Drugs and Television

http://harrywrites.wordpress.com/

My name is Alexander: I haven’t felt grass on my feet or wind on my neck for 25 years.

At the age of seventeen we have few worries: this isn’t to say we have no worries at all, but they are the little worries which tickle the mind. We worry about fickle things like the opposite sex and when the next opportunity to get fucked is; we either do it too little or too much but society is the judge of that. Of course, we study and we read about the Cold War even though, in reality, we have very little interest in it and come Friday night we are lying face down on our friend’s kitchen floor with an empty bottle of Vodka nestled under our arm because we have to drink to have fun. We just exist on a day to day basis.

It is repeated over and over again. Sometimes we smoke drugs, sometimes we don’t. You meet new people and you discover traits and interests you have in common and through an underlying want and need to have fun, you make friends. Most of the time they aren’t real friends; real friends are rare, too rare. For most of my teenage-life, even though it may have been rudely cut short, I can honestly say I had one true friend, and she was insane.

She wasn’t schizophrenic or suicidal; she just saw the world in a different way. At parties she’d sit in the corner and scribble things down into a notebook; what was in there, it was difficult to tell a lot of the time; I think she spoke in her own language, composed mainly of scribbled words and biro doodles. She would watch people for a long time and if anyone conversed with her they’d be sucked in and dragged away into her own little Wonderland; her Cheshire cat would rip and tear at what they understood and when they walked away, baffled, drunk and lost, she would sit and smile.

We’d do most things together. Sometimes she’d call me up to come to the shops with her because she’d be lonely and wanted to share a new idea with me: of course, I went. We would drink strange tea and sing stupid songs until early hours of the morning and before we knew it we’d be on the floor in a bundle of blankets like a pair of content seven year olds. After a long night out I’d walk her home and we’d share the last torn cigarette in the back garden, on the decking by the stairs, and neither of us would say a thing. She knew me better than I knew myself; she’d often say she could read me like a book, but a long and complicated Oscar Wilde novel…I think that was the greatest compliment I ever received.

I loved her but she could never be loved. She was, like I will always say, not of this world. I don’t think love ever crossed her mind and, sometimes, in those dark, quiet and intimate moments I envied her more than any King or Emperor. She was utterly content and you could see it in the way her eyelids flickered gently as her beautiful dreams unfolded before her like a well-covered page in her ever faithful notebook. It’s too easy to love when you’re seventeen; you fall in love with people who say nice things or are confident and sexy, but you fall out of love when you find another or get bored. No, what you really want is a friend like mine, because that is what I believe to be true love.

There were others in my life, but they were sparse: I would exchange hours of their time for five minutes with her. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them, they were hilarious and extravagant people, but I didn’t trust them further than I could throw them, which, as a weedy and somewhat underfed seventeen year old, was not far. We would spend hours together sitting in our friends cellar and for a long time I would simply say nothing: they’d be talking about football, a recent television programme or who fucked John from down the road; I couldn’t care less.

I suppose it was for this reason I turned to drugs. A bond with marijuana is formed over a long and drawn out process: it’s not just the addiction to the drug, but also an addiction to the social activity that fulfils a certain psychological want within an individual. A connection with the drug is formed through a complex social hierarchy: first of all, there is one person who has the drugs, perhaps a friend, or an acquaintance, and through the dying chivalry of a modern age, you are eventually passed the last embers of a shrivelled joint. That’s all it takes. Eventually you reach a state where you are able to entirely socially self-destruct and still perfectly retain your social life, as you slowly become the individual that offers the last puffs of your own joint.

Fortunately, most people escape. It’s rare for people to get caught in this web, extremely rare. Perhaps only one or two people per social group ever degrade this far and I, as they say, was one of the unfortunate ones.

I remember it clear as day. I was sitting in the back garden, as most of these tales begin, with a friend, a close friend as far as my judgement allowed. He was a quiet boy with hopeless eyes and he was never without a hat. He smoked drugs like an old Victorian train smoked coal and he offered some of the craziest psychological insights I’ve ever experienced. He was, to talk historically, a village elder of the world I resided in.

He asked me if I wanted some money.

“Money…?” I asked, half laughing, expecting a tantalizing story.

“Yes, money, have you ever thought of dealing weed?”

And that is how it begun. It started off light and I dealt to a few of my close friends, one or two at a time, never more than twenty pounds worth. My closest friend told me a hundred times to stop and every night before I left her house she’d grab my hand and say “Please”. I never listened. Not once.

To say I got involved with the wrong people would be an understatement; this world is full of some truly dodgy characters. Imagine the cockney scum in a Charles Dickens novel willing to sell their own children multiplied by a hundred: that’s who I ended up acquainted with. At first I couldn’t see how this had happened, but before long I realised it was too late to do anything about it: I earned their trust. Once you earn trust from people like this, it is too late to save yourself. If they trust you, you don’t go anywhere. For the first time in my life I wished for people that talked about television. It all went downhill from there.

It was October and I was nineteen now. Life had reached a point where the best part of the day was opening the kitchen door on to a crisp Tuesday morning and inhaling the freshness. There was four people upstairs I didn’t know and half empty Fosters cans, whether piss or alcohol, stood on the table. I make toast with the last piece of loaf, the crust, and the final few scraps of Raspberry jam from a jar which looked like it had been recently licked clean. I turn on the radio and listen to The Smiths before dressing and heading out with a bag of cocaine.

It’s a big deal too, a very big deal; the biggest yet. The driver arrives in an old Saab estate with three missing hubcaps. He offers me a small shake of the hand and no name. There is the bulge of a small pistol in his left pocket. The journey is relatively short, but I am lost. It’s an estate with a warehouse I have walked past a hundred times and never bothered to look at. I look at it now; I suppose if we were writing a story about drug dealers, this would fit the clichés of a meeting point exactly. Of course, this isn’t a story.

There are three men standing just inside the door way and I walked forwards, silently. I pull the bag from my pocket and, as I take the last few steps towards who I presume is the leader, I notice the well-trimmed beard of the man on the right and the hand of the left, resting on a gun holstered in his black leather belt. I gulp as they shout.

What happened next has become a blur over 25 years of denial. I can’t remember if it was me or them who ran first, or who reached their car last. I just remember slamming the door and the cold metal of a gun being slid into my palm. Images of my best friend flashed across my eyes in time with the red and blue. The siren pierced my ears and I felt sick.

I would go into more detail about how I entered two undercover police officers bodies with bullets, but this isn’t a story about a shooting. It’s a story about what the hell was going through my head when I agreed to live my life like that. It’s a story about leaving behind one of the most perfect and beautiful people I’ve ever met. It’s a story about leaving behind innocence and watching drama on television rather than being one of the characters. It’s a story about my life.

I visited her grave two days after my parole release for “good behaviour”; I don’t think I spoke a word in 25 years. For a long time she had written to me every day, and when she stopped I knew she had died; a girl like that was never expected to live past thirty-five. I didn’t feel sad because I didn’t feel much anymore. The world was a new place now and in it, I had no place at all.

After everything I regretted not having more friends, because, now, alone, sitting on a park bench in the twilight hours of a Friday evening, watching a group of kids across the way drink cheap alcohol and smoke cheap drugs, I realised that I really wanted someone to talk to.

Even if it was about television.

Reviews

[de_maruf]

liked it

[KAOlmsted]

Your work always gives me chills. I have no real review, you understand, just a strong desire to tell you I read this...twice...and enjoyed every last word. Thank you, Harry, for posting this remarkable piece.

-kimmer

[Harry Alston]

I look forwards to your comments every time I put a piece of writing up because it is people like you that inspire me the most. Thank you very much :)

[KAOlmsted]

the pleasure is mine entirely...thank YOU very much.