Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (50 page)

He walked straight back to the club and got on with the pre-opening, all his security team turned up and the queue started to build early. Dave decided to watch proceedings from the office on the CCTV. The doors opened at 10 p.m. and within five minutes Dave had seen the dealer enter, he guessed he had seen three or four guys who were probably with him. He waited till nearly 10.30 p.m., slipped the bag of Es under his jacket and went to the loos. Although punters were coming in quickly the club was still quiet, especially near the toilets. The dealer was waiting; he was relaxed, even cocky. He knew that he was protected and connected, he knew he was untouchable by security and therefore safe from the police. The Man had set it up and it would be sweet. The dealer gave Dave grief for being late. Dave didn’t reply but just walked into the toilets, they went into the cubicle on the left and locked the door. The dealer was still relaxed when Dave took the bag out, pulled it open and handed it towards the dealer with his right hand. The dealer was looking at the contents and didn’t see Dave’s left hand in his jacket pocket pulling a metal flask from it. By the time he saw it there was nothing he could do to stop Dave tipping its contents into the bag. The acid ate straight through the plastic bag and the contents dropped to the floor. The dealer wasn’t relaxed any more, he jumped back as far as he could and watched as the acid destroyed the tablets fizzing viciously. The cubicle filled with an acrid smell that was noxious to the senses. Dave left the dealer with the ex-tablets and walked out.

Dave moved past two of the minders, who were opposite the toilets, he gave them an assured smile and went to the front of the club. He went and stood on the front door feeling a huge weight lift off his shoulders and a sense of satisfaction. The rear fire-exit alarm soon went off and he knew that it would be the dealer and his boys leaving. He expected retribution; he wasn’t stupid. He also knew he was safe on the front door under the constant protection of the CCTV.

It was twenty minutes before his mobile went: it was the Man’s number. He didn’t answer; he didn’t leave a message. The night went peacefully and the clubbers had a great time. Dave knew that the first problem time was after locking up and going back to his car. He could have left early or got some of his team to wait for him but knew that would mean more people getting hurt.

He was the last one to leave the club. He set the alarm and locked the side door. The car park at the rear of the club was empty, he had been checking the CCTV, and there hadn’t been much activity out there. It looked OK, and he had already decided not to go back to home that night. He knew that he could run to his car safely even if they showed up now. Dave walked to the car and kept looking around him, no problems. He was starting to relax; he knew he was going to make the car. He stooped forwards to open the car door and his eye caught the glint of something metallic on the roof.

There are plenty of good reasons to leave Margate, and a 9mm bullet with the word DAVE etched on it and Sellotaped to his car was as good a reason he needed.

Dave the Doorman
, 2001

T
HE YEAR MUST
have been 1975.

I hadn’t known Billy before he went to jail. He’d served a long sentence because he’d been convicted of armed robbery. He really didn’t seem the type. A gentle giant, his Liverpudlian accent carried more than the faintest lilt of his Irish heritage, even though he’d been born and bred on the banks of the Mersey.

I met him through my oldest friend, Mal McGreary, who grew up in the next street to Billy in Orrell Park. I’d known Mal since my early teens. Although we had gone to different schools, we’d been drawn to each other since we were the only teenage long-haired dopers in that part of the north end of Liverpool. There might have been others who had grown their hair below the tops of their ears and attended the occasional concert, but there was nobody else with the sort of commitment that we had, with our nipple-length hair and our absolute determination to see every gig ever played in Liverpool, for free.

So Billy had just completed a long stretch and now he wanted some fun.

When the pair of them first showed up on my mother’s doorstep, they wanted to know if I could cop. At that time it could be extraordinarily difficult to buy heroin in Liverpool, even though you knew everyone within a twenty-mile radius of the city who used the drug. The black market as we know it today didn’t even begin to emerge until five or six years later. Virtually all opiates came from one of three places: you were registered with a drug-dependency clinic (and the one in Liverpool was notorious for its refusal to prescribe anything, though some people in one-ampoule towns like Ormskirk or on the Wirral seemed to be doing OK); you were managing to scam some GP into prescribing an opiate (but you couldn’t get heroin any more – that had died out with the new laws that had led to the opening of the drug-dependency clinics); or lastly, and most likely, somebody broke into a chemist shop.

Anyway, nobody had telephones, so I went to all of the usual sources, which meant driving or taking the bus to far-flung reaches of the city to Speke and Halewood, to Ormskirk and Toxteth. But it didn’t matter where I went, there wasn’t anything of interest to be had. Not heroin, not Diconal, not even as much as a Physeptone amp. Billy ended up buying half an ounce of hash and some acid from somebody, but it wasn’t what he really wanted and he went home disappointed.

A few days later I got the telephone call from Mal. It was unusual because it was 8.30 in the morning, and I’d never known Mal get out of bed before lunchtime. What’s more, he was extremely cryptic.

‘Come on round to Billy’s mother’s house now,’ he said. ‘It will be to your advantage.’

I didn’t have to be told twice. There was only one thing that excited Mal, and given how understated he was, he was obviously very excited.

It was only a ten-minute walk to Billy’s house in Orrell Park. Past my old school and across the rec. Up Hornby Road to Walton Prison, and then along the path beside the old Liverpool-to-Preston railway line, which brought you out just around the corner from his mum’s. Nevertheless, I was breathless by the time I arrived.

I knocked on the front window. Billy quickly came to the door, grinning, and ushered me into his mother’s front parlour. In the centre of the room there were four big cardboard boxes.

Mal was the first to speak.

‘We were wondering if you could try and put a price on that?’ he asked, nodding his head towards the cartons. I looked into the first, which seemed to be full of big brown bottles. The first I pulled out was titled ‘Tincture of Opium’ and measured two and a half litres. It was about three-quarters full. I pulled another out that was roughly the same size. Diamorphine hydrochloride, according to the label. Heroin linctus. There was even more in that one.

Then Billy spoke.

‘I think that one’s the box with all the shite. Take a look at the stuff in the others.’

He pushed a box over to me with his foot. When I opened it, my stomach turned over with excitement. The box was about eighteen inches wide and two feet long, and inside were scores, maybe hundreds, of little bottles and jars. Some were made of glass, some brown, some blue, some green. Others were plastic. I recognised the grey plastic cartons of Smith, Kline and French with their logo on the top. There were cardboard boxes and other bottles in the red-and-blue livery of Wellcome & Burroughs. I swear I was so excited my dick got hard.

I started pulling them out and examining the labels. Pethidine, 100 tablets. Palfium, 100 tablets. Dexedrine. Drinamyl. Valium. Nembutal. Seconal. Morphine. Heroin. My hands began to shake. There was something I needed to do before I went any further.

‘Would you mind if I had a hit?’ I asked.

Mal smiled, a look of total satisfaction on his face. Billy threw me a bag of works. Of course, they were all used. This was ten years before anyone had even heard of AIDS. I fished the cleanest out of the bag and went back to digging in the box until I got what I wanted.

The first bottle contained pink tablets. The second, a white, fluffy powder. My two favourite drugs. Diconal and pharmaceutical cocaine. Combined, they made the notorious ‘pink speedball’. This the most dangerous, yet most intensely euphoric hit known to man or beast: just a few weeks before, I’d woken up next to a croaked Chrissy Booth, who just couldn’t manage to be cautious enough with the old pink proportions. But did that bother me, or even phase me for a second? Not at all. We’d simply called the police and abandoned the apartment and went back to pounding ourselves into oblivion.

I crushed a couple of pills on a piece of cardboard using the bowl of a spoon, and when the powder was as fine as I could get it, I formed a ‘V’ in the card, and slid it all into the back end of a syringe, followed by a smallish pinch of coke.

I didn’t want to take too much. Given the quantities available, I thought it best to do what I could to pace myself. And even though the shot was on the moderate end of the scale, it was still profoundly satisfying. The truth is, I never knew pinkies to be anything else. Until you were ready for your next, of course, and then it was as compulsive as crack.

But even though I’d been moderate in my consumption, I lost my focus, as Mal and Billy did another. Then we all did another round.

We spent the morning in a state of blissful nod, and it wasn’t until the mid-afternoon that I tried to turn my attention back to the boxes.

I’d pull out a few bottles, and check them out, spend a little time in awe at both the quality and the quantity of the haul that I had before me.

There were four bottles of heroin powder in total, the largest being a blue, one-ounce bottle that was labelled 1933. As far as I could tell, there was no sign of any degradation – that heroin was as good as it had been on the day it had been manufactured. A drug fit for war heroes.

Now at that time, the price of heroin was twenty pounds a gram when you could get it. So, twenty-eight grams at twenty pounds a pop. That was over five hundred quid for that bottle alone. And there were at least three more bottles that held another five grams apiece. Not to mention the dozens of ampoules, and pills, and linctuses.

And then there was morphine. Morphine sulphate. Morphine hydrochloride. Was that heroin or not? Morphine tartrate. And every type came as several bottles of powder, as pills and as ampoules. Why the fuck had this guy kept so much stock, much of it dating back from the Second World War and before? It had only been a small corner chemist shop, but it had been in Bootle, close to the docks. Perhaps he’d stocked up in an attempt to deal with the consequences of the Blitz?

I never really made much progress in evaluating the retail and wholesale value of the stock that day. After a while, we gave up all pretence of trying to be businesslike and just settled down to a good, old-fashioned binge. At five o’clock, Billy’s mum came home from work and Mal went back to his house for his tea.

Me? I was going nowhere. Not with a stash like that about. The only way that I’d leave is if I was forced to do so at gunpoint.

Billy’s mother was the breadwinner of the family, a clerical officer with the tax office, and a devout Catholic. His father had some sort of serious heart condition and couldn’t get about much. He could just about make it to the Windsor Castle for his lunchtime pint, and that was it. The rest of the day, he spent in the armchair in front of the TV.

Whenever we came around, the family tended to leave us alone in the front parlour, possibly believing that the pictures of the Sacred Heart and the statues of Our Lady would do an adequate job of maintaining the necessary scrutiny. Nevertheless, we pushed the boxes behind the settee, just in case she decided she needed to come in for something.

We spent that evening doing the wildest things imaginable, mixing combinations of three and four different drugs. Speedballs that involved the use of a syringeful of coke in one arm, and a syringeful of heroin in the other, with two people shooting them in simultaneously. Billy and I matched each other shot for shot, the regular hits of coke keeping the pair of us from passing out completely.

We were just about to put together another shot when we noticed that the bottle of water we’d been using was empty. Billy didn’t want to go back out into the kitchen to fill it up for fear of waking his parents, so he pondered for a moment, deciding what we should do.

Then, a smile spread across his face and he went across the room and opened a china cabinet, bringing from it a small bottle. Without saying anything, he poured enough heroin and cocaine for two more speedballs into a couple of spoons, and then opened the bottle.

‘Are you up for this then?’ he asked.

‘Up for what? What’s in the bottle?’

He didn’t answer at first, just continued grinning at me.

‘It’s some kind of holy water, isn’t it? You want to shoot up with some kind of holy water?’

‘This isn’t just any old holy water. This isn’t your common or garden, priest-blessed tap water. This is the real deal. This stuff comes from Lourdes. This is the stuff that miracles are made of.’

Although I hadn’t been brought up as a Catholic myself, I was familiar with the stories, of the stream where the Virgin Mary had appeared to a young girl and since that time, after being immersed in the waters, the lame had been healed and the blind had regained their sight. Now, it was a place where hundreds of thousands of pilgrims flocked every year in the hope that the water would work its magic on them.

‘Miracle juice, huh? In that case, you’d better make mine a big one, because I’m surely in need of a miracle.’

The preparation of a fix is always a ritual in the early part of one’s drug-taking career, but Billy put these two shots together with a degree of pomp and ceremony quite unlike any shot that i’ve done before or since. Indeed, when he presented the two filled syringes to me, so that I could choose which one I wanted to do, he looked less like a junkie offering me my gun, and every bit like a priest dispensing the sacrament to a devout member of his congregation.