Spit on the Floor- chapter 4 of Something in the Way by Preston Peet: Drugwar.com

Spit on the Floor
- thankful and lucky to be alive

by Preston Peet

(Chapter 4 of Something in the Way, and included in the upcoming Paul Krassner book for High Times magazine, "Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs: From Toad Slime to Ecstasy")

posted at DrugWar.com
Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 2002

A cheerful London officer at work

There isn’t anyone out anywhere. Thomas has been to all the spots. The Green Man pub, the bus stop, the old shabby apartment he’d been taken to on one occasion, there isn’t anyone or any dope, anywhere. But as he’s heading back home, he remembers one more stop he can make, one of the Jamaican dealers who he’d hoped to find on the street, who happens to live just blocks from the squat where Thomas is living, halfway between the Kennington tube station and the squat. Though he doesn’t expect to catch him there, he decides it can’t hurt to try.

Ringing the bell gets an answer fast, the dealer’s girlfriend, who lets him up with hardly a word through the intercom, just a “who’s that,” a click of the door, and he’s in and climbing the stairs. He’s sick, the lack of dope making him feel exhausted, worn out, making the climb more difficult than it should be, especially since he has his guitar with him, fresh out of the tube from busking. The door is open when he arrives, but going in he finds her alone.

“He’ll be right back, he just went to pick up,” she tells him. “ Have a seat.”

He rests his caseless guitar against the arm of the sofa, and sits, making small talk, trying to ignore the nausea he feels, not wanting to throw up on the living room floor in front of his hostess, who is being very nice. She gives him a glass of water, and seeing how ill he appears offers him some of her filters, the now-dried bits of cotton she’s been drawing her gear through when she cooks up a shot in her spoon. He’s about to accept, when the dealer arrives.

“Check this out,” the dealer tells the two of them as he opens up a packet of white, floury powder. “China White, totally fantastic stuff.” His own eyes are already pinpoints, almost no pupil whatsoever. “Don’t need lemon, don’t need heat, just put it in the spoon, stir, and stick it right in your bloody vein,” he says, giving them both a wicked grin.

Just looking at it sitting there, at least a quarter ounce of dope, as sick as he feels, makes him break into a sweat, and he wants to yell at the guy, “Hurry the fuck up,” but it doesn’t pay to yell at one’s dealer, so he bites his lip, and waits.

It doesn’t take the dealer long to measure Thomas out twenty quid’s worth of dope, two-tenths of a gram, weighing it on his triple-beam scale right in front of him, which Thomas really appreciates, as most pushers sell their shit pre-wrapped so one never knows exactly what, nor how much, one might be buying.

“Could you put half of it in a paper for me, and give me the other half to do now please?” The dealer agrees and hands him one half wrapped and folded closed in a square of paper with the other in an open square, and a spoon with the other hand.

Thomas wastes no time. Sitting back down on the sofa, he pulls the glass of water the dealer’s girlfriend had given him closer. He puts the spoon down, and pours the dope in. Next comes his water, and sure enough, the dealer wasn‘t lying. As soon as the water hits the dope, it begins to melt, breaking down immediately. Usually he has to squeeze a couple drops of lemon juice into it, and cook it hot to break the dope down, to get it to mix with the water, and get him high. This is very different. He’s only done China White, real China White once or twice before, and never in his arm, only up his nose, or smoking it, ‘chasing the dragon.’ His mouth is watering as he draws it up into his rig, getting every drop, wiping the bit of cigarette filter around and around in the spoon soaking up every bit of moisture, then pushing the needle’s tip sideways down onto the cotton he draws the last bit of fluid into the rig, watching the filter turn white as the fluid leaves it, becoming bone dry.

“Oi, watch it with that stuff, it’s really fucking good. I’m telling you mate, careful.” The dealer is watching Thomas as he finishes tying off above his elbow, tapping his arm to get the vein to rise. “Put it in slow.”

Thomas concentrates as he finds the vein and registers, a ribbon of bright red blood twirling and swirling up into the clear plastic tube, clearly visible in the solution inside, then he shoves the plunger forcing it all in. Never one to tarry once prepared, he has to go all the way, as fast as he can, every time.

Takes a lot to kill the pain he carries inside.

Then he hears what the dealer said, at the exact same moment he smiles.

“Holy shit, this IS good,” he just manages to slur before he falls back, towards the back of the sofa, into another place, never feeling himself land.

Instead he finds himself outside walking along the sidewalk, no idea what time it is, nor where he is exactly, only that he is no longer sitting in the living room at his dealer’s. The traffic is sparse, but loud, unnaturally so. His mouth tastes funny, both dry, and sticky at the same time, with an overabundance of thick saliva. Thomas begins to feel like he can’t get his breath around the mouthful of spit, so he puckers up his lips, leans forward, and spits it all out in front of himself, onto the carpet at his dealer’s feet.

That isn’t what brings him back. Although his brain is trying to tell him there isn’t something quite right about what he’s just done, it is not his own awareness that brings him to, but rather the disbelieving guffaw, the laughter and cry of “Jesus Christ man, you are Fucked Up!”

He opens his already open eyes, and the picture shifts in front of him, the street loosing focus, and the living room almost instantaneously, but not quite, replacing it, the dealer’s white-toothed smile and outstretched rag to clean up the spit on the floor looming before him.

“Don’t tell me I just spit...” he trails off. It’s obvious he did, that he just spit a huge gob of spit right at the feet of his dealer, in the middle of his dealer’s living room floor.

Thomas almost feels humiliated, but the dealer and his girlfriend seem to be handling it ok, more glad he is still alive and not overdosed on their sofa than angry for his spitting on their carpet. Plus he is so stoned it’d be very hard to really feel much of anything, much less shame. He manages to clean it up ok, now that he is awake again, but he is utterly wiped out now. Before he’d felt tired and drained, now he feels completely removed from any sort of caring about anything, and no pain, none at all, physical, or mental. His cramping muscles have relaxed, his stomach is no longer heaving, and he is feeling a warm soft glow all over, almost like a huge comforting hand holding him close.

After he gets the spit off the floor, he takes the other envelope of dope and puts it deep in a pocket in his shirt, under his sweater and jacket, then heads back out into the cold mid-November London air, his bag and guitar over his shoulder. As he heads towards the squat he remembers that Emma is always on the lookout, and lives only blocks from the dealer’s house as well, just like himself. She’ll be really mad if he tells her about this dope later, if he doesn’t try to let her know now that it is around. The dealer already told him he won’t be able to get it for long either, so Thomas stops at the first phone box he sees.

Getting into the thing causes him some problems at first, as he pulls the door open right into his face, almost knocking himself out hitting his forehead on the door. He finally gets in after a brief argument with the uncooperative door, puts down the guitar, and picks up the phone. Placing the receiver against his ear, Thomas lifts a coin towards the coin slot.

“Hey, wake up mate. You alright?” Thomas opens his eyes. He is in the phone box still, but on the ground, under the phone, the receiver dangling over his head. “What’d you take?” Crouching down over him, wearing one of the tall, silly-looking, dome-shaped Bobby hats, is a London Officer of the Law, a cop. Thomas struggles to wake up. “What in the hell happened,” he wonders silently to himself. He doesn’t remember a thing, except getting ready to put the coin into the phone, and now there’s this cop he’s got to deal with. Gotta think fast.

“Uh, I didn’t take anything. I’m just really tired. I spent the night with a friend and not sleeping in two days. Just fell asleep,” Thomas tells him, trying to get a grip on the shelf above his head to pull himself erect. It isn’t easy. He feels way off balance trying to explain the situation to this cop while sitting on his ass on the floor of the phonebox.

The cop gives him a hand up, looking straight into his extremely pinned eyeballs.

An old girlfriend once told him not to come into the bar where she worked in Rotterdam due to the fact that his eyes look “like fucking billboards” when he’s on dope, advertising for all the world, “Hi, I’m on heroin.” It’s no different now in front of this cop, but for some reason the cop doesn’t tell him he knows Thomas is lying, though it is obvious to Thomas, even as fucked up as he is, that the cop knows.

While Thomas is helped to his feet, a second cop is going through his shoulder bag, and finds two rigs, one brand new one, and one that’s open and floating around inside his bag without a cap over the tip. Good thing the cop didn’t stab himself. No cop is ever friendly after that.

“What’s this then?” The cop holds out both needles in his hand, the plastic- wrapped and the open-tipped, out in front of the three of them standing there facing one another on the late-afternoon sidewalk.

“Uh, those are a friend’s. She gave them to me last night to hold, and I forgot to give them back to her this morning,” he lamely tries to explain. The cops just stare at him without a word for a moment.

Thomas is upright, but his eyelids are only barely the same. He valiantly forces them to remain open, and the cops sense this it seems, and decide to take pity on him. There is no other explanation for what they do next.

“Alright, you can go. Go on, get out of here, go home.” The cop stuffs the rigs back into his bag, and hands the bag to Thomas, who is stunned motionless at first.

“What?” he stammers at the cops, who repeat, “Go on, that’s it. You sure you’re ok, right?” The cops stare at him some more.

“Sure.” Thomas takes the hint. Picking up his guitar, he crosses the street right away, and walks to his squat, just another block up the sidewalk.

He only manages to get into one of the big ripped-up easy chairs in the living room in front of the fireplace in the big, ramshackle Victorian building he’s squatting with friends. The fire passing shadows flickering over his face, he passes out again, out to the world, lucky to be alive, but completely unaware at that moment of the fact.