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