Free Junkie Love by Phil Shoenfelt Page A

attempted to grow into and adopt as his own also seemed to slough away — it was as if all the intervening years had melted into the air, and he was right back there as if they’d never happened, back on the one-way track to oblivion. I felt dizzy and vertiginous as I watched him enter his spin.
    The brown liquid bubbled in the spoon that I held above the candle, and as it cooled I drew the smack up through thecotton filter into the syringe. As if in a dream, I tied-off and got a vein up almost immediately, “Ol’ Faithful” in the crook of my left arm, and as I stuck the needle in I almost shit myself in anticipation. The rush was incredible. I thought I was going to pass out, it was so intense, a spreading white light that warmed every cell and nerve-ending in my body, and that felt like the best one hundred orgasms I’d ever had, all rolled into one. I lay slumped in my seat, totally sledgehammered, drifting in and out of consciousness while luxuriating in the warm, healing waters of the high.
    There is something undeniably sexual about shooting up, and I’d experience a sharp pang of jealousy if I ever watched another man give one of my girlfriends a shot. But it’s like a surrogate sexuality, and with some junkie couples it does more or less take the place of active sex, due to the well-known effect of long-term heroin use on the male libido. Paradoxically, it doesn’t seem to affect the female of the species in quite the same way, and I’d often noticed that girls who were uptight sexually when straight became much freer and more relaxed, and had orgasms more intensely, when they were stoned. Some junkies sit for half an hour at a time, booting and re-booting the blood in the syringe, out and back in again, which always struck me as being quasi-vampiric, maybe even necrophiliac. In a room full of addicts, the air thick with cigarette smoke and the odour of sweat, the feeling is somehow pornographic — a sleazy, voyeuristic type of necro-sexuality that is, to a greater or lesser extent, addictive in itself.
    I must have stayed in this oceanic state, bathing in the glow, for three or four hours, slipping in and out of dreams and feeling the warmth in the pit of my stomach like a comforting weight. It anchored me, it allowed me to feel the physicality of my own existence, and it entwined its warm tentacles through my intestines and around my spine, reaching every part of my limbs and body.
    Eventually, I started to come down, and I began to feel guilty and bad-tempered again. I knew that I’d fucked up by getting high, but what was most worrying was that I had no real awareness of how it had actually happened. No conscious decision had been taken. I had moved as if under the control of some power alien to me, like a sleep-walker; and it suddenly seemed that this whole idea I’d concocted of weaning Cissy away from her habit was merely a pretext that my unconscious mind had formulated for getting me back into close contact with heroin once again. I was aware of a hidden part of me that had its own agenda of secret appetites and desires, that moved of its own volition and took no account of “me” at all. I could feel it inside, working away, moving silently along its own invisible tracks; and not only that, it was much stronger than me — of this, I was totally sure.
    I went to bed determined not to succumb to the urge again, and when Cissy came in about 4 a.m. I pretended to be asleep. I didn’t want her to know that I had got high, and decided I’d wait until the morning to spring my surprise upon her.
    She, of course, was delighted. She had only managed to cop a pitiful amount of skag the night before, after waiting for hours, and was depressed and sick when she woke in the morning. Her big eyes nearly popped when she saw what I’d bought, and I allowed her one big hit to celebrate before she began her reduction cure. We went back to bed and fucked for a couple of hours, slowly and dreamily, and I