Down and Out on Murder Mile by Tony O'Neill Page B

out my window and landed there. Broke both of his legs and his hips too. ’E’s in a fuckin’ chair now, the fuckin’ cabbage.”
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    â€œWhy did he jump?”
    Â 
    â€œWe was smoking rocks. I dunno. I s’pose he thought he heard something, you know what I mean?”
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    The deal was that the flat would be free in two weeks, and Susan and I could move in. The flat in Hammersmith had to be vacated in a week and a half. I asked Michael if there was any way he could clean out sooner than two weeks. He just shrugged and didn’t answer.
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    â€œThere’s something else,” he said. “I promised the other room to Jack. Do you mind?”
    Â 
    Michael saw the look on my face.
    â€œâ€™E’s all right. He’s just young is all. He won’t be any trouble!”
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    Susan was livid, and we had an argument on the way home. She was already complaining about having to share the flat with Jack.
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    â€œYou got a better idea, Susan? Maybe we should put a fucking down payment on our own place? I hear Chelsea’s nice!”
    Â 
    â€œFuck off. You should have told Michael no when he brought up Jack’s name.”
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    â€œYou were there. Why didn’t you tell him?”
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    â€œYou’re the man!”
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    â€œYeah. That’s why I’ve been out twice a fucking week praying with these cunts, picking up fucking key rings for making it nine months clean and fucking serene and having to listen to their fucking bullshit, and everybody asking me ‘Oh, why don’t you have a sponsor?’ and all the rest of it! I’ve done my part. If this place ain’t good enough, go get a fucking paper and start looking for another place yourself.”
    Â 
    â€œFuck that. Let’s just call RJ.”
    Â 
    â€œAll right. That’s more like it.”

15
JOBS (TWO)
    The regime under Dr. Stein was pretty good. I was back at my old pharmacy and once a day we went to Shepherds Bush Green to pick up our eighty-milliliter bottles of methadone. The methadone itself was luminous green and sickly sweet. Once the methadone kicked in I would be filled with good-natured cheer and get an insatiable appetite for sweets. At a bakery nearby, I would eat cream buns and custard tarts. I existed on a diet of methadone, Coca-Cola, chocolate bars, and pastries.
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    Over the next few months Susan and I met with Dr. Stein weekly. He would ask how we were doing. We would tell him that we were fine. Once in a while he would send one or both of us to the bathroom with a plastic bottle to take a urine test. While not actually curing the mental yearning to shoot heroin, the high doses of methadone wewere being prescribed took away the physical need to do it. Without the relentless pressure of withdrawal gnawing at us we actually stopped doing heroin for a few months. However, once things were relatively stable for a while, I started to get bored. A junkie friend of mine used to remark how he would inject water whenever he didn’t have heroin, and somehow it would make him feel better. Methadone did nothing for either the Pavlovian craving for the needle or for my need not to feel . Life was as ugly and as meaningless on methadone as on heroin, except now I didn’t have my routine of scoring drugs and fixing to look forward to. I knew that there had to be a way to get around the urine tests, so I went to an Internet café and did a search on heroin’s half-life in the bloodstream. It revealed that heroin tends to leave the system quite quickly, and you could give a clean urine test seventy-two hours after your last dose. So I resumed, regulating my use of heroin to the beginning of the week and weekends.
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    Once a week I attended the job center. Susan was ineligible for the dole, and I was eligible for only fifty-seven pounds a week. I was using at least a hundred pounds a week in heroin alone, so as unsavory as the prospect was I