by Robert Power
‘Not heard that, not about injecting,’ she said, straining at her task, ‘but I’ll find out. I’ll let you know.’
Then all went quiet again, as each thought about what it might mean, but then, more so, what tonight would bring.
‘Tea’s up!’ shouted Molly.
Lennon jumped to his feet again, pirouetting and playing air guitar.
‘All you need is love … da da da da da …. all you need is love … da da da da da … love is all you need …’
THE POOL HALL, OLD COMPTON STREET, SOHO, LONDON, 1985
Squeezed between strip joints, the small unmarked door opens to an unlit stairwell leading to a large room on the first floor. Small groups of people chat together. Some sit alone on the hard benches skirting the room; others lean on the coffee bar in the corner, sipping from plastic cups. Three full-sized pool tables dominate the floor space. The one by the wall, farthest from the window, is occupied by the Maltese, who gamble for a thousand pounds on a single frame. The other two are in constant use. Pool played on these less exclusive tables is perfunctory. The players are biding their time; their minds are on other matters. They look up now and again to see where the action is, who is coming and going, who is buying and who is selling. For pool is not the main activity of the room. At the top of the stairs, leaning against the balustrade, the dealers keep a keen eye on the flow of people coming up from Old Compton Street below. Even before their heads come into view between the struts of the banisters, the gauntlet of dealers make their offers.
‘You looking?’ says one. ‘Want some smack?’ asks another. ‘After gear?’ whispers a third.
Every heroin user in London’s West End knows of the ‘pool hall’. It’s the one place where it is guaranteed that class A drugs will be on sale day and night.
Each morning, before the doors open, the dealers gather together with the Maltese gamblers who own the place. The Maltese divide up the drugs among the regular dealers, and that’s the last they have to do with it. From then on they relax, drink wine and play pool on the alpha table and joke around with Little Ed, the bartender, who can just about see over the counter. The system works well for everyone. The Maltese shift large quantities of drugs each day, the dealers have a reliable source, and the users don’t have to linger for hours on a street corner waiting for ‘the man’. Some of the less chaotic users act as runners. These carefully selected foot soldiers work for payment in kind. The dealers supply them with £10 bags of heroin that they peddle around the streets of Soho and the West End. When they’ve sold their load they come back to the pool hall for more, inject some drugs in the toilets, collect some more bags and head out again. Everyone is happy.
The atmosphere in the pool hall is heavy, but rarely threatening and never violent. It’s a club where no one stumbles in by mistake. Even the police and the drug squads are content. It keeps the drug injectors off the streets, and that keeps the residents and politicians happy. Every now and again there are busts and a few small-time user-dealers are hauled off to the courts. An occupational hazard.
But it could never last. The properties in the area were at a premium and gentrification was on everyone’s agenda. So the police were pressured to close it down and the drug users were forced back onto the streets. The pool hall was converted to office space for a high-flying media company. Bizarrely, I visited it once to consult on a documentary on cocaine addiction and sat around a huge class table where I swear I could still hear the clunk of ball on ball and the whispers of ‘You looking?’, ‘Want some gear?’
HANDCUFFED
Okay, so he was the consultant psychiatrist and head of mental health services for the region. And yes, she was the chief executive officer (never before seen in such a state of dishevelment). And I’m sure it must have been exhausting, lying there all night in so contorted a position. His bloodshot eyes all but pleading; she unable to keep the sheet over her bare behind. The two of them handcuffed to the metal bedstead, the key marooned in the middle of the room, tantalisingly out of reach (but would toes alone have been able to grasp it?). Just as well it was a Tuesday, I told them, as it was the only day I mopped the floors of the old nurses’ quarters. I realised the irony when I said there wasn’t much use for the rooms up here these days, what with the new building and all.
‘The key,’ said the consultant psychiatrist in a faint, exhausted whisper. The chief executive officer’s face was buried in the pillow, but I heard a muffled sob. Her head bobbed up and down and her hair shook. I undid the handcuffs then turned away as they searched the floor for their clothes.
On his way out, the consultant psychiatrist winked and muttered something that suggested there could be money or other favours if I kept quiet. The chief executive fled the room without a word. After they left I swept and mopped the room and heaved the heavy bed back into its proper place under the window. As I was squeezing the mop in the sink I heard Doris flip-flopping along the corridor, accompanied by the squeaky wheels of her tea trolley.
‘Doris,’ I shouted, ‘you’ll never believe this …’
DENVER, COLORADO
This is the Ronald Reagan era of no free clean needles for illicit drug users in the USA, and rates of HIV and AIDS deaths unheard of in most of the developed world. The ride across the southside of town is like a trip through a war zone. A dry and cratered landscape of boarded-up buildings and potted roads. We stop abruptly and the driver points to a figure waiting on the other side of the road.
‘There’s the big boy,’ he says to me. ‘Off you go, pal.’
Jose is an enormous man with wild hair and a long grizzled beard. He looks clownish in outsized denim overalls.
‘Good to meet you,’ he says, grabbing me by the hand. ‘Come on then … let’s see what they make of you.’
I follow him as he turns and enters the open door to the derelict bombed-out building behind him that serves as a shooting gallery for the Hispanic coke and heroin addicts. Figures shuffle around in the darkness, stirred by the intruders.
‘Who are you?’ challenges a shadow in the corner.
‘My name is Jose. I work for Project Safety. I’ve brought bleach and condoms. I’ve also got a doctor here from England. He’s on our side. He’s come to see how he can help.’
There is talk and movement in the darkness. A man emerges from the depths of the building. He is like a scared nocturnal animal disturbed in its lair. His skin is pale and pasty, covered in purple blemishes. He winces at the brightness of the sun. His name, he says, is Ricky, but it could have been Lazarus. Jose hands over a plastic bag.
‘There’s bleach for cleaning your works with. Make sure you follow the instructions. The leaflets are in Spanish for the brothers. There are condoms in there too.’
Ricky peers into the bag of treats like a small boy at a children’s birthday party. Jose tells him the mobile team calls at Humbolt Park at two every afternoon to hand out bags and sandwiches. The man nods and retreats back into the shadows.
‘I’ll be back on Tuesday,’ shouts Jose.
‘Sure thing, okay,’ comes the muffled reply.
All the while I stand near Jose, observing the man at work, listening and taking it all in. Jose signals for me to move away from the doorless opening, wiping the beads of sweat from his face and forehead with a large handkerchief he produces from a pocket. He carries a lot of weight and is visibly uncomfortable in the heat.
‘I’m playing it cautious with these people,’ he says, the sweat still seeping from his pores, the sun high in the sky, the heat rising. ‘They’re getting used to me. Word has got around that I’m okay. That I’m one of them. Possession of syringes is bad news here. If they get caught they get a ticket and a court date. Maybe a big-dollar fine. Miss the court and you get ten days in jail. So they’re suspicious of everyone.’
‘Ricky looked bad,’ I say.
‘Sure thing. Those blotches … you saw the blotches?’ I nod. ‘Well that’s Kaposi’s sarcoma … skin cancer. It means he’s
got AIDS.’
A couple of days later I head to San Francisco to work on another program desperately trying, in the face of mounting political opposition, to address the epidemic among drug users. When I next hear from Jose he tells me Ricky has died. No Lazarus miracle. No second chance. And it’ll be nigh on a decade before America provides free needles and syringes to its injectors.
CAGED
I could only ever remember one sadder zoo. But that was forty years earlier in Athens, in different times, and was less of a zoo, more a shock of caged animals in a busy park. From that Athens park the psychotic panther always comes to mind, the one that walked round and round his cage, the right side of his body denuded of fur, scraped away on the bars.
This day I stand in the grounds of Norbulingka Buddhist Temple in Lhasa, Tibet. Barren concrete cages hold a wolf here and a sleeping tiger there, barely room to stand and turn, rusty bars, crumbling concrete. A peacock trails its tattered and colourless feathers through the empty drink cans and cigarette butts. Monkeys on their ruined cement hill fight over plastic water bottles and popcorn cartons. Two small boys throw stones at the tiger. It shifts, turns over and goes back to sleep.
DEVELOPMENT
Two more men, asking the same questions. White men. Middleaged. ‘How many? … What do you provide? … Do you?’ These white men in their four-wheel drives sweep in, drink water, sweep out. Look at our bare walls. Peer into cabinets and tut-tut at our out-of-date medicine. Make notes in their little notepads. Ask the same questions. Yawn from boredom or jet lag, or both. Smile, don’t smile. What do they know of us? With their notebooks and sweaty foreheads, clutching their plastic bottles of water. Then reaching for more water. Some come again with another questioner. To ask the same questions. ‘How many? What do you provide? Do you?’ Same. Same. We shake hands. They might utter a word of language in goodbye. We smile at their attempt. Commend them on their prowess. ‘Like a native!’ Joke a little. The hour passes. They say they have another appointment. Busy, busy. On the other side of town. ‘Oh, the traffic! The motorbikes. No helmets! Babies on the handlebars! Carrying groceries!’ More joking and smiling. We lead them out. Smile and bid farewell. They climb into the relief of their air-conditioned car. Windows closed. They drive away, little scuds of dust from the wheels. Off to their next visit, to repeat the same questions.
PENTONVILLE PRISON
He had one cigarette behind each ear. I’d just handed them to him.
‘Give us the rest, mate. Go on. No one’s looking.’
So I pushed the packet of Marlboro Reds across the table and Warren whisked it away like a magician. I knew it was against the visiting rules and would probably cause havoc to the prison black market in (rare) quality tailor-made smokes. But I knew how sick Warren was, even though he was happily ignoring the fact.
‘This AIDS thing’s a conspiracy and it ain’t getting me,’ he said, taking the cigarette from behind his right ear. ‘I’ll get a nice break here, put some weight back on, then I’ll be out by Christmas.’
I leant forward and lit the cigarette for him.
He was inside for selling a few bags of heroin on the backstreets of Charing Cross, just enough to raise the funds for his own injecting drug habit, not real drug dealing, as he told the judge.
‘Safe here. I know the routine. Get a break from the madness outside. Only have to look out for your back in the showers.’ He laughed out loud at his own joke.
I think he’d forgotten, but he once told me about the time he chased a dealer who owed him money onto the roof of the flats on Rosebery Avenue and then pushed him fifty feet down to the street below. But he was stoned when he told me all that and I was sure he had no memory of the conversation.
He lit the left-ear cigarette from the stub of the first. His long black hair fell across his face, but I could see the tell-tale purplish marks of the cancer beneath his skin. He touched his cheek as if he were reading my thoughts.
‘I’ve got this idea of going straight,’ he said, as if it was the darkest, guiltiest secret. ‘I’ve been to a couple of NA – you know, Narcotics Anonymous – meetings, and I think I can make a go of it. Get out of here. Get out of town, get a job, get a new life.’
He was always so bright and optimistic, was Warren. Even that time I visited him in the hospital after he’d been run over by his worst best friend for stealing his drugs.
‘Sounds like a great idea, Warren,’ I said, even though I knew his time was running out.
And so it was, for this was 1985 and AIDS was way beyond a conspiracy. As it turned out, Warren died in prison – but he died clean, so his NA buddies told me, except for the smokes.
BALLET
Tonight it is ballet; last night it was opera. The seats are all taken, except for the box nearest the stage. I sit in the front row next to the deputy minister for health. Like all the oblasts in Russia, Sverdlovsk prides itself on its opera house and its resident company. The conductor takes his bow and the curtain is raised. Giselle appears. The strawberry wig with pigtails, thick mascara and rouged cheeks are not enough to hide her age. I’m told she’s married to the theatre director and has been performing the lead roles for decades. As she begins to dance, a group of six young men and women crash noisily into the vacant box. They talk loudly into their shiny mobile phones. One puts his feet up on a cushioned chair.
‘Uralmash mafia,’ whispers my companion, ‘the children of the nouveau riche.’
Giselle and the rest soldier on. Half an hour later, their statement made, the young mafiosi clatter an exit. In the final scene, Giselle dies. My Russian friend turns to me, cups his hand to my ear in classic style.
‘She has died,’ he whispers, ‘because she is very, very old.’
LIGHTER
It was in that very sad and dark time before even the glimmer of antiretroviral therapy. The only hope was for a death not too long, not too, too painful, not too, too degrading. Not that the medicine would come any time soon to Ho Chi Minh City. I laughed with the young boy. He was painfully thin and his eyes were sucked of life, deep-set and frightened. But still he had a certain sense of youthful playfulness about him. He showed me his cigarette lighter, which was decorated with a picture of a young curvaceous woman. She was dressed in a tight black dress. He turned it upside down and laughed wildly as her clothes disappeared to reveal her nakedness.
‘For you,’ he said, handing it to me.
For many years, I kept that lighter in a drawer in my bedroom. Whenever I picked it up, turned it over and watched the dress disappear, I’d think back to that day in Vietnam and the tall thin boy who would only live a few months more. Later that afternoon we played pool and drank tea.
‘The lady!’ he said, gesturing for me to turn the lighter upside down.
He smiled, wickedly, conspiratorially, as the forbidden flesh revealed itself. Then his friend arrived on a motorbike. The young man waved goodbye to me as he sat on the passenger’s pillion. He rested his head on his friend’s shoulder as they sped off and disappeared into the traffic.
TEMPLE
He showed his passport. His entry permit letter. But the man shook his head. He’d been there since early. Queued for almost two hours from six o’clock. He was eager to enter, to see inside the second most sacred place in Tibet. It was a special day. A sacred day. Only Tibetans allowed, though this was unknown to him. All this reminded him of his boyhood, outside the football ground, waiting for the gates to open. The rush to his spot. In the days of standing, before the all-seater stadiums. So today, in the crush, the crowd moved forward to cross the threshold. It was then that he was stopped. Barred from entry. A side gate was unlocked and he was ushered outside. To join the pilgrims. Circling, clockwise, prayer wheels, chanting, walking. He was not upset, not disappointed: for while he was waiting he had touched the tiger painted on the temple wall.
PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL, PORT MORESBY, PAPUA NEW GUINEA
The doctor was on secondment from Fiji. She showed me the medic
ine cabinet. Mainly empty shelves.
‘Stock-out, they call it,’ she said, ‘and the meds we have are mostly out-of-date. And not the ones we need. But we just have to adapt and hand out what we have. We have to keep control here.’
The office where we sat, where interviews took place, where any counselling happened, was open to the ‘exercise compound’. The men stared at me through the bars, much more than wildeyed, as I talked with the doctor. Like men in a run-down zoo. The exercise compound was no more than a prison yard with a huge, heavy padlock on the gate. It had a concrete floor enclosed by metal bars rising to an apex about fifteen feet high. Just like a huge birdcage. And there was a big pole in the middle. Men and boys wandering around, swinging on the pole. Some naked. Sweaty. One prowled up and down, rubbing himself against the bars. He stared at me long and hard. Me as alien to him as he might have been to me.
Later in the afternoon, on the ward round with the Fijian doctor, I spoke with a young boy from the highlands. He’d been sent to the psychiatric hospital when his family caught him smoking marijuana. They had read in the paper horror stories of dope smokers killing their families, eating raw farm animals, and worse. He was fifteen years old and had already been in the hospital for nine months. Here amid adult males who were variously and seriously deranged, many of whom had committed major criminal acts of violence.
‘He can’t go home until his family pay for his transport and they have no money,’ said the Fijian doctor. ‘So we sedate him.’
‘From the medicine cabinet?’ I asked.
‘Whatever we have,’ replied the Fijian doctor.
The young boy’s eyes were pinned and dull. He shuffled as he sat.
‘And how are you today?’ asked the Fijian doctor, in a voice tinged with resignation.
‘One-one voice,’ said the boy, suddenly enthused. ‘Only one-one voice, missus.’
She looked at me, her eyes as dull as the boy’s.
‘He’s learned to say he can only hear one voice in his head. He knows if he says there are others in there then he’ll never be released.’