seen before, like a dream and like a river, like everything I'd ever wanted.<br />
<br />'Worst Storm Since '88', it read when it was all over and finished.<br />'17 dead in a Once in a Generation Tempest'<br />'Dog Found Stranded on a Raft. Weak but alive. BELIEVED TO HAVE A HEART!'<br />
<br />And that was the storm. All gone and all blown out, the city and its people stripped of everything they didn't need. In the old square I had watched it come in, watched it prepare its way and had looked through it in search of something I didn't know what. And when the night finally closed down, when we'd all had enough, soaked through and nauseous with water, I was left with just one way to go and that way was East. In the miserable, tail-end dripping of such fury, with the storm's better half all raged through, tender tender now, I took out a cigarette and made to light it up. Marinated through it broke at the filter and folded over, hung from my lips like I was a beaten man. I was. I was walking home to my second night in a bed that would smother me in torment, have me come to in the violence of solitude, mad for yesterday again.</span></div>
</div>
<br />
<i>Thanks as ever for Reading... Shane. X<br />
<br /><a href="http://thelostpostsofhh.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/lines-for-joe-m-night-that-storm-came-in.html" target="_blank">Lines for Joe M</a><br />
</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS4Buy1RxVcy2EL4JuYcS8mS2S3lQPLiKnk4HRHsjF-gvsZJhi2AWNOPfVzBjOHtCrwFri-KyBIO5NwVl0jTXcPwY3VGL42YqvIScDXKc_WVAf5O1LfanmyCNKLA9VgsGpC-Zf6ntGleA/s1600/stormCAEIN.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="324" data-original-width="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS4Buy1RxVcy2EL4JuYcS8mS2S3lQPLiKnk4HRHsjF-gvsZJhi2AWNOPfVzBjOHtCrwFri-KyBIO5NwVl0jTXcPwY3VGL42YqvIScDXKc_WVAf5O1LfanmyCNKLA9VgsGpC-Zf6ntGleA/s1600/stormCAEIN.png" /></a></div>
<i><br /></i>Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-62501535173398309842017-03-16T13:30:00.000+01:002017-03-17T11:51:26.816+01:002 Stories of the Sea & Love<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><br />The cabbage came to the boil and it smelled like the sea, the sea on the stones and in the kelp, the smell of the old rotting pier and the barnacles and mussels clamped on down low in the shade and damp. I often think of the sea. I've never lived in a seaside town nor alongside the coast. I can barely swim and I despise the sun and hot, sticky days beneath it. But on certain days the sea still comes and I can hear the screams and they are not screams of horror.<br />
<br />My last but one told me a story of the sea and I told her one back. Mine wasn't so good. I thought I could get a laugh but I told it badly and it didn't even get that. I'll tell it here. Just for the record. Everyone's heard it anyway. It was that day I was dragged off to Brighton by that Italian Girl, the one who cried herself to sleep over my use of opiates; the one who thought anything besides straightforward in-and-out sex was perverted and odd; the one who left a stain on the mattress in the shape of the missionary position. I'd be fantasizing of the craziest shit as we fucked. Maybe she was too? Though I doubt it. When we eventually split and had it out, the only time we ever spoke of such things, her body betrayed her and her eyes teared up and she gagged. She was preparing to say “You should have told me... I'd have done that!” Those dry heaves made me terribly sad, like she couldn't have done anything worse than that. Anyway, she took me to the sea. She was from Naples and had such a desperate longing for the ocean. <br />
<br />“Please don't be getting stoned,” she said.<br />“I've nothing to get stoned with,” I told her. “We'll pass my mum's on our way to the Station.”<br />“Why?”<br />“Got to drop off something for her fella.”<br />
<br />Why I still lied I couldn't say. She had long ago made the connection with me visiting mum and an hour later my pupils pinning up and a giant's slumber filling me without warning.<br />
<br />We arrived at the seaside in the early afternoon. I had come around numerous times on the train down, had watched the countryside hurtling by outside, and now I opened my eyes to us slowly pulling into Brighton Station, the unmistakeable scent of sea air floating through the old train carriage, boiled eggs and tomato and the feint sound of the high ocean. <br />
<br />My girl wasn't angry; it had passed. And then it passed some more. Out of the train and heading down the platform you could see straight up ahead, right through the station to the city outside, the hordes of people making their way down, and at the end the bulging sea, like some huge heart expanding and contracting away.<br />
<br />“The sea,” she whispered like it were something sexual. “The sea.” And she looked at me with a wonder that I thought adults no longer possessed. Then she held me and close in she whispered once more, “the sea.”<br />
<br />The sea was wild. Choppy and powerful. The danger signs were out 'NO SWIMMING'. Up above the sun appeared dazzled by its own brilliance. It was beating down, so hot it seemed to muffle all sounds except the heave and sway of that fucking ocean.<br />
<br />“We can still swim,” she said, excited. “I will!”<br />
<br />I looked at the sea. There were a few people out in it, bobbing around like sewage between swollen rows of waves. “You go ahead... Enjoy yourself. Like I said, I'll just watch.” <br />
<br />We laid our bags down and set out a large towel on the stones. I had a shitty little transistor radio. I tuned it into a mess of static and let it crackle on like that in the afternoon. She looked at me. “Come on,” she said, “make an effort.”<br />“What?”<br />“Your top... Your boots!!!”<br />“I'm good just like this.” She stared at me incredulously, sitting there in my long-sleeved white cotton top, cut down military trousers, black, steel toe-capped Doc Martin boots and shades.<br />
<br />“You can't sunbathe like that. Only your knees and nose are showing!” <br />“All the more skin cancer for everyone else,” I said. I just wanted to sleep and dream of dragonflies and a small boat gently lulling on the waters, out there in the deep blue of nowhere.<br />
<br />They removed the dangerous current signs at around 2pm. My girl had already been swimming and now woke me excited, pestering me to go in the shallows. After a moment I gave in, reckoned on giving her ten minutes and then I could get back to reading and drifting off. <br />
<br />“You must remove your boots to go in the sea,” she said. “You'll lose them if not.”<br />
<br />I took the Slacker's option. I redid my laces, tied them tight around the uppers of my boots so as they couldn't be pulled off. She shook her head but I could tell she kinda enjoyed leading me down to the water in my boots and shades, looking like some drug fiend who was being shown 'How To Have Fun'. I strode into the water, into the shallows where the children were running in and out from the waves and screeching wildly. I could see people on the beach laughing at me. I walked into the water up to my knees. It felt good, cool, like a young memory I only barely still remembered. That's when the wave appeared. We saw it coming from a long way off, a big swell of water pushing in. <br />
<br />“Get back a little,” she said. She remained bobbing in the water, waiting to impress me with how well she would navigate the incoming bulge. I retreated to a safe place. The wave hit and the water came up to my hips and almost lifted me off my feet. Then everything stopped, like the moment was on pause, and then came the suck, the horrendous sound of hundreds of thousands of small stones being pulled over the larger ones as the sea took back what it had given. Now, somehow, the full might of the sea was in my boots, a force pulling from inside the steel toecaps, pulling me out and laying me back in the same movement. I was under the water, under the damn sea and being dragged out. I tried to right myself but my boots were then a terrible weight and it was impossible. I panicked in a struggle to unlock myself from the sea, the water rushing up my nose and taking my breath. I caught dirty snapshots of bubbles and driftwood and wide planes of sunlight shining somewhere through the water. Then came those muffled screams of joy, the beachgoers screaming from the excitement of the wave. For one awful moment a panic hit so terrible that no-one had noticed me disappear and the world would play the sounds of a wild summer day as I lost my fight to right myself. And then my face somehow broke the water and something behind me was giving me just enough angle to right myself. My Italian Girl, laughing: “I knew that would happen, going into the sea stoned like that. you should have seen how quickly you disappeared. PLOOOP and you were gone! Idiot!<br />
<br />I couldn't talk. I was flushed pale with shock and gulping for oxygen. I let her turn me around and lead me back to the shore. Up, safe on the beach, I said: “It wasn't the drugs. It was these fucking boots... filled with the fucking backwash!”<br />“Ah, yes, you are right. It wasn't the drugs it was absolute stupidity!”<br />
<br />It wasn't stupidity either but I didn't argue. In fact it was something far worse, a character trait that would almost have me dead on several occasions and even more often have me harm myself. I guess that was how I sourced out love and friendship in those early years of my life, the only way I knew how without having to speak too many words.<br />
<br />The sea had ruined my high. I wanted no more to do with it. I sat back down on our towel. I had lost my shades. I urged the Italian back out into the sea, told her to go swim and have fun. I pretend read as she hurried off, dripping wet over the stones and back on down to the water. When she was safely in the sea I turned on my side, went through my bag and pulled out a strip of subutex. I crushed down four and hooted them up and then laid back, waiting for the sun to blur, the sounds to merge and drone out and a warm tranquillity to put me out under the glorious day.<br />
<br />I couldn't remember moving but I must have. Maybe I did so in increments as the tide slowly came in up the beach. For whatever reason I moved she couldn't find me. She woke me up furious in the late afternoon, standing over me, tears of anger in her eyes and screaming. I couldn't hear her words and anyway they didn't seem too important just then. I had something much more pressing to tell her, an instinct which made anything else irrelevant:<br />
<br />“I feel like I'm dying,” I said. “Something's happened. ”<br />“You're burnt to a crisp you fool! You must have been asleep in the sun for more than three hours! You have sunstroke!”<br />
<br />She gave me water and cooled my head and chest. She fed me small squares of chocolate and fanned me with a piece of card. After a moment I felt a little better, still very weak but better. We packed up our belongings and made it off the beach. Our return train was for 7pm. We decided to quit ahead of time and took a slow walk back to the station.<br />
<br />“You're a walking disaster,” she said.<br />“Maybe, but it's mostly only ever me who suffers.” She looked at me with eyes that called bullshit.<br />
<br />The day had completely drained me. I was burnt and dehydrated. All I wanted was to be on the train, resting as we travelled home through the darkening evening. Back in London we had a room and in the room we had a bed. The room was clean and the bed was fresh. That idea occupied my mind as we walked through the dusk, that and the thought of ice fresh water. Any day can be perfect if it just ends well, I thought.<br />
<br />7h15 and our train was nowhere to be seen. Neither were there any other beachgoers at the station. I sought out our return tickets and went in search of a station attendant. I didn't find one; I didn't need to. Reading over the tickets as I searched I noticed that our return train was at 6pm not 7. We had missed it and there were no more trains to London until the following morning.<br />
<br />“We're slightly fucked,” I told the Italian on my return. “The last train for London left at just after six and there are no more until morning.” <br />“6 PM??? But why our ticket says 7 then?”<br />“Fuck knows. That gorilla in the ticket office must have fucked up.” She shook her head in total disappointment, seemed to know instinctively that it was me who had fucked up. Then she must have remembered that I was ill. “How you feeling?” she asked.<br />“Not bad... Better. I was looking forward to lying down so badly, was thinking of just that.”<br />“The night will be cool... It'll be good for you.” <br />“Are you hungry?” I asked.<br />She nodded.<br />“Come on, lets find some place to get something to eat. We can rest inside for a while.”<br />
<br />We found a Fish Shop down a quite deserted little backstreet close to the sea. It didn't look like it did much trade. On entering it was clear that the owner was on his way through closing up for the evening. “Sir?” he enquired.<br />“You done for the evening?” I asked. He nodded. “Almost. Why, what were you after?”<br />“Fish and chips.”<br />“We've fish... no chips. Hang on right there.”<br />He returned with a tray of battered cod. “Half price,” he said. We took two pieces.<br />“You down from the city?” he asked. “Got family back there?”<br />“Some,” I said.<br />“Hmmm... Some. You think they like fish? REAL fresh fish straight from the sea?”<br />“I guess they would. You only get fresh fish in London if you catch it yourself. Ans even then it's not certain.”<br />
<br />We paid for our two pieces of battered cod and wished the Fish Man a goodnight. “Here,” he said, handing me a bag. “Fresh Brighton cod for the family... 7 pieces. I was about to leave it out for the cats.”<br />“Serious? That's very kind of you.”<br />“Take a drink too,” he said.<br />The Italian took a cola and I took a bottle of fresh, chilled water.<br />
<br />Back out the night was almost upon us. “Let's go back to the sea,” I said, “find some place to sit and eat our supper.”<br />
<br />We found a bench up on the main road, directly looking out at the sea. The coming night was mild. Not hot and sticky and not cold. Just perfect. We unwrapped our fish and sat staring out and eating. At the back of the sea, on the horizon, there was a light that lit up the very top of the water neon blue. I didn't know what that light was but I knew it wasn't the setting sun. We both sat and watched that light, eating our cod with our fingers. ”The sea contains magic,” she said.<br />“I know it,” I replied. “Beautiful wayward magic that cannot be harnessed by man. That's what that light is, an illumination of everything we can never know.”<br />
<br />We finished our fish and shared another piece besides. With no warning and not looking at me she asked: “Will you ever do anything without drugs?”<br />I heard but didn't reply, sat there in silence as if I were thinking. After a while she said, “Hey?”<br />“Maybe one day,” I said. “Maybe one day I will”.<br />
<br />She turned and threw herself around me, gripping on tightly and burying her face in my shoulder. I thought she was crying but she wasn't. She was feeling the beginning of the end of her feelings, knew she wasn't cut out for a future of this. I let her hold on, stared at her sea in the distance as she silently, unknowingly undid the first chain of her bondage.<br />
<br />- -<br />
<br />She broke the stillness of the water sometime that morning, walked into the clear emerald sea and fell into a swim. There was a surfer out, waiting for waves, but there were no waves to be had. She would swim out so far she couldn't be seen from the shore, would spend hours out there alone, just floating with her head back. This is the story she told just not how she told it. Neither did she tell it all. Maybe she couldn't or maybe she didn't know it all. It was a story about the beauty and relief of giving up, of witnessing the awesome power of the elements and understanding some intrinsic connection with nature. It was confirmation of death being quite OK under the right circumstances, a return to something, not an end.<br />
<br />So, the green sea spread out from a deserted beach in Costa Rica. Since arriving three weeks beforehand she had all but lived in the water. She was out on her travels alone, just her and a little hut on the beach and an array of credit cards. The water was mysteriously calm that morning, sat there like it had given up for the day. She didn't tell it like that but that's how it was. <br />
<br />What was also how it was was that the water was so clear you could see the fish through it. They followed, curious, and after some days were curious no more and didn't even disperse when she kicked up into a swim. <br />
<br />“You become a real part of nature,” she said. “Very different from having a pet of being a farmer or zoo keeper. Out there, like that, you are interacting as a free wild animal and the wildest animal is the sea... it's alive.”<br />
<br />So, she was out, floating with her head back as usual, and then she rolled and dived and swam. And that was when a mighty and invisible force collected her and kept her under and took her out. She fought to get to the surface but it was impossible. She described it as trying to navigate through multiple planes of overlapping glass. But the weird thing was the fish, all rippling away in the same force, leading her, following her, hardly exerting any energy at all. After a moment she did break the surface, found herself being rushed out to sea. She was caught in a powerful current which was impossible to swim against. I didn't understand that. I visualized it as walking up a downwards moving escalator: difficult but possible. <br />
<br />“Such currents are no downward moving escalators,” she said. “To swim against such a force would be like coming up against rock-face and trying to swim right through it. It's the entire sea pushing in whatever direction it's heading.”<br />
<br />So, the sea had her and it was taking her in the wrong direction and, after a while, when she looked back, she could no longer see the land. That's when a serene calmness overtook her, like the weight of breathing and existing and keeping well, that constant battle to survive and be healthy, had been lifted.<br />
<br />She said that she felt no fear at all, that all she felt was an all encompassing sense of beauty and a deep admiration for the powerful force which had hold of her. <br />
<br />“This innocent element that didn't know who I or my mother was, that didn't care about age or wealth or status, it had hold of me and I understood its almighty power and indifference and it was an honour to be taken in that way. I just felt completely helpless, like my fate was out of my own hands, that it no longer had anything to do with me. I wanted to cry I felt so ecstatic. Something about it seemed so correct. And those fish! They followed all the while, reminded me that I was out of my natural environment and that's why it was so impossible.”<br />
<br />The sea dragged her out for over an hour and, just as quickly as it had taken her, it let her go, dumped her at what she figured was over ten miles from the land. Only then, with no distinguishable reference points to understand her position, she had no idea which way the coast was. <br />
<br />“The sun?” I offered. <br />
<br />“The sun's useless if you don't know it. You only realise once its too late how little notice you take of it. I had an idea which way the coast was, but in such a situation its hard to act on an inclination, knowing you could be swimming to safety in the wrong direction.” <br />
<br />That was when she panicked, knowing her fate was once again back in her own hands. So, she did what most people do when they have no idea what to do: she did nothing. She stayed right where she was, looking out for help, hoping to see a boat. She didn't see a boat, but what she did see were those same fish she knew from closer to the shore. <br />
<br />“They swim with the current,” she told me. “I was no expert but I gathered they had had their free ride and were now making it back to the reef in the shallows.” So she put her faith in something other than herself, latched onto a guide, a belief, and followed the fish. The problem was that every minute seemed like ten and when there was still no land in sight she began to doubt her course. <br />
<br />“You learn that memory, well, recognition, is all mathematics,” she said. “That when everything looks identical that memory doesn't exist as we know it. Imagine if everyone looked identical, all had the same features and the same voice... How would you ever know who said what? Who was who? 360 degrees of sea is like that. There are no reference points. You even become doubtful as to whether you are swimming in a straight line or not. I really almost stopped and did a u-turn, suddenly convinced that land was back in the opposite direction.” <br />
<br />Fortunately she carried on, followed the fish and ignored her doubts. And just when she was really on the point of giving up she saw the faintest trace of something in the far distance, and that something was land.<br />
<br />The full swim back she never made. The surfer who had no waves to surf turned out to be a member of the local lifeguard service. He knew the currents and had noticed her disappear. In a small boat he and a colleague were criss-crossing the area and they spotted her on one of their passes. They picked her up and sped her back to land. She was quite OK, not hurt or injured or suffering from shock. They warned her to be wary of still seas and explained about the dangerous undercurrents which frequently pass under the calm waters. She listened, took notice, but she had her own idea of what would be more helpful. From that day on she began to study the sun, wanted to be always sure of at least one point absolute were she to ever find herself in such dire straits again. <br />
<br />“The sea is amazing,” she said. “I now have more love and respect for it than ever.” Then she said: “I could never live for too long away from the sea... I need it, physically and mentally.”<br />
<br />I nodded, sad. I understood. I needed the city like she needed the sea. Only that need wasn't really what she was communicating. What she was saying was that the romance of living hand-to-mouth in my filthy bedsit was over, that the novelty had worn off and now her mind was thinking of new adventures.<br />
<br />“So, what dyou want to do?” I asked.<br />“I'd like to go to Paris to see some friends,” she said. “I'll only be gone a couple of days.”<br />“Is it the drugs?” <br />“Partly. I thought I'd be able to handle it but I can't. It just seems such a waste. But its not only that... it's everything. I need a break. I need to be alone for a while. Maybe after a day or so I'll want all this back again... I actually found myself in this shitty little room.”<br />
<br />I cried. Told her I couldn't make it on my own. <br />“You mean without my money? I'll still help... I'll always help.”<br />“No, not your money. You... Without You the person!”<br />“You'll survive. You always have. You always find a way.”<br />“So everyone who shoots thru keeps reminding me. But I'm no survivor... Look at me, my body, I'm quite useless at it.”<br />“I'm sorry. I tried... I really tried. But I need to be alone... figure my life out.”<br />“Hang out the month,” I said. “Help get me home and we'll leave together... Say goodbye nicely.” She nodded, slowly, and then said “OK.” <br />
<br />She changed after that. Was happy and light again, began dreaming of all she would do with her young life. I felt better too. I could stop pretending, stop curbing my drug use and denying myself in order to make a visible effort at trying to contain things. I had never promised to contain things but I had taken that road anyhow as a natural gesture after bringing someone into that environment. But now I had no responsibility, nothing to gain through making such a gesture and nothing to lose from being as wayward as my finances allowed. And so I cashed out, scored and used freely with any guilt or conscience or the need to apologize. It still upset her. She tried to control her temper but couldn't. She spent the weeks painting and doing yoga, let me give her guitar lessons when I was wide enough awake. In the late evenings and through the early hours we watched double-titled TV movies: Stolen Innocence - The Taking of Sarah Kindle; Empty Cradle - A Mother's Worst Nightmare. All, supposedly, true suburban horror stories but which had the converse effect of making life inside the screen seem quite serene, like there was some kind of natural, harmonious balance which turned tragedy and horror into a lush sedative. We ran the month out and come the end we were both ready to say goodbye. <br />
<br />It was a sad, tearful day. I took her to the station and promised to put her on the train for Geneva. The train was delayed. First by 30 minutes and then by a further 45. She had noticed me texting, getting more and more anxious about the time, cursing delays and ranting how easy it was to keep trains running on time.<br />
<br />“You can go if you want,” she said.<br />“Yeah? You sure? You won't be annoyed?”<br />“I'll be OK. I'll get a coffee. Where must you meet him? Croix Rousse?”<br />“Yes,” I said, “the Croix Rousse,” a shard of shame stabbing right through me. “I'm already late.”<br />“Well, you can't miss that can you. Go on... Go score your medicine.”<br />“The place will be empty when I get back... It'll be terribly lonely without you.”<br />“You'll get used to it.”<br />“I'll never get used to loneliness. I hope not anyway.”<br />“Your writing will ensure you're never lonely for too long.”<br />“No. My writing will only ensure destitution and no-one will put up with that for too long.”<br />
<br />We held one last time and I looked over the top of her head, through wisps of her hair, at the world. A sea of people, coming and going, staring up at departure and arrival boards, waving goodbyes and greeting hellos. <br />
<br />“Take care You,” I said. “And try to love your mother.” I unhinged, turned, and without looking, left. Walking back through the crowded station alone I could already feel that strange disconnect which comes with waking and living and shopping alone. But, soon enough I'd have some help. The Croix Rousse was waiting for me and the summer had arrived. I thought of her as each footstep took me further away, wondered how she was doing. I imagined her running behind to catch me up, saying to hell with the train and that she didn't want to leave. But it never happens like that. Unimpeded I was down in the metro, a ghost amongst the commuters, travelling the opposite way from home and dreading the emptiness that awaited me in my room that night. <br />
<br />I scored and stayed out late, sat nodding on the steps of the Opera House in the city centre. I sat through the closing of the metro and sat through the gradual dispersal of the tourists and revellers. All who remained were the skateboarders, practising and perfecting their jumps and tricks to the lights and the fountain of the square. I watched those skaters and I remembered a time not so long ago when the world was there to be explored and the nights held a very certain magic. As my eyes closed over again the blue neon backdrop of the city flared and died and I dreamt of a coastal town, the cool salty air coming in from over the water. At gone 2am a text beeped through on my phone: home safely. xhausted. thanx 4 the memories & sorry. I closed the phone and thought of nothing and watched the skaters skate some more. I was exhausted too and I had a long walk home. <br />
<br />When the next skater falls I'll head off, I thought. And then there it was, the thump of a body falling in the night and a skateboard spinning loose across the concrete. It reminded me of the backwash of a wave, the sea retreating and pulling everything into its rightful place. <br />
<br />You'll be OK me old mate, I thought. Just a minor bump. You've the joys of love to flatten you yet... Then the night won't be so brilliant. <br />
<br />Only the night was brilliant. I walked home lonesome amongst many ghosts, felt the sinister city leaning in on me and the pain of existence in my stride. I took out my phone and read her message once more. I wanted to be cruel and bitter, tell her a few home truths. She had arrived with her wealth and riches and had left with them intact while I was in a worse situation than ever. I wrote many replies on that long walk home but I only sent one: No, thank you, it read, tonight I am half alive. <br />
<br />- - -<br />
<br />Two weeks later and I was back under the sea again, rocketing through the Channel Tunnel on the Eurostar. She never did help me get home, took those dirty credit cards of hers and a guitar and canvasses and oil paints and set up life in some shanty town in Southern India. I never thought of her much after that, had maybe just been lonely in those middle years of my life. But like the sea occasionally she'd come , and as the cabbage boiled away on the stove and the cheap potatoes softened and crumbled and turned to mush in their water I thought of her and I thought of the sea and I thought of the life to come. </span></div>
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</span> <span style="font-family: "trebuchet" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 0.655cm;"><i>Thanks as ever for reading and linking... Shane. X</i></span><br />
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</i></span> <span style="font-family: "trebuchet" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 0.655cm;"><i><a href="http://thelostpostsofhh.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/lines-for-joe-m-2-stories-of-sea-love.html" target="_blank">Lines for Joe M ----></a> </i></span><br />
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Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com32tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-62041408602944726582016-10-29T23:04:00.000+02:002016-10-29T23:04:13.919+02:00The Poet's Curse<br />
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</span> <div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-right: -0.03cm;line-height:0.57cm"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;">I feel it so profoundly that it comes through me as a sadness. But it is not a sadness; it's a beauty, a beauty so dramatic of all the sensations whipped upon me. It feels close to an insanity. Either the most perfect insanity or the most cur'sed. And I see it and feel it and smell it in all things, in every step and every breath and every shattered day or brilliant morning. It's in brick and concrete and metal and flaking paint, in leaves and bush and trees and plant. I come across it in the shade of hidden places, amongst the tiny European lizards that dart upon the walls and scurry down into the undergrowth. It is on the wet of dogs' noses and in the smell of their coats, sheen or soiled. It romances me in piss and beer-soaked telephone booths as I'm carried away on the whiff of metal and polished copper and coin<i>. </i>It's in the methadone clinics, the hospitals; in the cancer patients who stand outside, held up by IV drips, smoking and looking so wistfully at the dew dying in the grass. It's in the crunch underfoot and the chaffing of fabric on fabric; in gravel and snow and ice, in car tyres scrunching over grit. It's in the wild of overflowing gardens, in rose bushes in early autumn. It's in the long shadows of first summer days, in the haze of the distant roar and city spray where the Now feels like a memory <i>and you smelled of fresh soap and water and it was something more than sex and skin and blood. </i> I hear it in the sounds of builders and cries from up on high, in the afternoon drilling and the clink of scaffolding poles. It's in the dust and slop of freshly mixed cement and, way up high, in the isolation of great cranes stranded in the devastating blue of the sky. I smell it in the molten tar when the roads get relaid, in the uncovered<i> bottles of tincture and ointment in Victorian dumps and Roman fares and paths.</i> It's in rusted rakes and spiders' webs and sodden pines and cones and leaves; in the treated wood of garden fence and damp and dampened earth and mossy stones. I feel it in pine needle lawns <i>in small southern Italian towns in the sand and ruins of Pompei and stretched out across the Bay of Naples.</i> In the ghettos of Mermoz Pinel and Villerbaune and far into the distance yonda, Grenoble and then off to nowhere and<i> early dreams of Europe and fiesta and dancing all around.</i> In the scent of old books and printed ink the words themselves are blood in me and I've only ever looked at them in<i> Georges Bataille and Dirty: gazing out at London we [almost] wept. </i>In cherry blossom snow and terraced housing and fragrant streets, in parked cars exhausted under the beating sun, in sap and milk and milky grass as great days blow in and the city is a-bustle and the radio says <i>it's clear skies across a beautiful London town</i>. In the bushes in the thickets in the tramped and trodden porno mags on Hampstead Heath in bodies fucking through the trees <i>and you wanted to swim in the lake while from the hill I watched the suburbs and we rolled in the glade and hooked ourselves on Scottish thistles while they screamed and splashed and played. </i>In the alien nights in Soho, in the acrid smell of amphetamine, in the smoky bar of the Intrepid Fox in the broken bottles and indiscriminate violence in the faces gashed by jagged glass. In the spoon in the cook in the draw in the pin in the passion for life and desire for death in wide open eyes in your desperate climax in the soft of your breast in our myth and obsessions <i>alone on the bridge </i>in the black scorch of river which snakes through the heart of this murderful town past the point where I said <i>so leave if you can</i> in the <i>I'll walk you some more</i> in the <i>arrived all too soon</i> in the decision to sleep, holding each other, on the bench in the common in the freeze of the night in the healing of wounds and the beautiful trauma of young damaged lives. In the cafes in the coffee in the stir in the cup in the harsh bite of winter in the sulphuric night of millennium eve when the world came together and life was no good. It runs through me as a sadness. But it's not a sadness, it's a beauty. A beauty which clings on, stalked me around Europe and European towns and left me screaming for quit into polluted foreign air. It arrived one morning and stood standing five foot nine outside the Perrache railway Station. In the bare room of the St Michel hotel it was there. It lay with us in the carved wooden bed, lingered in the melancholy of deep night. It flickered outside the window in the blue neon gas of the vacancy sign, illuminated briefly her sexual fantasies of sirens and bullets, wept as she narrated the story of our <i>failed heist, holed up suicidal awaiting the loudspeaker and armed police, two people dead and two more to follow</i>. It drifted out those cheap black-market cigarettes, twirled like ribbon and dissipated in the dark. It sat warm in the earliest boulangeries and cafés, could be found in the fumes of the 6am pernod of the loneliest bars. It rang out from the church every hour and was in the funeral knell of Sunday afternoons. <i>O My Love, let me ruin your life for just one more day.</i> But she was gone, and it resided so terribly in the gone. <br />
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O it came and it pooled out of me as a sadness. It came through youth and I didn't know what it was. It was there in my sick bed during long fantastic days off school; came in on the drone of helicopters and the mid-afternoon screams and whistles from the schoolyard opposite. It passed by the window as a millipede of children, cruel and unruly, looking in and laughing as it made its way down to the local swimming baths. It was in the smell of chlorine, in pruned skin and warts and verrucas, in the hideous stench of changing rooms and sour milk, humid feet and prepubescence. It was in me and I don't remember a time when it was not. It roared by in the whoosh of freedom, expanded in my eardrums as I freewheeled downhill for life. Come each dusk I would feel it, would stare out as the sun collapsed and the city died, would want to cry over nothing I could fathom. It came in with history and it overwhelmed me and made me mute. And those were the first lashes from the whip and it was in the whip and in the lash and in the rhythm and the meter and the crack and the yelp of youth. It circled by overhead in the traumatic squawkings of seagulls, sounded in the high winds and arctic skies. It frothed out from my mother's mouth in the back of an ambulance and spread out in the bruises across her chest in intensive care. It comes through ugly and then turns beautiful, comes beautiful and ugly again. <i>On a terrible night I wrote. It was the first time and it made me ill and she nursed me better. </i> It was in me then and in the bright cold healthy morning. I woke up freshly damned and I wanted nothing more. </span> </span></div><div align="JUSTIFY" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-right: -0.03cm;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
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<i>Thanks for reading... Shane. X<i><i></i></i></i><br />
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</div>Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-13838310905478266022016-08-11T19:16:00.003+02:002016-08-11T19:47:03.257+02:00The Junking Ballad of Earling Mid-Morning<br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">7.30am Gorge de Loup standing in the raining doing my renting money again feeling like shitting no needles pharmacy opening at 9 getting the yawnings methadone all going sweating it out on metro dirty clothing filthy fingering heading down towning feeling like shitting burning tearing cracking lips and sores on my face.<br />
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Two grams in handing no cleaning syringes pharmacy sleeping 9am opening feeling like shitting soaking in sweating stinking 'tween workers backing the metro gotting the yawnings burning eyes rawing heading on home n god damning those shit lazing pharmaceutical workings.<br />
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An hour to killing to get out of jailing feeling like shitting guts full of sicking big nose keeps dripping 2 grams in handing riding the Metro green line the D line the one auto driving am making it homing and maybe thanksgiving muscles up cramping convulsive gagging watching the second hand ticking an tocking.<br />
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Sold to the hard life live hand to mouthing rushing through tunnels an' black carbon dusting could be the night~time these early mornings making it homing diss honest grafting shovelling shitting pot handling digging chasing the ghostings back through the old town waiting on something zero to nothing guts swaying rough seas handing to mouthing crawling the hallway sicking the dog's bowl groaning and weeping damning the clocking 8.45ing making to leaving limping like deaths gripped around my left leg.<br />
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Loyal 9aming clocking in staffing pharmacy open 2 grams in handing needing some stocking Christmas steriboxing one euro two needles forgetting 'bout shitting striding the long stride sweating this morning junkie speed walking got all that I needing keys in my handing rattling sounding god blessing the landlord and Bulgarian gangsters.<br />
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Salut filthing bedsit salute the rain shining the rhyme pitter pattering softly outsiding do devil play kindly no blood bath this morning a quick cooking filter quick finding the lining good drawing good swabbing tying the meating probing a home run a big fly Babe Ruthing nectaring honey flowing upstreaming the lurch of the D train barebacking its sleepers curing my sicking my yellowing fever laying so lowing kissing pink tilings spilling all worry clean outing my minding nodding down heading syringe free falling strung out for drying through the sweet middle morning.<br />
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Thanks for reading/listening... All My Best, Shane. X</i></span></span></div>
Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-64952489677744574472016-08-01T02:52:00.000+02:002016-08-01T02:52:04.802+02:00FREE EBOOK DOWNLOADS<div style="text-align: center;">
Selected texts now available for FREE for all your e-readers. To download simply click on the image and then choose your desired e-book format. </div>
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For those wishing to show their appreciation you can do so by sharing the downloads on your social media pages, blogs or internet sites. Such sharing, even a tweet to two people, is invaluable... X</div>
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<br />Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-25687374650867078142016-07-22T23:43:00.003+02:002016-07-22T23:53:11.742+02:00Deathly Hallows<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: small;">(The opening text of The Void Ratio - a book by Shane Levene & Karolina Urbaniak).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 0.655cm;">Into these deathly hallows. I Love you Darling. Do you find the landscape bleak? The fog sat low outside and the dew in the grass by the motorway? These things puncture the skin, that is all. Don't be scared. It's not like in the movies. I'll wake up in the morning, you'll see. You'll find me just where I am now: sat at the table near the window, in the breaking light of day, where the syringe replaces religion - held up, air bubbles flicked and rising free, its needle a part of the modern city skyline. London in the new millennium. All silver and aluminium and glass, reflecting the world two tones darker. Sleep well, Princess.... Who knows what life may bring today. Those clouds sure don't look good. And the seagulls. Can you hear them in your dreaming? Squawking away and going bird-crazy over some death in the river? Their silhouettes against the sky, against the last smoke of the industrial age. Oh, I'd cry eternally if it wasn't for THIS. Things are changing, Darling. The world is on the turn. War is coming, like you'll never believe. Don't you see it migrating out of North Africa and the Middle East? Sweeping across Europe? Not a religious war as such. More a war of the old ways versus the new. A war over what's gone on and what's been said; over what is left and in what direction the future world will take.</span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: "trebuchet" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 0.655cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><--- Total ignorance THIS WAY</span></strong></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: "trebuchet" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 0.655cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Total depravity THIS WAY ---></span></strong></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 0.655cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">And you know which side I'm on. If only you could see what I see as I hold this needle to the sky. This sky which loves birds and hates the nuclear bomb. Really, it does. Now, if I can just... </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 0.655cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">Oh, you've risen. I have been going on some. Are you weeping or is it the condensation on the window? Don't cry for me; cry for yourself. I'm your tragedy now; not mine. My tragedy I've long since forgotten what it is. At 18 I could have shown you. At 25 I could have told you. But not anymore. I no longer believe in individual tragedy, except yours of course, and that's only because you fuck so much more intensely when you're psychotic. Fuck. That hurt. Sometimes it hurts so little and other times it hurts so much. And you know, I know every type of pain there is. No pain is serious. It's just, well, painful. Death doesn't hurt. Dying is easy. It's holding onto life which hurts. People don't realize that. Junkies don't realise that. Numbing the pain is holding onto life, not chucking it away. Don't be fooled by peoples' make-up or myths. What I'm doing isn't self-destructive, it's quite the opposite. The <em>médecins sans frontiers</em> are self-destructive. Applaud them. Hero-worship them. Walk about pretending to be them. I'm not willing to die. I'm doing everything and more to stay alive. Aaaahh. Fuck. That tastes so good... Ohhh.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet" , sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 0.655cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">There was an old black and white film I once watched. It was an afternoon matinee at the Riverside Studios. I remember how the lights dimmed dark, and then came the silence, and then the crackling sound of static and old reel. I watched in horror as my life unfurled...</span></div>
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<i>A new Memoires text coming soon... A work detailing the hell and misery that was present in my life during the writing of The Void Ratio. X</i></div>
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Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-34877806067853635592016-06-09T16:57:00.003+02:002016-06-12T15:47:38.879+02:00The Art of Being Poor<div style="text-align: justify;">
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Sometimes you have to walk. You have to walk miles to tramp out the shame and disgust. I had to walk 6 miles. I had a supermarket coupon - 50% off a bag of frozen paella. The cashier shook her head and handed me the coupon back. Her enamelled red nail poked at some pygmy writing on the reverse.<br />
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"Not here," she said, directing her eyes up at me.</span><br />
<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><br />"I received it from this store."<br />
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"Yes, that's right. But it's an offer valid only in our Super-Stores. The nearest one is in town."<br />
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"In town?"<br />
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"As I said. But pay attention: the offer runs out tomorrow and is conditional upon available stock. Would you still like to purchase the item, sir?"<br />
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I cast my eyes down at the frozen sack of paella and shook my head. “No,” I said. Without looking back up I grabbed my empty shoulder bag and snook out the shop, cursing and furious, a pressure building in my head and blood flushing through my face. Sure, I could have bought something else, something cheap, but my mind was set on the paella, sweet, golden-yellow Valencian paella with rice and peas and chicken and seafood. I could already smell it cooking up in the pan, the rich aromas steaming away on my plate and drifting around the room. “Fucking shysters!” I hissed, tramping furious down the street. My mind throbbed away, a-rage with thoughts of retribution. I envisioned scenarios from thumping the cashier to sending a notice of civil claim to the stores' Regional Director, citing public humiliation as my grievance. I made raving promises to myself that, in revenge, I would return to the store with a similar coupon, shop hundreds of pounds worth of produce and when the coupon was declined refuse to buy a single item. <i>Fucking villains! Vile dirty shit-eating fucking villains!</i><br />
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My step-father was a poor man. Not as poor as me, but poor nevertheless. He was a gambler. That was his problem. He showed me how to cook a meal in an electric kettle. That's how we'd cope for hot dinners when the the gas had been cut. By the time it was reconnected the electricity would go. Then the oven became our most valued asset. It was not only used to cook and boil hot water but also for heating and some light in the kitchen. We'd run a cable in from the neighbour's so as we could watch TV. People passing by outside would always slow down and gawk in at us all huddled up like that. The dog would go crazy, do cartwheels up at the window and shit at the same time. My step-father said it had a phobia about big noses. We'd throw a book at it and it'd lay down for a while, whimpering. When it thought it's crime had been forgotten it'd creep in on his stomach and smooch in close to the heat.<br />
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I only ever remember being poor. It's all we were. My mother was poor as well. She would have been even poorer if it wasn't for her looks. She did well with them in her youth. But she drank, chronically. That was her problem. Later she accepted poverty, seemed to kinda enjoy it, enjoyed totting up the pennies and just barely making do. Hanging on like that, with so little and never being late on a payment, somehow made her proud. She made the most out of poverty without ever doing anything too crazy. Poor people are always doing crazy things. I guess rich folks do too. Only rich people actually go crazy. They don't have the burden of needing to appear stable to the landlord to keep their feet on the ground. They kind of fly away, take on a type of insanity that looks like their high on drugs. They probably are. Poor people look more crazy than they really are. My step-father again. Walking around with his split shoes stuffed with newspaper and cardboard, his big toe and heel painted black with shoe polish so as to hide the holes in the leather. Only his shoes weren't leather. He found that out each summer when the heat would get so bad that his feet dimpled from the moisture. That's when he'd slice the top inch off the toes, turn then into sandals for their final half a season. By the time he threw them away there wasn't much left of them. My step-father knew all about the supermarket racket. Before there was ever a documentary on </span><span style="line-height: 22.8px;">about it, about the cunning offers and positioning of products on the shelf, he'd already sussed it out and told me all about it. That was his thing: corporate corruption. He despised it. Corruption and incompetence both. It was a mixture of the two which killed him, left him flipping out on a ho</span><span style="line-height: 22.8px;">spital bed as his aneurysm exploded and his heart gave out. That's how it ends when you're poor. Not very nice at all, and even worse if you live in America. </span><br />
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So, it was late spring. A high sun was up above but there was a dampness in the air. Things were sprouting in parks and gardens and smells were here and there around the city. I hadn't left home expecting to go far and now I found myself marching at a wild pace towards the super-supermarket in the center of town. I was dirty and it made me hot and itchy. I pulled a few times at the neck of my jumper, creating waves of air beneath it. <i>Damn fucking jumper,</i> I cursed. I would have liked to remove it but my shirt beneath was not only filthy but also turned inside out. Through the winter I had gotten into the habit of only scrubbing the visible parts - the collars and cuffs. <br />
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It's too hot for dirty shirts now, </i>I thought. <i>It was too hot even last week! </i><br />
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I damned myself for not having had done a wash, but without a machine it was such a laborious process and was always put off until absolutely necessary. Filling up that deep plastic vat with cold water and dumping the clothes in. Stirring them around with the wooden handle off the broom. Just that alone took the entire light part of the day. In and out the bathroom every hour or so to give it a good ol' stir. Once the water was sufficiently black and swampy it was down on the knees, scrubbing the shirts and trousers on the floor of the shower unit. And that was the easy part. After came the wringing out. There was a time when even that was done purely by hand. That was before I found a method of looping each garment around and through the shower taps and then twining the ends together so as to twist the water out by pure force. It would still half kill me. Come the end of the day my palms would be red raw and every muscle in both my arms dead. For the next two days, with all the damp clothes hung on lines across my room, the place would resemble a camping den. <i>A fucking wash, </i>I thought.<i> I could do with one too. </i></span><br />
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Lost in such thoughts my anger faded. My step slowed a little too. That's when the perspiration came. I was still a good half an hour walk from the super-store and didn't much feel like steaming hot paella anymore. But loss of appetite never stays long when one's that low down. As was said: sometimes you just have to walk.<br />
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Butchers are strange people, at least most the butchers I've ever known were: they love animals. I love animals too, but I don't spend the best part of my day chopping them up. Grace wasn’t lost to this fact either. She realised that butchers like animals much more than they like people. Grace loved animals too, way more than the butcher knew. Every other day, on her bad week, she'd take up her five yapping mongrel dogs and pull them on by the butcher's shop. Then she'd turn around and pull them back again.<br />
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"Them dogs there seem hungry, Grace," he'd yell out. "Not right them going on without food like that. Need some good meat and marrow them dogs do."<br />
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"It's my low week," she'd say. "Dogs would be in fuckin’ Dog Heaven if I hadn't 'av taken 'em in."<br />
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"Go an put them away home an’ come back. Won't have animals go hungry on my watch."<br />
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When Grace returned the butcher would beckon her over and, in front of his little queue of customers, give her a white, blood-smeared bag full of bones and gumps of dark offal. Of course, Grace never fed such cheap and rotten scrapings to her dogs. Grace loved animals. Her dogs never went without food. The bones from the butcher were boiled down into a stew for her and her crack addicted fella George. The offal she slung out back for the foxes. <br />
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"That cunt would let me and George starve to death," she'd say. "Just thankful human meat is illegal."<br />
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The week when one of Grace's dogs got sick and then died she stormed into the butcher's, in tears, and told him that his rotten offal had killed her favourite mutt. That really hit the butcher hard, especially as he knew the kind of offal she was talking about. From that day on, maybe out of a sentiment of real guilt, he'd then chuck in a half decent cut of meat with his bag of bloody, sour bones. <br />
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The super-supermarket was pack jam full of people. From outside I could see that the tills were overflowing and the queues were trailing far back into the aisles. I called to a young worker. He wore a slanted sweep of blond fringe which covered over his right eye. I showed him my damp and crumpled special offer coupon. <br />
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“I've been told this is valid here?”<br />
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“Huh???”<br />
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“The coupon. Is it valid here or not?”<br />
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He looked at the coupon as though it were a cryptic puzzle. He beckoned for me to turn it over. Ever so slowly he squinted over the small print, probably hoping he'd find some clause which would allow him to give me bad news. He slowly nodded and then just as slowly shook his head.<br />
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"Well, is it valid or not?"<br />
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"Er... Yeah, it's valid... if we've stock."<br />
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He cast his one visible eye at me. It didn't stare quite straight, seemed to be straining to get into the corner. He stood there looking at me like that, a slight smile on his lips like I was the mental retard. That's what working so many hours for so little does to a man.<br />
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"What's funny?" I asked.<br />
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"Huh?"<br />
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I paused for a moment, tried to calm myself. Without warning I echoed an equally retarded sound back at him. It was so explosive that he straightened up and shot back in shock. As he did so his fringe swung off to the side like a battleaxe, uncovering his other eye for the first time. He looked terrified. <br />
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"HUHHH!!!" I moaned again before entering the store. <br />
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The frozen food aisles were at the very far end. I must have walked back and forth ten times, scanning the deep-freeze units and compartments before I discovered where the paella was stored. The freezer was in total disarray, a mix of various brands of paella all pulled and dragged and piled together. I began rummaging through the stock, sure that the one I searched would be all sold out. Almost. At the very bottom of the freezer was one last bag, split open down the back and with its contents spilling out. I palmed what I could back inside and took it anyway. While trying to fold the split in the bag over and make it good a man appeared besides me. He looked at me with a strange regard and then began burrowing through the freezer unit. After a moment he stopped, looked at me again, and then had another rummage through the compartment. When he next straightened up I found him not looking at me but at the split bag of paella I was holding. <br />
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"You buying that?" he asked, bluntly.<br />
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"If they let me," I said.<br />
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"Last one is it?"<br />
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"Appears so."<br />
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"It's on special offer, you know?"<br />
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I shook my head as if I didn't.<br />
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"You not got a coupon then?"<br />
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"What coupon?"<br />
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"Here, like this..."<br />
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I looked at the neatly folded coupon he showed me and shook my head like I wasn't petty enough to be using special offer coupons.<br />
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"Didn't know anything about that," I said.<br />
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He screwed his face up, cast his greedy little eyes about in the freezer compartment once more, smashed a few bags about and then left. He didn't even offer me his then useless coupon. If he would have done so I would have given him the bag. I watched him go, holding his little basket like an old woman. Down and along the far side product shelf he stopped and took a wad of folded coupons out his back pocket. He stood there going through them, stooped over like he was guarding the secrets of the world. I followed him for a while, stood watching him from afar, the words 'PIECE OF SHIT' circling around in my mind. Then I cut off to queue and pay and get the hell out of that place.<br />
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I hadn't told her that there was no hot water and no fridge, nor that the bed was broken and propped up on books for fear that she would decide not to come. When she stepped in with her suitcase I saw the feigned looked of being only slightly horrified on her face. <br />
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"You spent a week cleaning this place?" She asked.<br />
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"Not quite. Four days."<br />
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"Jesus."<br />
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Later that evening I heard the tap running in the bathroom. After a few minutes she called in asking how long it usually takes for the water to run through hot. That's when I explained about the boiler and the small explosion I had had the previous winter.<br />
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"So how do we wash?"<br />
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"We boil water."<br />
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"How? You've only one electric ring."<br />
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"I've a kettle too. We just have to be organised."<br />
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"Your sink's cracked. It won't hold water."<br />
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"I know, we use the two buckets in the shower." She went silent just after that.<br />
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In the bathroom I went through the process with her, how with two pans and two kettles of boiling water, and by using both buckets, we could shower and wash our hair and rinse off.<br />
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"So I wet my hair first?" She asked, sounding like half the romance of love was already gone.<br />
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"Yes. But be careful to retain the water which runs off your scalp... you'll need that to wash with. Once your hair's wet, soap it. As the shampoo is doing its magic you wash your body. While you're doing that I'll be boiling the second lot of water that you'll use to rinse off with."<br />
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"And the radiator? Can I turn it on?"<br />
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"No... Don't touch that thing! It blows all the electricity. Use the portable fire from the room. But keep it away from the water or you may end up fried."<br />
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"Is there anything else I should know," she asked.<br />
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I thought for a moment and then said no, absolutely certain that there was.<br />
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By the time I got home the paella had defrosted. It wasn't any great tragedy. In fact, it was a good thing. I had no fridge anyway and defrosted it would take much less time to cook. I dumped the soggy bag in a saucepan and covered it with a plate to stop the flies getting to it. It was then late afternoon. Due to the run around with the shopping I hadn’t had time to raise money for tobacco. What cash I had in my pocket wasn't enough and was needed for food anyhow. What I did have were cheques... plenty of them. They were useless in most shops as they'd be processed too quickly and I didn’t have cash in my account to cover them. So the drill was to trade them in for cash at the local kebab place. For a twenty-five euro cheque Moustaffa would give me twenty euros in cash. It was a good deal, and a way to raise badly needed money when I had none, and too often I had none. Also, unlike most shops, Moustaffa only banked his takings once a week, always on a a wednesday when the Delice Kebab was closed half day. And so for money I didn’t yet have I bought less money to have immediately. I kinda gained. And if I didn't gain I at least got what I wanted. It’s the same old story just done in a different way. Like that guy who wrote to me once and explained how he bought marijuana on credit and then sold it for money to buy heroin. When he had funds a week later he’d repay the debt for the marijuana and it'd start all over again. <br />
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Moustaffa read over the cheque and then gave me a twenty euro note. I held it up to the light to verify it was real. Satisfied, I pocketed it and set off for the local square to buy some fake tobacco from the real Algerians.<br />
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It was the same set up most days. Big John Mcdonagh would march into each site and head menacingly towards the first young lad he set eyes upon. There he’d stand, his feet planted wide apart, his legs slightly bowed, his left hand scrunching away in his pocket, clutching and unclutching at handfuls of coins and keys. On finishing his spiel he'd raise himself on the balls of his feet and swipe the backside of his right hand across his bottom lip and then strain his face forward like a plucking cockerel. <br />
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“John Mcdonagh,” he'd bellow. “Tell him it's John fucking Mcdonagh!” The young labourer, sure his boss was ripe to take a good beating, would invariably run off and fetch him. <br />
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“Aye d'ere aw fella,” John would say, “hoi'm h’arfta tekkin away a bitta'yer O scrap,now---” <br />
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“You've already tekkin it or you’d like to?”<br />
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“Hah, uh sees we got us selves a bitt'ah da ol joker. Alroighty-O, Joe. Now wheres a tawkin’. Whaddya got fer da ’ol Mcdonagh Clan today?”<br />
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And that’s how it would go, each morning, five mornings a week. Most site managers would willingly oblige and give up their scrap metal and some would do so for a small fee. Of those who declined, some would decline because they did their own scrapping and others out of pure meanness. Whatever way it came, and whatever came, John Mcdonagh and his two boys would drag and carry the metal out and load it up on the back of the pick-up truck. As they made their way around town, from site to site, they’d keep their eyes peeled for any abandoned fridges, radiators or washing machines; wire, cable and aluminium sheeting. On finishing their rounds they'd drive back to the campsite and unload the wagon. The large appliances would be dumped with their stock to be stripped down by the younger sons and cousins; the smaller scrap sorted into individual metals ready for the afternoon runs to the scrap yard. This is where The Mother comes in. <br />
<br />
The mother. The soundtrack of the campsite. A small hulk of a woman, 400 lbs on a good week with short, tight, black permed hair and a faint smudging of dark above her upper lip. In a tight Lycra mini-skirt and heels she'd spend most her time stamping proudly around the family’s main caravan, squawking age old wisdom to the half naked children who sat mesmerised and terrified by her. Her size and the energy of life she displayed represented the good health and well-being of the clan. She also represented the money and the collection and distribution of it. As such she never missed the afternoon trips to the scrap metal yard, taking the place of her youngest boy who’d stay behind stripping down car engines and making a noise. But it wasn’t distrust that took her along to the merchants. Mrs Mcdonagh rode shotgun for a very specific reason. <br />
<br />
Turning into the scrapper's yard Big John Mcdonagh would stop the truck to let his wife and son out. As they walked in he would drive the pick-up, get weighed, and then head on over to the unloading bays. Once unloaded he’d drive out, be weighed again and paid the difference. The other side of the scales he'd pick up his wife and son and head home. At least that was the drill for the cheap metals and tin and alloy. When it came to scrapping his grade A copper a small but important change would occur. This time only the son would alight and enter the yard on foot. The 400lb mother would remain, sat down low in the truck. The weighing in process and the unloading would be repeated. Then, as per usual, John Mcdonagh would drive out and his wife and son would make it on foot. No one ever suspected a thing. The scrap dealer, sat up high in his porta-cabin, would think nothing of it when Mrs Mcdonagh came waddling back out. If anything crossed his mind he’d just have thought he hadn’t noticed her walking in. In such a way, every cunning day, going on years, the Mcdonagh’s got paid for The Mother's substantial weight in grade A copper scrap. <br />
<br />
Travelling folk. As wily as they come. Thieves as well, but honest with it. They’d never steal anything which was owned by a single person – at least not without good reason. And like many poor people they abhorred meanness - especially Meanness for the sake of Meanness. So, twice a week, once the evening was in, Big John Mcdonagh and his two boys would drive back around and revisit all the sites in which the managers had dumped their scrap metal rather than having someone else profit from it. They’d first empty their skips and then enter the site and make off with spools of copper cable, metal sheeting, lead and any power tools left lying around. As a final underarm salute, for personal satisfaction, Big John Mcdonagh always took a good, long piss in the cement mixer. <br />
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"M’oi fekkin piss holds up a good fair bitta dis town," he’d say. "Tiocfaidh ár lá!"</span><br />
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It was a little after 8pm when i finally began cooking the Valencian paella. Defrosted and raw and spewed out in the large frying pan it didn’t look quite as appetising as it appeared on the bag. The fish was cubed and made from the reformed waste of multiple varieties, and if that wasn’t off-putting enough each cube was run through with branches of fine blood vessels. The chicken was grey and of the cheapest cut. As it steamed in the pan it let of a stench reminiscent of dog’s breath. The prawns, all two of them, were the size of winkles, and as for the peas, well, they were rock hard and turned brown in the heat. After a few minutes of cooking the whole lot had become a stodgy mess, stuck and burning to the bottom of the pan. When I eventually spooned it out onto a plate it looked more like porridge than a fancy spanish dish. I looked at it and nodded knowingly. There's only ever two reasons for half-price offers: to introduce a new product on the market or to get rid of an old one. This was obviously for the latter. Rather than make a loss on a dish they knew wouldn't sell they were flogging of the remaining stock at break-even price. Alone on my bed I took up my fork and tucked in. <br />
<br />
The first wave of vomit came just after midnight. Then came the shits. I lay on my back, on the bed, my eyes watering and a pond of gasses bubbling around in my guts. In that state visions came to me and went. I saw the cashier and her finger with the red enamelled nail. She threw her head back and cackled and that sound rang out for a long time in my mind. Then came the the old guy at the supermarket, hunched over and leafing through his coupons. Lines of shelves and products and people and queues and the ringing of tills and the rattling of money. I heard the beeping of products being scanned and the sound of people swiping their credit cards and machines munching off cheques. And there it came again, up from my stomach and hardly time to lean over the side of the bed and spew it out. It was all making me nauseous. This wasn't just about Valencian paella. No, there was something much deeper which was making me sick. Maybe it was the struggle? The struggle to get on and get by and the fight to wake up tomorrow with as much fight as one had yesterday. Maybe this sickness was me giving in for a moment at a moment when I could. It's a hard life when you're down to your last every day, when every thing is a calculation, when even one's small pleasures are sacrifices. It's not the fittest who survive around here; it's the quickest. When there's only one bag of frozen paella left and fifty hungry men after it, it's who goes furthest for the smallest gain. Sometimes it's just pure luck, but over time, tomorrow after tomorrow... that ain't luck. The junkies do it, and the whores do it, and single parents do it, and the low paid and exploited do it. Creative survival. The dying art of staying alive. </span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;">- - -</span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><i>Thanks as ever for reading, Shane. X</i></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><i>Lines for Joe M to follow shortly... ... ...</i></span><br />
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Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-13162959082467658272016-03-27T19:06:00.004+02:002016-03-28T22:24:28.018+02:00Le Désespoir de La France #2<div style="text-align: justify;">
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France. La France. O France. Comment tu es belle la France. Go fuck yourself in the arse, La France! It's too late to start again now. I loved you once and then I arrived. In quick succession you ravaged my heart and ruined my health, made me too fat for my shirts and left me with just a single, sodden shoe. <i>Va te faire enculer, La France!</i> I had to walk home in the wet and, for the next nine months, tramp about like a clown wearing odd shoes and no socks. That winter of pneumonia and bronchitis when your dealers robbed me of everything but that which I didn't have. You laughed at me in the cafes and mocked me in the unemployment offices. You sent me back and forth between despicable civil servants, all asking for different papers that they knew I didn't have; didn't need; some of which didn't even exist. O with what joy did you run me around town? Send me to places on the very outskirts which no longer resembled Europe. O fuck You La Belle France. I thought such thoughts and worse as you had me suffer entire days of remedial classes, listening to a government trained retard lecture on how to formulate the perfect CV. Curriculum Vitae. Mon dieu! Did you not see us? How the fuck could a CV have helped any? O La belle France. What have you done? You deserve everything that comes your way in these wicked times. You drag it all down upon yourself. Every shot; every bullet; every exploding belt. It's all done beneath the shadows of your actions. The right-wing uprising and retaliation too. The bubbling conflicts in the suburbs. Peck out a man's eyes and watch him go crazy to defend what's left of him. A whirring, crazed, waltzer of indiscriminate violence. France, you pecked out my eyes. You harpy fucking scavenger!</span><br />
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France! My beautiful prison of diluted and overpriced joys. I weep desperately within your borders. I go to your marches and observe the left, divided up into a hundred factions, blowing whistles and lighting flares, beating drums and chanting and laughing to serious matters. Your squares bordered by the armoured ignorance of the Police Nationale. Their black, ruthless boots ready to stomp over anyone not draped in the tricolor. France, you told me, swore to me, lied to me that only the Arabs and Africans get ID checked. Go away with your falsehoods and propaganda. Pink skin doesn't save one here. Five fucking hours I spent on my back in your rotten custody cell. Mary, half junk sick, having to journey out into the middle-of-nowhere to produce my ragged passport. Then, last autumn, in the Perrache train station, being marched off and strip-searched for standing too close behind three armed officers on the escalator. A bottle of unscripted methadone discovered in my bag . It's a stupifiant! they kept shouting. I told them I wished it fucking were, that I'd love to be as stupidfied as them. I should have left you to rot without me then, but the prospect of dire poverty and heartache, a few years of dying in your third largest city wooed me. <i>Lyon! Only Lyon!</i> You were beautiful for a summer; the lap of your twin rivers calm and serene; the mist and fragrances rolling down your hills early morning; the spirit of European summer and fiesta wafting through your narrow streets. O France, is that your ruse: to beguile? You promise everything and deliver nothing but tax demands, obscure charges and rent increases. Then you close your banks on Monday and snip the electricity at its root. France, I never used your fucking electricity! How could I have? I only had one lightbulb and a mobile phone. Though, soon enough, you took them too. </span><br />
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France. I lost my teeth in your streets, marinated them in your methadone and coughed and spat them out in disgust through your lonesome nights. I spent years suffering from your toothache, woke in pain to each new day with my face swollen and the nerves in my temple raging away. France your toothbrushes are useless! Four for one euro sixty seven centimes. Red, blue, green and purple. The handles snap in half and the bristles fall out. Fuck you Carrefour® and the Part-dieu Commercial Centre. Fuck the whole rotten lot of you. Your doctors too. Kneading my liver each month as though it were pizza dough; the young interne with his specs and stethoscope so eager to diagnose his first death, asking: Is it swollen? Foie gras, Monsieur. Foie gras! The doctor giving an indifferent shake of his head, telling me to get dressed and, begrudgingly, giving me another month to live. Halle-fuckin'-lu-jah! How adept you are at presenting bad news! Stop the drugs, you said. Get off the needle! Quit the cigarettes! Do some exercise! Lower your cholesterol intake! What kind of a fucking doctor would ever levy such a miserable tariff on a dying man? O, fuck You Dr Denis! Fuck you L'hôpital de la Croix Rousse! You gave me so little you didn't even charge for it. </span><br />
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France. Monsieur the Mayor of the 3rd arrondissement: fuck fuck you! Your crooked, corporate socialism twists my stomach. Of the left? Sure you're of the left. You're so far too the left you're on the fucking right! What with all the scandalous discrimination you lord over in your own house. Call it what you like, celebrate the PS coming into power after 18 years, I saw the same happen in Britain, the exact same idiots singing with joy and heralding in the new bandits and gangsters, clinking glasses and slurping down oysters together. Power is power and it always sounds like that. I moseyed around your office, listening, Monsieur The Mayor. I watched your advisers cutting out the day's press clippings and political news; your personal assistant mailing off the video footage of your latest speech to <i>Le Progrès</i>. I saw you lumber around with your trousers unbuckled and your shirt hanging out, raging on about how cheap and acidic the wine was. I watched you, Monsieur the Mayor, heave on your heavy felt coat, have your sash pinned in place, clear your throat like a tenor and gob a lump of vile phlegm into your handkerchief, ready to lead the war veterans' D-Day parade. O Sir, I eyed your staff, and the town hall gardians, sweeping before you as you walked and wafting away at your behind as you went, fanning your wind to either side of the red carpet and scooping up your droppings as they came to bear. Monsieur the Mayor of the 3rd arrondissement. I had to clean your bureau every second evening, empty your bins and dust your plants. O, you should know better than to ever employ such a scoundrel. I pissed in your fire grate and masturbated in your leather chair. O Monsieur Thierry Philip, if only you could have seen how wildly I came, shooting sperm across your desk, over your diary and bullseying a picture of your wife and kids. I cleaned and polished your desk that evening, Sir! The next morning, first thing, to my horror, I was summoned by my immediate manager. Wearing a grave look he asked if it was I who had cleaned your office the previous evening. Guilty, I pleaded. Whereupon the wild reprobate took up an email and read me of your surprise and thanks, broke into a salacious smile as he disclosed 'my desk and leather chair have never shone so splendidly'. Ha! How influence and importance garners special treatment. Don't trust the silent ones, Monsieur the Mayor of the 3rd arrondisement. Don't trust anyone your country has pecked at so much. </span><br />
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Mademoiselle La France. You contemptible beast of formations and concours and adjoints. How you sat glaring at me each time, blank and motionless, like there was nothing which could be done. I cleaned your toilets, Mademoiselle, and in return you shook your head in dismay. You told me that I had not undergone the required training needed to handle such cleaning products. I waved you away and you proceeded to grill me over my knowledge of glass polish and disinfectant cleaner, demanded that I state the dilute ratio of neat bleach to water when using it to disinfect public washrooms. I was set to say 10 to 1 part bleach but finally never bothered. Any answer would have been the wrong one. I apologised and swore to never scrub your crap again. Mademoiselle! I slogged out my soul for your pubic services and your minimum wage. For three years I worked myself too exhausted to write. You shoved me in a hole of a room, round the corner from the bins, and five years later hit me with a four thousand euro bill for unpaid residence tax! Four thousand euros. If I had four thousand fucking euros I'd be a resident some place else. Some place that functions. Mademoiselle La France, you do not function! You are <i>'hors de service'</i>: legs closed for business. Daily life is a succession of disasters and frustrations. Tobacconist closed. Pharmacy closed. Boulangerie sold out of everything but stale salmon baguettes. Fast food places shut until 7. Restaurants refusing to serve food. Supermarket closed for an impromptu stock check. Transport staff on strike. The corner store without change of a twenty euro note. The concierge on permanent sick leave. Mademoiselle, you insist on such a tiresome way of operating and then harp on about low foreign investment. Fuck you Mademoiselle La France. Fuck your 35 hr week. Fuck your Unions who have become just another cog in the political machine. The supposedly hardline CGT, agreeing that I was illegally dismissed yet telling me that they have a policy of fighting common rather than individual struggles. They gave me the number of a lawyer they said would work for free, who though, unfortunately, was also three months deceased. When I called back to give news of the poor man's medical status they abstained from answering the phone and ignored my various messages. Fuck You La République Française, I saw through you completely in that moment. </span><br />
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France. I know your whores and they suck. Too clean; too classy; too unwhorelike. You keep your own upstanding and legal, but what of the eastern European girls along the river, putting it out for all of 20 euros a trick? Not a single pin prick or crack pipe between them, a fact which bespeaks a real social tragedy. Oh, you know how to treat them. Drag them in for soliciting once a month or so, disturb their lives for a night while adding to the misery. First thing Monday morning, trot them out and stand them in the defence box, half naked and cuffed, their sordid misdemeanors and acts slowly read out to the judge and procureur. O madame La France, you sure as hell know how to look after your own alright, keep them from dribbling away at home! Your court rooms are full of criminals, La France, and most of them are being paid by the State. </span><br />
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France. The great romance you peddle is a myth. Romance never thrives under such hardship and drudgery. No-one kills themselves for love after that. All that happens is that people get worn down and out, and youth and beauty fades into early retirement. I've read your poets and I've watched your films. I crossed your bridges and I dreamed! I dreamed of fire-eaters and jugglers, street artists and musicians. I dreamed of song and death and fuck and absinthe, of opium and Gauloise cigarettes, sailors and show- girls. France, I stood on your terrain and I had hope, but even then I was looking way over yonder to God knows where beyond. Through your warm, subdued evenings I traipsed around with the poet prickling away inside of me. I saw all the wonder of life in your pink skies and said 'La France, La France' over and over, like I was on the cusp of something great. O I tried my best. I sought out wild, psychotic affairs, fantasized about death pacts and leaving a bloody mess for your civil servants to clean up. I went to your parties and took part in your theatre. I stripped naked and danced my birth and death in the Beaujolais valleys. I responded truthfully to the director when he asked:</span><br />
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Can You dance? </span><br />
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Can you sing?</span><br />
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Can you act?</span><br />
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No, I replied each time.</span><br />
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Perfect, he said, you're exactly what I'm looking for! </span><br />
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Madame, Mademoiselle, La belle France, L'hexegone, La République: You have ruined me all you can. With minus 883 euros to my name there is no more you can take. Go ahead, sling me into jail for a month, recuperate my debts that way, deal me your last remaining blow. I will take it, La France. I will suck it up and enjoy it, thrive of the stinging pain and spit the blood back at you in defiance. I will eat your porridge and your mashed carrots and I will shit it out down your fucking u-bends. France, your bidets are broken and your eau de toilette is wearing thin. Down South the stench of your filthy cunt is overpowering. Madame de la République, I will fuck you no more! You've no disease worth having. With nothing left to protect or defend my integrity is way out of your bounds. It's true, you took all that which I entered with, but that is hardly a victory. What? A broken suitcase? A pittance of cash? My final stay of youth and a mouthful of teeth? Come come La France, the spoils of war are not what they used to be. But me, O La France, me I leave with such words in my head – words so beautiful and vulgar and mine. And even on the journey out, on the last bus back home or for wherever it is destined, your nights will still sizzle and smell of fire and smoke and I will cry for all you are and all you were and all you still could be. France, from the Fourvière hill, looking down, on a day like today, I still shiver with life and love and passion. I become giddy and whimsical as the coming evening paddles your dark rivers towards the sea; inebriated by the lights from your harbours and river boats. France your skies still excite me like the first night of the first night of the first night. France, La France, O France. Comment tu es belle la France. Go fuck yourself in the arse La France. So impossible and hopeless, my France, La France. </span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;">- - -</span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><i>Thanks as ever for reading, Shane. X</i></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><i><span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="http://thelostpostsofhh.blogspot.fr/2016/03/lines-for-joe-m-desespoir.html" target="_blank">Lines for Joe M </a></u></span></i></span></div>
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Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-39001581836731417642016-03-14T07:15:00.003+01:002016-03-14T07:15:51.771+01:00SICK - L'Olympia, Paris 2016<br />
My reading of SICK, accompanied on guitar by the one & only Mr Peter Doherty. L'Olympia, Paris, March 2016.<br />
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Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-51029664147402990282016-03-06T12:27:00.000+01:002016-03-08T09:37:50.239+01:00 A Syllabus of Deceit - Part 3: A Short Step Too Far <div style="text-align: justify;">
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</span> <span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;">The last time I had seen Trey he was marching back and forth outside the 24hr pharmacy, fighting with himself over whether or not he should buy two syringes for ten euros.<br />
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“Man, ten fucking euros!” he kept saying. “Ten fucking euros!” He looked at me. “Should I buy them or not, dude?”<br />
<br />
“I can't tell you what you should do,” I said, “but I can tell you what you will do.”<br />
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“Man, I'm gonna buy them ain't I?”<br />
<br />
“If you're any kind of a junkie you will.”<br />
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“Man! Fuck!!! You sure ya don't have a spare rig at yours?”<br />
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“Just old ones,” I said, then beating him to it: “... And no, you can't boil one clean.”<br />
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“This place is a fucking joke, bro. Ten bucks for two damn pins! I mean, it's insane... tell me it's not insane?”<br />
<br />
I couldn't tell him that. It was insane. But there were many insane things in this world and, more often than not, sane people did them.<br />
<br />
“I'm gonna try again,” he said, stopping and pinching ahold of his brow. “Gonna bring on the charm offensive... Maybe have her warm to me.”<br />
<br />
Trey flashed his best, most contrived smile. The old black woman, behind the security window of the pharmacy, didn't even notice it. All she saw were two half-mad glaring eyes and a kid with the sweats and slightly jaundiced features asking for syringes with the neon blur of the city centre behind him.<br />
<br />
“And if I buy two boxes?” Trey asked.<br />
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“12 euros,” the old woman said.<br />
<br />
“Three?”<br />
<br />
“Thirteen.”<br />
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“Give me three boxes then,” Trey said. He begrudgingly handed over the money, snatched his syringes, and left. “Man, I worked a fly one there,” he said, rejoining me. “You only get charged the night fee once, so in a way, I just saved twenty euros.”<br />
<br />
I looked at him like you would someone you were deeply concerned about. His maths were all wrong; his logic too. I walked him back down towards the metro stop and said goodbye, knowing he was heading back to the States in two days and feeling sure, hoping, that I'd never have to look upon see his scheming, treacherous face again.</span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><span style="line-height: 22.8px;">_ _ _</span></span></div>
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He was gone a while but not while enough. He had left such a foul taste in my mouth that I would have needed at least an entire spring to rid me of it. And I wasn't the only one who had been left paled by the memory of the villainous little fuck. His house-lady, a chemistry professor from the upper bourgeoisie, had happened across his foulness too, looking into his unlocked room one day and finding it laden with used syringes and cooking cups. For the last month of his residency she hadn't spoken a word to him. It was just further reason why he could not possibly return. Not only had he flopped all his courses, burnt his bridges with me and lost his heroin supply, but he had also fucked up with his proprietor and lost his place of lodging. There wasn't much to come back to, just hardship and struggle and trouble on every front. So when there came a rap on my door, four months into the new year, and I opened up to find him standing on my doorstep, I first considered the possibility of the existence of ghosts before accepting what my brain so clearly thought my eyes were seeing. But there could be no mistake about it; it was him, Trey: “Hey up dude,” he said, “thought I'd just call round and see how you're cooking.”<br />
<br />
I stared at him. He was like a cloud that had drifted in front of the sun. He reminded me of days I didn't want to live. He read the hesitancy on my face, saw my mouth twisting into the shape of an awful excuse to get rid of him.<br />
<br />
“Trey... er... the place, it's in a fucking whirl,” I said. “It's really not laid out for company.”<br />
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“Straight up? OK, dude, no biggie. Then I wont keep you. Just thought I'd knock around and offer you a bit of stuff. But as you're... ...”<br />
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“You got gear?”<br />
<br />
“I'm pretty cool, yeah. But look, hey, your place is in a jam, bro.”<br />
<br />
“Well, it's not in so bad a jam to turn away free smack! Of course you can come in... fuck, you'll have seen much worse than this!”<br />
<br />
And so, against my better judgement, I let Trey in. And like that he was back, his rucksack being unhinged as he entered the room, something a little different in the space around him and a cockiness in his face which I had never observed before.<br />
<br />
“Man, if I didn't enjoy a break from this shit,” he said. “Can you see I've lost weight? Yeah, bro, been working on my pecks... training again. My face is less puffy too... healthier looking. Don't ya think?”<br />
<br />
He eyed me for a response, something pathetically melancholic in his regard.<br />
<br />
And then I had it; read his eyes. His vanity had done him over. I nodded, knowingly.<br />
<br />
“Oh, so you've read the texts I wrote about you?”<br />
<br />
“You could say that. Not very flattering, bro.”<br />
<br />
“The truth rarely is,” I replied.<br />
<br />
“The truth? Man, I don't look like no bloated diabetic! And what's with all that about my chest and biceps? Man, that just about killed me, dude.”<br />
<br />
“It's just writing Trey. You're lucky to be written about at all.”<br />
<br />
“Lucky? Dude, you've a screwed up fucking idea about what luck is.”<br />
<br />
“You did some pretty shit things Trey.”<br />
<br />
“Dude, you were way, way off! Especially on my physique.”<br />
<br />
Of all I had written about him, that which had aggrieved him most were the descriptions of his outward appearance. How rotten I had painted his insides he couldn't give a damn about. His septic interior was of little importance to him. Trey obsessed about his physical attributes, his money-maker: how attractive he was; the tightness of his arse; how little or much his cock bulged through the crotch of his pants. What lay under his mask of skin didn't concern him. I guess he reasoned that he would have been paid, possibly have drilled the well dry, long before that would ever be a factor. Maybe if he were heterosexual he wouldn't have taken it so much to heart? Would have put my words down to some kind of competitive undermining? But as it was, my physical depictions of him had hit home so hard that he had actually dieted and worked out. And it showed. But what showed through even more was his noxious underskin, and that would probably remain just as toxic for as long as he straddled the dope line.<br />
<br />
“So where's this gear?” I asked, ending the awkwardness.<br />
<br />
“It's number fucking four,” he said. “Scored it on the Dark W. My vendor sells grey and brown, number three and four. You wait till ya hit up a spoon a this.”<br />
<br />
Trey laid his rucksack down on the bed and poked steadily through it. I watched his hands carefully. This boy had such a propensity for dishonesty that I'd not have been surprised to see him try to steal his own stuff. And then he straightened, his freshly stream-lined torso tight against his top, his right hand held up, pinching ahold of a little button bag of powder, wriggling it about so as the contents shuffled down neatly to the bottom. The light hit Trey just right. Lit him up so honestly in that small moment of life.<br />
<br />
“Here check this out, dude,” he said, moving over to me with the bag. I cast my eyes briefly over the contents. It was a weird pinkish colour; fine powder.<br />
<br />
“You sure that's gear?” I asked.<br />
<br />
“Number fucking four,” he said. “Won't get quality like this from your guy.” I smirked. We were of different generations. No. 4 meant absolutely nothing to me, shouldn't mean anything to anyone. It was talk you heard online but had no relevance on the street. On the street you bought blind and the only test was in the vein. In there, carried to the brain, it was all heroin: good, bad or average.</span><br />
<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><br />
“Get your spoon out then,” Trey said.<br />
<br />
I eyed the gear again. It really didn't look right and I wouldn't have put it past Trey to hotshot me in revenge. I told him I wanted to taste it and gave him a small square of foil to put a sprinkle on. <br />
<br />
“OK, bro,” he said. “But you need to shoot this shit... serious.”<br />
<br />
On a small square of aluminium foil Trey sprinkled out the tightest measure he could without giving nothing at all. I smoked it flat, without a tube, in a single burn. Barely had I inhaled than I was spluttering a cough and then wincing from the acrid burnt taste in my throat.<br />
<br />
“What the fucks that?” I cried. “That isn't smack!”<br />
<br />
“Not smack? Ha! I told ya, you gotta shoot this shit.”<br />
<br />
There was a time when I would have shot anything, did shoot anything, but I had learnt to show caution in the world I mooched about in. I didn't know what this crap was, where it came from nor what Trey had added to it himself. “Give us another sprinkle,” I said.<br />
<br />
“It's a fucking waste, bro... but if you insist.”<br />
<br />
I eyed the heroin more carefully now. It was undoubtedly two distinct powders. And powder, certainly as fine as this was, always roused my suspicions.<br />
<br />
Trey fixed his shot. It cooked quick and clear. Too clear. Water clear. “It's fucking good shit, man,” he said, noticing the sceptical furrow of my brow. “Been using it for over a week now.”<br />
<br />
As Trey dug for a vein I smoked what he had measured me out. Within three burns it had turned black, bubbled to a crisp burnt death and was gone. It tasted like paracetamol. There wasn't the slightest hint of the distinctive heroin taste in it. But, regardless of how it tasted, from the tiny amount I had smoked, I could feel something, some heaviness in my head and neck, a loosening down of my muscles and limbs.<br />
<br />
I looked over to Trey. He was stooped over where he stood, the rig he had fixed with held in his hand.<br />
<br />
“Trey!” I shouted, “get that fucking needle capped and sit down before you go out.”<br />
<br />
“Yeah, bro.. just doing it,” he said, his free hand patting around blindly on the surface he had cooked up on, searching the cap. A second later and the uncapped needle fell from his hand. Trey was out on his feet, ah sweet lullaby, his eyelids shut down on life, all his problems gone for another short fix of time.<br />
<br />
It never fails to amaze me. The junkie will nod out on the world, will be incapable of capping his rig, sometimes even incapable of removing it. His body will double up over itself so as it looks like he's sucking his own cock. Frying pans can burst aflame and cigarettes can burn down and fizzle out between the fingers. But make a move for the addict's gear, cast even just a shadow of thought to that end, and that cunt wakes up without fail. Somewhere deep down, embedded in the junkie's psyché, is a deeply suspicious and healthy concern for his drugs. And so it was, as I neared Trey to take another dose from the heroin which lay next to his cooking cup, his eyes opened to see my fingers quietly lifting the button-bag of powder clear.<br />
<br />
“What the fuck you doing, bro?” he said, like he'd been waiting for it.<br />
<br />
“Taking a final hit,” I said.<br />
<br />
He wiggled a stoned finger. “Here,” he said. I handed him the heroin. With the last of his conscious resources he tapped me out a final dose. Then he pocketed what was left before taking to the edge of the bed to nod off in peace.<br />
<br />
I didn't smoke what Trey had given me. He was right: this stuff needed to be fixed. I prepared my shot and rolled up my trouser leg so as I had access to my inside calf. As I prodded and poked for a vein Trey's eyes opened and settled their focus on me. A faint look of content spread out in his lips. It was as if he had woken to an old, familiar film which calmed and soothed his very soul. The shot itched through my thigh, up my side flank and into my shoulder. As it dispersed across my brain I felt an old familiarish shutter go down on the day. Trey and the world merged, and then disappeared, into the after afternoon.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
The light of day had fallen dramatically when I heard Trey up and about, sniffing and scratching and checking his phone. The late afternoon was deadly still and dull. You wanted no-one to move a muscle, no light to go on, no disturbance at all. Only to sleep and breathe and for everything to remain just where it was until evening.<br />
<br />
“Man, I gotta shoot,” Trey said quietly, stoned. “Gotta get over to Bron for this fucking robot convention. You wanna come along and watch robots with me? I've a spare ticket somewhere, man?”<br />
<br />
“Robots?” I asked.<br />
<br />
“Yeah, bro: robots. They fight, you know: robot battles... Robot wars.”<br />
<br />
I did know and I would have gone if it were with anyone else, but not with Trey, not tonight, not with the heroin he had left which was not even enough for himself. To go would just mean walking off the slight effect remaining in me, and unlike him, I had no more ammo to push the world back again. <br />
<br />
“Nah, I'm good. Will stay in and maybe try to write.”<br />
<br />
“Your call, dude,” he said.<br />
<br />
I escorted Trey to the door, said farewell and watched as he shuffled into his backpack and disappeared off in the direction of the bus-stop. And if he thought for one instant he had fooled me, that I didn't know the real reason why he had turned up at mine, he was very much mistaken. His surprise call had nothing to do with affection or generosity. No, it was made for one very calculated and specific reason: to let me know he now had his own supplier of heroin; that he was free from my shackles and didn't need me any more. I guess he figured that the price of half a gram, to let me know, was worth it. Good for him, I thought, it's less trouble all fucking way round.<br />
</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><span style="line-height: 22.8px;">- - -</span></span></div>
<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"> <br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Hey, bro. W'assup?<br />
<br />
He's on, but I'm not calling.<br />
<br />
Huh?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Y're obviously wanting 2 score. U only evr msg or txt when u want 2 score.</span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Score? Of ur guy? Those rubber bullets he sells? Nevr, bro. NEVER!<br />
<br />
<br />
At least it's smack what my guy has. That crap u turned up wth last month was fucking fentanyl or smethng. There was no heroin in it.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Dude, Why'd u say that?<br />
<br />
'cause it wasn't heroin. It wasn't #4 or whtevr nonsnse u was told. That shit doesn't have a fucking number... wasn't a speck of smack in it – grey, white or brown. Gave me a weird, anxious nod as well.<br />
<br />
Man, u noticed that 2? Thought it felt a bit strange. Did me tho. Will get more soon, put u on2 a proper gram this time. Silkroad is down at the moment, bro, so just laying low and playing it cool.<br />
<br />
So u do need to score?<br />
<br />
Don't need to, no. Was just wondering how u were?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Well, I was fine b4 u messaged.</span><br />
<br />
I waited for a reply; watched the three blinking dots on Facebook's messenger screen and the bulletin: <b><i>'Trey is typing'.</i></b> Then Trey went offline. No message ever came through. He must have decided to bank his pride, lay low and suffer until the Silkroad was back up and running.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
It was some days later when I knocked up my dealer. He opened the door and stood there in just his boxer shorts, looking like a slumberous depiction of hell. It seemed to take him a few moments to recognize who I was. His room was cast in semi-darkness; his pitbull, Bruno, curled up asleep on the bottom of the bed. He stumbled his way past me and shooed the dog clear. Then he gave a sleepy smile, rubbed his eyes clear and flicked the light on. He bent down and snorted a line of something off the table and then shook his head to rattle the drugs up his nose and to his brain. He pulled on some light trousers, a top and then opened the curtains. His cache of heroin was sitting in a large bag on the table, a second bag full of coke just besides. I nodded towards the heroin.<br />
<br />
From his thumb and forefinger Theo laid a tiny dark brown rock down in front of me. I heard it rap on the glass of the table. This was good stuff. He wouldn't lay me on a freebie if it wasn't. As I cooked it up in a shot he warned me to be careful, that he didn't want the same thing happening to me as it had done my friend.<br />
<br />
“My friend?” I asked<br />
<br />
“Yeah. The young rich American kid.”<br />
<br />
“Who? Trey?”<br />
<br />
“Trey, yea... that's him. Almost fucking went under on me. We all but carried him out and packed him into the lift.”<br />
<br />
“He was here alone?”<br />
<br />
“Passed by a couple of days ago, said you had sent him as you wasn't well.”<br />
<br />
“I never fucking sent him. I'd have asked you before ever doing something like that. And how do you mean, rich?”<br />
<br />
“It's what he said. Kept talking about the cash he had and how cheap France was. Said he could live like a king over here.”<br />
<br />
Ah. Now I got it. The dirty fuck had not only veered around me and cold-called my dealer, but had also spun stories of riches which he'd picked up from reading the texts I had written about him. The little shit. Of course, I'd have done the same, but I would never have made someone dislike me so much that it would have mattered. As I drew my shot up into the needle, sucked the filter dry, I imagined it was Trey, dehydrating and withering away, writhing about in the pain of his own sobriety. It was then that I decided to fuck him up, to put him out his misery once and for all.<br />
<br />
I cast a furtive glance over at Theo. He was sat watching some crap about top-end luxury yachts on Youtube. I knew I could ask no favours from someone like him, that the dollar ruled his world and there was no loyalty to anything but paper. He would serve Trey in secret behind my back if it meant him having an extra customer. By the time Theo eventually sussed on that Trey was broke, was just another down-at-heel punter on the precipice of ruin, it would be too late. So, I began my attack on Trey, determined that by the time I was ready to leave that he would be no more welcome at Theo's than he would at the Westboro Baptist Church. <br />
<br />
“Theo, I hope you didn't buy the bullshit of Trey being rich? The guy hasn't got a fucking bean.”<br />
<br />
“Course he has! All these American students are from wealthy families. There's no way they could be over here if not. Trey's got cash alright.”<br />
<br />
“He's got cash, just not very much. He's on a fucking student loan. Gets 250 dollars a week or something. Haven't you noticed he doesn't even have credit on his phone? You need to be careful with dealing with him. Seriously. He'll have you locked up. It's why I put the block on him months ago.”</span><br />
<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><br />
“Why so?” Theo asked.<br />
<br />
“The guy's a fucking liability. He's been scoring heroin online with fucking bitcoins. The police probably already have him under surveillance. And if they do, then you and your cousin are in it deep.”<br />
<br />
Theo pulled a sceptical looking face, gave a little side tilt of his head as if weighing up the dangers and concluding that they were negligible, no more risky than selling to anyone else. I thought for a moment. I didn't really want to do what I was about to, but Trey had riled me too much, so I did it anyway.<br />
<br />
“Theo, I think you may want to look at these messages before you serve him again,” I said. “Trey sent me them just a few hours before he came to see you.”<br />
<br />
I showed Theo the messages on my phone. He couldn't read English but saw his name and his cousin's name and the word heroin and the word shit followed by a slew of exclamation marks. <br />
<br />
“What the fuck is that?” he asked.<br />
<br />
I pulled the phone away. “Oh, it's nothing... don't worry about that.”<br />
<br />
“I am worried. What the fuck was that?”<br />
<br />
“Look, Theo, if I tell you you must keep it to yourself. You musn't tell your cousin. Do you understand? He'll fucking kill Trey if he hears about this. You need to promise me you'll not tell Emil.”<br />
<br />
“Ok. Now what the hell has he written there?”<br />
<br />
I took a deep breath.<br />
<br />
“Well, none of it is very nice. He says your heroin is shit and you're both thieves and that he doesn't need you and that next time you sell him cut gear he'll rat you both out. But worse, worse than that, he's used your real names and talks blatantly about scoring dope of you.”<br />
<br />
Theo's face went. It sometimes did that when he got angry and was about to lash out. Last time it happened he had attacked an old, feeble addict, went for him with a butcher's knife before splitting his eye open and fracturing the socket. Theo's face was rippling with the same rage I had seen that day. This time he didn't grab a knife but snatched my phone out my hand to look more carefully at the messages.<br />
<br />
“Are these all his?” he asked.<br />
<br />
“Yes. I always delete mine.”<br />
<br />
“And where does he say our heroin is rubbish?”<br />
<br />
I took the phone off Theo, scrolled down to the culprit message and enlarged it. Theo stood glaring at the words. His thoughts seemed to block and back up in his head and for a second he seemed not to know what to do. Then he turned, let out an animal howl of frustration and punched his fist into the wall. He removed his fist and made the same animal sound again, like he was existing in absolute pain.<br />
<br />
“Calm down,” I told him. “At least we've weeded him out before he's had time to cause any real damage. Hopefully.”<br />
<br />
“No!” Theo said. “Wait until the dirty louse comes here again... he'll need heroin as a fucking painkiller then.”<br />
<br />
Poor Trey. Only two days ago he had swerved me and successfully cold-called on my dealer. He was probably bent over at his right now, enjoying an especially heavy nod, imagining how easy he'd have it for a while. And what's more, if I knew this little cunt even half as well as I thought I did, tomorrow he would be back out in the world, back out on the score. How sore he was gonna feel this. But, as much as I despised Trey, I didn't want him hurt, and a visit to Theo's would not do his future prospects in train station toilets any good at all.<br />
<br />
When I arrived home I called Trey. “So, you finally did the sensible thing and veered around me straight to the supply?”<br />
<br />
“Had to, bro. Couldn't keep on as it was, you always leaving me dry. If you wanna flex your fucking power over me, then be prepared to to get by-passed, dude.”<br />
<br />
“Well, congratulations Trey. You played a real smart one. Though I'm not too sure how welcome you'll be around Theo's any more.”<br />
<br />
“You reckon? Them guys think I'm made. He was fucking drooling last time I saw him.”<br />
<br />
“I don't doubt it. Though he hadn't read your Messenger texts then... wasn't aware you had been scoring on the dark web and buying bitcoins with money-orders. And if that isn't bad enough he also thinks you've threatened to rat him out. So you can have him... we'll share the dealer.”<br />
<br />
Trey knew I was serious. I could discern his panic on the other end of the phone. His stir was just starting, probably thinking of the amount of heroin he had remaining and wondering how the hell he would make it last until he could cop from some place else. The dark web, if a marketplace were even up, would take days and I knew Trey didn't have days. I sensed his hate and rage boiling up, bubbling about furiously in the radio waves of transmission. He despised me and I felt good being despised by someone so cold and lacking in empathy. All his conniving and trickery had finally been put through, his greed to save himself half a gram had lost him everything. I would have felt it cruel if he hadn't have brought it all on himself. Trey had been out to fuck me all along, looking to lure me into being tricked at every chance he had. He had left me debts to pick up, called me across town at night only to say he had no cash, had created headaches and arguments and bad feelings over divisions of heroin so small as to even matter. When he needed something he would act as my best buddy, harp on about how great he thought my writing was and how stoked he was just to walk besides me. Yet, when he had what he wanted and no longer needed the human race he became as cold as a mossy stone. His situation now was not from a cruelness on my part, it is the only way it can ever end for people like Trey, people who just aren't as clever as those they are trying to fool. Trey had fallen into the self-deluded crap that many such junkies become afflicted with. He thought he was getting away with it, fooling the world, just because no-one ever said otherwise. Every time he met me, regardless of what antics had taken place previously, he did so as if the slate was clean, as if his bullshit and theatrical attestations of honesty had somehow shone through, like he still had all nine lives intact and his character was with a pristine a record as it had been when we'd first met. The only marker Trey had for success or failure was getting his drugs or not, and, in ensuring he did get them, all was justified and nothing was important. Equally, when he needed more, his desperation was such that anything he had done previous he felt was minor and forgiveable, that nothing was so serious as to warrant leaving an addict suffering withdrawals as punishment for past crimes. So he had turned up each time, befriending me anew, his hair getting oilier and his stubble rougher and his hands needing to go further down into his pockets to make it. But still he smiled and talked like he adored you, like you adored him, like you hadn't began observing his hands, hadn't started questioning his words, wasn't watching him like a hawk so as he never found any real chance to fuck you over. Trey took the drugs, tried to take more than he deserved, tried to leave you in a place he wouldn't like to be left himself. And always, forever always, saying “Thanks bro.... that was fucking appreciated, man. You sure as hell saved me there.”<br />
<br />
I wished Trey good luck and closed the phone on him. He would have to learn that the worid doesn't inherently cut us a bad deal, that sometimes we generate our own fate; ensure that hell comes to our door one day.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Bro, I need something</span>, read the message I received a day later. At the and of his text was attached a winky smile: <span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">;-)</span> It looked fucking evil.<br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br />
What u need cannot b bought. Nothing doing.<br />
<br />
Man, don't make me beg!<br />
<br />
Beg Trey. I'd like to see u beg. Tho begging is fuckall 2 som1 like u, just the easier step b4 the real treachery begins. I'll tell u what, if u can b honest I'll score for u. Do u think u can b honest?<br />
<br />
Have only evr been, bro. But go on, shoot.<br />
<br />
The day u owed me $$$ and suddenly lost yr phone.... remember?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Yeah, bro.<br />
<br />
Well, right now, I want the truth. I want u 2 deconstruct yr behaviours & explain 2 me the reasoning behind each & evry act & decision u made. If u can do that, admit evrything u've denied, I'll score for u.</span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br />
Man, what? Y're fucking w/me, right?<br />
<br />
No, I'm not fucking wth u. 2day, if u want heroin, u're gonna take a walk thru yr own felonious self, reflect & deconstruct & give answers to all yr fucking scheming.<br />
<br />
Man, I lost my cell phone!!! Y're fucking paranoid. I lost it! I'm not admitting things I nvr did!<br />
<br />
Cut me anthr slice of that same bullshit & yre on yr own. The truth, fuck u! Like the truth that u knew u didnt have my cash & had set up a convenient way whereby I couldn't contact u?<br />
<br />
Man. If u want me to say that I'll say it, bro. But that's not how it was.</span><br />
<br />
And it went on like that. Trey denying everything, then begrudgingly making false admittances, before finally owning up to the real truth and telling me what I already knew. It took almost an hour for the whole saga of the borrowed cash and phone, and then the ATM machine, to finally come out. Trey admitted everything, every sly and crafty thought which had gone through his cunning little brain. When he had quite finished, he text: <span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Sry bro. U know how it is... I needed stuff. So, we cool now? You gonna phone yr guy?</span><br />
<br />
The fool! He thought that was the end of his ordeal.<br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br />
I'll call, yes, but we've a way 2 go yet... all those times u called me & was either short on the readies or broke. I told ya, u're gonna have a good look at yourself 2day. I even want 2 hear u tell me y u turned up here at mine, after all that time, 2 turn me on2 a shot? What the real motive of your visit was? You're gonna tap out evry despicable thing u've evr fucking done!</span><br />
<br />
Trey knew, as well as I, that there just wasn't time enough left of the evening for him to go through all that – that's how much bullshit he had fed me over the months. He fell silent on the phone. I could hear him working up like a wind, breathing, waiting, getting more frustrated each second I let him blow up. And then, finally it came, the wind of humiliation broke his sails and Trey lost it, knowing I was never going to score for him whether he told me the truth or not.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> FUCK U!!!</span> he messaged. <span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">FUCK FUCK FUCK U!!!!</span><br />
<br />
<br />
During the course of that week he sent me countless messages, all insults and teeming with rage and hate. I never replied. I let him carry on, go further and further than he was ever tougher to go. And then, out the blue, on receipt of his latest message, I phoned him. He answered, hope in his voice that I was gonna ask him if he needed anything. Very calmly, I said: “Be very fucking careful Trey.” And then I closed the phone.<br />
</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><span style="line-height: 22.8px;">- - -</span></span></div>
<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"> <br />
I saw him from a long way off. He was walking down the Rue de Hénon, his black ruck sack up on his back like a huge fucking tick. Theo saw him too. From the driver's seat he gave me a large, wide smile. Sat at the lights we watched Trey, his short but muscular thighs making his trousers look a cheap, regular cut. He had his headphones in and held his phone in his hand. It was a fresh, crisp day, blue, the sun distant and white. The first buds were in the trees and rags of feint cloud were strewn across the sky, ripped to ribbons by high, spring winds. Theo moved on past the lights, accelerating to catch Trey up and then slowing as we drew alongside him. Trey felt the presence of the car and turned to look. The driver's window descended, revealing Theo's cropped head, dark shades, nose, mouth... pistol. Trey's face froze in an assemblage of fear; panic and confusion ghosting through his face like rippling water. He scrunched up into a defensive ball, trying the best he could to cover his head against any bullets. And like that, his arms up, his eyes closed, he started running, skittish, down the road. He bumped into a man, scrambled past, and still covering his head, scooted left. Theo cruised straight on by, the electric window rising, the sound of the day being replaced by the whir of the car's fan-heater. Trey was running for his life, legging it to safety, to wherever would save his rotten soul next. Theo laughed a hearty laugh and tossed the replica gun down in the foot compartment my side. As it clattered about his Pitbull stirred in the back and shoved its large head between the headrests. Theo put a hand back and stroked it, let the dog lick the metallic taste from his fingers. “The young rich American,” Theo howled. “How strange the American boys run!”<br />
<br />
At home that evening I thought of Trey and decided to phone him to make sure he'd got the message clear. But Trey had pre-empted me, pre-empted the end of his stay in France. His phone was dead, just a recorded and slightly disturbing robotic voice saying :<br />
<br />
</span><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><span style="line-height: 22.8px;"> <b>the.number.you.have.dialled.is.no.longer.in.service</b></span></span></div>
<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><br />
I felt something, but it wasn't sadness. It was some feeling, some rogue wind from the end of last summer, something that had existed then in the belting hot of the afternoon on the Croix Rousse. I saw Trey, fresh and vibrant, t-shirt and shades, coming across the square. And then I saw the sky and then the sun and then imagined an early evening plane en route to Massachusetts. For all the foulness it was both our calling, and alone in my room, on my bed, in the darkening light, I thought of Trey and I thought of writing and I thought of life, and I wondered when I'd next rise and live again.</span><br />
<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><br />
</span> <span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;">- - - -</span><br />
<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><br />
</span> <span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;">Thanks for reading. All My Best, Shane. X</span><br />
<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><br />
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Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-73226605114865467042016-02-13T18:21:00.001+01:002016-08-01T04:12:02.677+02:00The Dirty Works of Shane Levene<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">My official website, containing all my collated writings, can be found below.</div><br />
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</div></div>Memoirs of a Heroinheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17401281805284793756noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-5460458314376707052016-02-05T19:37:00.004+01:002016-02-05T19:37:46.303+01:00Down on the Low<div style="text-align: justify;">
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Stooped over in the shelter of a shop doorway I vomited up a sickness from the very dull of my gut. I remained like that, vomit water burning in my sinuses and dripping out my nose. I thought of the little bundle of notes and how close I had been to salvation. How now, just a few metres on, I was back floundering in the most desperate of predicaments, once more facing sickness with my chance pardon gone. I dry retched and choked on life. I was nauseous from my stupidity, from an illogical pride which had so often plagued me. I was nauseous from the shame I would have felt in barging through that little crowd and picking up the notes on the ground; from the thought of scurrying away at pace while ignoring any shouts of suspicion. I had happened upon a rare slice of fortune and I had blown it. And now I was sick through such cowardice; fucked through such a lack of conviction. I flushed pale and filled with horror reliving the moment again. Perspiration broke and spread like mildew beneath my shirt and jacket. The adrenaline rendered me weak at the knees. I vomited once more, spewed up a nervous watery waste. And then I composed myself, wiped my mouth clear, turned and stepped back out into the day, a day that no longer felt quite real at all.<br />
<br />
I decided to double back past the ATM machine once more. It was a crazy thought but I somehow imagined the notes still being there, and if not those same notes, then maybe some new ones. I told myself it was nigh on impossible and then reasoned that two people losing money, on the same day, in the same place, just moments apart, was so improbable that it could maybe just happen. I crept closer to the ATM machine. I visualized a new little bundle of notes on the ground, imagined the warmth and relief of picking them up. I walked by slowly, my eyes cast down upon the lower legs of more people queuing to use the machine. And then I looked: nothing. Just a large gob of yellowy-green phlegm. I cursed myself again, damned my rotten luck and rotten courage. What kind of a cretinous coward are you ? I asked myself. What kind of man, under such terrible conditions, would not have blundered in and picked up those notes regardless? I gave my being a harsh dressing down. The life around me moved; carried on as ever. Something so humdrum and fatigued, a world unaware of the drama and struggle playing out in thousands of surrounding lives. Rain spat down and the afternoon wore on. The cash machine beeped its yellow light and my sweats progressed as the last vestiges of heroin left my body. Without destination I tramped on. Disappointed and emotional, desperate to somehow make amends after my squandered opportunity.<br />
<br />
I anguished over his black leather shoe. Saw it once again tread on the notes as he put his card in the machine. My soul lit up just then knowing he was concealing them, knowing that when he was done his natural turn away would leave them clear in my path. It was just a matter of moments. I would bend and scoop and I would be out of trouble, counting my find and calculating the drugs I would be able to buy and how they would help get me through the next couple of days. That fuck of a man. Maybe 30; maybe not. Spruced and well groomed. Money to spare in his account. Someone who never finds anything because he never has to; someone who's life was safe beyond the need for luck, who wouldn't want luck anyway as luck is always on the precipice. Oh that fucker. How he withdrew his cash, took that single step back and must have glimpsed my good fortune on the floor as he verified his own dispensed notes. Unbelievable! Checking his cash fresh out the dispenser. The cash machine doesn't make errors you fuck-starved fool ! And, if you do insist on verifying your withdrawal, have some fucking decency and do so out of sight - in the secrecy of your own shade. I recalled again how his eyes had narrowed in curiosity, the vulgar, anxious way he had looked around before his knees bent and his coat lifted up at the back and revealed the clean pressed denim of his behind. I flirted with the idea of barging him aside, making the scoop before he did, of maybe even wrestling the notes clear out his hand. I imagined much, a swirling hurricane of thoughts going through my mind as he picked up the money and strode away. Approach him! I told myself. Tell him the money he had found was money I had dropped. That I had returned in the hope of finding it! But it was all too late. By the time a hand tapped me on the back, letting me know the ATM machine was free to use, the man was just a fading shadow down the road, a ghost, merging with the crowds and carrying with him the only chance I had. I stepped forward to the machine, my mind all askew. I pressed some buttons, any buttons, my heart racing and my stomach hollow with nausea. The machine flipped through its default screens, asking me to insert my card. I had no card to insert. I pretended to take a receipt of my transaction and I left, the colour having drained out of me and a vile pressurized heat shuddering through my face and brain. <br />
<br />
I walked around cursing that man for over an hour. The only person I cursed and despised more was myself. I walked and I kept my eyes to the ground, somehow hoping that the day would bring an impossible second slice of luck, something not so grand but maybe enough to get me a consolatory bag of dope. The gutters held nothing of any good worth. My only find was a battered twenty pence piece, so misshapen that not even a telephone box would have accepted it. I held it for a moment, fingered its sharp edges and then dashed it away. When my cloud of disappointment finally cleared I found myself wandering around old roads, roads on which I had not passed down for many years. I racked my brain for some way to raise a meagre few quid. I looked around, at the street signs, the railings and curb stones. I looked at the buildings, their porch lights and doors and fittings, at all the riches that made up this city. It seemed incomprehensible that in one of the great financial capitals of the world one could do absolutely nothing legal to earn oneself a few bob. I was short on twenty quid and save for pimping out my arse, or a desperate theft, there seemed no possible way to raise it.<br />
<br />
I kept to the main shopping routes. I figured that if any money had been lost it would, more than likely, have been lost there. As I walked and scanned the ground I went back over and re-evaluated all the people I could possibly borrow cash from. Of course, I had already played this game out, multiple times throughout the day. But now my desperation stakes were higher and maybe that would push me to consider asking someone I had earlier dismissed. But there was no-one. I couldn't even think of anyone I could ask who would refuse me – that's how bad things had gotten. And then there I was, my eyes on grit and pigeon shit, the iron railway bridge above taking away the light for a few strides, opposite the multi-storey car-park where years ago we had parked a stolen van. The Kinsellas, I thought, becoming more optimistic as I better considered the five brothers, all still living at home with their mother. True, it was a fair few years since I had last seen them, but surely on the whim of a surprise visit I could somehow coax twenty quid out of their collective coffers? Maybe, just maybe, they were the answer to get me out my jam? Through very light rain I picked up the pace, my stride becoming furious as I made my way down towards the White City Estate, to the only plan I had.<br />
<br />
It was the heroin: all but gone from my body; my metabolism speeding up under my skin and pushing the perspiration out through my pores. I tried to compose myself, regulate my breathing and keep a dry air of calm about me – but it was no good. Through the grapevine the Kinsellas had gotten wind of my heroin problem, and as my plan was to spin them a story of being clean it was important that I arrived looking at least vaguely clean and sober. Of course, my visit would not be an obvious one for cash. I would turn up as if just calling around out the blue and, at some stage, work an opportunity to ask for a lend of money. It was a Sunday afternoon and so the chance of at least one of the brothers being home was good. I smoothed my hair down and ruffled my shirt to let in some cool air. The Kinsella name sounded like a winning ticket just now, and as I turned into the old block I felt sure that I'd be able to scratch them for a score, maybe even a little if more.<br />
A young kid opened the door. He gave me a furrowed look, as if I wasn't who I said I was. He closed the door over and called out the name of his brother Paul. <br />
<br />
“What da fuck,” I heard Paul say as he came out his room and and made his way down the hallway. I took a step back. When the front door re-opened Paul stood there, as small and thin and as wiry as ever, in the same kind of ill fitting track-suit bottoms he had always worn, littered with burnholes from a thousand hot-rocks. “Fuckin' hell, if It's not da freak himself! Thought we'd got shot of you for good.” With my best smile, which felt more like a grimace of pain, I said, “Alright cunt? You gonna invite me in or what?”<br />
<br />
Paul turned and led me in. As I closed the door he entered the living room and said, “You'll never guess who's just turned up?” Then he called and I stepped into view, stood there with another gritted smile, my clothes damp and my face moist and pasty. My eyes felt like fucking saucers. God, I could feel the junkie in me twitchy and on edge. The occupants of the room stared at me standing there and one of the two people I recognized, Paul's mother, said something like, “You alright?” I nodded and mentioned something about the rain. <br />
<br />
“Come on, Paul said. He asked me if I wanted a coffee. I didn't. Coffee would make me vomit. I said yes anyway. I pulled a hand over my face and brow. Now I had stopped walking the sweat just poured out of me. I could feel the grime from the back of neck rubbing loose on the damp collar of my shirt. While Paul pottered about in the kitchen, I snuck off to the bathroom to wipe myself down. As I stared in the mirror at my sallow reflection I caught the slightest glimpse of Paul, stepping briefly into and out of view, his shadow then deadly still in the hallway, discretely checking up on what I was doing. I didn't let on I had spotted him. <br />
<br />
“So, what brings you round here after all this time?” he asked, once we were sat down and settled in his room. <br />
<br />
“Nothing special. Just thought I'd pop in as I was passing. Not a crime is it?”<br />
<br />
“Probably worse if it brings you here. And what's with the fuckin' sweating?”<br />
<br />
“That. Yeah. Won't fucking stop. Ran the entire length of Wood Lane in the rain. Thought I'd put in a few extra miles as we're playing in the company league next week.”<br />
<br />
“What, you playing football again?”<br />
<br />
“Yes,” I lied, pleased that my ruse had worked. “We're sat joint third in the division.” Paul took a sip of his coffee, flicked the TV channel over and began skinning up a joint.<br />
<br />
“Still smoking that crap?” I said.<br />
<br />
“Better than the shit you've been pumping into yer veins! You shoulda quit with this.”<br />
<br />
“Shoulda,” I said. “I've stopped all that other crap now... been clean almost 18 months.” As I said that a bead of sweat ran down my brow as if to betray me some more. I sponged it away. As Paul twisted and harassed his spliff into shape he shot me a curious look. Then, eyes still on me, he ran the grey tip of his tongue along the length of the joint, wetting the gum of the papers. He looked like he was playing the fucking harmonica to my bullshit.<br />
<br />
“I'm managing a warehouse just down in Greenford,” I said. That was true, though I had only said so for strategic reasons. Paul ignored me. He took a deep drag of his joint and lay back on his bed. The light was out in the room. I hunched forward pretending to take notice of what was on the TV, all the time thinking, conniving as to when best to put the bite on Paul. <br />
<br />
I could feel it myself. The nervous, fleeting presence I gave off in the room. It was like I emitted some sense of not really wanting to be there, of being there for ulterior motives. I did my best to look relaxed. I settled down into my chair as if I had nowhere to go and that time was just something which needed to be passed. But no matter how hard I tried, some strange compulsion kept having me roll cigarettes, kept sliding my eyes over to Paul's way. What I did manage to watch of the TV made no sense. My brain was awash with desperate thoughts of how to sponge cash out of Paul, deliberating over what was the most likely strategy to succeed. One thing for sure: under no circumstances was I to tell him the truth. He was one of the many people who ensure you lie to them, lie from a fore-knowledge of what their reaction will be to the truth. It's not heroin that makes the junkie lie; it's the person before them. I glanced again at Paul. Though I was desperate it wasn't the right time. And so I said nothing; made no move. I pretend watched the late afternoon TV, all the while feeling worse and worse, fantasizing over what dealers would be on on Sunday and which one I should call if ever I got the chance. <br />
<br />
It was maybe an hour in when there first sounded the ring of the door-bell and then a double knock on Paul's bedroom door. Paul strained across from where he was lying, unbolted the lock and opened the door. There stood Lawrence, one of his younger brothers, looking at me with a smile. “Well look who it ain't!” he said. Then, before I had time to answer, he added, “Jesus fuck, you look worse than death man!”<br />
<br />
My sweating had stopped but I was still damp and pale. I rose and shook his hand. My palm felt slimy in his. He smelled of beer and had a slight tipsy look in his face. He made a pretend punch to my liver. I hunched up as if to protect myself and felt my guts squelch in my stomach. I had barely moved and the sweat broke out under my clothes again. So now there were two brothers. All the better, I thought. Double the chance of one of them lending me a note.<br />
<br />
Lawrence sat staring at me. He wore the same tipsy smile with which he had arrived. Whether he understood I wasn't doing too great or whether he had had one too many beers, I couldn't quite figure.<br />
<br />
“So what brings you here?” he asked.<br />
<br />
“Just a friendly visit... wondered if you guys were still around.”<br />
<br />
“Wish you'd fuck off,” Paul said humorously, turning the volume up on the TV. He handed Lawrence the joint. Lawrence took a long drag, held in the smoke and then emptied his lungs, making the sound of a light calm wind. <br />
<br />
“You working? He asked. I nodded. “Doing well,” I said. “Managing my own place now.”<br />
<br />
He nodded like that impressed him. It was supposed to. It was said so as when I eventually asked for cash they'd be confident that I had the means to repay it. I tried once more to watch TV, now with the two brothers stoned, staring at the screen as if hypnotized by it. In my mind I played around with thoughts of asking them for money, thought up various excuses as to why and tried to figure out the perfect moment to ask. I couldn't concentrate on anything else. The heroin was all but out of my system. I was running on dry as I sat there, each moment becoming more and more uncomfortable. <br />
<br />
“What you up to tonight?” Lawrence asked.<br />
<br />
“Nothing planned. Will head off home in a while.”<br />
<br />
“What, you don't fancy coming out for a pint with us?”<br />
<br />
“Not for me, thanks. It's been fucking years since I had a drink.”<br />
<br />
“Ya boring cunt!” <br />
<br />
I stared at Lawrence, his eyes challenging me to change my mind. And in that look, that offer, I saw my chance.<br />
“Nah, I can't. It'd mean going home, getting my cash and then returning... can't be fucked with all that. And I must be up early tomorrow.”<br />
<br />
“Always was a fucking lightweight, “ Paul said.<br />
<br />
“Fuck off... I Drank you to your bed many a night.” <br />
<br />
Paul darted a scrunched up piece of cardboard at me. “Come on ta fuck! We'll only be going for a few and a game of pool.”<br />
“Nah. I would but I've no cash on me and I'm not running home and back at this time.” I left it at that, hoping one of the brothers would take the hint and offer me a loan of money. When neither one did I made the bite. “I'll tell ya what, if someone can drop us in for a score I'll tag along. Twenty quid would be enough... a couple of rounds and a few games. I'd be up for that... if someone will stand me the cash until tomorrow?”<br />
<br />
Paul flicked his lighter and re-lit his joint. For a moment the dark room lit up. As it fell back into darkness I caught Paul's eye curl my way. But he said nothing. Lawrence neither.<br />
<br />
“Come on lads,” I said, “who's gonna put us in for a score?”<br />
<br />
Paul made a scoffing, choking sound as if he'd inhaled a little too much smoke. He looked at Lawrence. Lawrence sat there with the same stupid smile plastered across his lips, only now there seemed something quite knowing in it. I could feel the heroin withdrawals burning through my eyes and a feeling of restlessness jittering away in my muscles. Sickness was taking to the stage. The familiar moist feel of breaking sweat came over me again. <br />
<br />
“Oi, Paul. Put us in for a score mate? I'll bring it around first thing tomorrow evening.”<br />
<br />
Paul shook his head. “Ain't got a score,” he said. “It's the end of the week and I'm on weekly pay. Just got enough for myself and my fares for the week.”<br />
<br />
“Fuck off... You must have a score?”<br />
<br />
“Fuck all, mate. Ask Lawrence... he's rolling in money!”<br />
<br />
I turned my attention to Lawrence. He didn't look much like salvation to me. Then he said, “I would, but I'd need to pass the bank and they're all closed today.” <br />
<br />
“Oh, come on guys. Twenty fucking quid... you ain't got a score between you and you're going out? What about ten? Give us ten each?”<br />
Now the brothers looked at each other. I waited eagerly for a response, my well-being hanging in the balance. If one would give the other would too. Lawrence shook his head, and then Paul did the same. “Seriously, we ain't got it,” he said. <br />
<br />
“Fuck. Then maybe I'll have to go home and come back after all. Not a bad thing, I suppose... means I can get changed and scrubbed up as well.”<br />
Of course, I had no intention of going to the bar with the Kinsella brothers. If they'd have been stupid enough to lend me the cash I would have wandered off and disappeared at the first opportunity, crept into a phone booth and dialed my dealer. As it was neither brother seemed up for lending me even a tenner each. I dropped my stakes, my pride dropping with it. “What about a fiver?” I asked. “Five quid each would get me a few pints. Come on guys.... for fuck's sake. Don't make me go home.”<br />
<br />
Paul shook his head. He mocked me for begging for a tenner. He didn't realise just what ten pound would do for me, that he would also beg for it if it was attached to his entire well-being.<br />
<br />
I looked at the brothers, thinking. “What about your mother?” I said.<br />
<br />
Paul pulled a face and shook his head. <br />
<br />
“Well, is it OK if I at least ask?”<br />
<br />
Paul nodded for Lawrence to unbolt the door. With the door open Paul shouted for his mother.<br />
<br />
I heard Paul's mum, Veronica, come trundling down the hallway. She was a pleasant enough woman with a blunt honesty, a died blonde bob and the figure of a church bell. <br />
<br />
“What the fuck d'ya want? Calling me like that?”<br />
<br />
“The Freak wants to ask you something.”<br />
<br />
Veronica looked at me. Whether I imagined it or not she seemed to have a look of horror on her face. I felt like I was glowing green or something. I began to explain about the bar and Paul and Lawrence, but before I was even halfway through she cut me off and asked, “What the fuck d'ya want?” <br />
<br />
I played it straight. “Twenty quid, Vee... I'll pop it straight back around tomorrow evening.”<br />
<br />
Veronica looked over at Paul who was staring straight ahead at the TV. I could see her brain doing the arithmetic, understanding that I must have asked both brothers first and they must have refused me, even though she must have known they had money. “TWENNY QWID! You've narf got a fuckin' cheek, int ya? Not even here five minutes and already on the ponce! Nothing ever changes. No I ain't got twenty fucking quid to lend ya! Piss off home and get yer own!” I laughed, but Veronica wasn't laughing. She wasn't as rude as she was making out, but she was deadly serious about not lending me the money nonetheless. I smiled it off, sat there like it didn't matter. But it did matter, a lot. It felt like my soul was beating inside my body. I could feel myself reddening, secretly cursing the Kinsellas. I considered falling to my knees, crying and begging them. Melting down in any pride I had left so as to make them feel so embarrassed for me that they'd lend me the cash just so as they didn't have to witness such a pathetic sight. Veronica pulled the door close and went off back down the hall. From in the room we heard her saying to her partner: “He only fucking wanted that I lend him some money! What a fucking cheek. It'd be another 5 years we wouldn't see him if I did!”<br />
<br />
I raised my head and looked at Lawrence. His smile had gone, now replaced by two quite serious eyes, scrutinizing me, as if observing every drop of perspiration I expelled. He very slightly nodded and pulled a sad face. I knew what it meant and looked away.<br />
<br />
So, the Kinsellas had blown me out. I wanted to leave but didn't want to make it so obvious that I was in dire-straits. And so I remained, sat there where I was, cursing the whole lot of them, the entire clan, all the while hoping against hope that someone had bought my story and would come good if I only stayed long enough. When the bedroom door knocked only minutes later I secretly harbored hopes that it was Veronica, that she had changed her mind and was back with a score. But it wasn't Veronica, it was the young kid who had originally opened the door to me, Patrick, the Kinsellas' youngest brother. <br />
<br />
He came and plonked himself down on the bed alongside Paul. Paul pushed him away. He was a podgy little kid, kinda looked like a midget version of his mother and had the expressions of a grown man. He wore a pair of shorts beneath a grubby T-shirt, and had a stick of candy in his hand which he was all sticky on. He looked at me, mischievously. <br />
<br />
“I remember you! Freaky Shane,” he said, laughing. “My mum said that you and Alan used to dress like girls.”<br />
<br />
He sat there, his back against the wall and his bare feet hanging off the bed. “I could kick you from here,” he said. “I'm doing karate and I could kick you if I wanted to.”<br />
<br />
“Well, don't kick me,” I said. “Go and kick a sack or something. I'm not up for being kicked today.” <br />
<br />
“I'm not gonna kick you,” he said, “just saying I could if I wanted to.” Paul suddenly shot out a hand and gripped the small boys thigh, just above the knee cap. Whatever grip he had him in Patrick began squirming and screaming , all the while laughing in playful pain.<br />
<br />
“You're not gonna fucking kick anyone,” Paul told him. “Say it! Repeat after me: I'm not gonna kick anyone!”<br />
<br />
“I'M NOT GONNA KICK ANYONE!” Patrick screamed.<br />
<br />
Paul squeezed his leg with his claw grip a little harder. Patrick wriggled as if electricity were going through him. “Mercy! Mercy!” he cried. As he tried to wriggle free from Paul's grip he let out a loud, ripping fart.<br />
<br />
“You dirty little bastard,” Paul screamed, throwing Patrick's legs to the side and slapping them as they fell together. Patrick laughed, and while trying to catch his breath he farted again. He moved down away from his brother's reach and sat there with his hair all scruffed and a bright red face. <br />
<br />
After a moment he said to me: “Do you know what Tae kwando pads are?”<br />
<br />
“No,” I said. Just the thought of Tae kwando and physical assertion made me feel weak. A chill went through me; the evening was coming in.<br />
<br />
I was desperate. Sunday's were depressing alright. There was something so sad in the clouds outside, the silence, the shutdown of the city as everyone passed their last few hours of the weekend with a communal dread hanging over everyone of monday being on them again so soon. I could feel it, could hear it, as if the last sounds from the river were traveling through the evening sky and everything was getting ready to camp down for the night. I needed to do something. Get some cash or not get some cash and get out of here. It hurt me more being around slight hope than being alone with none at all. At least with no hope I could quickly come to terms with and could start counting down the hours, days, until hope and health would be back. But here, in the Kinsellas, wherein survived even the most meagre thread of hope, it was impossible to get on at all. It was even more impossible to leave. Leaving was defeat and defeat was a long walk home with the wolf of heroin sickness clamped upon my back. <br />
<br />
I pulled the sweat down my face, pulled the skin down with it. <br />
<br />
“I'm getting new shoes next week,” Patrick said. “The new Nike Airs, white with the red tick. You wanna see them?”<br />
<br />
“Go on then,” I said. I wasn't really interested but shoes cost money and that fact registered with me immediately. <br />
<br />
“Hang on,” Patrick said, “I'll show you.” He slid off the bed. As I moved to let him by I caught a whiff of the musty smell of moisture and rain and damp in the space my body was occupying. As Patrick left, Lawrence also rose and announced he was getting ready. Paul nodded. <br />
<br />
A moment later and Patrick returned with a crumpled, well used, sports catalogue. It was full of all the latest trainers and prices. He pointed to a pair. “That's them,” he said, “but mine are white and red. Neat, huh?”<br />
<br />
They didn't look neat to me, but I said they were anyway. Then I saw the price: almost seventy quid. <br />
<br />
“So, when you hoping to get them?” I asked, now very interested. <br />
<br />
“Next weekend,” Patrick said. “Paul's gonna give me the rest of the money to add to what I've saved.”<br />
<br />
“I might,” Paul chirped in, “but not if you continue with your fucking around.”<br />
<br />
I sat staring at Patrick. He was looking again at the sports catologue, the light from the TV flitting across his face and illuminating his dreams of his new trainers. His eyes positively thrilled at the prospect of going to get them. I stared at his bare feet. He had no idea what a world this was, how predators were everywhere, scheming and scamming for their own ends, smiling when necessary and often within touching distance. No, he had no idea at all.<br />
<br />
I didn't want to ask; I couldn't. Don't do it, I told myself. Save your pride. Keep your respect. Go home and suffer out two days and bank such desperate measures for when they're really needed. My thought processes and internal debates, trying my damnedest to see them off, had me rocking where I sat. It was only a very light movement but enough for Paul to notice. What with that, and the sweats, and the red under my eyes and I must have looked in a much poorer state than I imagined. My next conscious realization was staring dead, dull ahead at Patrick. The room had seemed to disappear around him, as if it was just us. He looked a fair child, trusting. I never made the decision to speak but found words coming out my mouth regardless.<br />
<br />
“Hey Patrick,” I said.<br />
<br />
“Huh?”<br />
<br />
“Those trainers... how about getting them tomorrow?”<br />
<br />
He looked at me, intrigued. “Tomorrow? Serious? How?”<br />
<br />
“An investment,” I said. “You lend me twenty quid so as I can go for a drink with your brothers, and I'll pop it back around to you tomorrow with an extra twenty quid bunged in as a thank you?”<br />
<br />
My heart was racing. Out the corner of my eye I had seen Paul spring tight to attention on hearing what I had asked.<br />
<br />
Patrick wore a bemused smile. He stared at me, his naive head trying to figure out the catch, his young instinct sensing something wasn't quite right about the offer.<br />
<br />
“Really? You'd pay me twenty pounds for borrowing you twenty? Tomorrow?”<br />
<br />
“Yeah, tomorrow,” I lied. And depending on what time we finish I may even be able to pop it around tonight. I mean, whether tonight or tomorrow, by Tuesday you could be wearing your new Nike Airs to school.”<br />
<br />
God, this was low. Not only could I not repay the money tomorrow, but I sure as hell would never pay double on the lend either.<br />
<br />
“So, whatdya say, Patrick? You gonna lend us it or not?”<br />
<br />
Patrick thought it over. I could see he was totally confused. I was an adult, should be trustworthy, ut something in him was fighting over some other instinct, an instinct he was too young to comprehend I sat staring at him in the semi-dark of the room. But Patrick couldn't muster up an answer. He was somehow frozen in deliberation, unsure as to what to do in maybe the first real gamble of his life. That's when I saw his eyes very slightly shift and widen, obviously trying to communicate with Paul; Paul who was sat up rigid, his eyes pinned open, very subtly shaking his head to tell Patrick 'NO!'. Patrick seemed to have problems understanding his brother's message. His brow furrowed, demanding more information than Paul could give him discretely. But, sure as hell is sold as a hot place, Patrick was soon mimicking the stiff actions of his older brother, his head then very lightly shaking and his mouth saying “No... No” denying me a lend of the cash.<br />
<br />
“What Patrick? No? You can't do it?”<br />
<br />
“ I... er... can't...” he said.<br />
<br />
“You can't lend me just twenty pounds? Not even for a few hours?”<br />
<br />
I watched Patrick's eyes slide to Paul once more and now his older brother came to his rescue.<br />
<br />
“Hey, leave him alone for fuck sake! Dint you hear? He said 'no'! That money's for his trainers.”<br />
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“Oh come on! Jesus,” I cried. “It's just twenty quid! Paul, guarantee me. If I don't come through with the cash that you'll pay him back. Come one... I'm not gonna do a fucking runner!”<br />
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“I'm not standing a debt of yours,” Paul said. <br />
<br />
I turned to Patrick again, all pride and care for how I looked gone. I begged that he lend me money, tried convincing him in as many ways as possible that I was good for it. I pleaded with Paul, said “Come on, man... have a heart.” I said way too much and the more I said the more sure it became that I would not get the money as it was now quite obvious to everyone that it couldn't be to go for a drink with the brothers. Patrick sat before me, shaking his head and repeating over and over the words “I can't... I can't.” Then Paul really did end it. He warned me to leave Patrick alone and said that no-one was going to lend me any money. He told me to go home and get my own and come back or don't... as I wanted. The way in which he said that told me he knew that I had no intention of returning, that he understood that I had no money nor wallet at home... that maybe I didn't even have a home. His words brought me out of my trance and now, absolutely despondent, my ailing body seemed a hundred times worse than it had done just moments before. <br />
<br />
“You mean cunts,” I said. And then I thankfully accepted the out Paul had given me and said I was gonna shoot off to get my cash and then return. I asked Paul what bar they were going to and he said he didn't know. I guess he didn't want to waste the breath in his body. As I gathered my things together and put on my jacket, without looking at me, Patrick left the room. I felt drained . There was a weird smell in my nostrils and the yawns were coming on strong and aching out my jaw muscles. I said goodbye to Paul. He refused to say a word of goodbye but nodded. Down the hallway the living room door was open. Inside Patrick was laying on the sofa alongside his mother, watching the early evening entertainment and guffawing along to the canned laughter. He looked at me. I couldn't leave it. I beckoned with my head for him to come. He mouthed the word 'wot' and raised me a fed up looking look. <br />
<br />
“Patrick, come here... I want to talk to you,' I said. With the dirty sole of his little foot he flicked out a karate kick and pushed the door over, closing me out and leaving me alone in the darkness of the bare hallway. I stood there for a moment, the sound of pumping blood gushing through my head. From Paul's room I heard him coughing on another lungful of joint and then the TV channels flip through once more. <br />
<br />
I opened the front door. It was dark outside. I barely felt I had the legs to walk home and only took the first step because those last steps, that journey home to collapse down in defeat on my sick bed represented the last sliver of any hope of salvation I had. Maybe I'd bump into another junkie? A dealer? A work colleague? Come across someone, anyone, a familiar person I could beseech for help, slide down and beg to hold my weight for a day? Jesus, there were enough people who I'd done good turns for, who owed me at least a small favour in return. And so I made my way home, through the dark, gaudy evening, my eyes pinned and primed and my wits about me, treading down hope, step by step, until there was no more left at all. <br />
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- - - <br />
</span></div>
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Thanks as Ever for reading... all My Thoughts Shane. X<br />
<br />
<h4>
<i><a href="http://thelostpostsofhh.blogspot.fr/2016/02/lines-for-joe-m-down-on-low.html">Lines for Joe M</a></i></h4>
Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com33tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-73516625150781997572015-12-05T14:06:00.000+01:002015-12-05T14:06:12.224+01:00A Letter to My Landlord...<div style="text-align: justify;">
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Dear Mr Piegay, my loyal and long-suffering landlord...</div>
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It is fast approaching seven years that I have occupied the room in Rue Laennec and it is not without a twinge of sadness that I hereby present you with my official notice of leave. In your last email you asked that if I did indeed decide on quitting the premises that I was to inform you of any small repairs or renovations that are needed so as you could make the room good for the next tenant. On this note I am pleased to inform you that apart from some minor and natural wear and tear the apartment is in pretty much the same condition as the day you let it to me. The one thing I feel I must bring to your attention is the outside shutter of the far window. As you are most likely aware, it is not of the highest quality and was bound to fail at some stage. Well, it has failed - almost certainly due to the mechanics in the pulley system. In fact, it is the mechanics in the pulley system. I know because in attempting to fix it I accidentally shattered the interior plastic cover and a spool of cord and a broken cog shot out – leaving it quite beyond repair. The box itself I managed to make good, albeit using half a roll of brown scotch tape covered over by an old cravat which serves to keep the whistling draught out. My intervention works sufficiently well, although I would imagine that a new tenant paying 400 plus euros a month may not be too enthused about such a remedial looking repair. The shutter on the nearside window however remains in good working order; it is only the graffiti sprayed upon its exterior that you may want to look at. Shutters aside I suppose I should take this opportunity to inform you about the two electric wall fires and how they blew out, one after the other, two winters ago. Though neither now works, it is the one in the bathroom which poses a more serious problem as it somehow detached itself from the crumbling plasterboard wall. It currently sits on the floor connected only by exposed electrical wiring. As a consequence I have had to remove the heating fuse from the main fuseboard so as to prevent any unwanted electric shocks. The bathroom itself, although in need of a new lick of paint, has stood the test of time pretty well. It is only the cracked sink which needs replacing and, of course, the shower unit, which came clean down one afternoon and with it pulled two fist-sized lumps out the wall. As it came down it caught me a good whack on the head, though, it seems, without imparting any permanent damage. So as to save you the cost of a new shower rail and curtain I salvaged what I could of the old one, dis-assembled it and stored it in a black bag behind the toilet. The cracked sink I must put my hands up to. One day, while nodding out in front of the mirror, I accidentally knocked one of my painted stones off the product shelf and it smashed with full force into the ceramic. The crack is not so bad as to leak and so you may be able to hide it from the view of the new tenant. At worst all you need is a new sink which, thankfully, are very inexpensive nowadays. What are not so inexpensive are water boilers. The cheapest one I have come across is over 500 euros and that is without the added cost of the engineer to fit it. I only mention this as the element packed up in ours almost three years ago and the apartment has been without hot water since. The toilet, although useable, is tremendously rocky on its base. In order to gain access to the u-bend (a quite unpleasant blockage which I'll not go into) I had to unbolt it from the floor. Where I delayed in re-fixing it the two six-inch bolts somehow got wet and rusted and would not bolt back down as a consequence. The only worthwhile counsel I can give you on this issue is that you advise any new tenant to spread his weight out evenly when he plonks himself down on the throne. Failure to take care in doing so could possible upend the entire thing and then the bathroom really would need renovating. </span></div>
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The main room. As mentioned above it stands in pretty much the same condition in which you rented it to me. The sole exceptions are the walls which are covered in coffee and blood and paint and have turned a septic yellow colour through years of confined chain-smoking. There also are what appears to be large cracks running up the sides of each window. Whether it is structural damage or not I am unqualified to say. What I am qualified to say is that, as with the bathroom, a good coat of paint will do the room a world of good. What paint will not fix is the broken door of the fuse box. As you'll probably never have noticed the damn thing was installed too near to the main door, and the same day I removed the heating fuse I unwittingly knocked the fuse-box door clean off its hinges. There is also a problem with the lighting. The two Edison screw-type holders are at present unusable after the light-bulbs burnt and melted themselves into their fittings and now are impossible to remove. I did try removing one but the bulb, from the sheer force required to turn it, shattered in my hand leaving just a bare stalactite of tungsten element protruding from the fitting. The ceiling itself is more of a problem, half collapsing on the left side, victim of an upstairs flood which soaked through and nearly brought the place down last spring. Concerning the small kitchen area in the far corner of the room, one would suppose that not much could go wrong in such a tiny space, and indeed, not much can. Unfortunately, the little that could go wrong has. I am of course referring to the two electric plates. One does nothing but burn black smoke up the wall and the other short-circuits the instant it is turned on and not only blows its immediate fuse but that of the entire apartment. The light casing above the hob also needs changing after melting away one night as I slow-stewed a curry. It seems the heat from cooking and the natural heat emitted from the bulb was too much for it to handle. The only other minor problem in this part of the room is the fridge: it no longer works and is currently being used as a book cupboard. It looks like some idiot tried to defrost the small freezer compartment with a knife and hammer and has pierced the casing of the evaporator. As to any other damage, apart from the MDF cupboards which all warped in a small flood I had back here in 2010, I can't think of anything else. The floor, as you know, is tiled and so apart from the two centre tiles (which have somehow cracked) is as polished and flat as ever. One good piece of news I can give you is that I have fixed the once lagging front door and it now closes. The repair was a simple case of heating and gradually sawing four inches off its bottom. The downside of the repair is that the door is no longer insect proof. As a result, for two months during the summer, the apartment falls foul of quite a severe ant problem. Rats are also prone to sneak in from time to time. There is a dead one somewhere in the storage cupboard as I type. I did my best to keep it fed and happy, each night consistently leaving it out handfuls of expensive handmade Italian egg pasta, but, alas, it seems the good life isn't conducive to such rodents and there is now quite an horrendous stench lingering in the small square of hallway. I only tell you this as you'll surely remark upon it during your visit next week, and I don't want you thinking it is me. For the ten thousand used and uncapped syringes stored in the top cupboard, I was hoping that together we could maybe contact the environmental health department and have their hazardous waste disposal team come around and clear them out. It's something I would greatly appreciate your help on.</span></div>
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In regards to the rent; it is only right and fair that I give you warning now that it is highly unlikely that I'll be able to make good on the three months of outstanding arrears. It is, of course, for such defaults of payment that all tenants in France are obliged to have a legal guarantor. All I can offer is my good luck with that: the guarantor I used appears not to actually exist. In fact, all the paperwork (barring my passport) was fake. The work contract was downloaded and adapted from online, and my last twelve months of payslips I created myself using Word and pasting and re-sizing the company logo up in the top left hand corner. Another quite interesting fact is that the day you met me outside my work to sign the contract, well, that wasn't my place of work at all. Indeed, it was the first time I had ever been there, and I could only pray for divine intervention when you asked that we go inside to sign the paperwork so as to escape the spitting rain. Divine intervention indeed (or just sheer fucking luck) the warehouse was closed up for the evening. I remember sitting in the depressing dark of your car, that vile perfume of mint air-freshener making me think of all manor of depressing life events as I watched you go over and over the paperwork. How I fucking despised you and knew what you were from that first moment – a meticulous, risk-assessing, teetotal cunt. That stupid balding head of yours shining under the dull compartment light, the few front strands of hair looking like something one would blow away and make a wish upon. And oh, those cheap, ill-fitting, faded jeans that you wore and those large, padded sports shoes - which maybe allowed you to brake more easily but also had the effect of making you look like some kind of a fucking bum. It turned out that you was much worse than the honesty of a man with nothing. Six months down the line and you tried laying a three thousand pound electricity bill at my feet, worming your way out of what you had agreed when we signed the contract, blaming my intermediate French on misunderstanding the finer details. It was only when I bluffed you with a non-existent piece of paper which I said had your writing on with all the details that you backtracked again and said you did indeed remember saying such a thing and that it was your error. Still, you also said that you couldn't afford to pay the bill and that unless I forfeited my guarantee that I would remain through the winter with no electricity – which meant no lighting or heating. I agreed and let you use my deposit. Well, now you can re-use the non-existent deposit to cover the costs of renovating the apartment. Not only was your rent exorbitantly high for a room measuring less than 18² meters but you made me suffer hours of checks and a two hour 'state of the place' walk-around. Even my fake guarantor, complete with a stolen identity card, was cursing your indecisiveness. Your forehead actually trickled sweat as I signed the contract! And do you recall the one time you came knocking at my door uninvited? Pushed your way in, and then stood staring at me in open-mouthed horror when you saw melted plastic tops from methadone bottles stuck to the electric rings and paintings nailed into every part of every wall? How you asked to use the bathroom and then I heard you scuttling around in there, looking through the cupboards and no doubt discovering my used needles in the lower cupboard. You returned looking like a ghost who had been told he would die again. You left pretty soon after, forgetting to have me sign the shitty piece of paper you had brought down for me. When you returned twenty five minutes later I was fresh from having taken a shot and shouting something out over a broken guitar. I signed the paper on the doorstep not quite sure if your re-appearance was real or not, or what the fuck I had even signed for. It was the rent increase. The increase you had so scrupulously thought up to cover your costs in the electricity fiasco. I guess that finally says more about you than anything else.</span></div>
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In ending this letter I will not pretend that the damage caused to the apartment was a calculated response to your cunning, duplicitous nature, as the truth is that I would surely have been just as despicable a tenant to even the most honest of landlords. But the thing is this: I have never met an honest landlord and I seriously doubt that one exists. It's the age old story of greed and profit, and how the two can only go hand-in-hand and do go hand-in-hand. And so, I will end this letter, not on a bitter or hateful or goading note, but to wish you well with yourself and all you are. Maybe people like you are the future and it is the fools like me who will die hideous economic deaths and fade away. For the sake of humanity I hope not.</span></div>
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With all the sadness a man can have...</div>
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Yours sincerely, Shane Levene. </div>
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- - - </div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="http://thelostpostsofhh.blogspot.fr/2015/12/lines-for-joe-m-landlord.html">Lines for Joe M</a></div>
Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com39tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-10028986509378352902015-11-18T16:11:00.001+01:002015-11-19T03:07:29.601+01:00The Devil's Pause<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="line-height: 22.8px;">When the Devil came to rest I was a third through the good of my life and it was springtime. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><span style="line-height: 22.8px;">God, it's spring, I thought, pausing in the street and closing my eyes. I hadn't felt the spring for many a season and now here it was. I sucked in the scents of the morning and held. I had forgotten just what a pleasure fresh air was. It felt good, like menthol or eucalyptus flowing through my respiratory system, flushing out all the gunk of sick living. I took in another deep lungful, let it seep down into my muscles and unclog my pores from the inside out. I wanted to be burst full of all the day had to offer, to be steeped in every poison and fragrance which travelled along on the whip of the season. I lowered the zip of my jacket and let the crisp cold have my neck and skin. A feint mist sat in the distance and seemed to clean the town. I walked with my arm out, my fingers trailing through hedgerow and foliage, disturbing the cold droplets from the night's rain. I felt the wet on my hand, running cold beneath my sleeve. I could have wept in joy, a strange relief hitting me at being privy once again to such irritable sensations. The smell of dustbins and refuse drifted out the damp front yards. And even that was a pleasure. </span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="line-height: 22.8px;">On the high-street I followed the morning slew of people as they made their way down towards the market. I passed the early bird businesses: the butcher's with its cutlets of meat laid out; the baker's full of freshly risen dough; the newsagent's, the ink of their gossip barely dry. A double-decker bus pulled out from its stop. As it passed by the hydraulics of the automatic door system let out a hiss, and a warm front of oil and diesel fumes accompanied me for a moment. I remembered days picking wild raspberries along the motorway, getting snagged and scratched on the bramble. It was years since I'd last had such memories, memories I could taste and feel as if they had happened only yesterday. What memories did come to me during addiction were hollow, forlorn things with Arctic winds scraping about around them and sad echoed voices drifting in empty out the expanse of time. I tried to recall the last time I had been freezing cold or tormented by the heat of summer. I couldn't. Heroin, in numbing the required emotions, had numbed a lot else besides. It had created a calm constant, cocooned me safely within the centre of a place void of all extremes. But now, four days in on methadone, the longest I'd been without smack in three years, the world was a melting pot of sounds and smells and colours and sensations, all reminding me of a life I had once meditated in and thrived off, yet a life which in other ways had touched me so profoundly that such rawness had been unbearable. This morning it wasn't unbearable. After such a hiatus I wanted to be around normal, everyday things, partake in a life that I had gladly abandoned for the hook of the heroin spike. As walked I listened to the clip of my heels on the paving, took a strange delight in the grit crunching beneath my soles as I crossed streets and roads. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.8px;">In the market I wandered around looking at the cheap wares of faulty and imported goods. I passed by slowly, perusing in each stall like it were a book to be deciphered. There were stalls full of leatherware, and handbags; others selling luggage and travel packs. There were stalls of linen and bedding, and still more of nothing other than kitchen utensils: trays of plated stainless steel cutlery, tin-openers and egg whisks. At the top end I passed Sikh and Muslim fabric stores, caressed rolls of cotton and silk and roughed my hands over yarns of sequins. I found myself in strange African general stores, peering into deep freezers packed full of frozen bush meat and smoked snake. Making my way back down I followed the scents of dry-roasted Eastern breads, of hummus and falafel, feta cheese and marinated and pickled olives. I passed the fresh fish stands, eyed buckets of sloppy octopus and crates of dying crabs. I smelt the shit of rock oysters and the congealed black blood of shark, reflected on the fact that they were once living creatures with a fury for life as great any. I paused at the meat auction, stood staring at the butcher in his bloody white apron as he tied up bags of half rotten kidneys for pensioners chewing on their gums. Down onto the fruit and vegetable stalls, the musty smell of turned earth and leeks and onions. There was something in the things from the ground which beckoned me, some connection with root and growth and natural living. I had a queer desire to jump into the potato stall and roll around in the loose soil, get back to some place essential from where I had come. I must have been sunk in worlds of thought, as when I next looked up I had come full circle and was wandering aimlessly back around by where I had started. Only now it was the start of something else. From out of nowhere a terrible spring wind whistled through the marketplace. It gusted up the canvas covers of the stalls and blew boxes and rotten vegetables across the floor. My fellow market-goers seemed not to pay it any mind. They milled about just as before, only now they appeared terribly down, weather worn and life-beaten. An old woman passed me by with her head hunched into her chest. She carried a white plastic bag full of oranges. The bag seemed to contain a coldness, like it was full of ice. The handles cut into the soft of her fingers and cut off her circulation. Her presence irritated me. On a pitch to my left was a stall piled high with boxes of toys; the kind of cheap plastic rubbish which make children cry on opening them. Down on the ground, in a small inflated paddling pool full of water, swam half a dozen gaudy blue and orange battery operated deep-sea divers. They rattled and buzzed and crashed into one another, and in a very particular way, horrified me. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.8px;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.8px;"><b>“THe waY Of all soRrow iS bY Here”</b></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.8px;">That was the last thing I saw on leaving the market. A crazed man in a faded suit, stamping around in circles of torment, those words on a banner, stuck to a broom handle and held aloft. I followed his directions, for so was my only way home.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.8px;">* * *</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.8px;">I saw him from afar. Long-haired John making his miserable way down on the other side of the road. He raised a hand and beelined across to me. He was wearing his cut down brown military bottoms, his lower legs cratered in needle marks and sores. I eyed my way up his body and it only got worse. His lips were dry and cracked and flecked in black scabs; he had filth and dried saliva in his beard. Without even greeting me he said me that he was 'as sick as a dog' and asked if I could help him out with a small lend of cash. I couldn't. I said that I was running on dry myself, that I was well only due to methadone. He stood there with a tortured expression on his face, as if he were hurting from some place deep inside his body. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.8px;">“What about your bank card?” he asked. I shook my head, beginning to move on. I'm sick as a fucking dog, he said again, following besides me like some leprous mendicant, his grubby hand lightly upon me as if to slow me down to his sick gait. He told me that with my card I could withdraw cash I didn't have. I told him that that was called an overdraft and that my bank had judged me too irresponsible to have one. I said that anything he could suggest I had surely already thought of. He went silent for a moment, trying to think up anything that maybe wasn't so obvious. He came back with nothing. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.8px;">“So what, you've not got a penny? Not enough for a single bag? Not even a fiver?” I repeated I was all out, as beaten as he was.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.8px;">“And juice? You said ya'v got some juice. Ya got a bit for me?” I said that I didn't even have enough for myself, that I couldn't help him today. He didn't believe me. A look of hatred flashed across his face, thinking that I was holding out on him. I pulled my arm free from his retaining hold and walked a pace faster, hoping he'd fall away and disappear out of sight. He didn't. John remained there, a filthy, lingering presence, like a soiled rag fluttering about on the periphery of my vision. Making extra effort to put some distance between us I heard his last words. They slopped out his mouth like lumps of stodgy wet oatmeal. </span><span style="line-height: 22.8px;">“Mate, I'm fuckin' dying 'ere... Gotta be summit' you can do? I'm seriously fucking dying.”</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.8px;">I didn't doubt it. After an awkward silence I shouted back: There's fuck all I can do, John... I'm down to the same nothing as you. Then John did slow. Though, no matter how far behind he tailed off, I could still somehow sense his presence, his hand held out and a look of desperation on his ravaged face, hoping against all hope that I'd turn around and offer him a way out, save his rotten soul for one more day. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.8px;">I circled the streets trying to rid my mind of John and of a certain cold, detachment which had first became apparent as I left the market. I tried consciously to reconnect with the season, feel its complete dominion over my soul as it had done not even two hours before. But there were now ghosts in the spring. I found them hidden in the blossom, in dark shadows behind the mulberry bush, whirring around like cirrus clouds in the sky, croaking with the Larks, and in the dead foetuses of pigeons jellied in the gutters. Imbued in the portrait of the new found spring was some terrible ill-boding left behind by the thaw of winter. Vague memories sat in the sparkling dew drops on leaves; the rot of turned compost beneath hedgerow now spoke of death and decomposition and not of birth and growth and nutrients. The slick wet roads and pavements glimmered with a damp depression. There were too many things in this world which the spring could not cleanse, things so unnatural and manufactured that they were beyond the touch of nature or weather fronts. I lit a cigarette and almost vomited. In the dull middle of my liver the last milligrams of methadone were being absorbed. For the first time since stepping out that morning a reckless twinge of disregard entered my thoughts. Fuck methadone! It had shown me the spring, had cleared my lungs out and had maybe allowed a vein to heal or my swollen hands to recover, but it had also delivered me back to a world which had an icy hollowness at its heart. I thought of the bank card in my inside pocket, how useless it was today but how tomorrow it would be my salvation. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.8px;">At the end of Boscombe road I stopped and stood staring at half a dozen rubbish bags dumped besides the post box. One was ripped open, its contents spilt out onto the street: tins of tuna in brine and cat food; mouldy bread and soggy news' headlines; wraps of soiled nappy and losing scratch cards; perfect home magazines and junk mail for pizza; strained tea-bags and empty packets of prescription drugs. It was like an anatomical study of modern life. I walked on, an abysmal sadness then provoked within me. Through the park a dog squatted on its haunches and squeezed out a slop of yellow turd, all the while watching me. When it had finished it sniffed the ground where its arse had been and then hoovered through the grass, the dew wetting the straggles on its lower legs. I had smelled such dogs throughout my entire lifetime, the burning carbon of excrement wafting over British bogland and drifting like smoke upon the river. A woman cut through the pathway in a white fur coat. Out in the distance sirens wailed. Somewhere a fire blazed, and in me, something was rising and burning too. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.8px;">By the time I had circled back around and hit the crossroads of my own road the afternoon hung bleak all over. But the bleakness wasn't in the day, it was in me. It bled out and induced itself in everything, even in inanimate objects. I strode, dark down my road, back home to wait out the wait. The sun broke through the day and I cursed it. I had not even 24 hours to go until I'd be able to score again. The Devil's rest was all but over. I had seen the spring and I had seen the sun and had smelled life and it had smelled good for a moment. But now, all too soon, old sensations had come in with the season, sensations of which I had needed to escape and had wanted no part of so many years before. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.8px;">I had nothing just now and the day would have me suffer in my rightful hell, but tomorrow things would change and fortunes would improve. Yes, tomorrow would be here so slow and so soon and with it, up on up, the Devil would rise in me again and spring upon the spring once more.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.8px;">- - -</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.8px;">Thanks as ever for reading... next post will be a little lighter: a leaving letter to my landlord. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.8px;">Shane. X</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.8px;"><a href="http://thelostpostsofhh.blogspot.fr/2015/11/lines-for-joe-m.html" target="_blank">Lines for Joe M</a></span></div>
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Memoirs of a Heroinheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17401281805284793756noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-23959172416740142192015-10-16T14:47:00.000+02:002015-10-16T14:47:33.459+02:00The Thinman Affair<div style="text-align: justify;"><div align="" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 0.3cm;"><span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><span style="color: black;"><br />
</span>They had been found dead in cars, slumped in doorways, crouched on their haunches in telephone booths and flat out at the bottom of stairwells; men and women, young and experienced addicts alike. Eleven deaths in North London, seventeen in Scotland and multiple others dotted around the UK. Other addicts were turning up in Accident & Emergency rooms, often taxi'd in and dragged to the front desk, terribly ill and on the point of death. From the very early news reports it seemed that the only common denominator tying all the casualties together was that they were all intravenous heroin users and they had all shot up just prior to going over.<br />
<br />
“Lucky fuckers,” said Thinman, reading the news report, his filthy stained index finger, which had been running under the words, now jabbing at a certain part in the story. “Says here it's a suspected pure batch that's doing it. Apparently some uncut gear has found its way onto the street. Un-fucking-cut! Wouldn't half mind getting me hands on a bit a that.” <br />
<br />
I didn't respond. I sat watching Thinman as he read, as his eyes lit up and different expressions moved across his face like changing weather patterns. Heroin addiction had all but destroyed the man, eaten every morsel of fat from off his bones, bleached his skin a deathly yellowish grey hue and somehow faded his tattoos so as they looked liked processing stamps from the mortuary. There he was, sat in the lounge of the local needle exchange, looking like he'd been air-packaged, and still salivating over the thought of one last great fix, of something that would relieve him of the fear and knowledge of an impending and premature death. <br />
<br />
In the cramped store cupboard of the exchange the key worker bagged up my usual fifty pack of 1ml needles along with a button bag of citric acid and a handful of sterile water bottles. “Now, be careful,” she said, “what with that bad batch going around. Take these guidelines and have a read through them on your way home.” She handed me a leaflet, a list of bullet-pointed directions. I cast an eye quickly over them, over the casual, childish font which had been used. “You're up,” I said to Thinman as I came out the supply cupboard, “I'll wait for you outside.” <br />
<br />
Late morning, the air fresh and floral in the residential streets; the sky deep and blue and clear. From behind floated the subdued rumble of the high-street, the cogs of the day turning into lunchtime. I walked with Thinman up towards St Stephen's Church, to loiter hidden in the damp shade under her arch for Danny. Heroin was burning through our lives. I felt good in my habit, not yet tired and jaded and all shot out. As we walked I read Thinman the needle exchange's counsel to avoid dying that autumn.<br />
“Smoke it!!!” Thinman yelled, repeating what I had read. “Well, they know that's not likely gonna happen, is it? I'd need two hundred dollars a day to smoke it. And how'd they figure that? Like the only time real serious shit hits the streets and we smoke it! Fuckin' jokers.”<br />
“They're talking toxic gear here.... not pure. Says it's maybe laced with fucking anthrax or botulism. Advice for those hellbent on injecting is to make absolutely sure to vein it... under no circumstance go intra-muscular.”<br />
Thinman laughed and flicked his hand out, as if batting away an annoying fly. “It's all just more anti-smack propaganda, more lies to scare the shit outta us, scare us into quitting. I've heard of bad gear... but toxic gear??? Do us a favour.” I balled up the leaflet and tossed it down in the street. Even accepting the reports were true, barely fifty addicts in the entire country had died and so you'd have to be pretty unlucky to come across the contaminated heroin. And anyway, Thinman was correct: no-one seemed to really know what was going on anyway – maybe it had nothing to do with the heroin at all.<br />
<br />
A week later and the so-called toxic heroin was the main talk of the IV'ing community. More junkies had dropped dead up North and the first rumours of addicts round our way turning up in hospitals with sorely infected limbs and skin necrosis had surfaced. As is always the case, the rumours never concerned anyone who one knew personally. They were all mostly third hand reports, gossip blowing around in the waiting rooms of methadone clinics and needle exchanges, people with very little going on in their lives and wanting to fan the fires in their dying grates.<br />
On the street, the talk and rumours affected little. All it did was add an extra ounce of danger to the practice of shooting up, supply us with another element to use to blackmail money out of anyone who cared. Nobody cared. And so we hobbled on as ever, taking our chances and hoping our chances were good, not having the luxury of playing it safe for a while. We shot first and dealt with any consequences later. We scored and used as ever, more tales that week reported of addicts blowing out and toppling over, others staggering into A&E and put in intensive care having bloated up with some kind of bacterial elephantitis. <br />
That's when Thinman disappeared. <br />
Thinman's disappearance was strange. I was in his debt for two rocks of crack and only something terribly serious would have had him not be home to collect. But he wasn't home, and neither had he returned when I did another pass later on that evening. On the second day when he still hadn't turned up I called in on his brother. Together we travelled over to Thinman's, spoke to the downstairs neighbour and then forced the door. Thinman's flat was a shithole, a mattress on the floor surrounded by syringes and shooting paraphernalia. But there was no Thinman, and no sign that anything untoward had happened. Thinman's brother left a handwritten note on the mattress and said if there was still no news by the following evening that he would report him as missing. He said his brother often laid low for days at a time. That was true, but never when in credit for crack. <br />
Later that evening I received a call to my mobile, a soft female voice asking me if I knew a Mr Saul Messinger. That was Thinman's real name. I said I didn't think I knew anyone by such a name and asked why. She explained that she was calling from the hospital concerning a recent inpatient who had been admitted with no contact details and that my number had been found amongst his possessions. I thought for a moment before telling the hospital assistant that I didn't know him very well but knew his brother. I gave the details of Thinman's brother and put the phone down. It was late. From what I could gather Thinman was in a poor way but still alive. I pondered over all that may have happened to him. It was impossible to know.<br />
<br />
- - -<br />
<br />
“No Saul Messinger here,” said the fat receptionist, sat there in her XL mint hospital uniform. She returned back to her Sudoko puzzle, wishing me to go away and leave her alone. <br />
“Will you look again, please” I asked. “He's definitely here. It was the hospital which phoned me saying so.” The receptionist froze with her pencil on her puzzle. When I didn't disappear she let out a little huff of air, snapped her pencil down and took up the mouse. She clicked the cursor into a blank field and started to type a name in. After no more than four letters she stopped and without raising her eyes to look at me, said, “What did you say the name was?” <br />
“Messinger,” I said.<br />
She hit the back space rapid-fire and typed in the correct name, giving her return key a good whack to show me how pissed off she was that she had to work. She sat staring at the screen with an expression of contempt on her face. A few clicks of the mouse later and she said, “He's in the infectious disease unit.”<br />
“Infectious disease unit? Where's that?”<br />
She pointed to a plan of the hospital on the wall over near the lifts. Then she raised her eyes and looked at me for the first time. She looked like a cow that had been interrupted while grazing. <br />
“Are you family?” she asked, hoping I wasn't so as she could deny me access to the ward and possibly have the security come down and sling me out.<br />
“Yes, I'm his brother,” I said.<br />
She didn't believe me but had no way to say that I wasn't. She lowered her eyes, going back to her game of numbers, brooding all the while, knowing her fat arse would be disturbed again soon.<br />
<br />
The infectious disease unit looked like any other ward. I had expected to see isolation rooms and quarantine units, but there was none of that here. I wandered down through the ward, poking my head in rooms, looking for Thinman. Just as I spotted him a nurse came rushing down the hallway, calling after me. Thinman looked up. He was lain back in a bed with the right sleeve cut off his hospital shirt and his upper arm heavily bandaged. He looked awful; worse than usual. He widened his eyes in greeting. <br />
“Excuse me, sir, who are you looking for?” the nurse asked, stopping.<br />
“Him,” I said, pointing to Thinman. “I'm his brother.” I said that a notch louder so as Thinman would hear and confirm it if asked. The nurse told me to wait just there. She entered the ward and spoke to Thinman. As she left she gave me the OK to see him. <br />
“What the fuck happened?” I asked Thinman. “We all thought you were dead!”<br />
“Nearly fucking was,” he replied, “got some of that fucking bad smack that's going around... almost had me. Wound botulism or some shite.”<br />
“Fuck! How d'you know?”<br />
“Fuck all else it could've been. Ate my arm away right where I struck up. Was that little cunt Jay's gear.” I thought of Jay and of his two cousins who also dealt and must be all holding the same stuff. I wondered how many more addicts in the area I knew would drop. It was a scary thought, and even more terrifying was the thought of how many unrelated dealers may have picked up from the same batch. <br />
“Has your brother been around?” I asked.<br />
“Passed by this morning. Was here when I fully came around. Was out of it for almost 36hrs. Not pleasant, mate... and was sick to boot. They dosed me up on methadone but still feel like crap.”<br />
Thinman shuffled himself up in his bed. He had a catheter in his neck which was dripping saline and antibiotics into his system. He began picking at the bandage covering his upper arm, his face creasing up in pain as he slowly pulled the dressing free from the wound. <br />
“What the fuck are you doing,” I asked.<br />
“I wanna see what fucking damage I've done... ain't seen it yet. It stings and burns like fuckin' hell... I know that much.”<br />
As Thinman pulled the bandage back it first revealed a sore red swelling. Then the first wound was exposed, a small drawing pin sized hole in the skin. <br />
“Fuck,” Thinman said. He then pulled the bandage free, exposing the full extent of the damage beneath. It was a sight straight out of a medical book. His entire upper bicep was cratered in open wounds of various sizes, all through to the flesh and seeping a sticky, yellow, sap-like puss. The craters of the wound were raised and cracked. It looked like he had had sulphuric acid thrown over him. Thinman looked at his wound in horror. Then he looked at me. “All that from a fucking shot,” he said. “What the fuck!” He studied his wound some time more, his eyes searching out the most rotten parts of flesh and squinting in on them. Now accustomed to the horrific sight he seemed to take some kind of sadistic pleasure from exposing his injury, like it was the embodiment of a life that was eating him alive. After a moment he replaced his bandage, grimacing and wincing in pain as it settled down once more against his wound. <br />
For a moment Thinman closed his eyes. I watched his sickly transparent lids, thin and taut over the balls and run through with purple threadlike veins. I had the distinct impression that he could see me looking at him through them. With his eyes still closed, he said: “Mate, you still good for those two rocks you owe me?”<br />
“Of course,” I said. “Though I don't know anyone around here.” He opened his eyes and looked at me like he was in pain. “I need something right now. D'you have credit on your phone?” <br />
I nodded. Thinman said that he knew a user called John Lacey who lived in the flats behind the hospital and as long as he was still alive and well that he'd be able to score. Thinman called out the number for me to key in and call. When I'd finished, I handed the phone to Thinman.<br />
“You've got ten mins,” Thinman said to me, smiling. “He'll meet ya just round the back of the hospital... and try and be quick... I'm half fuckin' clucking here.”<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
I met John Lacey in the grounds behind the hospital. He was dressed in a loose woollen top and piss-stained nylon tracksuit bottoms, walking around holding his stomach and cursing. <br />
“How's Thinman,” he asked, still partially buckled over.<br />
“Not bad. Will be better after a shot, you know.”<br />
“Sure. Sure I fucking know. God, so will I. ”<br />
“Must we go far?”<br />
“No, not far,” John said. “Come on.”<br />
Barely had we been walking a minute when John stopped abruptly and said, “I need to shit... me guts are gonna fucking drop on me.” He reached out and rested his hand gently on my forearm. He paused there like that for a moment before giving a little squeeze and rushing off, ducking into the nearest bush. The foliage barely covered him. I saw John yank down his tracksuit bottoms and underwear and a flash of dirty white thigh as he crouched down in haste. I turned around, staring over at the back of the hospital in disbelief. And as I watched the air-conditioning units, observed the odd rags of tissue which hung from the vents and ruffled in the out-blowing warm air, the sickly sweet smell of excrement floated up over my shoulder, John Lacey squirting his rotten junkie guts out onto the ground behind the bushes. It was the smell of London; the smell of those days and that time. Illness, shit and decay. Soiled clothes and pale unwashed skin. Doing things on the fly. The filth of a generation, dragging something dead and decomposing into the new millennium. God, the world had changed. But in the back hangouts, in the shadows of impoverished estate-lands, where the buildings block out the sun and the mildew grows up the walls and moss stands in for grass, it could have been any time in the last thirty years. I turned back around to see if John had finished his business. Almost. Still crouched down the bush was now being tugged and leaves being yanked free. When he finally emerged from the bush he was pulling up and fixing his trousers, the smell of shit hanging to him like it were his soul peeping out. <br />
“God, that was violent,” he said, smiling. I looked at his hands and didn't want them touching me. I thought of the bags of heroin he would have to soon hand over, and I didn't want to touch them either. <br />
<br />
Back at the hospital I gave Thinman his four bags of smack. He was itching for a fix, only now he realised just what a chore it would be to cook one up in the open ward. As he lay there looking at me, his face miserable with sobriety, I knew what was coming.<br />
“Mate, could ya do us a last big favour? Sneak in the bogs and cook us up a hit?”<br />
I didn't want to, but I agreed. Thinman gave me a bag of his smack. He told me to cook the lot up and split it between two needles so as he had another fix for when I was gone. <br />
In the toilet cubicle I went about doing as Thinman had asked. Halfway through mixing up his dose, just about to cook it down, I heard the main door of the restroom creak open and someone enter. I stopped what I was doing, the spoon in one hand and the un-struck lighter just beneath in the other, and listened. Whoever it was was just standing there, maybe listening too. I gently laid the spoon down on the top of the cistern and sat on the toilet. After a moment the person outside washed their hands, dried them and then the door creaked again and then creaked close. I wondered if the person was really gone or whether it was a bluff and they were still standing in silence in the bathroom, listening to what I was doing in the cubicle. I peeped under the door. No-one. I quickly sparked my lighter and finished cooking Thinman's shots. While sucking the second shot up the door squeaked open again and once more a presence entered and seemed to loiter in the room. So as to give the impression that I was just finishing up, I pulled some toilet paper free and then flushed the chain. Masked by the sound of the rushing water I hurriedly gathered up my cooking utensils, capped the syringes for Thinman and pocketed them. I composed myself and left the cubicle. There was no-one in the bathroom. As I made my way back down the ward the duty nurse surveyed me with narrow, suspicious eyes. I kept my casual. “Fuck You,” I thought, “you'll never stop this.”<br />
<br />
Barely had I given Thinman his two capped and loaded needles and he had concealed them beneath his blanket, than the nurse came wandering in from behind. She acted as if she were there just to prop Thinman up and take care of his comfort. Thinman was anxious and flushed hot. He didn't want her messing about too much down besides him. The nurse didn't speak a word but it was obvious that she knew we were up to no good. When she finally left Thinman was eager to shoot himself up, bring himself back in from out the cold of the sober light. He told me to go and distract the nurse, ask in private about his infection. He was already sitting on the side of his bed, his hospital trouser leg pushed up and prodding for veins down his inner calf.<br />
I left Thinman that afternoon when his brother came to visit. Thinman said that he was feeling much better; he could barely keep his lids open. His brother stood there watching him with a look of absolute disgust on his face. Thinman said that if he was not given the all-clear to leave by the following morning that he would sign himself out. I nodded in agreement. That was heroin. I would have done the same; just about every junkie would<br />
<br />
It's a weird feeling arriving at a hospital and not expecting the person you are visiting to be there. But on that autumn morning, on my second visit to see Thinman, the form of the distant sun reflected in the murky waters of the fish pond in the hospital grounds, I somehow knew I would find his hospital bed empty and Thinman gone. <br />
Thinman was gone. Only he hadn't shot through. The young ward nurse who I had located to ask about his whereabouts informed me that he was in intensive care. She said he had been found waxed out with a syringe under his bed cover and had gone down with septicemia. I stood looking at her in shock, my mouth unhinged and hanging open. In the past 18 months I'd known two junkies dead of blood poisoning and knew how serious it was – especially so with the contributing health factors, like hepatitis C, that which had affected Thinman's hue so visibly. <br />
"Is he conscious?" I asked the nurse.<br />
“I don't know his present condition,” she said, “you'll have to go on up to the intensive care unit and see the doctors there... they'll be able to tell you more.”<br />
The intensive care unit was a place of death and detergent. You could smell and sense the empty spaces in wards where people who used to be no longer were. It was a kind of factory, where people were trolleyed out covered on their backs, taken down to the morgue and then divided up amongst the competing vultures of the funeral parlours who'd wheedle the last pounds of worth from the corpses and sell them back to the family for burial or cremation. I could see it all; the start of the clean-up operation at least. This was a place where you went from being of the utmost importance to that of utter worthlessness in a second. And this is where Thinman was. I guess it was pretty serious then. <br />
It was a youngish looking blond doctor I found. He looked like he was just coming to the end of a 48hr shift, like chunks of his own existence had departed with each death he had called. He pulled a hand down his face in an attempt to liven himself up to my question, but it only served to make his eyes look even more tired and baggy. Just the concentration needed to retain and think of the name I had given him seemed to drain him some more. He walked on a few steps, the smell of cheap hand soap hanging in his slip stream. He poked his head into a small, badly lit room full of supplies. “Do we have a Mr Messinger with us?” he asked to whoever was in the room. <br />
“Saul Messinger,” I reminded the doctor. <br />
At those words there came a noise from a nearby ward and out came Thinman's brother. When he saw it was me who was asking after his brother he approached, shouting: “Get him the fuck outta here!” And then directing his words at me: “You here with more fucking heroin to finish him off? Come on, speak up you poisonous, selfish cunt!”<br />
I had no words to reply to that and it would have been pointless besides. Thinman was in his mid 30's and if he wanted smack in the hospital then that was his call. As a friend and addict, knowing what withdrawals were like, I was obliged to do that for him if it was what he wanted. Seeing the anger rising in Thinman's brother, the young doctor stepped in front of me, blocking the route.<br />
“Don't worry, I'm not gonna fucking hit him! But you need to get him the fuck outta here NOW. He's not family... he's not Saul's brother as he claims. He's just a low-life fucking junkie, out for his own gain and not fussed about who he helps kill in pursuit of it.” <br />
“I came to make sure Saul was alright,” I said.<br />
“Yeah, sure ya did. Alright for what? HEROIN? That stuff almost killed him, you imbecile.”<br />
“Dunno what you're talking about,” I said, “I didn't bring him any heroin.”<br />
“Well, there's only been two visitors and I sure as hell didn't bring it in to him! Now fuck off. You're not wanted here.”<br />
I didn't argue. Sure, I was curious to know exactly what had happened to Thinman with the heroin I had brought him up, but the last thing I needed was the police turning up, shaking me down and pulling me in for half a day. And so I gave no response, just turned and left from the way in which I had come. Thinman had my number. If he needed me he would call. <br />
Thinman never did call. It was almost a month before I saw him again. Even then I barely recognized him. Pacing around outside the Texaco garage, waiting on the same contact as I, he looked like he had shrunk in half. He had only been out three days. <br />
“What the fuck happened?” I asked.<br />
“Fuck knows. Feel like shit, like I'm dying. Got no appetite, fuck all and what I do manage to swallow I bring back up. Feels as if my bloods still sick or something.”<br />
“And the arm?”<br />
“What's left of it is Ok... doing better than me. Still infected but is on the mend at least.”<br />
“And you're back on the gear then? You didn't think it was maybe better to not start up again after those weeks without?”<br />
“You know how it is. I've done so much fuckin' damage now it seems pointless to stop. It won't save me any days now. At least it takes the world away.”<br />
I looked out into the world that Thinman was talking about. It was a shit one, alright. Autumn was on us proper and the city was damp from rain, a mist of vapour hanging in the distance below drab skies. In times gone by they would have piled corpses up and carted them away on days like this. I breathed in the air, wanting to extract some freshness from it, some cool that would unclog me of the smog and pollution and poison for a moment. But all I could taste was petrol, that and Thinman, mixing together and making me feel sad and ill, cars with rain speckled windows crawling by every now and again. Thinman was dying, that was obvious. Whether it was the botulism and septicaemia that was the cause, his liver, or just the life we led, who knew? What I did know was that the world which turned Thinman's stomach also turned mine, and together, on a low-hung autumn day, we stood outside the Texaco garage, our eyes flitting about this way and that, waiting impatiently for the only cure we knew. <br />
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- - -<br />
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<i>Thanks as ever for reading, Shane. X</i><br />
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Shane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com43tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-88801845314715545412015-09-14T01:57:00.000+02:002015-09-14T01:57:32.815+02:00Audio Recording - So Dog We Were Too<br />
Exclusive recording of my text So Dog We Were Too. Narrated by Tulip. Music courtesy of Zbigniew Preisner.<br />
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<i>I thought of the father pimping out his handicap daughter, of thé drunk dancing alone and pissing himself, of the hordes of social shrapnel inching their wounded bodies and minds down to the homeless shelter, of the whores outside MacDonald's sucking on straws and swallowing milkshake, of the violence consuming so many people and the bitterness and corruption which reigns. In the vile regurgitated odour of red wine and vomit, in a deserted carriage of the late night metro, I stood alone and thought of all these things. </i><br />
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A new Memoires text 'The Devil's Pause' coming very soon... Shane. XShane Levenehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03863320007737754609noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9193316819499446317.post-46125428815537558152015-08-12T21:51:00.002+02:002016-03-11T22:06:48.639+01:00Carry On up to Cuire Street<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;">Write us a little something as we drive, Peter says. I think he means with a pen and paper, but then he is turned around and stretching off somewhere into the back of the old camper van. I watch the road as the van moves on with no driver, Peter's swollen feet in flipflops on the pedals. Before re-taking the wheel he dumps an old typewriter down into my lap.</span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"> "What the fuck?" I say, staring at it in terror. "I've never used a typewriter."</span><br />
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"Whaa? Never used a typewriter? Every writer needs a typewriter!"</span><br />
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"Not this one," I say. "But I'll give it a bash, as long as it doesn't fucking come to life on me."</span><br />
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"Paper please, My most precious Darling Love*,</span><span style="line-height: 22.8px;">" Peter says to Katia, who is sat in the back.</span><br />
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"We don't have any, Mon Eternal Amour*"</span><br />
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Peter turns, looks around and points. "Rip a page outta that, if you'd be so kind, my One & Only"</span><br />
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I hear a page being torn out from some book. An aged yellowed leaf is handed through to Peter. Peter is smoking and driving and is now also feeding the paper into the typewriter. When he's done he lifts the front cover and redresses the ink spools, winds them back some. Then he adjusts the carriage and sends it sliding along with a rattle to a fresh paragraph. A little bell tinkles. I briefly consider Peter's sanity and prepare to type. I sincerely hope he is not sane. Sane drivers are just about more dangerous than any others – especially in France; especially in the rain. With the loaded typewriter sat on my lap I loosen my fingers and concentrate over how to start this thing. I decide to open up with a line that we could both relate to – travelling and writing. I type the opening letter of the opening word and four typebars spring forward and jam together. Without taking his eyes off the road Peter's right hand leaves the gearstick, unclogs the bars and knocks them back down into their beds. He must be used to having fools besides him doing that, I think. I tell myself to slow down and type with a little more care. Outside it is raining - plump, healthy splodges from a dirty afternoon sky. The rain soaks the city in seconds. We cross the first of the city's rivers. The water is green and beautiful. "Look how green and beautiful the river is," Peter says. "Waa." I nod. I know those waters very well, better than Peter and they now flow with time and loss and make me sad. Across the bridge lies traffic and the city square. Way up over is the hill. There is a feint mist rising up from its face. We are closed in against the world, condensation around the rim of the windows. Peter wants me to write and so I write. I stare at the typewriter and I look at the page and I am not thinking of anything but the words which come. In my concentration Peter disappears and Katia disappears and the van disappears. The city and all its tragedy and filth snakes right into my soul. I feel a familiar shade of darkness descend upon me. The rain lashes down outside. I am alone; we are all alone. I take a drag of my cigarette and I write...<br />
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Peter only wanted a paragraph. Something to capture that small moment. He collects mementoes and makes them. He reads what I have written. "You must read it," he says. "I'll accompany you and Katia will record." I nod. In an old clapped out Citroen Challenger camper van, in the centre of Lyon, illegally parked, Peter climbs over into the back and straps on a guitar. Katia takes up her phone and records, the opening close up of the drizzle on the windowscreen directed by Peter. I set my small text up on the dash and set the voice recorder on my phone. Peter plays his unmistakeable scratchy jangle of notes. I hear his nails slap down the strings and rap the body of his guitar as he strums. I stare out into the rain and await my cue.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/218797593&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%"></iframe><br />
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<i> We write as we go, paper in the ready and loaded. Lyon cries her heart out through the middle of summer. Up on the hill there's a creeping sadness. People are lonely; we're all lonely – and the loneliest man of them all awaits us. We drive and we drive and it just goes on. Peter says that sometimes it is better to hoot and steam through rather than to stop. It's true. Sometimes to stop is to never be able to start again. God, I hope I never stop. Death terrifies me still. There are three people as I write and we all want to live with a passion. It rains and the city smells like an old ulcerated dog has just crept by and is off some place to die. The French rain streams down the gutter and takes our Gauloises cigerette ends wtth it. The Bureau de Change will save our souls today but God only knows for how much longer. Just keep going, Peter says. This is and always was our mantra. We drive on through the rain, going nowhere very fast. </i></span><br />
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Peter sings an improvised tune using the title of my book as his inspiration as Katia de Vidas recites some text from The Body of Ewan Salt. Lyon, Rue de Cuire (Queer Street!) .<br />
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</span> <span style="line-height: 22.7999992370605px;"><i>Thanks as ever for reading/watching this one of audio/visual post. A new Memoires text will be put up very soon... Shane. X</i></span></div>
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Memoirs of a Heroinheadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17401281805284793756noreply@blogger.com8