Do you ever get those nights when you just can’t sleep for all the noise that is going on inside your own head? With my brain, sometimes, it’s like a movie theatre playing various images and throwing up bits and pieces of songs, poems, or sometimes just the memory of someone talking. Memories from the past will not easily be laid to rest; they will have their way, crawling back to the forefront of my mind in the dark hours when much of the world is silent, and I am lying awake in my bed…

The voices I associate with my period of heavy (as in constant, daily) drug use, during my twenties - those belonged to many people. Many of these voices I can hear in my mind even now, although I may not have spoken with the people they belong to, for many years. People move in and out of your life; some of them die. But the faces, the names, the voices – these things remain with me, just as will the thrill of the score, the urgency with which we always mixed up the taste, and that indescribable rush of heroin through the bloodstream just after the needle hit the vein.

The one voice I associate most vividly with my sink into full-scale junkydom, belonged to my ex-boyfriend S. Even when he was at his most animated, his voice always had a somewhat dead quality to it. After he’d had a hit of smack, his drawl could become almost sepulchral. For four years we lived together, scored together, even worked alongside each other in the shitty factory jobs we took to feed our habits while retaining at least a semblance of social decency. Our ethnic backgrounds were quite different - he Eurasian, I a red-haired Celt - but our facial expressions became similar enough so that some people mistook us for brother and sister. In the end, S. and I knew all too well how to take the “fun” out of “functional addiction” – but by that stage in an addiction, there are few real joys in life anyway. Your world narrows down to working to score, scoring to work, and staving off the sickness – every spare penny going to feed the monkeys at your backs. Heroin addiction isn’t fun - it’s work, pure and simple.

When S. and I first got together, we both knew our way around a needle, although neither of us were really very regular users, and certainly, neither of us had a habit. (I’d had one before, but it was minor, and I kicked it within a few days. Within the year, I knew that my first “kicking” had been relatively light going, and I’d gotten away lightly. Never again would it be so easy for me to shake a habit.) Both S. and I were talkative when we wanted to be, but we also both knew the value of silence.

Despite the fact that neither S. nor I had a habit at this stage, I had a regular heroin connection, in West End, Brisbane. I remember walking with him to that house one night, not long after we first started going out. I found it refreshing, really, the fact that we didn’t really need to put too many thoughts into words. We could walk together quietly, enjoy the silence between us, and anticipate the hit.

It was July - winter in Australia - when we first moved in together. Our whirlwind boy-meets-girl, girl-likes-boy story so far went something like this: we had only met some four weeks ago. He had been all but living on the streets at that time, and selling his body for the occasional hit of smack. I was down and out in the suburbs, having just lost my job as an office manager and copy editor when the company I worked for went into liquidation.
We met, of all places, at a needle exchange. We were both volunteer workers there, and our young romance ruffled a few feathers! Two or three of the gay male workers and volunteers at the exchange (which also served as a drop-in centre and information resource) had their claws out for me since S. and I had become an item, and S. had told me that one of the lesbians there had muttered to him as he passed, “If you ever hurt her, you’ll have me to answer to.” He and I laughed at all this, revelling in the camp irony of it all, and happy together in the warm bubble that was our new love.

It was late afternoon and we were at our new flat, having just signed the lease. We wanted to celebrate having found a good flat, not to mention having found each other. “Shall we - ” we both said together, and then we grinned at one another. Great minds think alike? Whatever. “I’ll call them,” I said, meaning my dealers.

“Oh, you’re near us now? You got that place? Sure, see you in ten,” they told me.
“Yep, sure.” I flipped my phone shut and slipped it back into my handbag.
“Want some company?” S. asked me.
“Of course… although you won’t be able to come with me all the way, they don’t know you yet.”

After leaving S. a block away from the house, and then conducting the $50 transaction in a messy, although much lived-in, basement flat, I returned to him with our precious gear. We almost ran back to the house together in our haste to mix it up and put it up our arms. Such a small amount it was (looking back with the eyes of someone whose tolerance has been raised plenty over the years), although at the time, it looked to us like plenty.

I didn’t realise how much it seemed to S. until we were back in our newly-acquired riverside flat; after I’d mixed up and equally divided the gear, and he’d taken his shot and then slumped back with a euphoric moan.

“Oh, man…” he sighed, in a voice just above a whisper. “Nice stuff… VERY nice…” - and then nothing, except the sound of his shallow breathing.

I’d had my shot too, but my tolerance was higher than the man whom I’d become so recently attached to. But his initial reactions were enough to put me on alert, since I myself had had a pleasant buzz - but nothing more - from the equally-divided packet. I watched S. carefully, because the signs of overdose can sometimes settle not-so-quickly upon someone… but he hovered in deep euphoria, just above the level of unconsciousness (read: overdose) for the rest of the evening. We curled up together, but despite our newfound mutual attraction, nothing sexual occurred. (Heroin has a rather depressive effect on the male – ahem - member… especially to those who are relatively new to the drug, as S. was at the time.)

The memory of that night, although hazy in my drug-addled mind, taught me one thing. I had hooked up with someone even less experienced in the way of the White Powder than was I myself. I made a mental note to give him slightly less of the drug than my own share, next time around.

The best piece of advice I never took was from a guy who, on reflection, wasn’t that much older then, than I am today. But from my nineteen-year-old, university-student viewpoint, the thirtysomething junky seemed to have decades of dark wisdom.

At the time I knew him, he was on methadone. He lived in a sharehouse full of about eight or ten people, some of whom I knew vaguely from Melbourne’s gothic/alternative scene. Everyone in this house used needles, it seemed. Often I’d find myself in a room full of people shooting up – I never knew where to look. The needles themselves didn’t freak me out, though. My only brother has been an insulin-dependent diabetic since I was ten, so I’d already seen hundreds, probably thousands, of the orange-capped, disposable little needle-and-syringe sets.

Needles never freaked me out all that much, to be honest. I myself, though, at that stage did not inject drugs. My junky friend, Dugald, thought that this at least marked me out as a nice girl (read: one worth saving? I’m not sure), and he took me under his wing. We did hits of acid together, and sometimes he’d score me speed.

I’d also listen for hours to his tales of the dark side – I was studying journalism at university, but I also just liked listening to people tell their stories. He had some hair-curling yarns to relate, but 13 years on from our time together, the details of those stories grow hazy.

The only piece of advice he ever gave me, though, is burned deeply into my brain. It has come back to haunt me in some of my lowest hours; those minutes that drag on like days because of the junk sickness.

“Peri,” he told me once, “Do any drug you want. Speed, acid, pot – whatever. But don’t ever try heroin. You’ll like it too much, and it will fuck up your life.”

My nineteen-year-old self nodded solemly. Less than four years later, I had broken that promise with a vengeance, and the prophecy was beginning to come true.

I look around the room as I write what will become the first words of this chronicle of my past and present.

I am typing on a laptop computer that is three years old, and has done many thousands of miles of travel with me (and has never been hocked, no, not even once!) The bed has CDs scattered across it, along with a couple of remote controls (even though the TV and DVD/CD player are practically within reach of the bed.) Pieces of paper are scattered about, too - Magistrates Court documents, telephone numbers, last year’s diaries, the employment section of last Saturday’s newspaper. Several pens, a couple of fluffy stuffed animals, and various miscellaneous items round out the mess on my bed. The limited floorspace is taken up by a pedestal fan, a few pairs of shoes, more paper, and a couple of art projects I’ve been working (or not working) on, for weeks.

There is hardly a flat surface in this room which doesn’t have stuff stacked on it.

Tidying up has always been rather low on my priorities.

And yet there is, somewhere, an order to this seeming chaos – just as there has been an order to my life, despite the chaos therein.

I am thirty-two years old. I have few possessions, save for the clutter in this room - even the furniture is not mine – and almost no money.

Why do I have no money? The answer to that question is a simple one: because I spent it all, mostly on heroin. I’m not especially proud of this fact, and this is why I called my blog by the name you see above. Don’t Try This At Home, Kids. I know the value of advice, however - and I know that many of you won’t listen to that advice. I’ve listened to what I wanted to over the years, and I’m sure you’ll do the same. In this blog, I will also be trying to impart some of the knowledge I learned as a needle-exchange worker, because I firmly believe that if you can’t be “good”, then be good at it.

But this is the story of my past. My future, of course, will never be the same. The future has its own mysteries. What I will mainly be concerned with here, is history.