Part 10: Beggars Cannot Be Choosers

WHEN I ENDURED MY WEEK'S "TURKEY" at my family's place, there had been several motivating factors. Although I'd still (except on odd occasions) yet to exceed £10 a day even on heroin (which is very low compared to the "average" of £30 a day. Though having been in rehab and having had extra meds I suspect that £30 a day includes crack as well as heroin.) Anyway, even this £10 was causing financial problems. Bills were going unpaid. The rent shortfall that I'd always had to make up ~ this totted up week after week. My mobile (an early pay-&-go) went un-topped-up for ages. The landline phone I'd had specially installed years before ~ as my solitary luxury item ~ piled up with bills and eventualy had to be sacrificed all together. We still had a payphone in the hallway that took 10p pieces (10p to call a mobile!?! Those were the days!) so I was reduced once again to using that. Me who'd been the first in the house to get my own phone line put in. But ho-hum: there we go ... I was too scared of debt collectors and bad credit references and suchlike at this stage to risk defaulting in any spectacular fashion. I still had dreams of returning to a "regular" life with a car and a cred it rating. Etc. So I treid to behave financially. Eventually, though, the proverbial muck hit the fan. Psychologically I was in crisis. And my family refused to help me out at all. Except for getting some sort of treatment. They searched. I searched. Private doctors who prescribe methadone do not advertise (in Britain I don't even think they're allowed to) so without the luxury of word of mouth (and I still was pretty much keeping myself to myself, apart from the local crusties I didn't know any addicts. And crusties do not use private clinics. So we were all stumped there. Anyway: financially, straights were dire. Reluctantly I realized the time had come to start grafting for a living: to earn my own gear.

To this day I look back to that particular corssroads and wonder, whether they had bailed me out, if I'd finally have accepted that this addiction simply could not go on... not in conjunction with living any ostensibly "normal" life any more and whether I really would have learned my lesson and turned my back on the stuff for good back then. Addiction is such a slippery, deceptive state to be in that I long ago learned to distrust my own so-called motives. Time has a habit of turning these on their head or shining light from hitherto unforseen angles and nasty truths are illuminated. So I don't know. But I still believe it I had a genuine chance of reforming at that point. And I was refused help. Being in debt was my worst nightmare. I'd spent years scrimping to restore my finances to "respectability" folowing my student days fiasco. All I was asking was, in effect, one last chance. But to my family, I was asking for money to fund my habit. These two viewpoints would never meet and I was too tired to argue. No help wsa forthcoming: so cardboard sign in one hand: "HUNGRY: PLEASE HELP. Thank you. & God Bless xx" and a torn-off McDonald's cup in the other, I hit the mean streets of London to beg the general public.

Within a week my "gear" usage had trebled. To achieve "Dutch courage" I took to hitting the White Cyder before "going to work" ~ as I put it. A drinking habit that has remained with me to this day...

Soon, of course, I'd met a variety of new friends, dealers and connexions. Having used almost at times in my own "bubble" I was now literally on the streets. Which always makes me laugh when the so-called "urban" musical fraternity and various assorted trendies talk about "coming up from the streets" and "the sound of the streets" I know the sound of London's streets only too well and believe me there's no two-step to it and no breakbeat either. The true sound of The Streets is roadworks, pedestrians and the relentless passing of traffic to a background of wind, rain, sunshine, moonshine and the silence of 4am streetlights. That's the original sound of the streets, believe! The pavements are hard and scuttle with empty food wrappings, rin-tin-tinning tin-cans, losing lottery tickets and occasionally something beautiful. A rose dropped from a bunch. A photograph of somewhere gorgeous. A lost £20 note ... Londoners are inverterate litterbugs.

On the other hand I was provided with a constant supply of smokes ~ both in the form of bus-stop dogends and donation from the public. Drink kept me in enough haze not to be upset. When I did cry I only got more money: so that was a win-win situation. Sometimes I formally "begged" people: "Excuse me, sir, can you please spare me any loose change at all?" Other times I kept my mouth shut. The money still came. Sometimes I played the cheery cheekie chappie. Others, I was a picture of misery. I lost sight of when I was and was not acting. Feelings come in layers like the skins of an onion, and all actors do is delve beneath to a deeper truth. So when I was acting, I wasn't really lying. I was indeed destitute. Why else would anybody choose to sit on the streets asking for loose change??

Bad weather was a problem. People literally don't want to take theri hands out of their pockets. But come rain or shine, I was out there. I made my pitch my own. I never was impatient or resentful: the time would pass by anyhow, so why not spend it begging? And what else was I to do with it? As slow as my sluggishest days were, I always, but always made my money. More than once I remember waking cross-legged on the cold street, in a downpour, being nudged: opening my eyes to encounter a £10 or £20 note fluttering under my nose. The kindness of the general public ~ many of whom I'm sure had a good idea what had put me out on the streets ~ I will never forget. The kindness of so many strangers actually restored my confidence in human nature. It boosted my self-esteem. To be able to sit there ~ just to be there ~ selling nothing, doing nothing except saying to all intents and purposes "help me; I'm desperate" and to know that I could indeed rely on the kindness of strangers, however long it took in coming. Somehow this seemed to justify my existence as nothing else could. Life didn't feel so bad when I was getting money just for being myself. I can't explain it any other way ....

Begging was hardly an ambition fulfilled, yet for years it was my vocation in the most literal sense. Every day I heeded the calling to go back out and scrape another few notes together ...

While, as I say, my drug use trebled in a week; I also altered the way I took my drug of choice. My one drug was heroin. Heroin was the only thing I touched. I woke up, used whatever I had, felt poor and hungry; went out and begged. Scored, used, probably slept a bit more. Was always ready by four or five o'clock to go out for the evening rush-hour, which was by far the most lucrative time of day.

If you weren't there early enough you'd oftten have to fight for a good pitch.

One late afternoon, when I had "only" £5, I threw in my money with a Portuguese fellow at the local tube stateion . He was one of the last of the old-skool of travelcarders ~ folks who made their living begging used one-day Travelcards off homeward-bound shoppers and commuters and selling 'em on at half price to people who ahd somewhere to go in the evening time. Juan returned with a great chunk of white-rock "brown". I got a ghood deal for my £5. Took it home, cooked up a light-brown solution. This would not be anywhere near strong enough, I told myself, to bother subcutting or skinpopping. the pale and meagre hit would creep over me so gradually... I may as well not be bothering .... what was I thinking? ... glancing to the crook of my left arm where the veins were fresh and bulging .... I saw another bridge to cross right before my eyes ... why not? I'd degraded myself in every other way! I'd hurt my family more than I ever expected to in a lifetime. I'd flirted with deadly drugs and viruses already. Why not inject straight into that ready vein? What was to stop me? I'd get absolute maximum value from my £5.

I knew hte procedure. This wasn't to be the first intravenous "hit" but it was the first I'd self-administered. Clumsily, I fastened a belt round my upper biceps (later I learned that belts are only used on television. A shoelace makes a far better "tournie" ~ if one is needed at all...) ~ all sweating and a-trembling I slid the needle in. Pulled back the plunger. Dark blood rushed into the pale brown heroin. Then no blood. I'd lost the vein. I steadied up, found it again, loosened the awkward clip-jangling leather belt and resolutely pushed in the entire "hit". It was not weak. My first sensation was one I'd never experienced from injecting before: that of running naked through stinging nettles. Prickling all over. Thugh the prickles were rapidly dulled by the same drug that had initiated them... A warmth broke out all over me, gliding into a haze. My face felt hot and flushed. My eyes ~ when Iturned to the mirror ~ were "pinning" down, the pupils contracting to needle-points of nothing. I ensured that the belt was properly off and the needle safe as the heroin overtook me in a slumber. This we call gauwching here in London, though I'm sure junkies the world over have their own expressions for the desired effect of their drug... Gauwching rhymes with crouching. And it's a bizarre state of affairs where the lights stay blazing on all over the building ~ but quite patently nobody at all is home.

Unlike the blackout of true sleep where you tend to need to lie down, in this white-out state, the heroin gauwcher can often remain crouching ~ or standing ~ or bending ~ or kneeling would-be statue-like for long periods, rocking sometimes or twitching in gormless, teddy-bear eye-rolling Muppet-like poses. This is often comical ~ or sordid, depending on your viewpoint ~ to behold. Sometimes you can even hold conversations with the gauwcher, but these are never remembered afterwards. Other times normal sleep ~ so often missed, forsaken or mercilessly broken to bits at night ~ is replaced by this life-consuming gauwching ...

But as a doctor once tol dme ~ whether or not you remain nominally conscious after a dose, heroin is sending to much of the brain to sleep, you fail to realize while you're on it. Just as the eyes adapt to dark glasses, so the mind adapts to the brain's being drugged 24-7 with something even as powerful as heroin. However much of the drug you take, you somehow never feel as stoned as you appear on the outside. "Normality" to the brain, is of course whatever state of being it becomes most accustomed to. So if "stoned" becomes normal, the brain adapts automatically. This is part of the "never enough" syndrome at the heart of all severe addictions. When the drug state replaces normality and "stoned" becomes "normal" ~ how can you ever have more and more normality? It's just not possible.

You get used to drowsing whenever life's hectic rushing between one money-making scheme and another or a dealer or a place to use. Just like an old pensioner, I found msyefls napping on teh bus ...

My body so swiftly adapted to the particular effects of IV heroin that no other "route" of administration would do it for now on ...

Morning, noon, night and in between, I was hitting up ever-increasing doses. So that I soon found msyelf on a gram of the stuff a day. My habit had entered its most raging phase. Heroin heroin heroin heroin. Heroin with everything. Before. After. During. Life was inconceivable ~ basically not doable ~ without this heroin. I needed heroin to eat ~ the flush of warmth, the distancing from bodily sensation ~ somehow gave me bon appetit. I needed heroin to sleep. If I didn't have it, I slept fitfully until I did get it. Even if that meant waiting till late into the next morning (by which time I'd met the dealer and scored) for any proper rest .... And then I could not get up without heroin either. At my habit's raging worst I awoke evey single morning feeling sick and tired and chilled to the bone and nauseated and bellyacheing. And could not function at all (although I had to drag myself against this deathliness to walk or bus or otherwise do what had to be done to get money into dealer's hand and heroin into mine and very rapidly afterwards into my bloodstream... That morning hit was my equivalent to the "normal" person's cup of tea and cigarette ...

Raging. Raging. And so my habit raged mercilessly on ...

More tomorrow....