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

with the drugs—my breath hangs in the frosty air—and he appears from the blizzard like the monster in Shelley’s Frankenstein, when the doctor chases his creation through the windswept landscape of Antarctica, and then I cut through to the toilet of the Kings Mall, where I fix with ice-cold, numb, and shaking hands, all the while, Frank Sinatra singing something festive like “The Little Drummer Boy” or “Silver Bells” is being piped into the filthy toilet.
    Â 
    And as the dope hits I know it is good shit—maybe a Christmas gift from RJ to me—and I fucked up my arm a little, and the black blood drips onto my shoes but I sit there—stupefied bythe heroin—as Frank’s voice takes on a different tonality—spacing out dramatically—like the record is slooooowwwwiiinnggg doooooowwwww-nnnnn , and the music sounds like it being piped through a swimming pool filled with jelly.
    Â 
    On the train I think that maybe right here, right now, I am the most beautiful man alive, because everyone is beautiful when they are high: I start to realize that the war on drugs is a war on beauty—a war on perfection, because everything is perfect on heroin—it is a war against the simple human aspiration of complete contentment, and the thought makes me sad—that we are waging such a pointless and spiteful war against the noblest part our own nature.
    Â 
    The train clatters into darkened tunnels, turning the carriage black for a moment, and the thoughts bubble and then fizzle— Pop! —like a thousand Christmas lights burning out in unison—they turn to stone and sink to the bottom of a
    Â 
    vast
    inky
    pool.

13
HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE
    I soon found out that the move from Stoker’s house to the garage had happened because Stoker had brought on a new staff member. She was from Newcastle; a thin pale girl who was supposedly there to lay out the magazine editorials. I had little to do with her. She seemed sad and a little beaten up. She smelled too, of thick heavy perfume seemingly to cover up for a lack of bathing. I recognized something in her and instinctively knew that she was an addict too. One day, after taking my mid-morning shot in the bathroom, I went to walk into the main office, stoned and forgetting about the move. Through the door I heard Stoker’s hushed, wheezing voice:
    Â 
    â€œDo it…like that…keep going…”
    Â 
    She gurgled, her mouth obviously full of the old man’s cock, and I could hear a wet noise beating faster and faster.
    Â 
    â€œRight there…faster…”
    Â 
    I got the fuck away from there and listened to a report on the opium farmers of Afghanistan, passing out upright in my old office chair.
    Â 
    I owed the bank money. So every time Stoker cut me a check I had to bring it to a check-cashing place. I found one place on Fortress Road that would let me write checks to myself and cash them for 7 percent of the total. I had a book full of blank checks with a limit of a hundred pounds on them, so three, four times a week I would convert one into ninety-three pounds.
    Â 
    Temporarily at least our situation was fixed. I knew that the checks would run out one day soon and then I’d have to find another way to get by. But in the meantime there was money and long winter evenings and nothing but time. I caught up on reading. I ghosted around Soho at night when I was feeling rootless and energized. The neon lights bathed me and the dark strip clubs and doorways leading up to beaten old whores gave me a sense that I was among my own kind here. Occasionally I would score crack in the Soho alleyways from the black dealers ensconced in the shadows and hit the pipe in empty doorways, while the sound of the city carried on all around me.
    Â 
    I’d sit there, looking out over the city I had left four years ago, a city I had once been a productive member of, and I would think that life could not