What's the price of a good time these days? Back then I'd have put it around twenty five quid. That and a small portion of my emotional well being for up to three days after but I'm less willing to make that exchange these days. Sure, I might take the odd bump for old time's sake, a pungent nostalgia but it just isn't as good as it was. That was back when a certain plant fertilizer took over the drugs market of both UK and Ireland. For a mere three quid you could have a little parcel of nastiness shipped from China right to your doorstep. It was an unregulated substance that for a small period of time was allowed to slip past our Majesty's drug hating law makers to provide sensational highs and crippling despair inducing lows.
It was in the midst of one low that I experienced the loss of a good friend. I had been up all night before, bouncing from shite bar to shite club to an even shiter student after party in the centre of my home town: Belfast. Ah Beal Feirste, a town that could be heralded not for its greatness, nor its shiteness but of its overall mediocrity. Danny and I had ended up chasing after two well off law students in sparkly dresses that led us to their gaff on the Lisburn Road. One of those bare basic toilet room at the top of the stairs, three bedroom, 80's carpet and a kitchen full of plates stained with Tesco's basic curry sauce. We'd picked up some Buckfast from an illegally open bar on the Ormeau road en route to the shitty little place. Danny had scored with the 7 whilst I had kissed the 8 before she decided her combination of Bacardi breezers and the soap bar spliffs Danny and I toked at were too much and she sulked off back to her room, presumably for a tactical boke. Yes it might seem horrible that I remember those girls more by the score out of ten I had attributed to their physical appearance but really that's all they had been to me. I didn't have a chance to delve too deeply into their inner psyche and chances are I may not have liked what I saw had I done so. I'd taken an interest in them because I found them attractive and more importantly willing to listen to the drivel I spewed into their ear on a busy dance floor.
What remained of the situation was me, some skinny gay guy, his fat Manchester-Chinese fag hag friend and our friend in common - Mr Meph E Drone. Don't get me wrong, they were nice people but once we got rid of that point seven of a gram, I'd probably never see them again. One thing you could expect from the drug was the sensation of feeling a residue drip from the back of your throat into your mouth in a salty sweet kind of way. When flavour became too intrusive, I'd wash it back with that previously aforementioned bottle of Bucky. Definitely against my better judgement. Indeed there were many clues on the label as to why consuming such a beverage was a bad idea. Despite being produced by the monks of some abbey in Devon, there was a clear reminder that there were 37.5 mg of caffeine per 100 ml of liquid. This quality only gave the imbiber the illusion that they were perfectly sober with only the clearest mind, despite all the outward signs suggesting otherwise. I was surprisingly acting very well behaved for a man cock-blocked by vomit and under the influence of two substances capable of leading the user to make very bad decisions.
"The name tonic wine does not imply medicinal properties," I read out loud musing over the yellow label's largely unheeded advice. Seeing that a recent news story had emerged stating that out of every 1000 Glaswegian cases of alcohol related crime report the word Buckfast had appeared on average 932 of them. Buckfast was medicine for the sober, the bored and the stupid. At that point in time it acted as an antibiotic to the malaise of the cheap vodka wearing off. It was in a ropey arm chair probably purchased by a cheap landlord in Oxfam where I sat Youtube DJing on a laptop. The music ranged from the Dubliners to MGMT. At about 6 am I retired to the spare bedroom. It was like the spare bedroom I seemed to end up at all those so-called parties complete with a dingy sheetless mattress in a room with a shadeless light so bright it invaded not just my eyes but the corners of my brain that just wanted to be left alone. I had two lose/lose options - turn the light off and risk the soap bar joints putting me into a slumber too deep for the faint bleep of a £10 pay and go phone to rouse me, or leave the corrosive light on thus binding me to an unpleasant twitchy experience bereft with paranoia and the feeling that time was slipping away all too quickly.
I'd find myself in work less than three hours from whence I'd made that decision to leave that sun-like ball of self loathing on. It was my second job since leaving university and was only marginally more shite than the previous one. Thankfully I'd worn a shirt and a pair of jeans dark enough to fit under the "smart casual" requirements of the office dress code. I kept a bottle of non-alcoholic mouth wash in my desk drawer to masque the stench of booze and plant food on my breath. Call centres were as one friend put it "The Devil's Workshops". You have to sign in five minutes to the hour to get paid for and almost certainly didn't get paid for the fifteen minutes you worked after your shift ended to resolve a complicated call. How many souls can attest to a real sense of satisfaction towing the company line and informing single mothers that the couch bought on credit was going to cost them thrice as much as it was worth. It wasn't that I was having to endure Bukowski style industrial madness, it was that I had to be the bearer of bad news on almost every single call. I answered the phone around eighty times today. Ten times higher than the average person in the office. I was good at what I did but my God did I hate doing it. Allow me to break down for you what my company did..
Here's where the story ends. Worth reading? Probably not. Too much preamble. Plus the entire novel's concept was self-loathing. We may have enough misery already.
