Junkie Love by Phil Shoenfelt

out of my befuddled brain, I felt like kicking myself.
    “I thought you said it was the first time, you lyin’ bastard! That probably means you’ve been using every day, smokin’ or sniffin’, if not actually shooting up — I bet you’ve got a fuckin’ habit again already. Well, fuck off, if you’re gonna get high then so am I, I’m sick of this tapering-off business — an’ anyway, it’s boring, an’ I feel like you’re controlling me. So come on,shit-head, give me a decent-sized hit … if you’re gonna be high, I wanna get high too!”
    I could hardly deny her under the circumstances, and I measured out a fairly large amount into the big silver spoon that lay on the table. I added water and lemon juice, and cooked the whole lot up until the hot brown liquid bubbled in the spoon, then drew half of it up into the syringe before handing it to Cissy. As she tied-off and tried to find a vein, I took another syringe and booted the rest of the freshly-cooked gear myself.
    • • •
     
    Within a week, I’d cultivated a nice little habit and was shooting up several times a day. I’d had to cop again almost immediately, the first quarter-ounce having largely disappeared, but I was able to score easily, and more this time, too. Cissy helped me to sell the stuff. She had numerous friends and contacts who were ready and willing to buy, mostly street junkie types who usually bought off the dealers that hung around the backstreets and alleys near King’s Cross station, and a rapid turnover was essential if we were to support our own growing habits. I also bought an ounce of speed, as I knew many people who used the drug on a casual basis — just at weekends to go to concerts and parties — and it meant that if, for any reason, I couldn’t manage to buy an amount of heroin, I would still have something to sell.
    This meant that there was a constant stream of people in and out of the house at all hours of the night and day, and I was always worried that the neighbours would become suspicious and telephone the police. However, the fact that the squat was on a busy main road, full of pedestrians and traffic, and that there were other squats nearby, also with large and shifting populations, meant that our never-ending stream of visitorswent largely unnoticed, or at least unheeded. I refused to do business after 9 p.m., unless it was a special favour to friends, but I was in a constant state of anxiety, always expecting the police to raid the place, especially as other people in the house were also dealing. A couple who had moved in downstairs were dealing hash — and speed also — and the boy who lived down the hallway from Andy’s room sold acid; and although most of this drug activity was on a fairly low level, money-wise, it did mean there was a perpetual flow of variously weird and wasted people, arriving and leaving from early in the morning until late at night. Sometimes, the house resembled a non-stop drugs party with people coming and going at regular intervals, buying and consuming various drugs in the different rooms on each floor, often staying for hours at a time. It was not at all the discreet, anonymous premises of a professional drug dealer: loud music blared from each crazily decorated room, there were always bizarre scenes happening somewhere and the place was more like a mixture of commune and opium den than a serious money-making proposition.
    My life, once again, fell into a routine of using and scoring, of hunting through the streets and council estates of North London and sitting in smokey, smelly rooms, often for hours on end, waiting for a delivery to arrive. At least I wasn’t having to go out on a daily basis, though, only each week or ten days when stocks got low and had to be replenished, and the rest of the time I could sit up in our room getting high and waiting for customers to arrive. It beat working in the T-shirt factory, but I was also aware that a threshold had been crossed when