Sing Backwards and Weep

by Mark Lanegan

  Four days later, standing in the rain and going into withdrawals, my intention was to catch a ride to Heathrow and then take the Tube into London to buy some heroin from a Portuguese dealer named Juan-­Joseph I’d met on one of my many excursions to King’s Cross, a notorious London neighborhood where I always scored when in the city. I would then take the train to Bristol. Thee Hypnotics bass player Craig Pike, my old connection in London, had overdosed and died a couple years before. Now I habitually haunted this busy but shady neighborhood, scoring drugs whenever I was in town.

  In the several-block radius around the large hub of the train station, you could almost always find someone selling drugs if you looked hard enough. Through the years I’d formed regular connections with some street dealers I’d met at different times in the Cross: out in front of the Ladbrokes betting shop, along the side street that paralleled the station, or near the porn magazine shop on the other side of it. Some would give me their phone number so we could hook up immediately when I was in need. Juan-Joseph had actually taken me to where he lived, three long blocks from the station, so that I could go directly to his flat when I wanted to see him.

  My previous regular hook-up was a young blond punk kid in his early twenties. I had spotted him on the street one day and made him for either a dealer or a panhandler and decided that even if he didn’t have drugs, he’d sure as fuck know who out here did. Sure enough, when I’d approached him, he’d led me into an alley, unbuttoned his pants, and removed several balloons of heroin that he’d stuffed beneath the uncut foreskin of his dick. He’d kept them safely stashed there in case he was shaken down by the UK police, who at that time had the legal right to frisk anyone they cared to on the street, regardless of any evidence of wrongdoing. While walking together back to the bustling High Street after doing our first deal, he’d asked me where I was from and what I was doing in London. I’d told him I was a singer from Seattle playing some shows. He stopped in his tracks straightaway.

  “Fuck, Yank! I love all Seattle music! Look at this!”

  He pulled up his sleeve to expose his arm. The kid was a cutter, something I’d only seen a couple of times before. His forearm was covered with crude symbols and names carved into his skin with a razor or knife. He had messily cut into his flesh “God Bless Kurt,” now manifesting as a large, raised white scar.

  “Damn, dude. A tattoo woulda been less painful,” I said, knowing full well that had been the point.

  Shortly after parting company from that first encounter, I’d passed two cops myself. They’d quickly given me the once-over two or three times, turned around, and started following me. I’d unfortunately had no choice but to quickly transfer the balloons previously held under the skin of his cock from my coat pocket to my mouth so I could swallow them if stopped, questioned, and frisked. To be caught with drugs in the UK meant not only jail time in what were said to be some of the Western world’s shittiest prisons (especially for foreigners) but also most certainly a lifetime ban from the country. For this same reason, I always carried balloons and crack rocks in this fashion while out and about in America. At home in the US, I was often stopped and searched by cops. Wise to this common practice among street users and dealers, the police often asked me to open my mouth to show them if I was holding anything within. On the couple of occasions I’d had to swallow my stash with nothing more than my spit to help choke it down, I’d been compelled to search through my own shit in the days following in order to find the balloons or rocks within, they being more valuable than gold to me.

  My current Portuguese-immigrant dealer wisely did not look the part. I’d met Juan-Joseph when he’d actually approached me late one night while walking his dog on the King’s Cross side streets. He’d seen me cruising the area, obviously looking for drugs. He told me to follow him a few blocks off the main drag to his flat, where he sold me dope and crack, gave me a clean rig, and allowed me to fix in his place. He had a thick accent that was difficult for me to follow word to word. He didn’t shoot dope himself. Instead, he was one of a very small group of people I’d met throughout my shadow life that was addicted to shooting crack. Not coke as was the norm, crack.

  In order to shoot crack, he had to break it down to liquid form. He first crushed the rock into something like a powder, then added citric acid like you did with dope. Instead of cooking it up, he just added cold water and continued to crush and swirl the now-liquid with the plunger end of a syringe until it was a clear, not cloudy solution. When he tied off and did one of these shots of liquid crack, he immediately went into this crazed, fucked-up, bizarre routine. As soon as the drug hit his bloodstream, his face contorted in a way totally mirroring that of a person with cerebral palsy. He’d stand up and, in a heavily animated and spastic manner, he would do a strange dance, falling around his kitchen, pulling violently and shamelessly at his dick through his baggy brown corduroy pants. In a loud voice, he would emphatically attempt to say something to me. Whatever it was Juan-Joseph was trying to say, it took a Herculean amount of effort on his part just to spit it out as he struggled, stammered, and spasmed. Of course, through his twisted mouth and already thick accent, whatever he was loudly trying to say was impossible for me to understand.

  Not great company, but soaking wet from rain in the frozen, cold, pre-midnight air waiting for the bus to Heathrow Airport, I desperately needed to see him. If I didn’t make my way onto this bus, I was fucked in the worst way.

  I stood waiting, shaking and shivering in the bitter November night air. An hour passed, then two hours. Still no bus. Now I began to enter a fairly advanced state of withdrawal, stomach cramping, cold sweat covering my body, mixing with and joining the cold rain running off of my face and pouring from my soaked, hatless head.

  Finally, a short time after midnight, a bus going to Heathrow pulled up and let a couple people off. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a ten-pound note and started walking up the stairs.

  “Hey, mister, are you scheduled to take this bus? I don’t see anyone on my list to be picked up here.”

  List, I thought, what the hell?

  “Yes, I should be on the list.”

  “Ticket?” he asked.

  “I forgot to bring it, can I just give you cash?”

  “No, you cannot, mate. These busses are preticketed and my work ledger tells me this bus is fully booked to Heathrow. I’ve got people to pick up on the way, I can’t take you.”

  “How can I get a ticket?”

  “You have to go to the local bus station during normal working hours or pay for it by credit card over the phone. Now off you go!”

  Well, that was fantastic news. I hadn’t the slightest clue as to where the station was. It was obviously closed anyway and I had never even owned a credit card my entire life. I walked back down the steps, then turned around and asked, “When is the next bus coming to this stop, sir?”

  “Three thirty, mate, but you won’t get on it either, unless you’ve booked it in advance.”

  With this distressing knowledge, I got off the bus. I considered my situation: completely empty, rain-washed streets, no extra money for the train, only enough for one from London to Bristol, no idea where either a bus or train station was, no dope in the foreseeable future, soaking wet, freezing, going into withdrawals, no phone nor anyone to call. My options were extremely limited. I absolutely had to wait until the next bus at three thirty. I would try this again but with a new strategy: I would play on the sympathies of the driver and hope that if the next one were not fully booked, a little bit of cash and a little bit of pity would net me a ride.

  As I stood in the increasingly biting cold air and rain, getting sicker by the minute, I silently cursed Wilkins and the rest of the entire goddamned band and crew. How hard would it have been to go an hour or two out of their way to drop me off where I could have taken a train directly to the huge station in King’s Cross? None of those assholes had an ounce of compassion for my self-created plight. They had begun to refer to me behi
nd my back as “Mr. Burns,” the old, bitter, bent-over, and creepy boss on The Simpsons cartoon television program, slightly reminiscent of Klaus Kinski in the title role of Nosferatu the Vampyre.

  I was admittedly getting skinnier and older-looking by the day. I was constantly operating on no sleep, walking the local drug neighborhoods of every city and town we visited every minute of every night I was not required to be with the band. Not in order to get high, forget about that, it was in order to just stay well. Every day I was subsisting on the barest minimum of dope that I could get by on, carefully rationing every last grain. When I could afford it, I also needed crack, since I was obviously a fucking degenerate crackhead also. Every spare second was spent on my feet and wandering, haunted, sticking out like a raw cock in my by-now filthy leather pants, eternally scanning the streets of the worst neighborhoods in every city we visited for more.

  I paced up and down the sidewalk behind the bus stop in the freezing rain. My hair and clothes were soaking wet, only the leather trousers not saturated with rainwater yet. Shaking, shivering, and occasionally gagging, on the verge of vomiting every second. I was constantly spitting out the thick, sick mucus that kept forming in my throat, a strong road-sign that full-on withdrawals were right around the corner. If they came on before another bus showed up, there was no possible way any driver was going to let me on, regardless of my obvious “charms.” Every five minutes or so, I would try to sit for a moment on the slatted, rain-­covered metal bench at the stop and attempt to relax. But it was so uncomfortable and my already-through-the-roof discomfort so high, that I would inevitably stand right back up again.

  As the hours crawled by like an extra-wide tarantula, I began to shake uncontrollably. I could not stop. Just when I began thinking seriously about trying to find a hospital where I planned to desperately throw myself on the mercy of the emergency room staff, I saw the unmistakable high headlights of a bus shine against the boarded-up building at the end of the block. A bus pulled around the corner, stopping to let a few people off where I stood on the street, shaking like a victim of Parkinson’s disease. After the last passenger got off, I quickly ran up the steps to where a kind-looking middle-aged female driver sat. I glanced at the clock on the dashboard: three thirty a.m.

  “My Lord, lad! How long have you been in the rain? You’re soaking wet!”

  I tried to hide my severe discomfort and talk normally.

  “A few hours, ma’am. I’m so sorry to put this on you, but I’m in an emergency situation. I got a call before midnight that my mother had been in an auto accident and is in hospital in London. They told me to come straightaway as she might not make it through the night. I know I need a ticket for this bus but it was after hours and I had no way to get one. I can pay cash. If I could just get to Heathrow, I can take the Tube into the city. I pray to God I’m not too late!”

  I poured out this river of horseshit as fast as I could, thinking I might puke at any second from the effort it took just to talk at all.

  With a sincere look of horror and empathy, she said, “Oh my! I’m so sorry, son! Please take the first seat behind me; this bus is mainly unbooked to Heathrow. And don’t worry about payment, this is an emergency!”

  I nodded my thanks and sat painfully down in the seat. I held my face against the window to feel the heat blowing up from the side of the cushion while fighting the urge to vomit.

  By the time the bus arrived at Heathrow, it was daylight and I was now on the verge of serious withdrawals. I knew from experience that my body had been generating a gutful of midnight-black venom for hours now. It took every bit of strength I had to not start shitting and vomiting it up, but I knew, no matter what, my body would soon begin to successfully purge. I walked to the Tube station, trying as hard as I could to literally hold my shit together.

  I got onto the train headed into King’s Cross. It was morning rush hour and getting off the crowded, standing-room-only train, I fought my way through the mob in a hurry to get to their jobs, being physically knocked around from person to person like a human pinball, a raw, skinless human pinball of all exposed nerves. The last three blocks to my dealer’s flat were the harshest. I had to stop frequently due to the severe contractions in my stomach up through my esophagus and the brutal cramping of all my limbs. A block from his place, I finally could not hold back any longer. I began to projectile vomit so hard that it took me to my knees, then flat out on the ground. Despite the fact that I’d not eaten any food in two days, up came copious quantities of pure-black liquid.

  I could not believe I had come so far and had gotten so close just to come up short here, practically on the doorstep of the doctor. Scatman Crothers in Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining flashed through my brain. He’d flown all the way from Florida to Colorado, had taken a snowplow and driven in a blizzard all the way up to the Overlook Hotel to try and save the kid Danny, only to be axed as soon as he got through the door. I highly doubted any children’s lives would be saved by my demise here, less than a block from the dealer’s. I spasmed like a jellyfish on my side upon the hard concrete sidewalk, puking uncontrollably, tears streaming from my eyes. Through the hazy blur of my saltwater-flooded corneas, I could see a group of giggling, uniformed schoolkids walking around me where I lay incapacitated on the ground. They pointed at me and whispered to each other and then broke out into loud laughter as they passed by the pitiful scene of my public shame and sickness, displayed out before them in the crisp, cold morning air.

  Okay, goddamnit! Get your fucking ass up off the ground! my mind screamed at me. What was I going to do? Just chill here kicking on a street corner for three days and nights? I had to get up the stairs I could see clearly in the distance, the stairs to my only hope, my savior’s pad. With every ounce of strength I had left in my cruelly ravaged body, I staggered to my feet and began running the last half block to the apartment building, puking off to the side the entire way, trying not to get any on my already-soaked-through, disgusting clothes.

  As I began climbing the staircase, I puked in the direction of a trash can, covering the top of it in black vomit. I continued painfully pulling myself up by the handrail next to the steps, foot by agonizing foot. I banged loudly on my dealer’s door and heard his small dog begin barking inside. In a second, he was there, opening the door in his pajamas, obviously just awakened by my insistent knocking.

  The minute he looked at me, Juan-Joseph knew what was happening. He put up his hand and in his thick Portuguese accent said, “One second.” He turned around, ran into his kitchen, and returned with a small trash container, which he handed to me to puke into. I said, “Toilet!” Pulling me by my arm into his place, he shoved me through the bathroom door. I narrowly avoided destroying my only pair of pants, getting them down a half second before the powerful, unstoppable explosion of the same black liquid ejected like a shotgun blast out of my ass as, at the same instant, I puked again into the bucket I held in my hand.

  When it was safe to get up for a moment, I went back into the other room. He sat me down on a chair in his small kitchen dining area where he’d already started to cook up a shot for me. I continued puking and heaving into the can. “Oh my God, oh my God,” I heard him muttering to himself in English, and then something else louder in his native tongue as he scurried around his kitchen, quickly preparing a dose for me. When finished, he turned to me and pantomimed the motion of sticking the syringe into his ass, a gesture that said it was no time to search for a vein, that I should just muscle the hit, something I already knew. I got the first hit into my asscheek while he was cooking up a second, and then a third. I stabilized enough to search for a vein with the fourth. Sickness finally killed, I fell into a dark, dreamless sleep, sitting halfway up on a loveseat in his living room.

  I awoke at noon to the feeling of my Portuguese friend’s little white dog licking my hand where it hung down to the ground. After buying a couple more grams and doing another shot for the road, I got ready to leave and catch the train to Bri
stol. I asked Juan-Joseph if he was going to be around at the end of the month because my band was going to be on the Later … with Jools Holland television program and if he wanted to come I could get him a seat in the audience. I was hoping my gesture might lead to me getting some free dope. He shook his head no and told me he was going to be in Portugal visiting family then. That was a drag because not only did it mean no gifted heroin, it meant when we came back to town, I would be back out on the street just a few blocks down from where I was presently, forced to cop once again.

  After playing in Bristol the next day, we caught a flight to Germany on an off day while our guitar tech and a salesman who worked for the merch company drove a van full of our equipment over to meet us for an appearance on a German television show filmed in Essen. All I had for the three days we would be traveling was what I had left over from my unscheduled stop in London. It was less than a gram. I tried hard not to think about a replay of the running gun-battle that had been Sheffield to London, only this time on German TV. I would have to ration myself almost down to nothing each of those days if I was going to make it. Hopefully there would be a train station full of drug pushers in Essen …

  We arrived to a wintry scene of deep snow and ice. I was deflated when I saw that we were being driven to a hotel far outside the city. We checked into our rooms in the late afternoon. Upon getting inside, I prepared to cook up and do my last shot of the day, then realized if I were to do that, it would bring my meager stash down to around a half gram. Just a fucking half gram to get through two more days? I began to quietly freak out and prematurely grieve the upcoming avalanche of shit that was going to bury me, breaking out into a cold sweat in the process. A cold sweat that told me I was already beginning to withdraw, and we’d only just gotten there.