I am scoring crack in Kings Cross. It is my twenty-fourth birthday. I am playing a show tonight with Liquid Sky in Tufnell Park and I am nervous. Louis, the incompetent bastard, promised to score some cocaine for me, and of course it fell through at the last minute. He seemed utterly bemused by how pissed off I was. We have two hours following sound check before we play the show. I decide to go to the Cross and risk the street dealers in the hope of getting some rocks.
Wandering the street making eye contact with the various dodgy-looking people loitering by the station, I find a runner who immediately tries to bully me into buying from him. “My guy is in the motel there,” he says, nodding to one of the many horror motels that dot this neighborhood, “Gimmie the cash and I’ll come back with the stuff.”
“I’m not a fucking tourist. I’m not buying unless I can try some first.”
“Nah, too many cops.”
He smiles at me, his gold teeth glinting with a vague kind of threat.
“Just gimmie the cash,” he says as if talking to a remedial student, “an’ I’ll be right back.”
“Forget it.”
As I’m walking off, he calls me back. Brings me over to his car. We get in and drive off, circling around the backstreets of the Cross. He pulls up next to a tired-looking whore lurking outside a McDonald’s and she jumps in the backseat. I start to get worried that they are going to rob me. He tells her to get a pipe out, which she does, one of those little numbers fashioned out of a miniature Martell cognac bottle. He pulls over, produces a rock from his mouth, and hands it to me along with the pipe. I unwrap it and place a piece on the gauze, running the flame lightly over it to melt it into place. I take a hit, handing the pipe over as I exhale. It is, at least, real crack. As I blow the crack smoke out the dealer hisses “shit” and I look in the rearview mirror. Police are driving slowly up the street behind us. We are double-parked and the car is literally full of white smoke. He shunts the car into life and starts to drive off as casually as possible while I wrestle with the busted handle to try and wind the window down and let the smoke out.
Somehow, when we turn left toward Euston Road again, the cops lose interest and carry on down the street. But now I am nervous as hell and want to get out of the car as fast as possible.
I buy the rock we have been smoking off him and another, bundled up in plastic wrap. In my shaken state I don’t take the time to check the merchandise. They drop me off at an amusement arcade on the Caledonian Road. I go into the bathroom and check the second rock. Motherfucker! I realize immediately that I have been burned. A piece of old chewing gum is all that is at the center of the bundle of plastic wrap. I am forty pounds down and I have about ten pounds’ worth of crack to show for it.
Stepping out of the bathroom I see someone familiar through the glass front of the arcade, lurking about on the street. With a start, I realize it is Michael. I have not seen him since he threw me out of the place on White Hart Lane. He looks like shit, nervously standing on the corner, waiting for his connection to show up. I have a knife on my belt buckle, and high on that blast of crack I briefly consider sidling up to him and sticking it between his fucking ribs. But fuck it: he already got his. He’s back to this tedious fucking routine, just like I am. It seems there is no escape for any of us, whether we have God and the twelve-steps on our side or not.