I occasionally returned to the Virgin Megastore to shoplift after being let go from my job there all those months ago. I knew the positioning of the security cameras and that the security staff were lazy, fat, ignorant, and complacent. It was simply a matter of learning how to remove the security cases quickly and discreetly. I learned the technique from Steve Cook. Steve had an almost Zen approach to stealing. He had a lizardlike calm and an economy of movement that I have never seen equaled before or since. He could locate the weak spots in the square plastic security boxes and crack them open with an almost undetectable application of pressure with the thumbs. The case would fall away like an old chrysalis and the CD would slide into his pocket as if it had never been there. Of all the times that Steve had been in prison, it had never once been for shoplifting.
But, like so many others in my life, one day he simply wasn’t there anymore. His phone was cut off; there was no one at his house, the curtains were drawn, and the place was shrouded in darkness. Gone. I realized that I did not know his family, or anyone outside of the circle of people we scored or used drugs with, and none of them had a clue. Maybe back inside Wormwood Scrubs for a spell. Maybe dead from bad drugs or an unpaid debt. Steve was a father; his two children lived with their mother. I sometimes smiled and thought about how wonderful it would be to have a father as knowledgeable and cunning as Steve.
The image of Steve that I would take with me was in Steve’s kitchen in his council flat in Dagenham. We had just returned there from seeing his connection at a working man’s club hidden away in a council estate, talking football and politics with the cab driver, who obviously knew that we were buying drugs but didn’t care, and then stumbling dizzily back into the flat, blinds drawn and music on—Deserter’s Songs by Mercury Rev—and Steve said, “This bastard’s voice is a bit fruity but he has something,” and I wondered if that album could be summed up any better by anyone.
And the sickness fell away from us as we cooked the junk and prepared the pipes. The first order of business was to get well and Steve had a knack for finding veins in the most abused and calcified of areas and offered to help me shoot. He found blood with a surgeon’s precision—sheen of clear perspiration on his forehead—and, saintlike, he rolled up his sleeve and took his own shot second.
And in the kitchen with the smack taking me, I looked at Steve—his skinny arms and rib cage poking out like the angles of a Schiele self-portrait—and the spike threaded into his arm and he tap-tap-tapped the syringe like he was checking the wall for hollow spots, and with an almost audible pop the needle burst through the vein and dark red blood lazily flowed into the syringe, turning the heroin black.
And this was it—this was beauty—no sickness, no worries, no nothing, except friends and the safety of heroin and the crack we were about to smoke and a whole day to waste—nothing but days and days and weeks to waste—no matter, life could not intrude into this sacred space.
I feel an understanding of God that I have never felt before, I thought as Steve pushed the hit into his vein in much the same way that Jesus might have, and we connected with something larger and more ancient and more vast than either of us could truly conceive of before the drugs.
Adios, Steve. Life had become a series of revolving faces, careering from medical emergency to drug spin out, from arrests to rehab, from relapse to sudden death or disappearance.
In my run-down flat in Murder Mile I said a prayer to Steve. I lay still on the collapsing bed and laid my arms out in a cruciform. On the CD player Ornate Coleman played—the sacred and the profane—while I waited, looking out the window to the overcast East London sky, waiting for something, anything, to happen.