Sponsors Say the Darndest Things

Here are some of the more hilarious things my sponsors/counselors have said to me over the last year

'It wouldn't surprise me to find you in a secure unit in 2 years time'
(Terry)

'To use a therapeutic term, you're fucked'
(Terry)

'Nathan, you can't use more bad ideas to make bad ideas into good ideas'
(Dave)

'This is Nathan. He wants to sort his life out and go through the steps but he's a cunt and he wont listen'
(Tim)

Hey, Mr Pharmacist

I once knew this bent pharmacist, a 50-ish guy with kind eyes. He had a small pharmacy on the Kenton Road. He was still open once the ‘open’ sign had been flipped round. You had about 10 minutes after closing to buy illegal prescriptions. I would open the door with a fluttering heart and see him sat behind the counter flicking through an industry magazine. My hello was muffled by the thick scarf I was wearing. It was Spring but withdrawal had already started to refrigerate my bones. The briefest eye-contact and I heard him ask what I needed. He was good for the strong Codeine tablets and Valium. He never let you have any nice, old school Morphine though. That would have been pushing it.

He was forced to close the pharmacy to pay his way through a bitter divorce. It was quite a few years before I saw him again, his kind eyes now lost in valleys of wrinkles. He told me that his wife had walked into the back office and caught him with his trousers down and a junky girl on her knees. In the ensuing commotion the girl had run off with half his stock of Methadone and Morphine. His honesty had a beyond-caring quality to it that people tend to acquire after a certain age. My eye contact is better now and I sympathized, never sure if I was sympathizing with him or with myself for loosing a good source of high quality meds all those years ago.

Rainy Sunday

This is some damn satisfying rain. It’s long and fat. Less that 5 drops would leave a chest-sized wet blotch on your white t-shirt. The sky is drilling them down at the rate of machine-gun fire. And it is a Sunday. The only people leaving their houses today are those with family commitments they cannot get out of. The rest of us are smug indoors.Where the heating is turned up.

Poem - Things are Fucked Up Right Here

Their coffee cups drum

a monotonous rhythm

on canteen tables. Heads

hook over dual newspapers

they periodically peer up at flat

screen news. Their neck wrinkles

merge into crumpled kagool hoods.

All slim pickings and colorless food,

swallow it down with avian gulps.

Aging together on plastic chairs,

morning glory coffee escapes

and trickles from cracked lips.

Their talk tastes like the resentment

of two thousand wet weekends.

They return to staring damply,

muscles hang like stewed meat.

All badly upholstered skin and

etch-a-sketch teeth.

Drug Deal

The junky presses ‘call’ and connects to the dealer’s handset. His desperation is digitalized and relayed over the network to the dealer. He folds his ill-gotten cash into a palm-sized square so an easy payment can be made with an underhand shake. The drugs are rolled beetle balls and spat, spit covered, into the junky’s open palm. If the CCTV temperature is high and police ride nearby, the junky immediately places the bags in his mouth between gums and cheek. He will swallow the contents if apprehended.

Poem - Friend Cull

Reign oblivion

over ex-mates

and old face-aches

that remain saved

on your Facebook page.

Become Death without a scythe,

let your mouse click decide

with no regrets or emoticons

pile the corpses high.

New Lows

The last time I felt compelled to write about the new lows I had been reaching in terms of shameless drug use was just over a year ago. At the time, I had recently left a nicely paid job working in financial recruitment with sizable pay-off and a healthy cocaine habit. The free time and large bank balance lead to the cocaine use getting dangerously acute. Luckily, I ran out of money before blood-vessels in my nose. At this point I had moved up from scoring off a one-legged guy in Bethnal Green. I was seeing a wonderfully cheerful Jamaican man called Charlie (probably not his real name) for my party prescriptions. He sold excellent quality gear, and provided cheery Jamaican chat about his many girlfriends. I picked up wrap after wrap which he handed over with a gold-toothed grin. The particular low point last year involved me smoking crack behind a bin in Hackney. I used to make my own crack, more out of a geeky love of drug chemistry than any desire to sell my possessions (although that was a slight side effect). I was smoking it crouched behind a bin because I did not think that inhaling inside the club would result in me staying in there for any length of time. A few tokes of the lovely plastic-candy tasting smoke and I was high as kite for about 7 minutes before crashing downwards. Luckily, I still had enough powder cocaine to prevent me falling all the way down into an unmediated crack-comedown which is notoriously intense. In the throws of a particularly bad one, suicide can become a viable solution.

Maybe I’m writing about low points again because they often coincide with the death of summer and the winter blues checking in to my soul department. New lows do not happen much in summer. It must be to do with mindset because I am sure snorting pills off a bin last June should have counted. So this winter I have become a Heroin ‘chipper’. A chipper is someone who ‘chips’ their heroin use so that they do not become physically addicted and risk suffering from withdrawal. This can be achieved fairly simply by not doing it more than 2-3 days at a time without having a 2 day break. It is a simple rule: ‘2 days on and 2 days off’. The use of the word ‘on’ is apt when on heroin. It is the sort of drug you can do it all day and still go about your tasks without too great a decline in performance. It gives you a wonderfully warm, fuzzy shield about yourself: a ‘big smacky cuddle’ as Russell Brand has put it. But there is a downside (well, there are loads that have been well documented but this is one is more amusing than life-crushing) and that is ‘nodding out’. The ‘nod’ comes when you have taken just a little too much and you fall asleep quite instantly. One minute you are awake, the next thing you head drops and the lights go out. You go straight into REM sleep and start to dream immediately. Reality and dreams mingle, I often wake to find myself talking on a dream blackberry or ordering food whilst sat in my room. You can easily loose up to an hour of your life in this fashion. My new low this time was nodding out whilst eating a mouthful of fruit and nut chocolate. I awoke 20 minutes later wondering why the fuck I had 20 minute-old half-chewed chocolate in my mouth. My grandmother regarded me with what seemed like suspicious pity, my story of being ‘very tired’ was quite strained at that point as I sat with a stupefied grin in her living room watching X-Factor. ‘It’s not as good as Strictly Come Dancing’ she said. I swallowed my chocolate and agreed

'Quaaaak': Duck on Heroin

After a typical night spent passing out for a few hours, waking up, taking more heroin, passing out, waking up, stumbling to the toilet, trying to piss, trying harder to piss, nodding out, hitting my head on the way down, waking up again, failing to piss again, consoling myself with more smack then passing out again, I decided to take a morning walk. I wound a trail among leafy North London streets through the brisk breeze towards a nearby park and small lake. The world was separated from me by a fuzzy smacky barrier and I looked on with pleasurable disinterest. I kicked a stone out over the water and a few morning joggers passed me in bright skintight attire, their ass-cheeks wobbling with each hit of the pavement. I ambled on walking around the lake while wrapping my trenchcoat around my adidas joggers when I heard a small noise whick broke through into my mystified mind,

‘Quack’

It said.

‘Quaaaack quack’

Despite the communication being in the form of quacking I understood the meaning. A duck was in some kind of distress! I opened my mind and engaged in my surrounding for the first time in a while, scanning the area for… aha. I medium sized duck flapped in distress on the grass a small distance from the lake

‘Quak quak quaaak’

It made a spluttering sound and looked around mournfully. It half flapped its wings and collapsed again.

‘The poor thing’

A feeling of immense pity for the animal overtook me as I moved towards it. The duck became fearful but it couldn’t move. I stroked its back and examined its shivering feathered body. It had a broken leg and an injured wing. The animal regarded the dirty junky holding it with the same wild fear it would a nice mum and child. I soothed the suffering animal with gentle murmurs. It seemed to relax.

‘It must be in so much pain’

I thought

So I took it home and gave it a small shot of heroin. The duck, Henry, spent its final days sharing my blissed-out cocoon. I put it into a small bucket of water and it seemed quite content occasionally emitting a peaceful

‘Quaaaaaaaak’

Its leg and wing were in pretty bad shape but I couldn’t do anything about this. I couldn’t get it to eat either, I tried breadcrumbs and milk but it wouldn’t take. 2 days later it shat all over my floor and keeled over. That’s gratitude for you. I buried Henry in the park where I found him. I thought about chucking him in a bin but an affinity for my smackhead duck companion stopped me. I felt Henry deserved better then that plus I wanted to avoid any embarrassing scenes with binmen and/or the council. I didn’t feel any sadness after he had gone. I was happy his last days were comfortable.

Pagan Ritual

I met up with the druids 12pm on a pleasant September Saturday - surprisingly normal-looking folk with a hint of countryside hippy about them. There was a singularly depressed man who was obviously wrestling with some deep issues, a long-haired psychotherapist and a not-unattractive divorcee and her son. We were soon joined by a couple of the organizers. A very friendly middle-aged lady who had found a look that works for her – hippy eco fabric skirt and kagool. The leader of this ritual was a hippy of the type I thought only existed at Boom Psytrance Festival. I was pleasantly surprised at how down to earth he was. Most extreme-looking hippies tend to look down on me and other non-tofu-eaters. He had brought with him a staff with manicured, holly-laden branches like a druidic bonsai tree. We walked up to the ‘Grove’ which is a space encircled by trees which druids use as a place for rituals. There were a few more people waiting there. Mostly normal-looking middle-aged folk but then, so were the inhabitants of that island on the Wicker Man. I kept my wits about me. The ritual was something to do with harvest and the transferring of summer to winter or ‘the dark part of the year’. They took out the sacrificial goat and… well I wish. The whole thing was a bit tame. No outlandish costumes or offerings of beer to the elements. The ritual followed a printed script with joining-in bits and bits for the qualified druids to say they were disappointingly similar to the Church of England in this respect. The best bit was instead of saying ‘Amen’ we said ‘Awen’ except it was drawn out into something like ‘Aaaaaaaaawwwwwweeeeeeeeen’ which is a much more awesome way of saying ‘Amen’ in my opinion. There was a bit where a guy playing the Spirit of Summer had to relinquish control to the Spirit of Winter or the Holly King. We ran around in a circle as these great elemental titans battled it out. Well, it was the depressed guy and a guy with a hat made of leaves reading from a sheet but use your imagination and you could get there if you tried. The highlight was doing a group meditation – pretty standard meditation stuff really. We were lead blindfolded in a circle, asked if we wanted to leave anything behind us as we traveled into winter and, as the blindfold was removed, we were welcomed to the ‘dark part of the year’ by the lead druid with his face covered in mud. Then we had a picnic. It beat bumbling around the house with a hangover.

The Recession of Our Lord 2011

Here I am in the middle of the recession of our Lord 2011. The job market has crashed. Employers fill what small vacancies are left with only the most earnest sycophants. The rest sit gamely pinging CV after CV via email like trying to erode a wall with spit. Occasionally I see middle aged guys. Thick-set body with a lifetime of labor prodding at the vacancy database computers in a ‘Jobcentre Plus’, this new world makes pre-schoolers out of our warriors. And me, I have taken my CV and thrown it into the bonfire of my intellectual vanity determined to live what I believe without compromise and find, somewhere along the way, my authentic self. My mate told me yesterday that I think too much… true say.

I started off doing what I have done before, pinging CVs to companies with cover letters intoning goodwill to all. I built a fake self that I chucked at alien recruitment officers who responded with nothing, or said they liked me and never called again. My ability to ‘choose’ a job was severely affected by the recession. No company can afford to risk taking on people who might not immediately work well. Every application requires experience or training. And seeing as I have no specific training and I’ve hated every full-time job I’ve ever had the message was clear to me: ‘sorry you’re plum out of luck’.

Today, I sat across from the Dr marveling at how easy it is to get a sick note from them. But then again, my sickness includes large lashing of delusion and denial so I would think that I’m OK. I’ve been claiming sick pay for nearly a year now during rush hour, depending on my mood, I see either wage-slave drones or dignified, independent folk. There is no room in my mind for middle ground. And listening to Terrence McKenna and Bill Hicks and reading Ivan Illich and Henry David Theroux consistently bolster my feeling that ‘work’ is not for me.

Grandfather

I sat opposite my grandfather eating a Christmas dinner in a pub. The whole family were there, three generations of religious upbringing and rebellion. My grandfather never rebelled. I heard on the grapevine my grandmother once thought of rebelling back in ’83. But she never did. Her marriage was listed by the National Trust and her place was by my grandfather’s side. The immovability of his morals held every part of his being in a strict structure. None of what I had could ever match what was sure and solid in him. I move like a kaleidoscope. Nothing is ever fixed in me.

He smiled and talked the conversation that been the same all my life. I wanted drama. I wanted to know what he feels. Somewhere, I saw in the space between his eyes that he did indeed feel. He felt deeply. And that reassured me. I felt affection for the creases around his eyes. The only place that was still spontaneous. He lit up, animated as we talked about the Bible. It made my latest foray into religion all worthwhile. For me, it was never more than an outlet for my self pity and desperation. But for him, he didn’t live his life by the Bible. It was his life. My grandfather’s life can be found in the footnotes of Cruden’s Complete Concordance. We talked of the Old Testament Prophets (my favorite characters, the men who raged and divined in desert madness, the souls who spoke damnation and religious ecstasy, I had always imaged their eyes burning with pearlescent light, two circles in a mess of dreadlocks facial hair, eyes that had seen the divine and lived to tell about it). My affection for the man who introduced me to the great stories lead me to ask him earnest Biblical questions which he answered with great pleasure. My grandfather reads the entire Bible cover to cover every year.

During this conversation a mischievous thought wound its way into my head around a book in the Bible called The Song of Songs, one of the greatest erotic poems in history which is found in the Old Testament. In the middle of this affectionate intercourse I said,

‘and what about the Song of Songs? That’s a bit racy isn’t it?’

He the creases around his eyes tremored slightly, caught of guard by this unexpected test of his well weathered thinking.

He looked like he was going to cry.

‘yes, it is’

He said to the table cloth.