Down The Rabbit hole
We stumbled out of the bar, down the stairs to street level and began striding down the road at a considerable pace. Jules started to talk. “I don’t believe in much in life. I was brought up to believe in all sorts of nonsense but its all just… distractions. You know?”
“Sure… you mean… like, religion and that?”
“Yup, and the rest… the amount of time they wasted trying to get me to believe nonsense when I was a kid… They fucking owe me that time.”
“And you’re gonna get it back I suppose” She turned and looked at me with faux seriousness.
“You’re damn fucking right I will… Anyway, the point is. Life is easy. Two rules is all you need. Rule number one: Don’t be a cunt. Rule Number 2: Seize the moment.”
“Carpe Diem”
“Clever boy! She grinned as she stopped, raised her shirt, pulled her jeans down an inch or so and revealed, written in tasteful calligraphy, “Carpe Diem” just below her waistline. “You know what this means of course?”
“Uh… I literally just said Carpe Diem when you said seize the..”
“Yeah yeah yeah, shut up. Not what it means. What it Means Means.”
“Like… to do whatever you need to do right now, in case you never get the chance to do it again….?”
“Not the most eloquent of answers but… sure… I’ll take it.”
“Well, what’s wrong with my definition? Do you have a better one to offer”
“Sure… Hang on” she paused for a second and then stopped walking, turning to me with just a shadow of seriousness to the seemingly unquenchable appearance of playful mischief she had held since leaving the bar. She grabbed me by both arms and said, “Put little faith in tomorrow, instead seize the day. Put aside your fears and worries and pluck every ripe moment.”
“hmm.. Ok. You’re right. That is a better definition.”
“I know. So. With that in mind, are you in?”
“In for what?”
“Nope. No questions. In or out. You decide now.”
“And then what?”
“Then we have a night”
“And what would this night entail?”
“This night would entail you shutting the fuck up and having an adventure with me. Don’t worry!” She grinned, “You can bail anytime you want… but you won’t want to…”
I paused and eyed her with a healthy dose of scepticism for a moment… and then nodded assent. “Sure. Let’s go fucking mental”
Jules squealed and leapt up, hugging me about my neck, I was amazed by how light she was. Images of throwing her around in bed intruded on my brain and for a minute knocked all sense of the present from my mind. Jules started laughing and clicking her fingers in front of my face. “Hello!?”
I shook myself in an exaggerate fashion and asked what the plan was.”
“Right, Do you drive? You got your bike with you?”
“Uh… oh yeah, shit… it’s back at the bar…”
“Right, come on, lets get your bike. The night’s young but we’ve got to get a move on.”
And so, with literally no idea what to expect, I drove off into the night with a girl who for all I know was about to harvest my organs for sale on the Chinese black market. Very Carpe Diem.
Our first stop was a non-descript 4 story townhouse in a tiny back alley somewhere just outside the centre of town. It was a classic Vietnamese family house, about 4 meters wide, 10 metres deep and impossibly tall considering its flimsy-looking thinness. Jules knocked on the steel shutters and we were let in by a tired, sour looking Vietnamese man of about 40. He wordlessly ushered us up a flight of stairs to a lounge, and with a dismissive wave of his hands gestured for us to sit on a bedraggled sofa while he went up a further flight of stairs. Strange Vietnamese music was playing out on the street and a dog was barking incessantly a few doors down…. Other than that we sat in complete silence, awaiting our hosts return. I still had no idea what we were doing there.
Jules was being infuriatingly secretive about every element of whatever she had planned or, indeed whether she had a plan at all. For all I knew I was about to get robbed in an elaborate double-team ruse, it seemed like a real possibility but… for some reason I doubted it.
Her ridiculous sense of humour seemed to have the power to put me at ease, a baffling power that I couldn’t quite get my head around- She had the air of someone who sees the whole world as a playground in which she can make up whatever games she wants, with rules of her choosing and act as captain, referee and star player all at once, with absolute impartiality and impunity. I have no idea why this made me trust her, but it kind of did.
Before long her friend re-emerged and said something to Jules in Vietnamese. Jules looked at me and laughed. He friend laughed with her and she said something… I recognized the word ‘ba’…. which i thought was Vietnamese for three…
Jules turned to me and asked me for 1.5 million dong. I raised my eyebrows and asked why she needed so much
“Don’t worry darling, you’ll see. We’re gonna have a great night tonight. And look, if you’re not comfortable, it’s not too late to bail and go home. No pressure.” She held her arms out, palms up. Smiling with cartoonish innocence.
I tried not to think too much about what I was doing as I pulled out 3 crisp 500,000 dong notes and passed them over to Jules, while doing the maths in my head
….that’s more or less…. Like… 75 bucks there. One decent gram of Bolivian back in London… I was curious to see what she was going to turn that into here.
She matched my money with 1.5million of her own and passed it over to her friend with some more instructions in Vietnamese. He pulled out a small sunglasses from his pocket and emptied the contents onto his coffee table, sorting the various sizes and colours and bags from each other.
He took two small bags packed tight with what looked like sea salt… probably meth I thought to myself. Then passed over a tied up blue ball sealed with an elastic band. I presumed heroin, if only because it was how I was used to seeing it packaged back in London. Then, in a surprise twist he turned to me and in broken English said, ”Special K ah?” I smiled and nodded enthusiastically as he threw over a red ball, again, sealed with an elastic band.
He pointed at Jules and said something, then pointed to the bag… I guessed from context that this was not usually on the menu, and the Jules had earned herself some sort of repeat customer discount. Their conversation continued for a while, I sat politely, unable to understand anything but more than happy to wait while the hard business of dealer-punter diplomacy was taken care of.
As she spoke, Jules pulled out a small glass pipe- angled back on itself three quarters down and with a bulbous end– a sort of burning chamber similar to the sort of thing I had seen the more serious crack-heads in London use. Most of us had always used the classic modified liquor miniatures of course (martell bottle, wire wool, no fucking about) but there was always some posh wanker who’d just come back from Amsterdam with a head full of ideas about optimum temperatures and burning techniques. This was the sort of pipe that type of person would use. In addition to the glassware she withdrew a plastic straw and drinking bottle, carefully prepared with two holes punched in the lid.
With delicate care she slid the glass tube into the lid, and then inserted the straw. Her friend passed her a bottle of water, which she used to half-fill the bottle before affixing the cap and placing the device on the table. Then, pulling out a knife from one of her hidden, discreet pockets she cut open one of the bags over a piece of paper, being careful to catch any stray crystals. Eyeing the selection in front of her meticulously, and poking around the pile of little shiny rocks with her blade she found the right one for her purposes. She hoisted it out of the pile with her knife and then gingerly clasped it in a light pinch.
Slowly, she dropped the crystal into the burning bowl and held a flame underneath it… watching closely as it melted, intermittently taking the flame away, I presumed to prevent scorching it… she repeated a few times and exhaled thick white smoke. Then repeated another two times before reloading the bowl and passing it over to me.
I attempted to mimic the process I had just watched but she instantly spotted my ineptitude and shuffled over next to me. Without a hint of condescension she said, “hey, let me light it, its way better if one person lights and the other sucks…” She smiled and all I could think about was how beautiful her eyes were when she was being kind. I obliged.
The buzz hit quickly and smoothly, the intensity increased at a pleasantly gentle pace until I could feel my brain firing up in a very tangible way. Countless ideas began to flood through my head, verbal, abstract, visual and surreal ideas all presented themselves with perfect order. I felt the sudden urge to create… to be of use somehow…
I got up and set about clearing up what little mess we had made. I then helped our new Vietnamese friend by collecting up his rubbish… much to his and Jules’ enjoyment. I knew I probably looked a bit odd but it didn’t bother me, I wanted to clean up, I wanted to do something… so I did, and it felt good.
In between sniggering at my new-found passion for homemaking, Jules had prepared some foil which she was already running a small beetle-like black globule of heroin down, and inhaling the fumes through a rolled up tube of foil. She saw me watching, probably marvelling at the sight of yet another daft expression on my face, and instantly offered the tube to me. I accepted, and again, she shuffled up and took care of the lighter.
Two ‘runs’ of the foil of was all it took to make me throw up, no surprise there. I hadn’t smoked heroin in years and with no tolerance the first hit of smack always has a risk of sending you that way.
The urge to throw up came with just enough warning to ensure I could hurl cleanly into our host’s toilet. When I emerged from the toilet Jules was ready to go and I eagerly agreed. Although I did request that I had one more hit of ice to celebrate what I considered to be a flawless vomiting experience. I had definitely earned it. Not a single splash outside the bowl.
