Down and Out on Murder Mile

by Tony O'Neill

  “Take a look inside,” Mick instructed.

  I did. The front cover had pretty much said it all, to be honest. The magazine consisted of photosets, all telling the story of how a young woman—or a pair of young women—end up getting an anus full of semen. Each picture had a caption in German, Spanish, French, and oddly translated English: “Pretty Anna is surprised by presences of her boss Duke, in the after hours of the office. ‘Oh’ says Anna ‘I thought you had left, Duke!’…‘Not yet. You and your sweet little ass are burning the midnight oils I can see,’ Duke sneers, loosening his belt.”

  “Does it offend you? The magazine? Cos it’s exactly the kind of thing we sell here.”

  “Well, the grammar’s a little offensive. But apart from that…no.”

  “The grammar? How’d you mean?”

  “The little bits of story they have under here. Does anybody actually read that?”

  “I’ve never given it much thought.”

  I handed the magazine back to Mick. He looked at me with a sardonic grin. I started to worry that he thought I was trying to be a smart arse. I needed the job. Fuck. If I didn’t get it, no rent, no drugs. Rent I could deal with, except without a fixed address I stood to lose my methadone script, which didn’t bear thinking about. I decided to shut the fuck up and speak when spoken to.

  “Okay. Lets role play,” Dave said, leaning forward.

  “Sure.”

  “A geezer comes in, right? And he wants a contact mag. D’you know what a contact mag is? It’s a mag that carries adverts for people who want to meet up for sex. Men looking for women. Women for men. Men for men. Women for women. Men for sheep. You get the idea, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he needs one for, say, West London. He’s looking for a dominatrix in West London. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “But we only have a mag that deals with piss drinkers in South London.”

  “Erm…yes…”

  “Do you tell him to come back when the mag is in stock next week? Or do you just sell him the piss drinker contact mag for South London regardless?”

  I knew where this was going. This was just another “fuck the mooch over for money” gig. This I could deal with. This interview I could nail.

  “I’d sell him what we have in stock,” I tell Mick. “Don’t let ’em walk out without buying something.”

  “Good!”

  Fuck it was hot in there. And small. I could hear the bastard breathing in and out.

  “Okay, here’s another one. Let me show you this….”

  He rummaged though the junk on his desk again, this time coming up with a small bottle of clear liquid.

  “Spanish fly,” he informed me with a leer, handing the little bottle over for me to look at. It reminded me of those little bottles of amyl nitrate I used to sniff to get high when I was younger. “You know what Spanish fly is?”

  “Sure.”

  “This is the original, mate. Before all of that Viagra rubbish. Spanish fly keeps you hard for hours and drives the women mental. Thirty quid a bottle, that goes for. It’s the pheromones, you see?”

  I looked the unassuming bottle over again. It seemed inconceivable that grown men could fall for shit like this.

  “Would you still sell this,” Mick continued, “if I told you that there was nothing more potent than ginger ale in that bottle?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Right answer!”

  Mick leaned over and shook my hand. “I have one more geezer to see today, so I’ll give you a call in the afternoon. Thanks for your time.”

  “No problem.”

  “Hey, before you go…could I interest you in some Spanish fly? Drives the women crazy!” He cackled his dirty smoker’s laugh again, and I told him, “I think I’ll pass, thanks.” Walking out of the shop and into a Soho afternoon, I felt gripped by the complete patheticness of my situation. In six years I had gone from someone who had just gotten signed to a major record label, embarked on a world tour, and been on the verge of truly great things to a penniless junkie, banking on getting a job in a Soho porn shop so I could earn enough to feed my habit. I started to laugh a little, but it was a sad kind of laugh so I stopped again. It sounded stilted, forced, and ugly as it bounced off the bricks of Walker’s Court.

  24

  SECOND CHANCES

  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 th
e 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.

  25

  VANESSA

  The final show. We walked offstage and into the dressing room, the yells of the crowd bouncing off the walls like the bloody yelps of spectators at a cockfight. The show was a success. You could hear a hush descend slightly as the audience realized that now that we had vacated the stage Garbage was preparing to make their appearance. Kelly hugged each member of the band in turn.

  “Well done, mate,” she told each of us.

  There was a twinge of sadness that it was over. It seemed so anticlimactic to go back to my flat after a week of carefree living on a bus. Even being in the little bunk bed above our drummer, Chris, sleeping in a little darkened coffin-space as we drove all night from city to city, seemed much more appealing than another night in my own bed. I opened a beer, took a last look around the dressing room, and said to Chris: “Let’s go check what’s happening in the audience.”

  We walked through the back tunnels of Brixton Academy and made our way to the VIP area, which was a room above the audience with TV monitors to show the performance in close-up and a huge glass window looking down on the stage. I looked around. There was Susan, with some girl from the methadone clinic she had obviously started hanging around with. The pair of them looked like they had wandered in from the street. I walked over and said hey.

  “Hey,” Susan said, pointing to her friend, “this is Julie.”

  “Hi, Julie.”

  “Nice show. Well done.”

  “Thanks.”

  Then the three of us sank into silence for a moment.

  “We were just saying,” Julie said, breaking in, “I know a geezer round here called Ahmed who’s had some pretty good gear recently. You want to come over to his place? He’s close by, like.”

  “Well, maybe later. I have to speak to people, you know.”

  “Oh yeah, right. No worries.”

  “D’you want to go now, and we can come back?” Susan asked Julie.

  “Well…if you don’t mind. Before it gets too late….”

  I felt a flood of relief. I had never felt it before, and as it happened I immediately felt like an asshole, but I suddenly became embarrassed by being seen around Susan. I silently cursed her! She hadn’t even made the effort to clean herself up. Her hair was unwashed and sticking up in clumps on her head. She looked like she had just rolled out of bed so she could head out to score. Although I had managed to downplay my drug dependence to everyone in the band, I realized that as soon as they got a look at Susan they would have to know that something was up. The girl had junkie written all over her. Her face was sunken in, her pupils barely there. She had obviously bathed herself in thick, pungent perfume to cover up her stink rather than subject herself to a shower. Since becoming an addict, I had become something of a stranger to personal hygiene myself, but when I was in close proximity to straight people I at least made the effort to try and wash some of the stench off me. I hurried the pair of them toward the exit and told Susan I would call her to tell her where the after-party would be.

  Walking back into the VIP room I saw Dan deep in conversation with a girl. Well, I noticed the girl first. She was olive-skinned and beautiful, with striking cheekbones and full, red lips. She seemed somehow apart from everyone else in the room. It was in the way she stood, the way she dressed. It was as if everyone else in the place were in black and white and she was the only one in color. Suddenly, I felt nervous. It was the kind of nervousness that I hadn’t felt in a long time and it took me by surprise. D
an saw me staring at them and beckoned me over.

  He smiled at me broadly as I walked over to them. I stared at her face as I approached. I couldn’t help it. I had never seen anyone like her. She had the most beautiful lips, and perfect, dark eyes. She looked like she was inwardly laughing at me.

  “You finally get to meet!” Dan grinned as I walked over and said hello. I didn’t understand.

  “Finally?”

  “Oh, you remember,” the girl said, and as soon as she opened her mouth to speak I knew. I knew immediately who it was and there was embarrassment for sure, but also a curious kind of sexual thrill that this girl was the one…“I believe you were going to bend me over and stick it into me from behind?”