Junkie Love by Phil Shoenfelt Read Free Book Online Page A

station and its environs, no matter what time of night or dayit might happen to be. It felt so good to be together — finally, I felt like I was coming alive again after a long, death-like sleep, and I knew that Cissy felt the same way too: I could see it in her eyes, her face, the way her skin glowed, I could feel it in her touch and hear it in her voice. It felt like two long-lost friends who had suddenly and unexpectedly found one another after years of separation, and I was determined not to let this precious feeling slip away through stupid, self-destructive behaviour. We were both clean of heroin, and in these early days the love that we felt for each other seemed to be enough.

     
    It turned out, however, that Cissy had been using until quite recently, until her bust-up with the biker, in fact, and her subsequent escape to the country. That was what the argument had been about in the first place: Jed was into speed, and with the peculiar ethics of people in the drug world, thoroughly disapproved of smack. Speed was okay because it kept you awake and made you do things (no matter how psychotic some of those things might happen to be); but smack was bad because it made you dopey and apathetic, and it was addictive. Cissy had tried to keep her little vice a secret. But Jed had walked in on her one day while she was shooting up and had gone berserk, destroying the flat before roaring off into the night on his Triumph, looking for the dealer who had sold her the stuff behind his back.
    “But I’m away from all that now, honest, I’ve had enough of that scene — an’ I wanna do something, get a new club started, put on exciting bands and fashion shows, an’ I can’t do any of that while I’m on gear. I would have done it before, but Jed always got jealous whenever I started doin’ somethin’ an’ we’d get in a fight, an’ anyway I never had the cash before. But now I’ve got this money stashed that Julia gave me — she’s gonna be my backer, my financier … it’s gonna be great, baby, just wait an’ see.”
    Such grandiose schemes and ideas were always flashingthrough Cissy’s brain; but her belief and enthusiasm were infectious, and I really did think that she had the talent and the energy to do something out of the ordinary. Her ideas were original, full of creativity, and when she got excited she was like a tiny whirlwind of activity, hustling and working away as if possessed by some demon.
    Julia was Cissy’s guru, a West London dealer with connections in the worlds of entertainment and business, and to hear Cissy talk of her, you would imagine that she was some kind of saint, rather than a drug pusher. She was older than Cissy, in her thirties now, and very “hip” to everything that was happening behind the scenes of the circles she moved in. Her clients were lawyers, bankers, media whizz-kids and successful designers, people who had money to burn and who liked to free-base cocaine at the weekends. They were a real status-hungry crowd who saw the drug as a vital fashion accessory, essential for proving to the world that as well as being literate, creative, rich and successful, you were also anti-bourgeois and in tune with “the street”. When I was finally allowed into the presence of Julia and her friends, we clashed immediately. I had an instinctive aversion to anyone who made large amounts of money out of drugs — out of other people’s weakness and stupidity in other words — whilst remaining detached and relatively unscathed themselves. Julia would free-base on rare occasions, but to have a habit was considered uncool: she and her friends talked about cocaine the way connoisseurs talk about vintage wine, and their drug snobbery annoyed me. Whenever I dealt drugs myself, or got them for other people, I was never interested in making a huge profit out of the deal, other than what I needed for my own immediate requirements. And, right or wrong, I justified my actions to myself on the