The Great Heroin Rip-Off Scandal!

I VERY NEARLY got ripped off for four bags of vulgar brown heroin this morning. The normal guy, who is just running for somebody else, said his man had "no B" but not to worry, he'd get it off somebody else and could be use my phone. So he rings up saying "can I see you and are you still doing the usual for £40?" And then I asked what are you making out of this? And why would you want to help me out anyway? I mean, he usually acts all friendly and promises that if I come to him with nothing he'd be only too happy to "bail" me a couple. He also pulls this "I'm only on cannabis" act ~ then asks couldn't I sort him out with 100mg of methadone. So he's one of those closet smackheads. Dealing in the stuff and using it daily and yet unwilling to admit, even to someone like me, that he has a raving problem.

So I queried: Why are you doing this for me? Surely it's four for £35 and you're keeping the fiver? And he said oh no, it's four tens for forty up here and the dealers never give discount (well mine do! Except the man who's supplying this one and I only pay £40 for four bags because they always used to be nice fat ones ~ and they're not even that any more so I don't know why I bother...) So he's claiming to be making nothing on the deal, except when he introduces five new customers to this new guy, he gets a £10 bag free.

And then I realize, not only is this guy running up the road with my money, but he also has my phone! I can be so dizzy in the morning. And then what appeared to be a crackhead and a dealer showed up, which really put my back up because I know this crackhead of old and when he started waving a handful of gear and crack at me I wasn't impressed. "If it's so amazing, you go and smoke it yourself!" I said. I grabbed the runner who still had my money and had to wrench my £40 out of his hand. Then the "dealer" started yelling at me by name, telling me to come back because he was serving up. No dealer is ever that desperate to sell. The paranoia always outdoes the money-grabbing, and it's just not cool to look that desperate for a sale. This guy did have the dealerly look about him. Tall and dressed in new-looking sportswear and the right colour skin (mixed race colour ~ I've never in my life met a heroin dealer with blue eyes and blond hair). But his eyes were so obviously drug-frazzled that I just kept on walking.

Then the runner comes back ~ junkies are nothing if not persistent ~ and keeps saying Just wait with me and my guy will sort us out. But my nerves were far too jangled by this point to waste any energy pondering who was in league with who~ and I hadn't liked the way he was so friendly to the crackhead. And how come the crackhead just happened to appear with four bags in hand right at the wrong moment? Which he was way too over-eager to flog to me. Crackheads smoke crack. They don't want to sell it unless there's something wrong with it! And that was another problem: the "drugs" he had: two heroin, two crack weren't what I'd ordered anyhow ~ I won't touch crack cocaine at all these days. It's far too vulgar. So I kept on walking and the £40-and-my-phone guy was running after me saying What are you doing? And I said Tomorrow. Tomorrow. I'll come back tomorrow. So then he swore at me because he is foreign and I vanished into the main shops...

Eventually I did score, off the guy I always used to go to. Once my dizziness had cleared, I worked out that of course Mr Runner guy was intending to pick up five tiddles for forty, keep one and pass on the four to me. So why couldn't he just tell me that? It would have made far more sense. So I scored off another guy I'd never seen in my life (old number, new man ~ the usual guy was in prison) I gave £30 for 4x10ses ~ the bog-standard price these days ~ and then I disappeared back home. It was such a chill morning, yet because I'm a junkie, my back was pouring with sweat, which is so gross...

Ukh: my elevated mood has fallen down. How terrible is that? I spent all last week insisting I wasn't hypomanic, I was Just Fabulous ~ so I MUST have been hypomanic. My mood was most certainly Up, but the Symptoms: the hyperkinesis, racing cognition, "decreased need for sleep" etc were all very minor and that's partly why I didn't believe I was mentally ill. It's true I did start Hearing Voices in the night ~ but Hearing Voices is NOT a symptom of hypomania ~ so how about that! I only think of it as a sign of madness because everybody else thinks so.

I could say here "and what's so wrong with going mad anyhow?" but I don't want to go up that path. When other people go mad there's normally a LOT wrong with it. A lot of ridiculous and bad behaviour and ranting and raving and all that but when I was mad [last year] I just thought I was fantastic. And yet did feel this inner desperation that something was badly wrong and yet I didn't know what... I mean, I was fully aware of meeting the diagnostic criteria for mania because only an idiot wouldn't, but I felt deep need of a label I could throw in people's faces: "IT'S THIS!" Talking of madness, I only KNOW that terrible crackhead with the four bags in hand because I met him in the nuthouse years ago! He gets incredibly "prang" ~ that means paranoid ~ so why on earth he insists on continuing to pipe the crack, I'll never know. He only seems to have Drug Psychosis, but his mum, so I hear, is the full cuckoo-clock schizo ~ you see it's all in the genes. I get my bad genes from my mother's side. She gets recurrent depression. Which gives me an equally elevated chance of unipolar depression and bipolar i disorder. See? No wonder I went crackers! My uncle, her brother, was an inverterate drunken gambler. One of my cousins was chucked out of school for toking Mary Juana, another called herself "the Coke Queen of South Kensington" and had a boyfriend who wanted to lug over a kilo from South America until she reprimanded him and told him not to... My other cousin is two nuts short of a fruitcake... Oh man they're all crazy. You see, it's all bad genes. But I'm the only manic-depressive junkie in the family. I wouldn't call myself a black sheep. I like to think of myself as a golden sheep with wool that twinkles in the night because when I'm Elevated that is just how I feel...

Well now I'd better go. My electricity needs topping up. My house has gone beyond chilly and into that Damp n Dank phase where it feels like a dripping wet mine-shaft ~ most unpleasant.



Right, here's some charming psycho-active trance for y'all... The music's very run-of-the-mill ~ not a single good tune until 12 mins 22 in ~ and again at 14 mins 55 and 31 mins 09 ~ but hey you can watch the kiddiewinks dancing... (And what terrible, half-hearted dancing it is! Surely this can't have been filmed in the UK~?, because the Brits are far more up-for-it than this!)



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Mental Hospital!

YESTERDAY afternoon I ended up in a mental hospital! Locked in as well. I had a great time. My friend Pinky was in as punishment for paranoid ideation and hearing the voices of dead friends begging for her assistance. After a week committed to a private clinic with Sky TV (the full package with all the movies and wildlife channels), single rooms for all, and a wide range of refreshments including capuccino and cocoa. All on NHS money. After the psychosis abated, her consultant allegedly declared: "We still can't trust you," and had her transferred to our local nuthouse, where she is ordinarily interred. Two weeks later and she's still not even allowed out ot get a packet of fags from the shop on the corner.

By yesterday afternoon I'd only had seven hours sleep since Wednesday. Physically I was becoming absolutely exhausted, my eyes burning thanks to being constantly open all that time.

But in mixed company I perked up immeasurably. I've been on a natural high ever since finding out that I was moving back to life, back to reality, back to civilization. Pinky thinks I'm going hyper again, because I was extra cheerful, babbling on and on in a loud voice...

We smoked loads of cigarettes and then I met the maddest woman in there, in dark glasses with a tea towel on her head, totally mismatched clothes and a black smudge on the end of her nose. This was Pinky's famous manic friend Margery, who once tipped a can of blue paint over her head, wandered into a pub and tried to get someone to buy her a drink and was surprised when the police ~ the real boys in blue ~ came steaming in to take her to hospital!

I got rid of the smudge for her and asked why the tea towel and she said she's turning into an Arab man.She also said she was having Sting's baby, that her mother was the Virgin Mary and that she thought I was Art Garfunkel in disguise. This prompted a tuneless rendition of "Bright Eyes". She kept asking for the Gap hoodie I had on and gave me a women's purple duffle top. It was way too short in the arms anyway. Pinky was trying not to laugh her head off. It didn't exactly suit me.

When I asked Marge whether wandering about in one flip-flop and one white stilletto wasn't a bit inconvenient, the entire TV room broke into cackles. We would have gone into the quad for a cig, but Marge says the snipers make it too dangerous. She wants a DAB radio walkman.

At 7pm we got free tea and Rich Tea biscuits. The nurses took all the best ones to gobble in the "fishtank" ~ their "nurses' station" hideout. Pinky had a chicken salad sandwich and strawberry yoghurt. I had pea-and-mint tortelloni with cheese. I'd brought in my own packed lunch. Pinky was in a bad mood because she'd been waiting all day to see a doctor ~ I mean, seeing a doctor in hospital shouldn't be THAT complicated. She had itchy private parts yet nobody cared.

The nurses crowded closely in their nurses' station munching on fruitcake, pretending not to notice patients' calls for help. With attitudes like that, I'm surprised they can be bothered showing up for work at all.

The atmosphere in that place was markedly different to the men's ward. A lot more bitchiness and petty squabbling. When I first walked in, a young black girl was pinging to and fro in agitation, loudly ranting on how terribly she felt she had been wronged by her confinement in this locked psychiatric ward. Pinky said such behaviour is more tolerated here, whereas on the men's wards anyone with mania or any type of psychosis who happens to lose their temper, however justifiably, is a candidate for instant "rapid tranquillization" (which entails being wrestled to the floor by ten nurses, having your pants pulled down and a needle shoved in your arse).

There was a locked punishment ward round the corner where ultra stern staff watch six foot six twenty stone (280lb) psychotics to ensure no cigarette lighters are passed through the chainlink fence. My nonviolent friend was confined there for a week some years ago to "teach him a lesson" ~ probably for inconveniencing the nurses in some way. I was horrified when Pinky revealed this was actually a MIXED ward where she had been locked in a couple of times. Not even allowed to light your own fags and subject to constant sexual advances and bullying from dangerously mentally ill men who are only in there because they lost control of themselves and/or cannot grasp the consequences of their actions.

Most of the men in the punishment ward are over six feet tall, and they're in there basically because the nurses on the "normal" wards are scared of them. I think it's ridiculously unfair confining a woman in such surroundings.

You'd think that mental nurses were empathetic, caring people due to the job they do. But that's not necessarily true at all. Many of them just do not care at all.

When I finally left, three hours after I came, loads of people said goodbye who I hadn't even talked to. I seemed to make a big impression. (I wonder whether it was a good one (??!)

When I got home after 8pm, eyes burning, legs acheing, so exhausted I felt I could not go on, I was convinced I would sleep the second I sat down. But no! Sleep still eluded me and I didn't drift off till one a.m.

Then I woke up at six, poured half today's methadone down my throat. Woke again at nine, frozen cold. Not having remembered to pack a breakfast bowl, I had to pick at my chocolate Shreddies (£1 a box at Sainsbury's (special offer)) from a coffee mug.

Normally I'd watch Judge Judy in front of the fan heater to get me moving on such a chill morn. But at this place I pay my own electricity and gas. Come winter I'm investing in an electric throw from Argos which runs on pennies rather than pounds. I don't care how cold it gets, I'm not heating my flat if I have to pay for it.

When something seems to good to be true, it usually is. Energy bills aside, this is probably my nicest home ever. When I've sorted out TV reception this place will be perfect. I just hope I'm here for the long haul. I couldn't bear to get transferred yet again. Something tells me that is exactly what my landlord is planning ...

The internet shop is shut, so I'm at the old one a few streets down, where Gledwood Vol 2 was born! So the circle is full to completion. Next stage: get a life back!


Illustrated: locked ward, as pictured in The Lunatic Express blog ...