Extract from Rock n' Roll is Dead And...

Here's a short extract from an autobiographical project I've been working on. Hope you enjoy, I'll post more soon...

FROM - ‘ROCK N’ ROLL IS DEAD AND...’

Patch's Funeral

2. The irony of it all

Patch had gone through periods of both smoking and hitting-up smack. There’s an added stigma attached to intravenous drug use, smoking has always been considered the lesser of the two evils, but fuck knows why, they’ll both kill you just as dead.

Maybe there’s a feeling that only trained professionals should handle things like syringes, people consider the spike more dangerous than the stuff in the tube. I dunno what it is, but believe me the stigma’s there. There are addicts who believe they’re less of an addict because they don’t use a needle. Ridiculous I know, but addicts like Patch take it seriously. So, whenever Patch felt he was slipping too far from the road of righteousness, he’d prove to himself that he was still in control by retiring the needle for a bit.

Now, I know I’ve just explained that there’s no difference between the two in terms of how dead or addicted you end up, and there isn’t. To the untrained eye, switching from the needle to the foil doesn’t seem like such a big deal, but believe me it is. Habitual behavior is a hard thing to change.

So, there was something to be gained after all, if Patch could prove to himself that he had the willpower to switch, then who knows where it could lead. But, it would’ve been hopeless trying while Simon was there, the temptation would be too great.

Watching Simon build a fix was like experiencing a Cordon Bleu master class. He’d meticulously prepare with a particular spoon and always use fresh lemon juice, he even made the tearing of the cigarette filters look artful. He’d cook his spoon over a specially acquired Bunsen burner, then as the brown liquid bubbled and spat, he’d toss in the torn filters like little pieces of polenta in a pan of frying butter. Then he’d ready the spike and himself for the hot rush.

All the while Patch sits sucking on some foil, I don’t think so!

Simon may’ve been the most committed of heroin addicts, but he wasn’t one to shoot up in the nearest toilet. The administration of his drugs were a precious routine to him. Like a retired colonel preparing his first scotch and water of the day, a little too close to noon, there was something terribly wrong but inherently civilized about the way Simon consumed drugs.

The unspoken attraction of their joint tenancy had been the chance to socialise their habits, build routines and procedures. Suffering an addiction alone was to be avoided wherever possible, knowing that someone else was falling as low as you, was comforting, safety in numbers. But, there was a downside, Newton’s law applied here too, couples end up locked in an ever downward spiraling dance of self-destruction, one’s efforts to stop disrupted by the other’s need to continue.

Simon’s weekend break was going to offer Patch the perfect opportunity. He deluded himself into believing that a few days would be all he’d need. In three days he could break the back of that habit and form a new one. Anyway, chasing had it’s own dedicated procedure, it wasn’t so bad.

But the biggest problem a hitter-turned-chaser faces, is the loss of the very thing that made them hit up in the first place: the rush. That fully fired up rush of Godly smackiness racing to and through the brain. The thing that; lays you back and with your mind she runs.

Just, this time she wasn‘t going to.

Here was Patch, desperately trying to do the right thing, but, denied the rush delivered by the needle, he’d begun chasing it, literally chasing a rush that just wasn’t there, chasing more and more, until finally, POP!

His fucking lungs explode.

So there it is, the final irony, Patch’s fate sealed, and all because he tried to take a step for the better. If it wasn’t so tragic it’d be funny.

Still, the only certainty in life is that it’ll end and dealers will keep you waiting. We all go eventually and at least Patch went with his boots on. I know, I wouldn’t wanna go alone and you can definitely keep the collapsed lung bit. But, I’m sure there are some who’d consider the pain and the loneliness of his death glamorous.

As I sit here, 15 years later, a middle-aged man, looking back on life and someone else’s death, I begin to envy Patch, preserved in memory as a young man. Unlike him and Dorian Gray, the rest of us have to wear the faces our lives weathered, and with every aching, creaking joint, feel the heavy toll of abuse on our bodies.

I’ve hung around for far too long to be loved by anyone other than those forced by circumstance. I really don’t want to know how it’ll be for me.