Bodies, p.19
Bodies, page 19
Even so, I’m determined to push it. In the years following the unpleasant matter at the Holiday Inn, things are starting to slip. I’m playing increasingly fast and loose with deadlines. Maintaining my refusal to submit copy with which I’m not happy, I convince myself that the issue is one of muddled priorities. Drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, fucking drugs. People make allowances for me, what with one thing and another. Holding the telescope the wrong way round, as I see it there’s not that much of a problem. Explosive episodes are followed by the resumption of a somewhat regular routine. How bad can it be? In what is surely a vainglorious conceit, I don’t take needle drugs and I don’t smoke crack. ‘That shit’s bad news,’ I think, while flushing the toilet on a fistful of bloodstained Kleenex.
But there are other signs, too, that I’m perhaps not well. On a free afternoon, I walk over to the Screen on the Green in Islington to watch a film whose details I cannot recall that very evening. I was sober, so it’s not that. There are days during which I feel safe only in bed, naked and warm, the passing of time marked by the conversational rhythms of talk radio. By now my hours are irregular. A giddy member of the Wide Awake Club at 3 a.m., come the middle of the afternoon I’m consumed by fatigue. What’s going on here? With deadlines hammering at the door, sleep arrives in ten- or fifteen-minute recesses of blessed distraction. Waking is panic. Why can’t I do this?
A talented section editor once told me that he’d never before encountered a writer from whom words so readily explode. ‘Even in emails,’ he’d said. Explode. I believe he meant it as a compliment; certainly it was received as such. Cleaving to the duvet in the months and years after Eric’s death, I dream of writing a book like this. But how can I do this when I’m feeling brutalised by the kind of pressure that for years has been my friend? Why am I lying here, twitching and coiled, jittery as a rattlesnake? Why is the noise coming to a boil? And. Then. It. Stops. Feeling something close to elation – three, two, one – suddenly I’m back in the room. Head bowed low, I tap dance an email to my editors saying that my piece will be in port by the end of the day. By now I have enough inches to make a mile. It’s okay, you can take’til tomorrow morning. But stop making a habit of this. Okay? Ian? Okay?
There’s a new number in my phone. Under a different system of laws the entrepreneurial graft of Nico, my latest drug seller, would be rewarded with a plaque and a rubber-chicken lunch at a ceremony at City Hall. Open for business until 4 a.m., seven days a week, not once has it taken him longer than a quarter of an hour to bring his goods to my door. At no point has he ever been low on supplies. Notified by a single-word text – ‘outside’ – like a gazelle I’m up the stairs and into the billowing nicotine biosphere of my courier’s Ford Galaxy. With a face like sundried chamois leather, Nico has a liking for Sheffield United. As a matter of ceremony, without fail we exchange two or three sentences about the dependable misfortunes of our respective teams. But, really, neither of us could care less about what the other has to say. In truth, I could hold my breath in the time required of each transaction. ‘See you soon, pal,’ I tell him, four or more grams of product in my pocket. It’s never fewer than that. And I will not desist until I’ve taken it all.
I am by now an antisocial drug user. Hidden away in what might just be shame, I take my medicine in the privacy of my own home. Apportioning myself a generous first line – clack, clack, clack goes the bankcard on the dinner plate – the opening twenty minutes of each misadventure see me floating and bouncing in the stratospheric air of rarefied elation. This. Is. Magic. If I could just keep my foot off the accelerator, if I could only maintain this altitude, then I’d be set for the night. Actually, I’d be set for a few nights. ‘This is what I’ll do this time,’ I tell myself. ‘This time I’ll be the one who’s in charge.’ But I never am.
Establishing a pattern of rapidly diminishing returns, with too much haste the second line follows the first. After this, on a black slope mapped by skulls and crossbones, it’s downhill all the way. Channel surfing, internet wormholes, shallow breathing. Switching off the lights, I turn down the volume until the television can barely be heard. Man, it’s so loud in here.7 By now, I know where this is headed. Come first light – please, not the dawn – I’m there on the settee, every muscle tensed in panic, shrink-wrapped in sweat. Urgently needing to urinate, in my hypersensitive state the sound of waste hitting water is like a tsunami. There are days when I honestly believe that a police SWAT team is hiding in the stalks of bamboo at the side of my back garden. Every sound is an explosion. Only after I’ve racked out the final tiny rail of white powder – only after I’ve held the plate to my face and licked its surface clean – will I reach for the antidote.
The fifteen minutes it takes Nico to arrive allow me just enough time to run out and buy two bottles of Tennessee whiskey and four litres of Diet Coke. Breaking the seal as if diffusing a bomb, in the grey of morning I pour four fingers of hooch into a smudged pint glass. The liquid is gone in a single slug. Aaaah. At once, the edge is buffed off my wild electric panic. The equivalent of six or eight pints of beer in under ten minutes, the third glass finds me in the transitional stage of doing a passable impression of a functioning drunk. Slowing things down, in the company of a fourth I reply to whatever emails have come my way. If there’s work in the evening, or later in the week, there’s a chance I’ll be able to do it. Marbled with relief, by now my state of mind is one of woozy euphoria. With help from the Jack Daniel’s distillery, in barely an hour I’ve somehow managed to steer myself back to shore. Placing a large glass of water on the bedside cabinet, I drink a fifth, and then a sixth glass of potion. Yawning like a hippo, I’m now at the point of blacking out. Coming round the following afternoon, many are the times when I’ve wet the bed.
Apparently Albert Einstein never did say that the definition of insanity is to repeat a course of action in the expectation of different results. Either way, according to this metric, what I’m doing is insane. Periods of abstinence are shrinking from weeks to days. My home is in ruins. Plates are piled high, the washing up hasn’t been done for weeks; the fridge looks like the Gaza Strip; the floors are obscured by dirty clothes. God alone knows what it smells like in here. I know that what I’m doing is deeply wrong. Over in Mexico the cocaine industry has made Ciudad Juárez the most dangerous city in the world. And here I am, helping to fund a trade of enormous cruelty and savage violence. Across the Atlantic, the bodies of young men are hanging from overpasses. With demented nihilism, young women are raped, tortured and killed. Entire communities are pummelled into submission. And for what? So I can set fire to the fruits of my father’s labour, is for what. So I can feel terrified and diminished, is why.
Girding myself, I go to New York for Christmas. In order that a neighbour can feed the cats, it takes me three days to clean the flat. En route to visit Bea and Freddie, the couple who opened their home to me in the days following Eric’s death, five miles above Newfoundland I practise the lines that I will say upon arrival at their new home in Brooklyn. Knock knock, I’ve brought Quality Street. I’d love a drink, thank you. Honestly, this is what I’m doing. Sitting in a seat that turns into a bed, I’m mouthing greetings that normally spill out of my mouth with the ease of a game show host. What on earth is wrong with me? I sound like I’ve been body-snatched. I sound like an incel. I don’t know if I can hold myself together.
It’s obvious that something is wrong. (‘You just weren’t yourself,’ Bea tells me, months later. ‘It was like someone different was in the room.’) One morning my hands shake so badly that I spill orange juice onto the floor. Seated in restaurants, or around the family dinner table, I force my hosts to endure evenings of which I have no memory. Struggling to produce even morsels of conversation, I’m spooked when I’m drunk and goosed when I’m sober. I fail to notice that my friends are sharing looks of alarm on my behalf. On New Year’s Eve I don’t even clock the expressions of relief that see me out of the door and into a cab bound for the airport. At JFK, as usual my air miles buy me an upgrade. Chain-drinking whiskey in the Upper Class lounge, for a moment I forget where I am. Aboard the plane, attempting to wrestle my bag into an overhead compartment, I fall heavily from my perch. I’m lying on the floor. A flight attendant responds to my request for a large Bloody Mary and two cans of beer with the words, ‘I think perhaps you’ve had enough for the time being, sir.’
As the clouds finally clear, the shame of my behaviour in New York keeps me away from my friends’ home for four years. When I do finally return, it is with my fiancée by my side. Inviting myself to stay for the first time since I ruined their Christmas, I can sense waves of uncertainty radiating from Bea’s core. He’s engaged now? To who? Some cokehead from the punk scene? But my partner has never taken drugs, which is why I know that her presence in my life will show to my friends that things are different now. It’s why I want her there, as proof. With natural light and gentle laughter my resplendent plus one helps tend to wounds that cannot be salved by apology alone. Tell you what, she’s like a magician. In a quiet moment, seizing my arm – ‘Ow!’ – Bea administers an unvarnished coat of sound advice. ‘Don’t … fuck this up.’
As I drank my way back to London, four years earlier Freddie wrote me an email in which he told me he was worried about me. He was sorry, he said, for not bringing this up while I was in town, he just thought that the best course of action was to check in with me electronically so that I wouldn’t feel ambushed. But seriously, mate, have a think about things, will you? Take stock of what I’m saying, and then perhaps give me a call. So it’s as bad as this, is it? Just as well that I have three bottles of duty free bourbon and a delivery from Nico with which to quell the worry gathering within me. At the finish line of a dangerous night, slipping on spillage, I shatter my left arm on a protruding drawer. Convulsing with pain, twelve hours later I’m treated to a chorus of tuts from highly qualified professionals at University College Hospital. A series of X-rays reveal a humerus that looks like a broken breadstick. A week later, after five hours in surgery I wake to discover that a dozen or more pins have been inserted through the bone via a four-inch incision just below the shoulder. Doped to the follicles, I spend three days and nights on a noisy hospital ward.
They won’t be my last.
NOTES
1 Running wild in the streets: ‘Wild In The Streets’, Circle Jerks, written by Garland Jeffreys, 1982, Frontier
2 It hits you, like a hammer: ‘Thunder & Lightning’, Thin Lizzy, written by Brian Downey and Phil Lynott, 1983, Vertigo
3 [Corgan] is a media slut: Everett True, ‘Live review of Smashing Pumpkins at the Metro in Chicago’, Melody Maker, 4 September 1992
4 Was always looking for the next big thing: Quote supplied privately by author and journalist Mark Blake
5 In at the deep end, hang on tight: ‘Let’s Get Rocked’, Def Leppard, written by Joe Elliot, Rick Savage, Phil Collen, Robert John “Mutt” Lange, 1992, Mercury
6 The aspiration starts now: Martin Amis, Inside Story, Jonathan Cape, 2020
7 Man, It’s So Loud In Here: ‘Man, It’s So Loud In Here’, They Might Be Giants, written by John Flansburgh and John Linnell, 2001, Restless
8: EPIDEMIC
Every now and again I’ll clean the flat. I’ll invite friends round to watch the football. Returning from Sainsbury’s with a case of Sol and two bags of Doritos, whatever booze remains in the fridge come the end of the night will be left alone until the next time things go wrong. One evening I drank half a bottle and poured the rest down the sink. I just wasn’t feeling it. My father’s son, on tranquil afternoons I’ve been known to take myself to the lovely pub at the end of the street for a pint and read. This is nice. But it never lasts. By 2015 I no longer require space in which to create chaos. An hour before being picked up by my singer-songwriter friend Frank Turner, at the start of a day in early summer I sink three quarters of a bottle of whiskey. It would have been more, but that’s all I had. Pushed for time, I drink some of it in the shower. At first convinced that I can hold things together, in the car it transpires that I can barely speak.
With London ceding ground to a green and pleasant landscape, Frank and I are on our way to the Latitude Festival in Suffolk, at which I’m due to interview him onstage in front of more than a thousand people. From Glasgow to Yeovil, over the past few years I’ve been part of maybe a dozen such happenings. In clubs and theatres, Frank draws the applause while I keep things moving. Sometimes I get a laugh or two. At the end of the set he plays a few songs. We have good chemistry, he and I; financially viable, on our second such tour, in 2019, we found ourselves stationed at the kind of hotels that serve eggs royale for breakfast. A writer rarely gets the chance to see an audience: even though it isn’t mine, I’m grateful for having been invited to be part of such a rewarding experience. But for our booking in Suffolk, even the prospect of being paid to talk isn’t enough to stop me. Merely functionally drunk by the time we undertake our mid-afternoon set, in the Big Top tent at Latitude I can barely hold a thought in my head.
On the long ride home, once again I remind my friend that I’m sorry.
‘Honestly, don’t worry about it,’ he tells me. ‘You more or less held it together. Anyway, who am I to talk? I played a gig in Manchester where I was so trashed that the only thing I was able to say was, “My name is Frank Turner.” I say “say” – I slurred it over and over again. I dropped my plectrum and it took me, like, five minutes to pick it up.’
From this, Frank learned a lesson I seem determined to ignore. After reports of my erratic behaviour during an interview make it back to base camp, the editor of Kerrang! invites me in for a chat. ‘Is everything all right?’ ‘Sorry, I had a bit of a rough spell. I’m out of it now.’ ‘Okay. All right. But, listen, you can always talk to us, you know.’ Instead, not long afterwards I answer the door to a furious features editor demanding to know the whereabouts of a missing cover story. Despite my insistence that it would be in his inbox five hours ago, by now the article is three days late. ‘Mate, I swear, it’ll be with you in the morning,’ I tell him. Tragically, I actually believe this to be true. A portrait of fury and concern, my visitor is sweeping up the broken glass scattered across the kitchen floor. I’m naked from the waist down. My feet are cut. I can’t say for sure, but it appears that the problem is not simply a matter of poor time management. After being given more than a dozen chances to redeem myself, my editors finally grow tired of cleaning up my mess. For the second time, I allow a dream job to disappear through the many cracks in my world.
Along with party packs of bourbon and cocaine, by now I’m taking a vast concoction of very cheap and virulently nasty legal highs sold from a basement shop on the Chalk Farm Road. Wrapped in brightly coloured sachets, each packet carries the warning that this is ‘plant food not meant for human consumption’. I’m swallowing a variety of pills purchased from Dr Internet. Dispatched from India, the tablets are manufactured by a company that requests payment by money transfer from Western Union. GlaxoSmithKline they are not. Warning of the dangers of buying prescription medication online, I well recall seeing an advert at the pictures in which a young man extracts a dead rat from his own mouth. What you order might not be what you get was the gist. But even this grisly public service broadcast isn’t enough to stop me.
With my head wreaking havoc with my circuitry, I think it’s fair to say that my life is in danger. One spring afternoon I wake from a vivid dream in which I’ve been to hospital. Placed on a stretcher by a team of paramedics, beneath sunny skies I’m carried into the back of an ambulance. Needle in hand, a doctor at University College Hospital is required to cut a vertical line up the sleeve of my three-quarter-length navy blue Ben Sherman jacket. Oh, doc, I love this coat. On a gurney in a corridor, I close my eyes with something close to serenity. Coming to at home – well, that was weird – like a doomed character in a horror movie I discover the garment from my ‘dream’ has indeed been cut to the shoulder. I have no idea for how long I was in the care of the National Health Service. I couldn’t tell you what procedures have been undertaken in my name. I don’t recall how I got home. These scrapes of mine are fast becoming unmanageable.
By now I’ve attracted the attentions of a team of care workers, counsellors, therapists and psychoanalysts. On calm days I walk up to a mental health facility in Belsize Park; waiting to be called, I take my place in a waiting room populated by people for whom being terribly unwell is a full-time job. Me, I can cram a month’s worth of damage into two or three days. If required, I can blow the doors off in a single afternoon. ‘Ian, what do you think is triggering this behaviour?’ I’m asked. ‘With all due respect,’ I say, ‘the verb is only relevant in the sense that this fucking thing is like a bullet.’ I appreciate the talk about trying to slow things down, about learning to spot the signs, but please believe me when I tell you that by now this thing is flying through the air at a velocity that cannot be seen by my naked eye. I think it wants to kill me.
It seems like I’m always in hospital. Driven to the edge of panic by a fellow patient screaming for hours on end, one night I flee from a ward at the Royal Free in Hampstead. Trying his best to stop me, a security guard tells me that the police will pick me up before I reach my front door. Fuck that, I’ll take my chances. Still in my National Health Service pyjamas, clothes clutched to my chest, I board the last Overground train to Camden Road. I’m surprisingly light on my feet, all things considered. Until this morning I’d been under round-the-clock surveillance for three days in case I was killed by the toxins in my system. I couldn’t walk without the assistance of a carer. After knocking back three-dozen bottles of spirits and many bindles of cocaine over the course of a nine-day bender, the bill for my actions was steeper than ever. Gruelling and apparently without end, the requirements of drying out for seventy-two hours constitute the lowest moments of my life. As if surfing the channels of an upended world, unable to piece together linear thought, my mind leaps erratically across a topography of unconnected moments. Scrunched under a thin blanket that somehow fails to cover even my own limited form, under these conditions I’m easy prey to the worst kind of desolation I’ve ever known. Panic is only ever a breath away. From a hospital bed at four o’ clock in the morning, my situation seems hopeless. I just can’t see a way out of this.
