Scream If You Want To Go Faster: Part One

Why Drugs Are Awesome And Why You Should Try Them

Make no mistake, cocaine isn't a drug. It's Instagram in a bag.

I hated doing cocaine on sheer principle but nothing else was satisfying the itch. It's one of those drugs that make you wink at yourself in the mirror after pissing down your trouser leg. One minute you're making a nuisance of yourself in a strangers kitchen; the next you're making dubstep records. It's really no way to live. Somewhere between dawn and the first nosebleed I would crawl back to my barely furnished flat, consume enough opioids to subdue the horror before slipping into a chemically induced stupor. You know it's shit when you can't afford to kill yourself.

When I was sixteen I met a girl and we ran away to escape the wretchedness in the North. We run amok through the countryside looking for benefactors. Soon we became pets of those in the Middle Class with more money than sense, paddling an old canoe up the slumbering canals of Buckinghamshire, travelling between the waterside pubs stuffed with champagne socialists.

Often we'd trade odd jobs for sanctuary and all the narcotics we could ingest. My juvenile brain was soon debauched with psilocybin, cocaine, cannabis and sloping piles of ecstasy laid out in bowls like peanuts.

The flickering summer light paints the sleeping houseboats oozing sensual Delta blues beside the lonely oaks and handsome hay bails that kept us company in the night.

We rambled West, on through the Mendip Hills and smoky tors of Somerset. The rolling forests, out to the snaking, muddy embankments of the Severn Estuary. Far from home and far from alright.

Listen to your gut. It will show you the way. Mine led me to sit in the dunes, burning driftwood and watching the distant, lights of Newport across the estuary flickering in prophecy.

We were kids. We had no business being out here. So I packed up my magic mushrooms, my nine bar of hashish and my dole book and went home.

Back in Leeds. walking home after a boozy night when I was jumped by a gang in matching tracksuits like the lads from Heavens Gate. Because I fought back they beat me to within an inch of my life. These Serbs pinned me down and kicked me consciousness.

Either as an act of humiliation or to conceal evidence they stripped me naked and dumped me unconscious into a skip behind a derelict bath house.

I came round heavily concussed, covered in blood and baying at the moon under the yellow street light. Mangled and twisted in agony. My ribs, hand, wrist, nose and jaw were clearly broken. My hair was matted with blood, eyes swollen shut, my lips looked like I'd overdone the fillers and there was an open wound on my hip exposing my pelvis. Some wild, primeval survival mechanism dragged me back toward town, limping down the road desperately trying to stop traffic.

The red tail lights of the passing cars blur through the long exposure of concussion. Nobody stopped. I'm dying by the side of the road and nobody stopped. Dozens of cars scream past without even so much as a mocking horn.

The candyfloss part of my human mind where empathy lives takes a screaming shit and dies. Empathy is permanently replaced with a scathing indifference. A pathological intolerance that would render other people’s suffering as a frustrating inconvenience. And why wouldn’t it? If nobody stopped for me, then why should I ever stop for you?

Twenty minutes later, a woman is sat at the reception desk at BBC Leeds when a naked man with a massive penis crashes into the glass doors covering them in blood.

I am promptly arrested for indecent exposure, given a further kicking by police and dumped in the car park of Leeds General Infirmary to lure Jimmy Savile.

A week later I discharge myself because I had Pearl Jam tickets.

From there life was about the pursuit of a teeth grinding, eye rolling abandon. Months later I’d fall down a flight of stairs at a party and stopped breathing. I'm prescribed opioids and immediately fall in love with them.

Opioids work like a smart bomb on the dopamine receptor. They subsidised the already dizzying symphony of drugs I was already taking and gave me a new weapon in the war against sobriety.

All time lapses and splinters. Prickly skin and heavy lungs. The synthetic whispers on a summers day. Dreams, feelings and imagination coalesce into a multidimensional synaesthesia. I could hear shadows and taste the weather. Soon I'm choosing substances over people of substance. I eat morphine for breakfast and I drink at work.

I've been working on the phones for British Gas for a year before they notice I have no idea what I'm doing. My girlfriend looks at me differently. I loved her more than life itself but I loved drugs infinitely more than her.

The irreconcilable differences are self evident. She wants kids, a house and a career while I want to drink until I'm sick on myself. I become such a miserable, intolerable bastard that she does the right thing and leaves me.

I want to walk into traffic. Devastated I lay there for weeks watching shadows race across the ceiling in a time lapse. The urge to run away again grows all consuming. In response I execute a shameful avalanche of debauchery.

I get used as a bit of rough, an exciting infatuation or as an exotic break from a relationship. I end more marriages than cancer. Crossing the country, looking for someone to stop the hurt. Looking, possibly, for a car that will stop for me.

I had spent three years in the Socialist Party, shepherding students onto coaches to fight the police. The SP was a stagnant cult full of first generation wokes and old trade unionists that left any room they were in with the stale aroma of piss. The men looked like trainspotters and the women looked like hookers. How much I believed in Socialism is anybody's guess. It could be argued that I was only there for the violence.

Unsurprisingly nobody liked me. The 2012 Socialist Party Convention had been held at London University. I'd spent most of it drinking in Camden and when they'd finished singing The Internationale they'd gone back to cockroach infested hostel while I got a hotel room in Kensington with a jacuzzi.

One time, without telling anyone, I ripped off one of Joseph Goebbels speeches changing the word Jew to Tory. Nobody noticed and after I'd delivered it I was given a standing ovation. Why I did it is anyone’s guess, I couldn’t sit right unless I was causing trouble. In the end I was summoned to a disciplinary committee and expelled from the Socialist Party proving that you have to be really fucking messed up to be kicked out of a cult.

Believe it or not up until now things had been going pretty well. I had funded my unsustainable fecklessness fraudulently and all the five star hotels and obscure narcotics had bled me dry. Lessons were never learned, sleep simply stopped visiting, replaced only by a heroin soaked narcolepsy, waking up in a stolen fur coat to find a live lobster in the bathroom and an unconscious alcoholic with cerebral palsy stretched across my kitchen table.

I'll go more into it in Part Two but it's safe to say I made life decisions that Katie Price would find distasteful. Drugs allowed me to keep a face melting itinerary of protests, parties, jobs and extra marital affairs, desperately trying to force my way into someone else's dysfunctional life because I'd lost control of my own.

Not that I was ashamed. I advertised my drug consumption with such bravado that strangers on Facebook would send me drugs in the post to critique.

Of all my drug dealers, by far my most reliable was my GP. Heroin comes in all manner of delicious flavours and varieties. You can even mix and match.

Tramadol is like the little black dress that goes with everything. Combine it with a few Oxycodone for a buzz you can drink on or couple it up with a trans-dermal Buprenorphine patch for that killer vomit-in-your-sleep look.

When I was on anything, I was also on Tramadol. They prescribed me the Buprenorphine patches to wean me off the Trams but I predictably just took them both. Inevitably I started wearing two patches then soon after I was wearing three.

Wherever I applied the patches I got heinous chemical burns that scorched my skin clean off but it was a small price to pay for paradise.

My favourite drug by far was Morphine Sulphate. It came in a funky bottle with a spoon for precise dosage but I would chug it straight from the bottle.

If I was feeling particularly spicy I'd cocktail them all to find that radiant trapdoor into the sun. Quickly I got used to waking up on buses in strange towns without any clue where I was or why.

This was during the legal high epoch when heinous chemicals were sold in the same shops as crossbows. It provided the best value for money on the drug market. You could take a quarter pill of Benzo Fury and be up for days but it was also guaranteed to make you shit blood.

If you're new to this lifestyle it's important that you learn the basics.

First of all make sure you don't eat before you start drinking. That’s important.

Never plan on how you'll get home or where you'll sleep. Try to wander off from your friends if possible. Strangers in nightclub toilets will offer you drugs, it's important that you don't ask them what they are before you take them. Above all, never ask someone's name before they take you home.

Nothing beats the reward of waking up half cut in a strange room. Swinging your legs around the bed to step into a pile of cold, gelatinous dog shit. The feculence oozing between your toes in your bare feet. Falling down the stairs in the dark, wiping off your feet on the curtains and escaping into the night.

This of course is all wonderful but there was a downside too. My muscles began to atrophy and my teeth began to crumble like chalk. But that only allowed for more prescriptions. I should have been ashamed but I felt absolutely nothing and it was glorious. That's the beauty of painkillers. It's like you've managed to stick the world on mute. Never having to notice that you're unhappy or having to ask yourself what pain you're actually killing.

Why did nobody intervene?

Someone should have run me over with a lorry.

Why did nobody drop me with a tranquillizer dart and lock me in the cellar?

A bullet to the face would have been a kindness.

This was never going to end well.

Sell me some drugs.

Scream If You Want To Go Faster: Part Two. A Woman’s Heart Is A Deep Ocean Of Secrets. Coming Soon.

I’ve made my posts all free to subscribe for the time being to reach a larger audience and petition for more support while I prepare for my summer run of gigs. This chapter in Mein legal Kampf may be over but I still have a testicle crushing legal bill to cover. Please continue to support free speech in the arts and allow me to perpetually be a problem by donating to my Crow Justice Campaign or by buying a fabulous piece of hatewear designed by The Famous Artist Birdy Rose.

Jay Mack Crowd Justice Campaign

Jay Mack Hatewear Shop