Jack was an eighteen-year-old kid with a shaved head that I thought at first was because of an affiliation to skinhead culture, but which I later discovered was because he was deeply ashamed of his natural, bright ginger locks. The first time I heard him speak was quite typical: it was during the Tuesday-night Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Camden. It took place in a filthy, cold room above a community center that everybody referred to as “the crack house.” He shared a long, meandering story in which he came across as a rather buffoonish, comical character. In this story, some friends set him up on a blind date. As he was “sober” he had assumed his friends would be decent enough to set him up with a similarly sober girl. I remember at this point wondering if there was such a thing as a sober eighteen-year-old in London. It seemed entirely possible that Jack was the only one—a kind of twelve-step Omega Man.
Anyway, the story continued. Of course the girl, Louise, was not sober. In fact, she showed up piss drunk to meet Jack. When he told her that he didn’t drink or do drugs, she just smiled and said, “That’s okay mate—all the more for me!”
I smiled. Nobody else did. What was it with fucking NA meetings? Nobody had a sense of humor.
The story continued and at one point featured a stone-cold sober Jack holding the girl’s hair as she vomited twelve Bacardi Breezers and a döner kebab into the piss-stinking toilets of the Intrepid Fox on Wardour Street. The tale culminated on a night bus at two in the morning, with the obliterated Louise throwing strawberries (I can’t remember where the strawberries came from) at the assorted drunks, psychos, hard men, and yardies riding the N87 to Wandsworth that night.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Jack whined, trying to grab her wrists before somebody beat the living shit out of him.
“I’m sharing the strawberries, dickhead!” came the reply.
I laughed. Everybody looked at me, Jack included. I held up my hands in a kind of I’m sorry but it was funny! way. He seemed genuinely aggrieved. I talked to him afterward, and that was when I realized that Jack wasn’t even an addict. He was attending NA meetings because he thought he smoked too much weed. I shook my head sadly at him.
“You’re eighteen,” I said as gently as possible. “You’re meant to smoke too much weed!”
I had offended Jack for the second time that night. He frowned and shot me an expression that only overly serious eighteen-year-olds can give.
“My addiction,” he said, completely seriously, “Deserves as much respect as yours!”
So I filed Jack away mentally as just another asshole kid who needed to define himself through his problems—real or perceived. I thought it was cynical how the NA meetings embraced him, despite how obvious it was that he didn’t have a problem. Now Jack was interacting with real-life addicts—crackheads, prostitutes, junkies—people he would never have had any contact with in the real world. For someone as guileless and naive as he seemed, this probably wouldn’t be a good thing. Little did I know that in a matter of weeks I would be living with Jack, and everything would fall apart.
The meetings were now superfluous to my needs. I didn’t have any friends in the program. But I did have some people I thought I could use to my advantage, and that kept me coming back.
Michael, the guy I knew from the Narcotics Anonymous meeting that I attended on Tuesday nights, still had the illegal sublet available on his old council flat in White Hart Lane. I asked around because I was informed that the lease was coming up on the flat share in Batman Close and we would all have to be out at the end of the month. The beer belly and the South African were going to take the opportunity to go backpacking. Susan and I were too high to make any adequate provisions for this event, so I decided it would be prudent to keep attending NA meetings to secure Michael’s sublet. Susan stopped showing up with me, content instead to sit around the flat shooting heroin, watching daytime television, and smoking cigarettes.
But, of course, secrets do not last long in NA meetings and suddenly Jack was sniffing around Michael, wanting to get in on the action. One day Michael took Susan and I out to see his place. We took the tube to Seven Sisters, and then an aboveground train out to White Hart Lane. The area was run-down, nothing but high-rise council flats, shabby-looking semi-detached houses, low-end supermarkets, and corner shops. All they had out there was the football ground. To Michael, this was a selling point of Herculean proportions.
“You’re just dahn the road from the ground, mate. It’s fuckin’ ace. You can hear ’em cheer whenever Tottenham score! Blinding!”
Michael obviously fancied himself as a wide boy. He looked like he would be handy with his fists. He was always in a Fila tracksuit and pristine trainers. He made his money as a ticket tout, now that he was out of the drug game.
“Fackin’ Madonna’s coming to play London soon! I ’ave five of us gonna get in the line for tickets. They’ll ’ave a limit, but these fuckers are gonna go for a couple hundred each, mate! Nice little profit, yer know?”
The flat was on the seventeenth floor of a piss-stinking council rabbit warren. The elevator was literally sopping with urine and garbage. Susan made a disgusted face at me, but I just shrugged and told her to get in. Michael seemed entirely oblivious to it. He just seemed happily surprised that it was working. Inside, the place was a shambles. Dirty clothes lay all over the floor, and the air was stale. It had two bedrooms and a small bathroom. The main bedroom was at the back and had balconies where you could walk out and enjoy the view of the gray skies and the countless other high-rises. It was one of the most singularly depressing panoramas I have ever seen.
“I’ve not been back since I quit the brown, you know? I had to get out of here to get clean. Too many memories. Too hard to stay clean here, you know? I’ve been in this flat ten years, using for all of them. You see down there?”
Michael pointed to a muddy patch of grass, seventeen floors down.
“Yeah.”
“A mate of mine jumped out my window and landed there. Broke both of his legs and his hips too. ’E’s in a fuckin’ chair now, the fuckin’ cabbage.”
“Why did he jump?”
“We was smoking rocks. I dunno. I s’pose he thought he heard something, you know what I mean?”
The deal was that the flat would be free in two weeks, and Susan and I could move in. The flat in Hammersmith had to be vacated in a week and a half. I asked Michael if there was any way he could clean out sooner than two weeks. He just shrugged and didn’t answer.
“There’s something else,” he said. “I promised the other room to Jack. Do you mind?”
Michael saw the look on my face.
“’E’s all right. He’s just young is all. He won’t be any trouble!”
Susan was livid, and we had an argument on the way home. She was already complaining about having to share the flat with Jack.
“You got a better idea, Susan? Maybe we should put a fucking down payment on our own place? I hear Chelsea’s nice!”
“Fuck off. You should have told Michael no when he brought up Jack’s name.”
“You were there. Why didn’t you tell him?”
“You’re the man!”
“Yeah. That’s why I’ve been out twice a fucking week praying with these cunts, picking up fucking key rings for making it nine months clean and fucking serene and having to listen to their fucking bullshit, and everybody asking me ‘Oh, why don’t you have a sponsor?’ and all the rest of it! I’ve done my part. If this place ain’t good enough, go get a fucking paper and start looking for another place yourself.”
“Fuck that. Let’s just call RJ.”
“All right. That’s more like it.”