New Crack City
A journalist friend of mine asks me to take her out on the street
and show her some crack dealing in action. I can’t understand
why she needs my help. You only have to stand outside the
main entrance to King’s Cross for five minutes to start spotting
the street people who are revolved with drugs. King’s
Cross has always had a name for prostitution, and where there
are brasses there’s always smack; and nowadays if you’re anywhere
in London where there’s smack, then there will be crack
as well. The two go together like foie gras and toast.
Still, I suppose I can understand why my journalist friend
needs me. The London street drug scene is as subject to the
caste principle as any other part of English society; druggies
identify one another by eye contact and little else. As Raymond
Chandler once remarked: ‘It’s difficult to tell a well-controlled
doper apart from a vegetarian bookkeeper.’ All up and down
the promenade outside King’s Cross, druggies are making eye
contact with one another. There are Italians-they’re principally
interested in smack-and a contingent of young black
men hanging out with white prostitutes. These men are pimps
as well as being crack dealers.
We watch the scene: dealers carry rocks of crack or tiny
packets of smack wrapped up in silver foil and cling-film inside
their cheeks. When a punter scores, he discreetly tucks
the money into the dealer’s hand, the dealer drops the rock
or the smack out of his mouth and into the punter’s palm. The
whole transaction takes only a few seconds. ‘Why aren’t the
police doing anything?’ moans my journalist friend. ‘It’s all so
blatant.’
And it is. But what can the police do? Snarl up the whole
of King’s Cross in the middle of the rush hour while they try
and nab a few street dealers? Supposing they do manage to
collar them: the dealers will have swallowed their stash. Fear
is a fantastic lubricant.
We’ve seen the street action, and my journalist friend wants
to check out a crack den: do I know of one? Well, yes, as a
matter of fact, I have some friends in the East End who are
well-established crack and smack dealers, but they’re not the
sort of people who accept house calls, especially from journalists.
What a shame I can’t take my voyeuristic friend, but I
can take you …
The day’s action is just beginning up at Bob’s place. It’s
about seven in the evening. Someone has been to see the
Cypriot and they’re washing up a quarter ounce of powdered
cocaine in the kitchen of Bob’s flat.
Bob’s flat is situated at the very end of the outside walkway
on the top floor of a thirties council block in Hackney. It’s a
good position for a drug dealer. The police have to come up
four flights and get through a locked, bolted and chained door
and a barred gate set in the flat’s internal passageway before
they can gain access. The windows are also barred.
Not that this deters them. To give the constabulary their
due, they have turned Bob’s place over several times recently,
but they never find anything. Bob keeps his stash up his anus.
The police know this but they can’t be bothered to pull him
in and fence with his brief while they wait for it to come out.
Bob would have a good brief as well. Bob’s family are well
established in this area; this has been their manor for years.
Three generations of the family have been hard men around
here, respected men. Before they got into drugs they were into
another kind of blag altogether: armed robbery.
Bob once told me how they made the switch: ‘Chance,
really. We were doing a number on this Nigerian bloke. We
knew he had something but we didn’t know what. It was six
kilos of brown. I got the flicker down on the floor with my
shooter in his ear and said: “You’re fucking lucky we’re not
the old bill!”‘
Bob is a talkative soul: bright, articulate and possessed of a
gallows humour that counts for wit in this society. But Bob is
mighty keen on that rock. Sometimes he’ll be up for several
days on end rocking it. Not that the crack is his core business-that’s
still smack.
As William Burroughs so pithily observed, smack is the only
commodity that you don’t have to sell to people; instead, you
sell people to it. And the people who it buys come in all shapes
and sizes. At Bob’s, most of them get dealt with through the
bars of the safety gate in the long, dark corridor that runs the
length of the flat. The clientele are a really mixed bunch; all
the way from shot-to-pieces street junkies, indistinguishable
from alcoholics apart from the abscesses on their hands, to the
smart end of the carriage trade: a young man, incongruously
dressed in a velvet-collared crombie, is buying a rock and a
bag of brown when we arrive. He has an accent that would
sit more comfortably in St James’s than in a Hackney council
estate.
Bob doesn’t have a pit bull or a Rottweiler; he doesn’t need
one. The other dealers around here all know who his family
are and they respect them. But what about the Yardies? They
don’t respect man or beast. The word on the scene is that
they carry automatic weapons and aren’t afraid to use them.
They have no respect for the conventions of the London criminal
world. I asked Bob about it. ‘Yardies?’ he snorted. ‘They’re
just another bunch of coons.’
In truth, there are always a lot of black people around at
Bob’s place. They’re heavily involved in the crack scene. Most
of them are second- and even third-generation English. They
talk like Bob and his family, and a lot of them have done bird
together. Bob’s current dealing partner, Bruno, is black, and
Bob himself has been scoring half ounces of smack through a
Yardie.
I’ll take you down the dark corridor to the kitchen where
Bruno is washing up. Bob’s place is always pretty cluttered,
so mind the stuff lying around in the hall. Like a lot of professional
dealers, Bob is eclectic in his activities. There are always
consumer durables lying around the flat that have either
been swapped for drugs, or are stolen goods waiting for a buyer.
Bob loves gadgets, and he’ll often detain an antsy punter and
force him to watch while Bob takes the latest laptop computing
device through its paces.
Bruno is holding a whisky miniature over the steam that’s
spouting from an electric kettle. The little bottle has a solution
of acetone, water and powdered cocaine in it. As we
watch, Bruno takes a long metal rod and dips it down the neck
of the bottle. A large crystal forms around the rod almost immediately.
This is crack cocaine. The fresh rocks have to dry
out on a bit of kitchen towel for a while, but then they’re ready
to smoke.
There are no Coke cans with holes in them round at Bob’s.
This is a piping household. The pipes are small glass things
that look like they belong in the laboratory. The bowl is
formed by pressing a piece of gauze down the barrel of a thin
Pyrex stem; fragments of crack are sprinkled on top of a bed
of ash; the outside of the stem is heated with a blowtorch until
the crack begins to deliquesce and melt, then the thick white
smoke is drawn off, through the glass body of the pipe and
out through a long, flat stem. Smoking a crack pipe properly
is an art form.
If you came at the right time, Bob might ask you to join
him-if he likes you, that is. And you could while away the
evening doing pipe after pipe, with the odd chase of smack in
between to stop yourself having a heart attack, or a stroke or
the screaming ad dabs. If you stay, you’ll have some amicable
conversations with people-one of the Yardies might drop by.
The English blacks are also dismissive of them. Bruno says:
‘Yardies? They’re just down from the trees, man.’ It is almost
universally agreed that the Yardies overplayed their hand in
London. They were easy to spot, too flamboyant for our
pinched, petit bourgeois drug culture. The Met has managed to
have the bulk of them deported, but their influence as a catalyst
to the drug scene has gone on working.
But now Bob is expecting his dad, whose flat this is and
who is due out on a spot of home leave. It’s not that he doesn’t
want his dad to know that he’s dealing out of the flat: far from
it. In fact, Bob’s dad will expect a commission. It’s rather that
he won’t want to see a lot of low-life punters hanging around
the place. So we say our goodbyes:
‘Stay safe, man.’
‘Yeah, mind yet backs.’
Security is always variable at Bob’s; sometimes, when he’s
especially lucid, it’s fantastic. He drills punters to carefully wrap
crack and smack and stash the little waterproof bundles, either
up their anuses or in their mouths. As Bob says: ‘The filth
pull a lot of punters as they’re leaving here, and they sweat
you, so make sure you stash that gear ‘cos I don’t want to do
ten because some dozy prannet had it in his band.’ But at other
times, you’ll find six or seven addicts scratching outside the
door of the flat, waiting for the Man. And there are young
black kids running up and down the walkways of the flats,
taunting the addicts, especially the white ones.
Even out in the street, Bob’s influence is still felt. A tall, young
black dude in a BMW CSi notices us coming out of Bob’s block
and calls us over. ‘Have we come from Bob’s? And do we want
to go somewhere else where we can go on rocking?’ Well, of
course we do! We have our public to satisfy.
Basie drives us back up towards the Cross. It’s dark now.
He keeps up a running monologue for our benefit; it’s sheer
braggadocio: ‘Yeah, I’ve bin back to Africa, man. I hung so
much paper in Morocco they probably thought I was decorating
the place.’ He isn’t altogether bullshitting. I know from
Bob that Basie is both successful at ‘hanging paper’ (passing
false cheques) and at Bob’s traditional blag: sprinting into financial
institutions with the old sawn-off. I’ve seen Basie round
at Bob’s before. Sometimes he’ll have a couple of quite classy
tarts with him who look vaguely Mayfairy: all caramel tan
streaky blonde hair and bright pink lips. If it wasn’t for the
hungry look and the strained eyes, one might almost take them
for PR account handlers.
Up at the Cross, we turn into a backstreet and park the
wedge. There’s a crack house here that conforms a little more
to our public’s expectation. It’s a squat with smashed windows
and no electricity. Once Basie has got us inside, we are confronted
with a throng of black faces. Everyone here is either
buying, selling or smoking crack. Candles form islands of yellow
light around which ivoried faces contort with drawing on
the little glass pipes.
The atmosphere here is a lot heavier. Sure, Bob’s place isn’t
exactly a picnic, but at least at his flat there is the sense that
there actually are rules to be transgressed. Of course, it’s bullshit
to say there is honour among thieves, but there is a hierarchy
of modified trust: ‘I think you’re a pukkah bloke, and I’ll trust
you and look out (or you until it’s slightly more in my favour
to do otherwise.’ it’s an ethic of enlightened self-interest that
isn’t that dissimilar to any other rapacious free market where
young men vie with one another to possess and trade in commodities.
And, after all, isn’t that what Mrs T wanted us to
do? Tool around London in our Peugeot 205s and Golf GTIs,
cellular phones at the ready, hanging out to cut the competitive
mustard.
But, at the crack house in King’s Cross, we have no cachet,
and we have the feeling here of being very, isolated: a
wrong move, a word out of place, and these people might get
very, nasty’. The people here are much more ‘streety’ and they
have very, little to lose.
We’ve seen what we wanted to see, we’ve come full circle;
you don’t want to stay in the crack zone, do you? No, I didn’t
think so. Turn the page, get on with the next article, go home.
Evening Standard, September 1991
Chapter Two
On Junky
I have it on the desk beside me as I write-the first edition of
Junky by William S. Burroughs. The world has changed a great
deal in the fifty-odd years since it was originally published, and
some of those changes are evident in the differences between
the first edition of this memorable work and the one you are
currently holding in your hands.
Entitled Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict
and authored pseudonymously by ‘William Lee’ (Burroughs’s
mother’s maiden name-he didn’t look too far for a nom de
plume), the Ace Original retailed for thirty-five cents, and
as a ‘Double Book’ was bound back-to-back with Narcotic
Agent by Maurice Helbrant. The two-books-in-one format
was not uncommon in 1950s America, but besides the obvious
similarity in subject matter, A. A. Wyn, Burroughs’s
publisher, felt that he had to balance such an unapologetic
account of drug addiction with an abridgement of these memoirs
of a Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ agent, which originally
appeared in 1941.
Since, in the hysterical, anti-drug culture of post-war
America, potential censure could easily reduce self-censorship,
it’s remarkable that Junky found a publisher at all. Despite its
subhead, Wyn did think the book had a redemptive capability,
as the protagonist made efforts to free himself of his addiction,
but he also insisted that Burroughs preface the work
with an autobiographical sketch that would explain to the
reader how it was that someone such as himself-a Harvard
graduate from a Social Register family-came to be a drug
addict. The same cautious instinct led Wyn to interpolate
bracketed disclaimers after most of Burroughs’s (often factually
correct but radically unorthodox, and sometimes outright
wacky) statements about the nature of intoxication and chemical
dependency. Thus, when Burroughs stated: ‘Perhaps if a
junkie could keep himself in a constant state of kicking, he
would live to a phenomenal age.’ The bracket reads ‘(Ed. Note:
This is contradicted by recognized medical authority.)’
Burroughs’s preface (now restyled as a ‘prologue’) still stands
first in the current edition, but relegated to the rear of the text
is the glossary of junk lingo and jive talk with which he sought
to initiate his square readership to the hip world. And for
Burroughs the term ‘hip’ referred resolutely to the heroin
subculture. The bracketed editorial notes have been excised.
Both Junkie and Narcotic Agent have covers of beautiful garishness,
featuring 1950s damsels in distress. The blonde lovely
on the cover of Helbrant’s book is being handcuffed (presumably
by the eponymous ‘Agent’, although his face and figure
are hidden in the shadows), while clad only in her slip. The
presence of ashtray, hypodermic and spoon on the table in front
of her goes a long way to explain her expression of serene
indifference. However, on the cover of Junkie we are given a
more actively dramatic portrayal: a craggy-browed man is
grabbing a blonde lovely from behind, one of his arms is around
her neck, while the other grasps her hand, within which is
paper package. The table beside them has been knocked in
the fray, propelling a spoon, a hypodermic and even a gas ring,
into inner space.
This cover illustration is, in fact, just that: an illustration of
a scene described by Burroughs in the book. ‘When my wife
saw I was getting the habit again, she did something she had
never done before. I was cooking up a shot two days after I’d
connected with Old Ike. My wife grabbed the spoon and threw
the junk on the floor. I slapped her twice across the face
and she threw herself on the bed, sobbing …’ That this
uncredited-and now forgotten-hack artist should have chosen
one of the small handful of episodes featuring the protagonist’s
wife to use for the cover illustration, represents one of those
nastily serendipitous ironies that Burroughs himself almost always
chose to view as evidence of the magical universe.
From double book to stand alone; from Ace Original to
Penguin Modern Classic; from unredeemed confession to cult
novel; from a cheap shocker to a refined taste-the history of
this text in a strange way acts as an allegory of the way the
heroin subculture Burroughs depicted has mutated, spread and
engrafted itself with the corpus of the wider society, in the
process irretrievably altering that upon which it parasitises. Just
as-if you turn to his glossary-you will see how many arcane
drug terms have metastasised into the vigorous language.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from JUNK MAIL
by Will Self
Copyright © 2006 by Will Self.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Black Cat
Copyright © 2006
Will Self
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8021-7023-4
