The following is a true story from a few months ago. I haven’t written about it here until now, as the sense of violation and betrayal was like a fresh wound for some time, and it’s only with more time and indeed, physical distance from the event (I have since moved) that I felt ready to share.
It was a sunny, early afternoon in late April. Nephalim and I were just about to head out to the doctor’s, having started the buprenorphine maintenance programme just a day or two before.
The quiet was shattered by the jangling of the front doorbell. ”I’ll get it,” I called, but my mother beat me to it. I walked into the living room, and all of a sudden, the entryway was awash in pale blue.
The cops had come for a visit.
“My name is Sargeant Josephine Mackenzie of the Karana Downs Police Station,” began the harsh-eyed, yet youngish, female policewoman, before introducing us to the men who were rapidly making our largish living-room feel rather small. “Are you the only two people in the house?”
No, my mother said, “My daughter’s husband is… Peri, where is he?”
“Ermmm… around the back, having a cigarette,” I replied.
“Could we have everyone in the house in here,” asked the policewoman, in a voice which meant this is a command, not a request.
I called him in, all the while thinking, cops in the house? Not good, not good. Not good at all…
“We have evidence from a source that cannot be named,” announced the policewoman, “That this house has been used for the purposes of dealing in illicit substances.” My eyes widened. Oh, for fuck’s sake, I thought, I do NOT need this. We’re going to be late for a doctor’s appointment, and for what? Because someone, somewhere, has decided to tell outright lies.
Inwardly, I was a mess. A seething, confused, but mainly just plain scared mess. I did a quick mental inventory of my room. No illicit substances, thank God, I thought. Please let there be no loose syringes I’ve forgotten about…
“What’s this about?” my mother asked the assembled police, confusion and fear plainly evident on her face. “Drug dealing?”
“Mum, I would never…” I started to say, but she waved me quiet.
“I know, Peri. What… who made these allegations?” she turned and addressed the hard-eyed young policewoman again.
“We can’t tell you that,” she said, and the subtext was clear: I wouldn’t tell you anyway. I am the law, and you are scum. I sighed inwardly.
Great. Some unnamed scumbag had reported us to the cops on suspicion of drug dealing, and we weren’t even allowed to know who it had been.
Drug dealing… from my parents’ house! As if!
Inwardly, I was seething with anger, and hardly even heard the policemen ask to search my room.
“Huh? Yeah, sure. It’s through here…” As I led three policemen to the room Peter and I shared, I heard my mother and Peter being interrogated by the cops.
“We run a family business from the house,” my mother was saying. “Oh yes… what sort?” ”Computers,” my mother told them, and went on to explain what, exactly, she and my father did.
“And where is Mr. ****” (my father)… “right now?”
“He’s out, seeing customers in the eastern suburbs,” I heard my mother respond, before the policemen who had followed me and I reached my room. I opened the door.
“We’ll try not to make a mess of the place,” a heavyset cop, the tallest of the three who’d followed me, said. I smiled, looking over the clutter that was the single room that Peter and I shared, clothes and papers and random lipgloss and other makeup strewn all over.
“Heh. Guys, I dare you to try,” I giggled, sounding far more lighthearted than I felt. I’m being raided, for Chrissake. RAIDED. This has never happened to me, not once in ten years of using…
I watched as they opened drawers, cupboard doors, looked under the mattress, peeked into corners. Even as I courteously answered their polite questions, I wanted to scream. I’m being raided. Fuck. The irony! I’ve just gone on bupe, the first time I’ve been on a maintenance programme in the ten years I’ve been using on and off, and this happens NOW.
After they seached not just the room Nephalim and I shared, but even my handbag as well (”What are these pills, ma’am?” “Well, there’s Xanax, and Valium, and amitryptiline, oh and those ones there are Polaramine…”), we were free to go.
Their unscheduled visit made us late for our appointment, though - which, ironically, was with the doctor who is supervising our buprenorphine program.
A few weeks later, I was walking by the front door when I saw something blue and shiny on the hallway table. “What the…?” I murmured, picking it up. It was a tape recorder.
“Oh yeah,” my mother said, passing by me that moment with a load of washing. “The police left their tape recorder here. They still haven’t been by to pick it up.”
We were trapped, once upon a time.
Years, we spent in this way. Trapped, in various types of prisons, first by our parents - abusers in their own way, although they did the best they could, I’m sure… or did they?
Then, later, we were trapped by prisons of our own making. Because we didn’t know what freedom felt like, it didn’t feel like we were doing anything our of the ordinary - we became drug addicts, prostitutes, bulimics, anorexics, problem drinkers and secret bipolar battlers… and we were again locked away from the everyday world, numbed by the coccooning unreality we lived our lives inside.
Opening the prison gates takes time; holding them open takes a little more.
Walking through the gates of that prison, and truly living life on the outside of those walls… that takes time, self-belief, and a helluva lot of courage.
To those who made it out, and are living their dream in the sun, a salute from those of us still in the shadows, working on walking out of those prison doors for the last time.
Waking up is never easy for me. Winters make it harder. And bupe maintenance? I’m on such a low dose now I don’t know why I still bother, but I’m afraid of the withdrawals.
The bupe keeps me more or less stable, but, like most of us, I miss the high of a good shot of heroin now and then. I crave the high, sometimes.
Today’s one of those days.
I stumble out into the kitchen, rubbing my eyes. Last night’s dishes confront me. The living room is a mess, and the whole flat needs a good vacuuming…
Ah, stuff it, says a little voice in my head. Let’s see if —-’s phone is switched on…
Minutes later, I’m on my way down the road to make the transaction. The gear’s been of variable quality lately… I cross my fingers, hoping today’s a good day.
One thing’s for sure, my dealer doesn’t keep me waiting. The deal done, I head home with my precious packet of white powder. As soon as I get in the door, I clear a space on the dining room table and start mixing up.
Loading my syringe lovingly, I tap the bubbles from the mixture in the barrel, tie my arm off, and begin the ever-more-difficult search for a vein. My dry, cracked fingers move across the softer skin of my inner arm, and then downwards towards my wrists. ”Best practice” injecting would have me avoid the wrist and hand area altogether, but the pale pink dotted scars tell another story. It’s been harder and harder for me to find a vein anywhere, so I utilise the spots I can find.
One false try, then - yes! - I hit a vein. The blood trickles, then mushrooms up into the pale liquid heroin as I pull back a little on the plunger. Yup, we’re set to launch.
I press the plunger down. Slowly, slowly… and then the drugs are in my body.
I feel a wave of…
Disappointment. Nothing. If there was the hint of a buzz in there, I missed it!
I shake my head, light a cigarette and start packing my equipment away. What a waste of time that was, I think, one more hole in my arm and a whole lot poorer. Not again.
Self-loathing competes with annoyance in my mind, and I continue cleaning the house, straight.
It’s late afternoon in Brisbane; the humid air collects into sweat which rolls down my back as the grey clouds above threaten rain. I sit on the back porch, typing idly into my laptop, a plume of smoke from my half-smoked cigarette curling lazily into the heavy atmosphere. I am reading a few of my favourite blogs, and reflecting on the nature of the addiction we all share…
And suddenly, a refrain from an old sixties protest song the aging hippies I had as teachers taught us in primary school, runs through my mind.
“When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?”
I think of the behaviour of my fellow junkies and I, and I have to wonder. Will we ever learn? Or are we doomed to forever be haunted by the memory of the opiates… the kiss of steel and the opiate rush which seem, by now, so much a part of who we are?
Yoshi asked me this the other day. He is the age now, that I was when I started using heroin. (Lesser opiates had been part of my life, on and off, since my teenage years. But once heroin got its hooks into me, it’s been a rare week I’ve been without - except during my year in the United States. Ten years already, and it shows no sign of easing up.)
“Will this longing ever go away, or is the sweet rush of that opiate pleasure burned into our soul for good?”
As I told him, I’m older but no wiser… well aware of the tens of thousands I’ve shot up my arm in my pursuit of a little peace, or perhaps just peace of mind? But no wiser as to why the allure still remains. Regardless, I should know better these days.
Word is there’s a heroin drought all up and down the east coast - people getting ripped off, even the best of dealers reduced to selling stuff much sketchier than they’d ever push at another time. The gear is, in a word, shithouse.
Those of us on maintenance therapy, or without a severe habit, are the lucky ones. But something in us still screams for the score, for the hit, for the few precious moments of bliss… even if we know the price is too high in the end.
The price is too high, to keep seeking the high. But do we learn? Not easily, it seems, and none too well. Why?
“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind.”
