I Walked 47 Miles of Barbed Wire (Part One)

My name is John Doran and I write about music. The young bucks who run VICE’s website thought it would be amusing to employ a 42-year-old who is finally taking family holidays in Tenby again.

In case you were wondering or simply too lazy to use urban dictionary, "menk" is Scouse/Woollyback slang for a mentally ill or educationally subnormal person, and is a shortened version of mental. As in, “Your Sergio Tacchini trackie is sick la, look at that menk Doran, he can’t even afford a Walker trackie. Let’s hit him with a brick and push him in the canal."

MENK 60: I WALKED 47 MILES OF BARBED WIRE (PART ONE)

I’m standing in the lobby of a fashion hotel in Oslo.

I’m presuming it’s a fashion hotel because there’s a poem about sado-masochism on the lift wall and a photo-illustration collage of a muscular man with a gecko’s head, bound in chains covered in cigarette butts surrounded by hieroglyphic style figures smoking joints, to illuminate it. Above my bed is a sub-Lichtenstein style graphic of Marilyn Monroe with crab’s pincers climbing out of the sea and the wallpaper has been carefully torn off in strips to reveal different but complementary wallpaper underneath. The torn off strips have been glued artfully onto my headboard. Down in the lobby Danny Brown is sitting at a table having a coffee. I don’t think that anyone is fellating him, however… the hotel is not that fashionable. Although I can’t see under the table he’s at, so who knows.

I’m with a number of colleagues and we’ve been working at the Øya festival. One of my party is fretting about the flight home. I wait for the usual chatter about statistics, and the safety of air travel as compared to crossing the road, to die down.

“I’m terrified of flying so I take diazepam,” I tell her. “Or at least I used to be terrified of flying. I don’t mind it so much now. Because I’m on diazepam. Every trip or holiday I take starts early for me nowadays. As soon as I’m on the tube to the airport I take one of these little pills and then when I’m going through security I have another and then I pretty much glide onto the plane, fall asleep and come round as I touch down.”

She is chewing one of her thumbnails agitatedly.

“When do you start getting scared?” I ask her.

“About a week before the flight,” she says.

“And which bit are you afraid of?” I ask her.

“Taking off, flying and landing,” she says.

“With you,” I say. “When you get home book an appointment to see your doctor and tell them that you’re in some discomfort because of flying but you need to do it for your job. Tell them you need medication to fly and if they say they can’t help you, go and see a different doctor. Where do you live? Tooting? Everyone in your doctor’s surgery bar you is on valium, lithium, methadone, escitalopram and temazepam, there’s no way they can’t give you an irregular script to do your job without suffering sheer existential terror. Who can describe indie rock capably when they know they’re going to crash screaming into the sea in a blazing hunk of steel at 470 miles per hour the following afternoon? There’s probably some guy at your doctor’s with a mouth constantly pursed like an anus who doesn’t want you to have a prescription for diazepam. This is the surgery manager who has the impossible job of keeping costs down. But how can he keep costs down when everyone in Tooting is so existentially terrified? Don’t be bullied by anus mouth man. Get some diazepam from the NHS.”

She doesn’t look convinced so I ask her: “Do you pay your taxes?”

She nods.

“Good,” I say. “This is exactly what your taxes are for – access to the means of tamping down violent and irrepressible intimations of your own mortality while travelling to work. Imagine if everyone suddenly realised how dangerous cars were? Nothing would ever get done. Everyone deserves this.

“Have you been drinking this morning?"

“Here we go,” says her boyfriend.

She shakes her head.

She also tells me that she is healthy, not allergic to anything and doesn’t plan on operating any heavy machinery later in the day.

“Have this now and then if you’re still nervous in a couple of hours when you’re at security, let me know and I’ll give you a full one. You’ll be fine,” I tell her.

I can see a little bit more reassurance is in order. I tell them: “Look, I’ll literally get addicted to anything. It’s embarrassing. Drink. All illegal drugs. Painkillers. Cough medicine. Caffeine. Cigarettes. Chocolate. But with diazepam… it is potentially addictive and it is pretty nice but if you use it just for this, for the flying you’ll be fine. Also, as drugs go it’s pretty straightforward. No psychedelic effects, no weird mood swings or crazy psychological insights, no inhibitions lowered, just an absence of angst. An all-too-short holiday from your own internal monologue.”

I’m lying slightly. There are plenty of things I never got addicted to, and two things in particular worth mentioning in this context. The first was heroin. I smoked it once in 1993 in Hull and vomited copiously. I hate being sick; in my twenties and thirties I was only sick about ten times because of drinking, despite being blind drunk every single day. However, I’m sure I would have got the hang of chasing the dragon sooner rather than later if I had stuck at it. People always say, “I’m afraid of needles, otherwise…” They’d get over this fear soon enough if they smoked smack regularly and probably wouldn’t need diazepam to help either. There are no degrees of separation with drugs. You either want to take them or you don’t – and I didn’t want to take heroin. The second, however, was crack cocaine and I certainly took enough in 2001 and 2002 to pick up a habit but that was a bullet that I didn’t even need to dodge. It just never happened and I walked away from it just fine.

The House where it happened was literally over the road from the pub where I spent all my time. Everyone who lived there or was a regular visitor sounded like the Second Class Fare To Dottingham man from the Tunes advert.

The House, to be fair, looked like the kind of place where you’d end up smoking crack sooner or later. It was falling apart, full of pornography and I never remember being round there at any time of day when there wasn’t hardcore grumble playing on the DVD player. For some reason, everything in the house looked sepia no matter what time of day it was. There were always people playing chess there to a frighteningly skilful level as well. I made the mistake of playing once and my “clown’s chess” was mopped up in minutes. By their own admission, most of them had learned in prison – this and cryptic crosswords are an honourable pursuit inside when you want to keep your head down and just do your time. There was one room downstairs in The House where no one, not even the live-in landlord, would ever enter. They’d just sling white goods and furniture in there when they’d stopped being useful. I was round there on the day that a stud wall collapsed and a landslide of newspapers, pornography, mangled chairs and broken toasters slid into the kitchen, blocking access to the back garden for several days. There was only one nice room in the house. That was where Snakeskin Steve lived and he, wisely, padlocked his room when he was out at work.

Snakeskin Steve was the South of England’s most successful snakeskin boot salesman. And as you would imagine, he liked cocaine. His room was amazing. Not only was it not reminiscent of a film set from Se7en (like the rest of the house) but all the walls were covered in homemade shelving displaying every imaginable style of snakeskin boot. It was a high pressure trade with a fierce work and play ethic, not to mention intense, not particularly friendly, rivalry between the salesmen. Once, Steve came home from a snakeskin boot seller’s AGM in Miami with his entire right leg in plaster. Details were hard to prise out of him but it turned out there had been an altercation with the North of England’s most successful snakeskin boot salesman in a parking lot outside of a conference centre with a free delegates' bar.

“You should see the other guy,” is literally all that Snakeskin Steve would say to me about the affair.

He had split up with his wife and ended up living in The House. It was a constant magnet to men who had just split up with their wives. It was also a constant magnet to men who were just about to split up with their wives (whether they realised it yet or not). It was also a constant magnet for several lesbians who were just fine with the continuous girl-on-girl pornography, abundant cocaine and non-stop chess tournaments. The last gift my ex gave me was a really nice push-bike which I cycled round there one day to score. Some time later, after I'd moved out of the house we’d bought together into a flat over the road from The House – and some time even later than that, when I was leaving the area altogether – I went back round there to pick up the beautiful bike. I’d only used it once but the thing was rusted solid in the back garden. It was fucked beyond repair.

There’s no uplifting, triumphant way to do coke when you do it all the time, every day. Fumbling through your pockets for a note that isn’t rolled up, thinking, “Please dear God, let there be some notes left… if there are no notes left I am fucked. Please let there be a bloodstained £20 note in a tight tube that I’ve missed…” Searching in a wallet past photographs of family and loved ones for wraps, thinking, “Please dear God, let there be a wrap left… if there are no wraps left…” Digging out otherwise useless bank, credit or gym membership cards to chop out lines. Trying to ride birthday present bikes from your ex when they’ve rusted solid at the back of a crack den… none of this is a recipe for triumphalism. When I went back to the drug some time later as a music journalist I resolved to only do it on my own or at work – a course of affairs that came with its own different set of consequences.

Snakeskin Steve was a nice guy but he knew some reprobates. I met one guy who would set the scene for every story he told by describing what style of boots he was wearing and which illegal animal skin his jacket was made out of. Each tale would be a variation on this: “So I wasn’t wearing anything other than a pair of black briefs, a pair of natural belly cut pythons with handmade, wood stacked Cuban heels and a newly imported, hand finished ibex skin jacket. I was lying on my couch listening to Creedence at full volume, drinking beer and smoking grass, when there was a knock at the door. I opened the door carrying a joint and there was a copper there: someone had called the old bill.

“He said, ‘Well sir… I don’t really know where to start.’ I could tell he wanted to bollock me but he was obviously distracted by my boots. He said, ‘Are you wearing python skin boots?’ So I told him: ‘Yes. Yes I am. And this is an ibex skin jacket. Look officer, you seem like a well-adjusted young man, would you like to come in, smoke some grass and listen to Creedence with me before getting back on with your beat?’ He looked really angry and said: ‘It’s a good job it’s 9AM on a Sunday morning and I’m literally too tired to write all of… this up. Make sure I don’t get called back here again today.’

“And that, my friends, is how you deal with the police.”

But all of this was before the wraps of cocaine got swapped for rocks of crack.

Part Two next week.

Previously – Check My Machine

You can read all the previous editions of John's Menk column here.