I soon found out that the move from Stoker’s house to the garage had happened because Stoker had brought on a new staff member. She was from Newcastle; a thin pale girl who was supposedly there to lay out the magazine editorials. I had little to do with her. She seemed sad and a little beaten up. She smelled too, of thick heavy perfume seemingly to cover up for a lack of bathing. I recognized something in her and instinctively knew that she was an addict too. One day, after taking my mid-morning shot in the bathroom, I went to walk into the main office, stoned and forgetting about the move. Through the door I heard Stoker’s hushed, wheezing voice:
“Do it…like that…keep going…”
She gurgled, her mouth obviously full of the old man’s cock, and I could hear a wet noise beating faster and faster.
“Right there…faster…”
I got the fuck away from there and listened to a report on the opium farmers of Afghanistan, passing out upright in my old office chair.
I owed the bank money. So every time Stoker cut me a check I had to bring it to a check-cashing place. I found one place on Fortress Road that would let me write checks to myself and cash them for 7 percent of the total. I had a book full of blank checks with a limit of a hundred pounds on them, so three, four times a week I would convert one into ninety-three pounds.
Temporarily at least our situation was fixed. I knew that the checks would run out one day soon and then I’d have to find another way to get by. But in the meantime there was money and long winter evenings and nothing but time. I caught up on reading. I ghosted around Soho at night when I was feeling rootless and energized. The neon lights bathed me and the dark strip clubs and doorways leading up to beaten old whores gave me a sense that I was among my own kind here. Occasionally I would score crack in the Soho alleyways from the black dealers ensconced in the shadows and hit the pipe in empty doorways, while the sound of the city carried on all around me.
I’d sit there, looking out over the city I had left four years ago, a city I had once been a productive member of, and I would think that life could not get any more perfect, unless perhaps I was to wake up tomorrow and all that was left would be the night stretching from one end of the land till the other, and the neon would be on 24/7, and the city noise would be nothing but yells and raucous laughter and music blasting from bars and clubs.
After two weeks or so of being late to work because of picking up my methadone in Hackney I switched my methadone pickup to the Boots chemist in Tufnell Park, around the corner from Stoker’s house. I did not like the new spot, despite its convenience for work. The old bitch that ran the joint would make me drink the methadone on-site. This was the rule for all new attendees. Despite the time I had under my belt at my old pharmacy, I was treated like I had wandered in off the street for the first time. There is no reasoning with pharmacists when the issue at hand is narcotics. In their eyes they are talking to you from a morally superior standpoint, so no words can be persuasive enough to make them relent.
At work one day, while I was doodling idly in my notebook, the new employee knocked and came in.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hello.”
“You busy?”
I shrugged and put the notebook down.
“Brian is out for a bit. I was bored.” She smiled, perching on the desk.
“Oh yeah? There’s nothing much happening in here.”
“You’re on stuff too, right?”
I eyed her suspiciously. “Stuff?”
“It’s cool,” she insisted. “I saw you at the chemist taking your dose. You didn’t see me. I was buying tampons.”
“Well,” I said, at a loss for the right words. “That’s nice.”
“My boyfriend uses too. I mean, he’s on a script too. He don’t do the gear anymore. I made him stop. It was killing him.”
Her name was Amy, it turned out. She seemed okay, a little slow, but okay. Two kids, a boyfriend out of work and on a script, and both of them hitting the crack pipe. She was working illegally—cash in hand—for Stoker to supplement their benefits. I didn’t ask if the blow jobs were a part of the deal. I figured it would be best to keep my mouth shut.
Once she started talking it was hard to get her to stop. She had a crackhead’s machine-gun mouth all right. She talked to me about anything, everything. That first day I stared off into space as she riffed on her kids, on her boyfriend, on reality television, on how bad Stoker smelled. I tried to listen to the World Service over her monologue, but found it was impossible to focus on anything else—her voice had a nightmarish quality about it, whiny and grating, and it seemed to reverberate from within your own head. Maybe that’s why Stoker insisted that she put his penis in her mouth once a day.
I garnered all kinds of useless information about this woman. Where she lived (around the corner, across the road from the video store), what medication she and her boyfriend took regularly (Lustral—an antidepressant—and a blood-thinning medication for the boyfriend’s deep vein thrombosis in his leg), her kids behavior (“Steve…come to think of it Steve and Jackie…They’re both little shits”), and, her favorite topic, the fact that she had to drive to Kings Cross every night after work to score rocks.
“Why aren’t there any decent crack dealers around here?” she would moan, repeatedly. “I hate having to drive all the way to the Cross to buy. I’ve never found a source for decent stuff around here. Why is that?”
“It’s a mystery, I suppose,” I would tell her.
The visits became more and more regular. I’m sure Stoker had the good sense to ignore her, but ever since Amy had discovered my “secret” I suppose she now thought of us as friends, and I became her unwilling confidant. She continually found excuses to come into the garage and bore me stupid with the minutiae of her life. After a week of this I started giving serious consideration to leaving the job.
I lasted another month. The job was easy, and the money was useful. But the main reason I had for liking the job—not having to deal with other people—was now irreconcilably ruined. One day after drinking my methadone in the chemist’s I walked out onto the street and turned right instead of left. I went to McDonald’s instead of Stoker’s house and bought breakfast. Once I was half an hour late for work I left the restaurant and called RJ and set up a meet to buy some coke and heroin.
My time of being an employed citizen was, for now at least, over.
The kicker was that a month or so later I was watching the local news. The police raided the video shop right across from where Amy lived with her idiot boyfriend and her little shit children, after a tip off that people were selling crack cocaine out of there. What they found was a sophisticated operation where crack was on sale for bulk purchases. The bundles where stashed away in VHS copies of the latest movies. In the back room they were producing the rocks from powder cocaine in a mini production line. I laughed to myself, wondering if Amy had seen this yet.
Poor, dumb Amy.