April Fools’ Day. Suddenly and gloriously, I found myself in a band again. I answered an ad in the New Musical Express for a signed band looking for a keyboardist, left a message, and was called back a week later and told to show up to a studio by Old Street station for a tryout. I had also received a call back about the porno store. They wanted me to start the following week, and I wasn’t in a position to turn the job down. My hours would be twelve noon to twelve midnight, four days a week. I imagined looking at all of those dildos and latex vaginas and inflatable sex dolls for twelve hours a day and realized that I might go insane, and this focused my energy even more on scoring this gig. I turned up to the tryout glowing with methadone and focused. This gig was important because the band in question was signed to an actual record label. The artist was Kelly Leyton, the one-time vocalist with a hugely successful trip-hop group called the Trainer Whores now embarking on a solo career. The album was in the can and about to be released, with “much fanfare” as her manager promised on the phone. There was a tour in support of a successful rock act called Garbage already booked to begin in two weeks, so I went to the rehearsal in the mood to take no prisoners.
I was introduced to the rest of the band, and then we ran through the songs I had learned from the CD I had received in the post the previous week. I had practiced diligently and brought all of myself into the room this time. No stashed syringes of methadone or heroin. No cocaine, no crack. Just me, and whatever I hadn’t lost in the intervening years.
After the rehearsal I was immediately offered the slot. I had felt it in my gut. The chemistry was there. The music I produced meshed with what the band was doing. I actually enjoyed myself for the first time in years. Kelly claimed to have psychic abilities and she placed her hand on me for a second and then smiled. It seemed that the vibes were right. I also met the manager, Alex. He was a chubby, boyish man with a bowl haircut and red cheeks. He seemed like a pussycat compared to other managers I had been involved with in the past.
“It’s great to have you onboard!” he said, shaking my hand furiously.
“It’s great to be onboard!”
“This is just the beginning. I’m in the process of booking more dates to support the album’s release. We’ll be quite busy. The Garbage tour is just the beginning!”
Walking home from the rehearsal, I allowed myself to gloat a little. It was actually happening again. I was signed to a record label. I could go back to doing what I did best, before I ruined it all with the drugs. I started to think that if I could just bank on this one thing working out okay, it could be a comeback that Lazarus would be envious of.
It took me a week of negotiations back and forth with the clinic before I realized that there was no way that they would let me pick up a week’s worth of methadone. Dr. Ira seemed to relish delivering the deathblow.
“I understand, that this…tour…constitutes some kind of opportunity for you. But I simply cannot let you walk out of here with a prescription for that much methadone. Any other answer, I’m afraid, would be…unprofessional.”
So I had to buy my medication on the black market. Forty pounds got me enough methadone linctus for the week, which I measured out into the correct doses and took with me in a mouthwash bottle. For all of the efforts of doctors like Ira, black-market methadone was readily available all over the city. On the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, between certain times and on certain days, if you had the right kind of face, you could score methadone juice or ampoules from the old junkies who congregated outside the underground station. I often found myself ghosting around Soho scoring Physeptone tablets from the relics of the West End’s old junk-dealing scene, survivors of the golden days when you could buy Chinese heroin from the old pushers who lurked by the restaurants and Laundromats of Chinatown, then on to Lady Frankau’s for a prescription for pure coke and morphine. They lurked around the corners, in the alleyways and shop doorways, huddling in their jackets and eyeing the passersby with cold, hungry eyes.
The band met up at the rehearsal room one last time before we were to start the tour. This was when we met our tour manager for the first time. He was a handsome, boyish-looking man with tousled hair who staggered in fifteen minutes late, obviously severely hungover and a little befuddled.
“All right loves!” he yelled. “Sorry I’m late. Had a bit of trouble with my phone.”
“You got it fixed?” Alex asked, in an attempt at sounding managerial.
“Well, not quite. It’s at the bottom of a canal. But no worries, it’s all under control!”
He was called Dan. And over the next few weeks I came to consider him a real friend.
As I left London, Susan, the methadone clinics, and Murder Mile behind, all of it fading away as we tore up the M1, barreling on to new cities, new landscapes, new people, I felt myself expanding to fit the air that was suddenly all around me, and the remembrance of who I once was came flooding to my mind.
The idea of me at eighteen years old, with friends who would soon be torn from me by circumstance and time, but who at this moment were my entire world…the idea of me being someone at the beginning of a journey, rather than limping toward it’s conclusion defeated…the idea of my having ambitions beyond simply getting enough money to pay rent this week and getting some heroin into my blood started to become something other than an abstract notion…. It became something almost tangible for the first time in years.
And as the bus lurched toward the first stop on the tour, I felt a surge of almost forgotten, but still familiar, emotions filling my brain, as if I were a waking coma victim. I looked to my travel bag stuffed under my seat, knowing that it contained a Listerine bottle filled with enough methadone to kill every man and woman on this bus, and I wondered if I were to toss it out the window onto the asphalt that zoomed past underneath us, would I—this newly awakened I—even feel the sickness anymore?
The shows flew by in a dizzying sugar rush. In every city we landed from Bristol to Edinburgh, Dan had a connection for cocaine, and the tour bus was in a blizzard of it; and, as is usual on tour, it was the lighting guys, the guitar techs, and the guys who operated the mixing desk who partied harder than the band. Having stopped drinking totally since starting using heroin, I suddenly began consuming great oceans of booze. The guitar tech was an old speed freak called Pat, who started selling me Dexedrine tablets, which I swallowed before every show. For the duration of the tour, I was indestructible. Superhuman. Before the shows I would vanish with Dan into the underbelly of whatever city we were in to score cocaine. We bought from shady men with faded blue prison tattoos and gold jewelry in high-rise council blocks, from Arabs who moved the stuff from under the counters of their side-street kebab shops, and from one guy in Newcastle who had a nice middle-class home, a wife, and two young children running about the place. All of them were on first-name terms with our tour manager. I started to feel an affinity toward Dan that I hadn’t felt for another human being in a long time.
One night, following a drunken show in Edinburgh, I slipped his mobile phone from his jacket pocket and started drunkenly calling numbers stored within it. He walked in on me, huddled in the back of the tour bus, talking dirty to a girl called Vanessa I had chosen at random from his address book. Instead of hanging up, she had encouraged it, and the whole thing went on for at least fifteen minutes. Dan walked in, saw me on his phone talking to one of his friends about eating her pussy, and snatched the phone from my hand.
“No…no,” he said to her, “that’s just one of the alcoholics we have in the band. I know, love. He’s incorrigible.”
The next morning I woke up, staggered from the bunk of the tour bus, and ran to the exit. I threw open the door just in time to vomit violently onto the concrete below. Looking up, I saw all of Garbage and most of their crew, who happened to be walking past at the exact moment that the puke erupted from me. They stopped and half-smiled. Shirley Manson looked impossibly small next to the crew of ex-Marines the band had carting their equipment around for them. I grinned at her and said as cheerfully as I could, “Lovely morning!” giving a friendly wave. They carried on walking.