The regime under Dr. Stein was pretty good. I was back at my old pharmacy and once a day we went to Shepherds Bush Green to pick up our eighty-milliliter bottles of methadone. The methadone itself was luminous green and sickly sweet. Once the methadone kicked in I would be filled with good-natured cheer and get an insatiable appetite for sweets. At a bakery nearby, I would eat cream buns and custard tarts. I existed on a diet of methadone, Coca-Cola, chocolate bars, and pastries.
Over the next few months Susan and I met with Dr. Stein weekly. He would ask how we were doing. We would tell him that we were fine. Once in a while he would send one or both of us to the bathroom with a plastic bottle to take a urine test. While not actually curing the mental yearning to shoot heroin, the high doses of methadone we were being prescribed took away the physical need to do it. Without the relentless pressure of withdrawal gnawing at us we actually stopped doing heroin for a few months. However, once things were relatively stable for a while, I started to get bored. A junkie friend of mine used to remark how he would inject water whenever he didn’t have heroin, and somehow it would make him feel better. Methadone did nothing for either the Pavlovian craving for the needle or for my need not to feel. Life was as ugly and as meaningless on methadone as on heroin, except now I didn’t have my routine of scoring drugs and fixing to look forward to. I knew that there had to be a way to get around the urine tests, so I went to an Internet café and did a search on heroin’s half-life in the bloodstream. It revealed that heroin tends to leave the system quite quickly, and you could give a clean urine test seventy-two hours after your last dose. So I resumed, regulating my use of heroin to the beginning of the week and weekends.
Once a week I attended the job center. Susan was ineligible for the dole, and I was eligible for only fifty-seven pounds a week. I was using at least a hundred pounds a week in heroin alone, so as unsavory as the prospect was I knew that I needed to find some kind of work again. After the experience with Traditional Country Music Monthly, I had vowed to stay away from regular employment. But, of course, cold hard reality intruded. In the job center, I sat across from an old woman with a pursed mouth who seemed to really resent her job. I told her of my work history: keyboardist in the Catsuits, then music video writing. It seemed so small and unimpressive when I tried to explain it to the woman.
“So…,” she monotoned, “would you be interested in doing something with music again?”
“Oh yeah. Do you have something?”
She tapped into her computer for a moment. She said, “Here we go,” and half-turned the monitor toward me. On screen it said: “VIRGIN MEGASTORE, OXFORD STREET. SALES ASSISTANTS RQD (IMMEDIATE).”
“I’ll set you up an interview, then, shall I?”
Well, Jesus. I was desperate. The night before I had flicked on the television and saw none other than my old band mate, Laura, presenting a TV show on Channel 5. She looked exactly the same. I sat watching her, with a snoring junkie wife on the bed next to me. I had less than a hundred pounds in the bank and was shooting up into my legs. I didn’t look exactly the same. I looked like the portrait in the fucking attic. Part of me wanted to stand up and tell the old whore to fuck off, that I’d eat dog shit before I’d work in a Virgin Megastore, but I fought the urge. I needed something straight away, or there’d be no more drugs.
“Yes,” I said quietly. “Set up the interview.”
My first day on the job I wandered around the shop floor in an ill-fitting T-shirt, trying to avoid talking to people until my lunch break. I was working five days a week, my schedule changing every week. Once a month I’d have a weekend off. I was paid seven pounds an hour to restock the shelves and work the tills. It was mind-numbingly boring work, made worse by the giant video screens that looked down upon us everywhere we went, blaring out terrible songs every fifteen minutes. That was the gimmick—every fifteen minutes there would be a great sound like the whole shop was about to take off. And then these huge video screens would flicker into life and a song would come on. The second or third time this happened I realized that it was the same fucking song. The same video. I found myself inadvertently singing along. Oh Jesus, I thought.
I walked over to the supervisor, a large Jamaican girl who seemed ruthlessly efficient and far too dedicated to a job that was the non-food equivalent to working in a McDonald’s. Her name was Jenna.
“Jenna,” I yelled over the music, “are they gonna play the same song all day long?”
“Huh?”
“On the big screen. They’ve played the same song three times already!”
“Oh yeah. The record company buys the screen for a block of time. Usually a month or so.”
“A month! I’m gonna be hearing this shit for a month?”
“Oh, don’t worry. After a while you stop noticing it. I didn’t even realize it was on.”
After two weeks I was ready to lose my mind. On my early shifts I’d be in there at 8:30 A.M. to endure a start-of-day pep talk from one of the managers. Usually some meaningless nonsense about how well the store was doing, what a great guy Richard Branson was, and how to watch out for shoplifters. Then, even before the store was open to the public, I’d hear the sound.
WHUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRGHHHHHHH.
That was the sound of the screens fading into life. The song started with a drum intro that turned my blood cold. I couldn’t block it out. I tried everything. I brought drugs to work and got high in the bathroom. I even walked around with earplugs in, but when I walked right past Jenna, ears plugged and oblivious one day as she called for me, I got busted, receiving an official reprimand. So no more earplugs. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night with that same fucking drumbeat playing in my head. I felt like I was being subjected to some intricate form of psychological terrorization.
And the customers. Jesus. If you made the mistake of making eye contact with any of them then you’d be stuck for an hour.
“Excuse me, where would I find Mariah Carey’s new album?”
“Excuse me, do you have a bossa nova section?”
“Excuse me, are things filed by first name or surname?”
I learned to perfect the art of walking purposefully with a bunch of random CDs in my hand. If anybody stopped me to ask anything I’d tell them, “I’m terribly sorry, I’m assisting another customer at the moment. Somebody else will be happy to help you” before cutting out. The building was so big that I could pass entire days going from one floor to the next, picking up a CD from the storeroom, carrying it to the next floor, taking a break, walking through the jazz section flicking through CDs. Anything but doing actual work. And, of course, stealing.
Everybody stole. But nobody stole as ruthlessly and efficiently as I did. The process was simple. Staff got searched when leaving for the day, but not on lunch breaks. Wandering around the West End on a break, I stumbled upon a Japanese language college. I entered and located an empty locker on the third floor. Sensing an opportunity, I bought a padlock and fitted it. Then on lunch breaks I would make the journey with my jeans stuffed full of stolen CDs and store them in the locker for collection at the end of the day. I wasn’t the only one stealing, but I was the only one with such a well-thought-out system. I took home approximately twenty to twenty-five CDs a day. Sometimes RJ would take CDs in exchange for heroin, and I started stealing to order. For the three months that I worked there, up until the time they let me go rather than renew my contract, I had all of the heroin I wanted. I was a king, I suppose. But unbeknownst to me, this rare moment of serenity would be fleeting. Life was about to take another turn.