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,
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.
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