Two People Disturb Me

A VOICE WAS CALLING me this afternoon. A posh (male) voice that I did not recognize. Calling me by my Christian name. (Maybe I had schizophrenia.) At some point this character got into my house and came upstairs to knock on my door. Assuming he was hiding there, I gathered keys, money, valuables together and shoved them in my pockets, opened the door: nobody there.

Venturing downstairs, nobody to be seen or heard. I did not open the front door, though. For all I knew this could be bailiffs or anything. Bailiffs will try and trick you by calling your first name in a familiar name to trick you into opening doors. They know all the cons and people don't admit it to their mates but of course they fall for them. Bailiffs wouldn't try these techniques on otherwise!

Ten minutes passed and again a soft knocking at my door. I demanded to know who it was and a wellknown shoplifter (he is about as famous, in a Dick Turpin kinda way, as any petty criminal gets to be in local circles) answered me. Very reluctantly I let him and his public school accomplice in. It was the accomplice, who is a nice lad from a posh background (and I bet his family give him absolutely f-all money or support) who had been calling me. That's why I couldn't place the voice. Unfamiliar because he's not someone I normally see except rapidly passing on (his) way back from expeditions and to or from liberating the financial value of purloined goods. They sat on my bed talking about prisons, nerve damage, hitting arteries and fights with women. It was mostly Da Man who talked while accomplice stayed quiet. Da Man I know from a decade ago when he was dealing. I gave my first or second ten pounds to a heroin dealer to him. So I remember this guy through dirt-tinted spectacles as the onset of my scuzzy habit. What else can I say??

Today all is upon me, all is stress, all too slow or else too fast, not there when it should be and intolerable when it is. It's one of those days. And these two characters were the last addition I welcomed. So I didn't make them feel welcome but they gave me a bit of free drugs and though accomplice was a little bothered, Da Man doesn't care what anyone thinks as long as his own needs are sorted, which they were in my presence. He got somewhere quiet to smoke his drugs. I hardly need mention what drugs they were but to put anyone who's wondering out of their contemplation he smoked crack and then some heroin. He has to smoke the heroin now because he's been on it for so very many years (at 55 years old) that inhaling vapours from tinfoil is the only way his body will tolerate taking heroin in. Why is everything about heroin so multiple-ly addictive? Rituals, routines, manoevres all become part of the brain-dulling day-in-day-out reality that is heroin addiction. A life minus excitement for the most part as it is minus pain. You take a drug that quashes both and life performs its own little rebound for you. The effects always speak for themselves far louder than anybody's testimony, if you get me.

I've decided to testify the details no-one else gives. Though it humiliates me often to do so, I think the unspoken aspects of the junkie life need speaking by someone.

And hence my blog ...