by Mark Lanegan
I inquired at the front desk as to where the train station in Essen was. “It’s twenty-five miles away, I’m afraid” was the depressing report I received. As I stood staring out the lobby window into the darkness, I could see that a massive snowstorm had kicked off. I could not afford to take a cab twenty-five miles and back while still having money to purchase drugs, so I decided to stay in my room and try to sleep. If that was not successful, I would stay awake all night, waiting as long as was humanly possible before allowing myself another shot.
I turned on German TV and stared at the screen with the sound off. I thought about what was happening at home. Were Simon and Layne still keeping my meager business together? I lamented the fact that if I were only there, none of this self-inflicted torture would be happening. If I were home, I’d be selling crack and supporting my habit. And while Layne was staying with me, I’d more than likely be kept loaded due to his generosity. There had never been a time while I was in his company that he’d scored and not given me the same amount for free. But that was there and then; my present reality was far from that twisted, wistful fantasyland.
As the clock revolved, I could not help but check it every few minutes, wishing like hell that the morning would come soon. I would turn and glance at the clock and, realizing only ten minutes had gone by since my last look, my heightened anxiety increased. I had to force myself to not glance at it until an unsettling mania inevitably arose as I lay all night on the uncomfortable hotel bed obsessing over the brutal reckoning coming my way. Finally, at eight a.m., still awake and heading into deeper withdrawals, I could hold out no longer. I did my next shot, only to discover to my horror that it barely got me well. A half gram left. Late that afternoon, we would do sound and camera check for Rockpalast, a German concert show, then play an abbreviated set in front of a live audience that night, wait until the next day, then catch a flight with an afternoon arrival in Amsterdam, the city of our next engagement. I was never going to fucking make it, that much was abundantly clear. I was going to be into a full-on kick by tonight and there was no way on earth I would be allowed to fly on any airline in the condition I’d be in by tomorrow …
Before we were to leave the hotel to drive an hour to the venue where Rockpalast was filmed, and once more on the verge of withdrawals, I did another tiny shot to even worse results. I had reached the point of seriously diminished returns. Had my survival strategy been inherently flawed? Should I have just done a normal-size shot, emptied my tiny cache of heroin into my veins and thrown the fucking chips wildly into the unknown? It was too late because now I only had the smallest amount of dope to get by on. Come what may, I had to get to Amsterdam tonight after the show.
I asked at the front desk and discovered Amsterdam was only a two-hour drive from Essen. I wouldn’t have enough money for a train and dope, so my only chance was if the equipment van was rolling out tonight. I would ride with them. In the large square in Amsterdam where I had copped in the past, the dealers were up all night. That was the only way I could possibly get by. We were scheduled to play there the next day but the proximity of the city made it a crapshoot whether the crew were going tonight or tomorrow morning. If it was the latter, I was fucked.
As band and crew gathered in the lobby to wait for a van ride to the Rockpalast studio/concert hall, I asked Wilkins what was the deal, were the crew driving that night?
“Yes, buddy,” he answered wearily, as if to a bothersome child. He was sick of giving me updates as to our every single movement every fifteen minutes.
“I know what you’re thinking and there’s no room for you in the van, Mark. Unless you want to ride in the back, on top of the equipment,” he said in his lilting, sing-song Birmingham Brummie brogue.
“Yeah, man. I’m going to do that. I have to, it’s critical.”
“Okay, buddy, that’s up to you. I’ll make sure you have a room in the hotel when you get there tonight.” And then, in a tone that intimated he knew this was against his better judgment, “If you should happen to need some extra cash, you can get it from James the merch guy. He’s traveling there tonight and you have some money coming from what we’ve sold already.”
This news almost entirely put my mind at ease. It was now all but assured I’d be well by late that night at the very least. I could change in my hundred-dollars’ worth of British pounds for Dutch guilders at the hotel desk, and I had a fallback plan if anything were to go wrong. I’d just get a cash advance from our merch salesman.
Confident I would easily slide through this nightmare of self-imposed rationing, this strict austerity program I’d set up for myself, I did my last tiny bit of dope in the dressing room toilet before our soundcheck, a full six hours before our scheduled appearance on German TV. It was too little, too late to make any noticeable improvement in my condition. I could smell the imminent, sickening cyclone of a kick coming on but was sure I could get to Amsterdam before the eye of it hit and tore my building down.
At Rockpalast my spirits were momentarily lifted when I found out my acquaintances L7 from Los Angeles were also on the show. Perhaps one of them had something to tide me over. That notion was kicked in the nuts when I found out they were all clean. Goddamnit, man, I thought, why in the fuck aren’t you clean? Everything would be so much easier …
After we played the show, I had to wait around while our van was being loaded. It was almost midnight before me, our Irish guitar tech Dave, and James the merch guy who had been with us such a short time that I’d not even spoken to him before got into the vehicle and headed out slowly to Amsterdam. From a precarious perch atop a stack of haphazardly packed equipment and merchandise in the back of the van, I watched, dopesick and unhappy as James drove syrup-slow due to his overly cautious respect for the snow-covered backroads and then the slippery Autobahn. Jesus Christ, you motherfucking pussy!I seethed inwardly. My fucking grandmother could drive faster than this and she’s been dead for fifteen years. C’mon, shithead! Move your fucking ass!I tried to close my eyes, to calm down and rest; none of my silent rage would get us there any faster. The only thing my volcanic inner storms would bring quicker was full-fledged withdrawals and, maybe someday after surviving that, the undertaker. I was running, raging, and drugging myself to death. A bitter, mountainous, unnamed, unrecognized, and poisonous grief melded with my rage. Rage pointed inward, and oftentimes fired wildly outward if I could find a semi-legitimate excuse to explode. Until then, I would silently kill anyone within range via silent, focused hatred. My mantra had become Die, motherfucker, die.
Sleep was an impossibility. I was lying across hard surfaces with several different levels, nothing straight enough to stretch out on and rest. I was cramped, uncomfortably stuffed like another piece of equipment on top of the uneven pile. That, the heavy-metal radio station, and the absence of dope kept me wide awake the entire shitty ride.
We finally pulled up to the American Hotel after two a.m. I had last stayed in this same hotel with Layne. We’d gotten loaded for a full twenty-four hours straight. My clothes were still damp from the sweat of my Rockpalast performance as I climbed gingerly down from the equipment mound. I stopped to rub my sore and tender legs, which started to cramp the moment I exposed my body to the freezing-cold night air. I was in a hurry to get my room key, exchange my British pounds into guilders, then walk the thirty minutes or so to the large square not far from the train station to score my medicine and get right. Not my preferred order of events but the order in which they must go if I were going to kill the fast-rising dopesickness, now at the same fever pitch it had been while I’d stood five hours in the rain at a British bus stop only four days prior.
After exchanging my money, I set out on foot on what had turned out to be a much colder night than any of the freezing nights we’d already seen on the tour. I’d not anticipated the severity of the low temperature and soon realized my clothes were not cutting it. I was freezing to death. I started to shake and then run in an exhausting, hopeless attempt to get warm.
In a desperate bid for warmth, I stopped into a nearly empty late-night “coffee shop,” one of Amsterdam’s storied weed-smoking establishments.
After everything else, was I now being prohibited from reaching my painful, solitary goal by the fucking weather? Was this turning into a fucking replay of Denver? I was so goddamned close! Just a scant thirty-minute walk was turning out to be Shackleton’s attempt to reach Antarctica. Except to my knowledge none of those guys had been stranded dopesick just out of reach of the dealer on the shore. Yes, my heroism knew no bounds and I lamented my terrible luck. I was, after all, simply a victim of poor timing and circumstance. After staying inside long enough to feel a tiny bit of life return to my extremities, with the thaw came the uncomfortable awareness that I was in fact nearly into a full-on, fucked-up kick. I’d best, by God, get my ass up to the square. Who knew? Maybe this Arctic chill had kept everyone inside tonight and I’d find the square empty anyway. That was a thought too horrifying to consider, and I shuddered at the image of myself suffering the consequences of such a scene. I had to get up there fast to find out.
After struggling the last fifteen minutes to the well-known dope spot, I spied two lowlife-looking characters, the mirror image of myself, at the base of the huge statue in the middle of the square, the place where dealers always stood waiting for customers. I approached them, and after smelling and taking a tiny taste first to make sure it was legit, I bought two-hundred-and-fifty-guilders’ worth of heroin, saving thirty guilders to cab back to the hotel. It was too cold to walk now and if I needed more dope money, I’d just get some from James.
Three a.m., back at the hotel, I’m searching the hallways for a room service tray in hopes of finding a slice of lemon in an empty glass with which to cut the dope while cooking it to make it safe to shoot. The young woman at the night desk had informed me that the bar was closed and room service was also shut down until breakfast time. Nearly at the last room on the last floor, I finally came across not a slice, but an entire half of a lemon, sitting untouched on a plate next to the vacant shell of a lobster tail. Thank God, I thought. I took it as a sign of good luck and hurried back to my room where I retrieved the spoon and two used-too-many-times syringes from my backpack. I proceeded to cook up, psyched that I’d pulled it off.
You made it, you stupid motherfucker, I said to myself in disbelief. By all rights, this should have ended worse than Sheffield to King’s Cross. Yet here I was, basking in the beautifully familiar smell of brown European powdered dope as it was heated, knowing I had crossed a mighty frozen ocean without a compass in an open dinghy against incredible odds. I quickly found a vein, more good luck. I registered and did the shot and … something was terribly wrong. Instead of feeling the warm, enveloping rush of the drugs as they coursed through my veins and sped to my brain, instead of the strange addictive phenomenon of smelling the heroin from inside your brain as it hit, instead of the sickness-crushing heat of the dope, I felt nothing at all.
Confused, I picked up the bindle that contained the rest of my dope. I re-smelled it: Yes, goddamnit! This is dope! What in the fuck? I cooked up the other hit and shot it. Again, nothing. I silently imploded. How in the fuck did they make that fake dope? It smelled, cooked, tasted even, exactly like the real deal. This was something I’d not encountered before but I didn’t have time to sit and dwell on it. I had to get more cash and get back up to the square and fast if I were going to get something real. If not, I was going to hit the red line on the sickness meter very soon.
I went upstairs to James’s room and knocked. Silence. No! Had he fucking gone somewhere else for the night? I knocked much louder and still not a peep. What in the fuck, man? I began to freak out, pounding on and kicking the door as hard as I could with the toes of my heavy combat-style black boots. I heard him move inside, and as the realization came that he was hiding, willfully ignoring me, I started talking to him, quietly but loud enough that I knew he’d hear me.
“Hey, man, I’m sorry if I scared you. I just need to get my cut of the merch dough. Or a cut. Give it to me and I’ll get out of your hair.”
And “Wilkins said it was okay, I swear to God it’s all good, bro.”
And “Hey, man, it’s critical I get it right now so if you could just unlock the door . . .”
“Go away” came his angry, unmistakably belligerent voice from inside the room.
I exploded in disbelief, screaming through the door, “You open this motherfucking door, James, or I swear to God, you’re dead, you fucking piece of shit! It’s my money, motherfucker!”
My voice dropped down several notches as I suddenly became aware of the insanity of my verbal attack.
“Okay, it’s okay, bro, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Getting no response, I then shot straight back up in wild furious volume.
“You can give it to me, man! What in the fuck are you thinking, dude? Open this motherfucking door, James, or I will fucking murder you in your sleep, you fucking cunt!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.
A door down the hallway opened and an angry-looking older woman stuck her head out the door and in an indiscernible European accent said, “Get out of here! I have called the front desk!”
“Hey, lady, fuck you, all right?” I responded with wild-eyed intensity, then flipped her off with both hands as she slammed her door as loudly as I’d been yelling.
“Either you leave me alone or I’m calling the cops” came from behind James’s door.
This infuriated me beyond belief. I began trying to actually kick the door in, trying my damnedest to gain entry to actually murder this recalcitrant son of a bitch.
“Go ahead and call them, you fucking cocksucker! Let’s see what they’ve got to say about you stealing my money, asshole! You work for me!”
“No, I work for the merchandise company, not you.”
“I don’t give a fuck who you work for, part of that money belongs to me, you piece of shit!”
Now the blood-pressure spike and adrenaline surge of my mania and the physical effort of trying to kick down the door, on top of every previous day, hour, minute, and second of the debilitating nightmare of this trip, pushed me over the edge into near-full withdrawals. I could no longer scream anymore because that brought me so damn close to puking. This was it. I had avoided nothing and the storm was going to annihilate me anyway, despite my heroic efforts.
Right then, two fifty-pound British notes slipped under the door in front of me. I quickly bent down and grabbed them up, lest he pull them back in.
“Take it, you animal!” I heard. “If you come back here again, I will call the cops!”
Clutching the money, wet and shivering, I ran down the six floors of stairs to the lobby and up to the counter, sweat streaming off my face, my shirt completely soaked through. The same young woman who’d exchanged my money earlier was still there. I slapped my money on the counter.
“Is everything okay, Mr. Lanegan? I have received reports of a disturbance on the sixth floor.”
“Umm, I didn’t hear or see anything. As you know I’m on the fourth floor, so … Do I need you to call me a cab or can I still hail one outside? It’s getting late.”
I tried to get my response out without gagging in front of her but it took too great an effort to hold it back. I turned around quickly and bent down, hands on knees, almost vomiting from the sickening mucus that filled my throat. Here it comes you idiot, you’re fucked! I thought. The grueling brutality of the past two weeks’ events, no, the dysfunction of my entire life, all of it had brought me to this moment of supreme lunacy, confusing self-laceration, and pain. I faced a tidal wave of dopesickness that was going to obliterate me. Of that, there was no doubt.
“There should be a cab right outside, Mr. Lanegan. Here’s your guilders.”
When I got back to the square, the two guys who’d burned me with the phony dope were gone. In their place was one smaller, smiling guy. He walked me around a corner and I followed him into a crack between bu
ildings. Once in the shadowy darkness, he turned around, still smiling.
“The guilders?” he said.
“The brown?” I asked. As I reached into my pocket and brought out the dough, I felt the unmistakable sharp point of a knife against the back of my neck.
“Don’t fucking move,” said a deep, older-sounding male voice, speaking English with a heavy Dutch accent.
No fucking way, my mind screamed. I couldn’t believe that in my desperation to get well I had fallen for the oldest trick in the book and walked directly into yet another rip-off.
I loudly protested, “Oh, c’mon man, don’t rip me off! Please, dudes! If you only knew my fucked-up situation I’m sure you’d . . .”
“Take the money and check his pockets,” the guy behind me said to the smiling man who had led me, lamb to the slaughter, into this setup.
He was still smiling as he grabbed the money from my hand. The guy behind me shoved me hard, face first up against the wall, while his pal rummaged through my pockets, taking the rest of my guilders. He then shoved me even harder, completely flat against the wall, to create a space in the tight crack for his pal to get around me.
“You stay here and count to a hundred. If you come out of here before that I will gut you, mister,” said the man holding the weapon, poking the end of the knife so hard against my neck that I could feel a small stream of blood trickling down onto my back.
“Please, dudes, leave me something, I’m begging you guys,” I said in a pathetic voice of shattered disbelief.