Free Junkie Love by Phil Shoenfelt

connections in the drug world, this was not an easy thing to do, and finally I had to settle for a quarter ounce. With this, I should at least have enough to stabilise Cissy’s habit and be able to recover my money by selling the remainder — I could always buy more the next time.
    It was a strange feeling to re-enter the world of heroinagain after so long. In some ways it felt like I had never left, and in another way I felt distant from it all, as if I was watching myself and my actions from down the wrong end of a telescope. As I watched the dealer weighing out the smack, I felt an undeniable tingling sensation throughout my body, and I was disturbed to feel a rising excitement in the pit of my stomach, as if I was about to take a hit myself. I hadn’t counted on this and tried to ignore it; but as I walked back through the rain-soaked Camden streets, I couldn’t get rid of the nagging voice that seemed to be urging me to take a little taste, just a little, for old time’s sake.
    We had managed to get the electricity, gas and water supplies hooked-up, and I had painted our room, laying an old carpet from a second-hand shop across the bare, wooden floorboards. Cissy had decorated the walls with photos, posters and cotton wall-hangings, and had even managed to create a canopy for our bed out of one of them, so that it now resembled an old four-poster or, together with all the embroidered cushions she had, something from North Africa or the Middle East. It was a warm and comfortable room, and as I walked through the backsreets I could see, across the tangle of gardens and wind-blown treetops, the light from our window high up at the top of the house, and I was looking forward to surprising Cissy with the gear I had stashed inside my sock. It seems incredible to me, now, that I actually believed this plan would work: that Cissy would be able to systematically reduce the amount she was taking each day and, even more, that I would be self-disciplined enough to be able to refrain from dipping into the supply myself.
    When I arrived in our kitchen at the top of the stairs, there was nobody in. I put the bag of heroin on the table, then sat down to read a book and wait for her. I must have fallen asleep, for I awoke a couple of hours later, cold and bad-tempered, and the first thing that my eyes fell upon was the little plastic bagof brown powder, tied with an elastic band, that sat waiting patiently on the table. Drawn inexorably, I went over and picked it up, turning it over and over in my hand. Surely, just one little taste wouldn’t hurt, nobody would know. It would probably be hours before Cissy came home, and I could wait until the morning to tell her about the smack. And, almost before I knew it, I had gone to the cupboard where she kept her spoons and syringes and was cooking up a hit, just as if I had never stopped at all.
    Once, in New York, I watched somebody who had been clean for five years take a shot. Something had gone badly wrong in this poor fucker’s life, and in a wonderfully perverse spirit of masochistic glee, he had obviously determined to wipe out everything he had so painstakingly built up in the intervening period. Since he had kicked the habit, he had got a good job, married, started a family and bought a house, and he believed his years in the drug wilderness were behind him, just a faint recollection from his wild and wasted youth. He had come to our flat with some mutual friends, and asked me if he could get high there, rather than return to the cold and empty house that awaited him in Westchester, or wherever it was that he lived; and though I was reluctant at first, not wanting him to OD on our floor, I did eventually agree. I watched, fascinated, as he prepared his shot, and as it hit him layers of his personality seemed to peel away. He was like a snake shedding its skin, and he literally seemed to grow years younger right in front of my eyes. The responsible adult character that he had