A Gun to my Head

I'M IN TROUBLE WITH MY LANDLORD for being too scruffy. At least I think I am. Downstairs told me this. Downstairs and I do not get on. This is the trouble I have and I can tell you but it doesn't make anything any clearer or less How It Is.

Last time I was in trouble with my landlord (my old landlord) basically for living in a mess, for not coping. A way worse mess than this one, the day I had to go down the council to sort out my housing I had this weird feeling, as if someone had put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger. Instead of feeling pain or stress I just felt unreal. I could not engage with anything. I knew what was happening, but it was not real to me.

That is how I feel now. I should be in a frantic scrabble to clear up, but I'm not. In a way I don't care about anything at all. If I get chucked out I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to go on holiday. Or vacation, to you Americans. I will take as much methadone as I can carry. I know where to buy it so I can get a week's supply up front at high doses. This I will cut down drastically on the road. Detoxing makes me hyper. Hyper makes me pace. Pacing is walking. I can get a lot of travelling done by detoxing. If I feel suicidal I'm lucky because there's snow. I need only go to sleep outside and I might be lucky enough to die. But I'm not into dying, as I said I'm going on holiday. I won't say where because people will try and follow me or spy on me. But I'm going.

If I stay here I will turn my home into an operating theatre. But I'm almost hoping to get chucked out. Because I'm fed up of my old life. The problems and non-problems I thought were caused by heroin seemingly aren't. I always knew this was the case. Heroin was only a mask, masking the reality of a person not coping. I don't need heroin to dissociate myself. I don't need heroin as an anaesthetic. I only feel real pain in withdrawal or extreme mood states. My ordinary depression is usually mild enough just to blank me. Most of the time. But I have a nasty tendency to cycle through various mental states and into one when I realize with full weight and intensity What I Have Done. And then I feel very deeply negligent and sorry. Sorry for the hurt I have caused others. And sorry for myself. Usually I don't feel for myself, but sometimes I do, and I hate feeling anything.

So I can live without heroin. Heroin was just a waste of time. I want off these opiates, they're only disabling an already disabled person. The sooner I'm off them the better. If I get made homeless I will have an A1 chance to come off because I will be nowhere near my methadone pharmacy, nowhere near the drug clinic or my "loving mother" who only wants to salve her conscience ~ or the rest of my family who do love me but I pity them for it. I wish I could kill their pain without killing them. (Maybe they would be better off on heroin!)

See I feel sad now because I have written the words of a badly messed up, lost person and I feel that. I can't accept that I am that person. Because if I could I would already be working not to be like that and I cannot do it. I try. I do try, but something invisible and very powerful, like bulletproof glass... something stops me. I wish I had never been born. I hate knowing the World. I don't care what the world knows about me, but I don't want to know the world any more. I never asked to live like this. I never asked to know what I know. I am the sort of idiot who would have bitten that forbidden fruit in Eden. I know. Drugs like Ecstasy, acid, ketamine, mushrooms opened up an understanding of something that is inexplicable to someone who hasn't been there. A kind of knowledge of good. A vision of paradise (on Ecstasy especially). So did heroin: an understanding of Evil. And a desperation you never knew was possible. And feeling it every single day for years on end.

I don't want to know. I don't want to know anything any more. I wish the anaesthesia would come back.

As a pancake ...

I COULD HAVE CALLED THIS POST MISERYGUTS but y'all know that's who I am (at least half the time). FLAT AS A PANCAKE. Yeah. I blame Sunday, the Sunday blues not wearing off. I'm supposed not to be drinking but I can't do without drink. I need a Valium or two. I haven't taken Valium in weeks, so it might work. Then again Valium is for anxiety and I don't feel anxious. I feel depressed. I would score gear but do not trust it any more. And I'm not sullying my body with anything less than A grade China White*, that's what I'm telling the dealers. (Not that China White felt any different from decent B, it just doesn't sting my collapsing veins.) Now I'm left without gear but with the pointless bleak emptiness of it all.

Snow and ice is all over the news. It's snowy outside but not too slippery. It's not cold here. One good thing about shivering is, it's supposed to make you lose the flab (I once heard). I have gone off food, it's a waste of time. I bought two carrier bags full. Mince pies. Cornish ice cream. Pasta. Broccoli. I shoved it in the fridge/freezer.

The only good thing about today was sleeping through most of it till 3:30pm. Got up at 4. I wish I could sleep 24 hours. If I'd lived in Victorian times I'd never have been on heroin and I'd hopefully have died of some infectious disease. When I was homeless I thought that was the most natural way of living: in darkness, squalor and cold. Somehow I never managed to adapt to living in a house again, I never got myself together. Don't know why.

All this hypocritical crap about Xmas is on TV. I hate Xmas. Absolute waste of time. The only good thing about Xmas was having an eighth of gear to get through by boxing day.

Heroin never made me happy.

The drugs don't work.

*Number four heroin, often called China White no matter what its origin (Burma, Colombia or Afghanistan (yes it is produced there), is very rare here. More common was a type of white rock gear called white heroin base, an intermediate product between Brown smoking base and injection quality white heroin hydrochloride. I don't really want China White. And I meant "telling" in the future tense. I haven't spoken to any dealer since I stopped. I just love being bloody-minded.

Wasted Talent

A TALENT was originally a weight of silver or gold and hence a sum of money. The word entered our language via the Parable of the Talents in the Bible. (Matthew 24:14-30; Luke 19:12-28.)

Spiritual interpretations aside a Talent is something valuable which it's up to us to use and not take for granted. Talented people have made the world a lot of what it is. Talent can change the world again.

Talent should never be wasted.

I was wondering why I felt increasingly uptight about what I saw as other people's "waste of talent". Michael Jackson who could sing so well hardly ever really showed off his voice. He was also a more than capable actor (see yesterday). But he never starred in a feature-film. MJ was said to have a thing about ET, and he knew Stephen Spielberg. Imagine what could have been achieved if Jacko and Spielberg had got together...

As we all know, Michael Jackson's career was all but ruined by child abuse allegations. He achieved more than any other musical star of his or any other generation. And yet...

He died in a drugged-out haze.

If you want to hear him singing a song named Morphine, click here.

Whitney Houston's voice was one of the wonders of the world. (Far better than Mariah Carey. Screaming an octave over top C is not a talent. That's like having extra long fingers or a third nipple. That ain't music, that's freakery.)

I'm more than amenable to middle of the road music, though it's not always my favourite. The only Whitney song I really like, from the first half of her career is the Dolly Parton cover I Will Always Love You. This morning (for some reason) I had Saving All My Love for You swirling round my head when I was buying Value Thin Bleach (20p) from Morrisons...

In the 1990s, having made her name and fortune, she went R&B and did put down a few tracks that are not only memorable but good. (One Moment in Time is memorable, but just did not do it for me.)

She was recently on tour in Europe. The press coverage was nearly all the same. The voice is gone.

The word is, she lost her voice to crack. Though she famously declared to Dianne Sawyer: "crack? We don't do that. Crack is cheap. I make two much money to ever do crack. Crack is whack."

A phrase that has come back to haunt her...

I could give legions of examples of hugely Talented people who made careers in average films, throw-away music... whatever, whatever.

This is not to mention the endless multitudes who can sing, act, create in various ways (I'm focusing on showbusiness because it's common ground. Y'all know what I'm talking about. "High" art I often find not only pretentious but irrelevant...)

I once lived in a house in a bourgeois suburb of London that wasn't posh but "happening". Television faces drank in the local pub. I passed actors and musicians in the street. At one point I sat opposite Annie Lennox on the top deck of the bus. A car once zoomed past with comic actress Maureen Lipman's head (for some reason) sticking out of the passenger seat window. I dunno who she was looking for. One time Phil Mitchell from EastEnders was at the bar. Certain friends kept ribbing me to go up and point out that Phil ("the hardman of Albert Square and a nasty drunk) was on the waggon. I didn't dare. I subsequently heard stories about this actor, more than once, waving £20 notes at the homeless and snatching them away... Mark Fowler (another EastEnders character ~ EastEnders is, or was, Britain's most popular TV programme, with top episodes attracting Royal Wedding-style 20,000,000 viewing figures)... Yeah Mark Fowler. He gave me £1.67 when I was begging outside Sainsbury's.

My point being that everyone in my house and many people in the area all around it, all wanted to make something of themselves. In a short space of time we had two actors, a singer, a yoga teacher, a maker of luxury furniture (it was just under £1000 a dining chair) and a trainee Alexander teacher were all in this house. I was the writer.

What makes me sad is that the singer, who I think did have beautiful warm, pure voice was a lush. She came in drunk most nights. She hung out with people one of the famous pirate radio stations. This was 1996, when the UK style of garage was all over pirate FM stations, soon to emerge overground. She could have been one of the UK's first "urban" artists. I handed her a Madonna biography hoping she might take inspiration and a few tips, because I could have told her more about the music business than she seemed to know. You need an experienced manager, being an obvious one. Madonna took Michael Jackson's old manager. The singer gave it back complaining Madonna was a tart and then mentioned she couldn't see her manager that morning. He was signing on the dole. Then I despaired. This girl hadn't a clue. She thought talent was a passport to automatic success, it is not. What's that phrase about 1% inspiration 99% perspiration..?

None of the people I knew from that time are now famous. Our actress got into a Spice Girls video. The Spice Girls were the phenomenon of the moment. A week later Oasis phoned wanting her to play violin (that is presumably mime) in a video...

So it was all exciting. But in the end not one of these people made a name for themselves. The person with the most drive had the least talent (a sad mismatch). The actor downstairs did get a speaking part in EastEnders though it was only one or possibly two episodes. As far as I know they all gave up and do normal jobs.

Which leaves me, feeling uptight about the paths other people took when they "could have done so much more"... what's the saying? One finger points forward, three point back?

I've lost an entire decade to heroin. The time before that was an odd-crossover period lasting maybe three years when I dabbled increasingly and at two points got myself tiny habits. But I knew what I was doing was not good. I had seen the utter despair of dead-end addicts. I knew the local beggars, "ticket touts" and homeless.

I was buying used one-day travelcards for £1-2. (I think they were £2 before 8pm or some set time; £1 thereafter.) Even the homeless lived by rules. These ticket touts congregated at tube stations. When a train emptied out it was "Finished with your travelcard?... Finished with your travelcard..?" Then people came in "Do you want a travelcard?...Want a travelcard?" You could go anywhere in London free on bus, train or tube until about 2am. A travelcard then cost £3.50, so to get one for a pound was a bargain. It meant I could go visiting in Hackney, Stepney and West Hampstead, where I sat round drinking red wine, eating middle-class Bulgar wheat veggie type food. I wasn't vegetarian but only knew how to cook veggie. I hated the thought of handling dead flesh...

... Anyway. It was through these ticket touts, who were all junkies, that I got introduced to heroin. I saw the life, I saw the misery. I wanted to try it to see what the fuss was all about (I had tried it once years before but took so many other drugs including acid that night, I had no idea what was doing what...) So I tried it, and still wondered what all the fuss was about. It certainly didn't seem worth going homeless for. And I couldn't understand why they didn't just stop doing it but they were like automatons. Get up, probably feeling a bit sick. Use. Feel OK. Go out. Beg. Score. Beg a bit more. Score again. Go to tube station for early evening rush hour. Sell travel cards. go down West End. Beg up huge amounts of money. Score from late night dealer, heroin and crack. Pipe late into the night. Knock self out with huge hit. Sleep till late morning. And so it starts again.

I was never into West End begging ~ around theatreland and the tourist spots. You got endless hassle from police. Some people begged inside the actual underground stations down there, but again you were liable to get arrested. I begged in the suburbs where you got less money, but hardly any hassle. And the dealers were all nearby.

Someone once pointed out to me that what had started out as a joke "I got drunk with the homeless" had turned into a reality. "I am homeless. Plus I'm a junkie." I did feel strangely accepted by these addicts ~ as I never really was by the shoplifting and prostitution contingent (they were a totally different crowd). Even in rehab shoplifters looked down on beggars. What's that saying now...

Rich man, poor man, beggarman ... THIEF!

Everyone I knew who begged did it for the same reason: they didn't want to steal. Or sell their body. (Though judging by the state of a lot of them, they'd have had a job doing that anyway...)

SO! All this happened. And now I'm here. And I still have some talent. And I got keranged round the head with three ideas in two days.

Because Talent is not to be taken for granted, not to be wasted. A waste of talent is a crying shame. So is a waste of a life.

I will not go on about what I'm doing or want to do because I've done that before and nothing happened. So I'm just doing it.

Gotta go, it's quarter past five in the morning and I need a drink...

My Love Is Your Love 1998 ~ already she's sounding hoarse...
Contains the line: if I'm homeless on the streets, and I'm sleeping in Grand Central station it's ok if you're sleeping with me....
Thank God that never became a reality.



"Crack is whack... to Dianne Sawyer"



To Oprah. The heavy drugs started after The Bodyguard (explains why she followed the biggest hit of her career with... nothing). "I was freebasing cocaine, but only with weed in a joint". Then she mentions heroin and cocaine speedballing. (I used to luuurve doing that. That's why it took me two years from deciding to give up crack to actually doing it 100%.)



Fascinating Link of the Day: Michael Jackson's Unreleased Material

Resolutions!

DO YOU LIKE PRINCESS MARGARET (the late Princess Margaret) with her drink and fag? I was sure every other photo I'd find would have her with drink in one hand, cig in the other: that's how I remember her. Seems in actuality she was more discreet than that - as you can see the rum-&-Coke's been quickly stashed behind her and the fag put down in the bottom of the frame but not quite out of shot... Rumour even had it that Princess Margo's drunken dropped Dunhill that sparked the great Windsor Castle fire of 1992 though Buckingham Palace still vigorously denies this ...

Actually I am writing this on Sunday night the 30th of December. And I am all forlorn and lost-feeling and depressed. Hmmm. Also I've had the heating on and working so very successfully I am now sweltering...

Well, whatever: on to Resolutions.

I don't actually make New Year's resolutions these days, having always believed that just doing things, whatever the time of year is by far the best course of action. Also, January 1st is but an arbitrary date to me. I've always felt my personal New Year began around September - in line with the academic year.

Having said all that, here are some things I'd like to accomplish in 2008:

~ Finish Memoirs
~ Write Baying Gwendolina novel
~ Get 1000 hits a day on blog (as if - I think it would be easier to sell five million books and at least I'd get paid handsomely for that)
~ Learn to cook just like Chinese takeaway (and save £££s)
~ Move out of present craphole where I live (by choice; not eviction)
~ Cease all nonprescribed drugtaking and immoderate drinking
~ Give up smoking

If I manage just one of these I'll call it an achievement; all 7 and it's a genuine miracle!

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2008 EVERYONE!
MAY IT BE FAR BETTER THAN YUKKY OLD 2007!!

Aargh! I am sposed to finish here. And yet the emptiness is killing me. So here's a poem I really like. (From Shakespeare.)

Fear no more the heat of the sun
nor the furious winter's rages;
thou thy wordly task hast done,
home art gone, and ta'en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the frown of the great
thou art past the tyrant's stroke.
Care no more to clothe and eat;
to thee the reed is as the oak.
The sceptre, learning, physick must,
as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the lightning flash,
nor th' all-dreaded thunder-stone;
fear not slander, censure rash;
thou has finished joy and moan.
All lovers young, all lovers must
consign to thee and come to dust.

No exorciser harm thee
nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee;
nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consumation have
and renownèd be thy grave.

Cymbeline 4:2:259-282


The LORD is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
he makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside the still waters.
He resores my soul;
he leads me in the paths of righteousness
for his name's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil;
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the prescence of my enemies;
you annoint my head with oil;
my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life;
and I will dwell in the house of God
for ever.

Psalm 23


R: If I profane with my unworthiest hand
this holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
my lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
J: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
which mannerly devotion shows in this;
for saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
and palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
R: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
J: Aye, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
R: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do!
They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
J: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.
R: Then move not while my prayer's effect I take. - (they kiss; woo!)

from Romeo and Juliet 1:5:93-106...

After 3am

I KNOW WHAT my real Resolution should be: to have some respect for myself. Because some couple of years ago, feeling suicidal and yet unwilling, when it came to it, to actually perform the act. Though even the train drivers (well, one driver in particular somehow saw into my eyes at 90+ mph. I wasn't being stupid, either. Wasn't acting out or hanging off the edge of the platform.) He just saw my eyes and frantically waved his arms across each other as if to say "DON'T!"

Something else along those lines happened another time.

And I lost all respect formyself. Let everything go. RAtcheted up my beloved bank account, which allowed me a Visa debit card with holographic flying wings, right far past the max until the entire account was suspended on me. I had kept that card through thick and think and the pits of homelessness and addiction. It represented my future and a nominal place as a respectable member of society. I was the ONLY junkie I knew who'd managed to hold on to such a relic of past life. Most had never had Visa cards. Because, being fulltime junkies since 18 or even 16, they'd never had jobs or normal lives...

I used to cradle this Visa card in my hand, as I slouched on a damp mattress all alone by flickering candle light in a raindripping cavern of an abandoned industrial building. I would tilt the card and watch the birdie flying free.

While I lived out this subterranean life...

And every day, when I woke I felt like I was lying face-down on the pavement, banging my head on the ground. "This does not work. I cannot do this any more."

And so I hit rock bottom every day. And yet lived on.

FOR MY SINS.

***

Video of the Day:
Queens' Speeches Go International -
This one is the:
Dutch Queen's Speech!!

***

I was going to post lots more blarble but I've got Thai chicken babycorn egg fly lice wafting mysterious oriental aromas out of a plastic bag so I must go back and devour it!!

***

Meanwhile, New Year has kicked off in Australia, New Zealand and many South Sea Islands already. It's nine minutes to 5pm as I write... Japan to get it very soon... America and Canada, you are still late morning in New York and the eastern seaboard; not even 9am in Vancouver and LA...

I will not be able to get to everybody's pages in time to say this individually, so I'll say it again here:-

HAVE A MARVELLOUS 2008 EVERYBODY!!!

STOP PRESS ~ 19/01/10 ~ someone put the most disgusting picture on my hyperlink here. If you click on this you either get needle and candle or a starfish. (Clue: not sea variety...)

Friday 13th: Evil Among US

IF ONLY I'D BEEN AWARE OF TODAY'S DATE earlier, things may have made more sense.

My landlord went ape and said he is chucking everyone out because our house is in chaos. Now he seems to have recinded (if that's the word..?) I think I have some leeway. Maybe a couple of days' grace. He told me to inform the council he's emptying this current house of everyone and we must all find somewhere new to stay via the council. The council knew nothing about this. So I'm none the wiser. I've started packing up my stuff to leave and if I do have to go, will go back out where I used to be. (Possibly the very same old building.) But we'll see what comes out of this weekend ...

That's all I can say about it really. No more details ...

Part 3

LONDON. CITY OF POSSIBILITIES. Arguably it is the Capital of Europe. When I came it was thee place to be in the entire world. London, to turn a phrase dropped by the Americans, was "swinging". Here they called it Cool Britannia.

Only I could play barely any part in this because I was ill. So badly run down I ahd to go to bed after a simple trip to the shops. And I could only buy one bag of shopping at a time, this I had to split in two, half in each hand, for the journey home.

I had a dull routine. As I say, of seemingly daily food shopping ... and that was about it. I did hit the West End a few times. But often, by the time I'd got there (it only took 20 minutes by tube!) I was too knackered out for any adventures or fun.

I battled on nonetheless and didn't even tell a lot of people I had "M.E." as they tehn iked to call it in this country. The M means myalgic ~ muscle pain; the E is encephalomyelitis ~ ie an inflamation ("itis") of the brain and nervous system. Basically it is exhaustion, (mental as well as physical), depression and constant low-grade flu-like symptoms; ie aching muscles, etc. At the worst times the "brain fog" as they call it, was so bad I felt like an old-style television when the aerial lead falls out the back. My brain was hissing with snow and all I could do was lie down, eyes closed, and let it ease up a bit.

Even when people did know (and they didn't really know how I felt. Actually nobody really asked) I rarely made an issue of it. Which caused problems with friendships. I remember someone having a go at me for cancelling a party (the party went on, only without my personal appearance. As if that was so important!) I felt more rough than usual ~ but as I say I was used to feeling rough. Only when I happened to take my temperature and saw it was 102F did I realize not only that I had the real flu but that somehow, on this occasion, my sickness was more justified. Because it was objectively real. Long ago I got my head round the fact that things that happen to me are not real when others fail to understand them. I think that is partially what is meant by the trippers' phrase "concensus reality"...

Anyway I had the flu and was very upset that I was ment to soldier on as I normally did. But when I chose not to a massive issue was made of it. Most people do not have to explain away not doing anything because they have flu. Being ill is enough. But not in my case. I'd handled the situation that badly that somehow my facts would not justify other people's matters.

Over the months I did go on a few big nights out. As I said: I soldiered on, did all I could to appear "normal" (I always thought it a bit sick to get a buzz from identifying oneself "sick" as some sick people seem to do. But that's another issue entirely. I remember being on the dancefloor, standing there as the party kicked off around me. Looking round at my generation ~ young, fit popel having the time of their lives. And yet, as I did so, I could actually feel the life and all my energy draining out of me.

One compliment I do recall receiving (if you want to call it that) was that I had never been seen drunk. Haha!! I always had the will, once I'd started drinking and felt the effects coming on, to check myself: "thus far; no further" and to keep to such self-appraisals. I hated being drunk. Associated it with the Toilet-Duck and crap smells of lavatory bowls as I puked my guts out. No way. Ukk. Drugs, when I took them, were always timed, dosed, planned. I took ecstasy maybe once over my entire first two years in London. Magic mushrooms a few times. Cannabis I vary rarely dabbled in ~ it just did not suit me any more.

This all changed one morning in spring 1998 when I opened the mail to find a free ticket to Escape From Samsara! Samsara means the Buddhist wheel of constant rebirth. But in this case it meant Friday night's trippy trancefest at the massive Fridge nightclub in Brixton, South London. My Australian cousin said she'd come with, couldn't make it; packed me off with a group of her friends anyhow. They were all cool people, my cousin's friends. They say a man (or woman) is known by his or her friends and I must say hers are a true credit to her. Nicest bunch of people I've met anywhere in my life and that's the honest truth ... Anyhow ... We went to this massive noisy cigarette smoke-filled club. I ddi take ecstasy again. Spent nearly the entire night in teh chill-out room feeling fantastic. met a girl called Lola from Melbourne who was about five years younger than me. Lola na dI went out for only ten weeks; but when the crux came ~ did I give up this sparkly new life of joy and celebration and go backwards or did I press on alone. I just resolutely went on. Queueing for massive parties on my own, yet knowing once I got inside there would be five, ten ... eventually twenty or more friends. A whole new life, as I say, but it came at a price. I was pretending to be OK when really I wasn't. When the pills wore off, when the wekend eneded, I'd have to spend days in bed, alone, recouperating. And often depressed and crying. These tears were a big part of the reality of the party life for a lot of people. Somehow they rarely got talked about.

AT EARLY EVENINGS MY LOCAL TUBE STATION became a gathering point for an entire alternative netherworld of crusties, drinkers and the misfits who roamed (and all too often lived on) the streets. Many appeared scruffy and rough yet somehow seemed free of some of society's constraints. They paid for this in poverty and pain. Gradually I got to known them because a prime source of nightly income came from sitting on the station steps and begging used one-day travelcards from the returning rush-hour, then selling these back to evening and night travellers for £1.50 to £2 each, depending on the time (there was an unofficial 9pm "watershed" when the price reduced. After 11pm it went down to £1.)

For one thing, the people I met on the station steps were far more personable than initially expected. Many were artists or "failed" musicians. Some were shockingly intelligent. (One guy in particular had messed up mid-PhD to become a homeless junkie. Drugs can affect anyone. Just don't take them!) I felt I fitted in with this crowd in a way I never had done anywhere else. For one thing I never pretended to be more knowledgeable or experienced in their way of life than I actually was, so they respected, I suppose that at least what they saw with me was what they got. Also it was OK among these people not to be feeling all right and not to be hapy. And yet to be accepted for how you did feel This, somehow, seemed a massive liberation.

I took up drinking on the station steps. At first it was nearly a joke: "I got drunk with the homeless 'crew'" (though I remained averse to actually being so intoxicated I was out of control). I began to dabble in their drugs. Valium, temazepam, the occasional Rohypnol; Dexedrine; crack and heroin. Gradually my useage increased in frequency from once a month or so, totally unplanned, to a couple of times a week. But never every day. And I thought I was being clever by avoiding drugs that were cross-tolerant on consecutive days ~ ie if I had heroin on Monday, Tuesday would be a Valium day ~ and so on. Heroin I was very scared of getting hooked on. Vivid proof of the worst kind was all around me of what the drug could do. One guy had lost one leg and was determinedly injecting right into the enormous rotting open sore on the other. When I first met him I thought he'd had an accident, unable to get to the loo on time because he was on cruches. No. This stench was the putrefaction of his own living flesh. It was disgusting. But once one leg had gone, so did his self-respect. Recently, after an absence of several years, he showed up again in my "manor". His remaining leg is still rotting, though it did used to get cleaned up periodically by doctors. I've not seen him for several months now and I've a nasty feeling he's dead.

As I say, I had reason to fear heroin addiction.

I did take a lot of Valium one long, hot summer. I enjoyed the muscle-relaxing effects they gave me. I was often in low-grade pain from the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Anyway ~

Heroin.

That's what people want to hear about, I guess.

I was daydreaming just now, before I put pen to paper, that if a poll could be gathered of users' private thoughts on first experimenting with heroin, ideas along the lies of "is that it?!?" and "is this what all the fuss is about?!?..." would top the list of reactions.

I felt peaceful, warm and sickly-sweet to the point of nausea. But I managed not to be sick, which was a small triumph. My first time with crack I did have my head down the toilet. You have to persist with these substances. They're not always user-friendly to start off with ...

Heroin is best compared to a big fluffy blanket. At first, because you don't actually need it, you might feel too hot and slightly uncomfortable. But as time goes on and you become inexorably acclimatized to the stuff, you eventually find, on throwing off the blanket, that the freezing cold world is unbearable. You hurry to wrap up warm again. Sometimes, perhaps if you got badly chilled, you might promise never to do without your blanket ever again~ which is what I have done. I'm far better at keeping promises to use than the ones I've made to clean up.

The process of addiction takes time and persistance. No way can anyone get addicted to any drug from one try. Admittedly, to the easily-impresed, the image of the junkie as a kind of anarchist or rebel with a cause (the cause is always to score more gear so you don't get sick!) can be just as intoxicating as the drug.

I am exhausted from scribbling pages and pages of this. It's dark outside and I've all this still to type in ... I do apologize but this will have to continue tomorrow when I can hopefully give at least some meaningful account of precisely what led on to what and how this heroin achieved the iron grip it has over me still to this day ...

Till tomorrow ...