Our drug worker, Stuart, was a top geezer. Unlike a lot of the drug workers who used to be more off their heads than we were. He was a drummer in a band in his spare time, lived near the Pennines, just on the right side… Well, he’d be on to B for a while about applying for funding to get him into this residential rehab centre. One of the only ones in this area. Funding was very competitive and places were normally only for those on licence from jail or as part of bail conditions.Very few were up for grabs for ordinary Joe Public.. Anyway, B had always been reluctant. ‘I’m not as bad as that’ and ‘I know I can stop myself when I want to’. Until one awful winter night when I walked round to his house in the blustering gale and horizontal rain to be met by a B on a mission. He was dead agitated, I could see that straight away. I think by us moving back to our parent’s houses it was causing the same tensions and frictions as it did befoe we moved out. He’d already sunk 4 fosters and his foot was tapping his bedroom floorboards whilst making a poor attempt at being interested at the programme on the TV we were watching in his bedroom. He had no money. He wanted some stone. Perhaps he’d even had some earlier on that day and the effects were so raw that it was twisting his melon (man) not having any more.
He went downstairs and his mum refused to lend him some money. Rightly so. I was trying to talk him out of it. For the last few months of being back at our parents, we’d followed the usual sham of us being clean to them but dabbling in reality. Well, B had and I’d pretty much abstained. Except B had been putting in that many hours using stone (crack), that it could probably be classed as a full time 37.5 hours per week-job. This night he was that wild with greed and the need to score that he was blatant what it was for. The charade of asking for money for a few extra beers had been removed, B’s mum knew what it was for and stood her ground. I stood side by side with her (I’d not been using for a few months if you remember) so took the slightly higher ground on the top half of the kitchen along with his mum, blocking the door from B and his bike. He was adamant that he needed to score and was going to go with or without money, on this wintry night, outside on his bike. We continued to stay there, arms folded, obstinate. We were doing the right thing. Things had gone too far, the truth was out and it was time to make a stand.
Except just at that moment his 6ft 2″ dad walked in from work… never very good at reading a situation (or just past caring, not sharing the unbreakable maternal feelings of his wife) and asked B what the problem was and why there seemed to be a stand off in his kitchen when all he wanted to do was to come home from work and make a cup of tea in his own house without feeling threatened. This, if you’d known B and his Dad (who were like 2 peas in a pod) was a red rag to a bull and culminated in B tackling his Dad to the kitchen wall and holding him up by his throat as me and his mum screamed in horror and we all went slightly hysterical. B put him down quickly, grabbed his expensive bike and disappeared into the windy night.
B returned home the following day, minus his bike which he’d weighed in, yet again in return for a few hundred pounds of crack. His mum, scarred from battle but knowing she might win the war, gave him the money to pay off the dealer – on the basis that he accepted the rehab place.
A very sorry and remorseful B facing the stark realities of his addiction in the cold light of day, dutifully agreed.
The battle was over. The war of addiction continued.
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