The thick brown line running down the foil is beautiful. Andy holds it up to my mouth and instructs me to inhale the plume of dark smoke. It tastes like truck exhaust.
My shoulders go slack and my head relaxes. Everything is gonna be all right. I am sitting naked on a bed bug infested futon mattress in a tiny room in Oxford, England. I am loved, safe, and very high.
It is 1997, I am 20, and I have just flown across the ocean to see a man I met once two years prior. However we’ve been exchanging hand written letters for over a year. Andy’s friend Mongo came around the house fiending for dope. We negotiated that I would buy him his drugs if he let me photograph him shooting up. The three of us trekked out to Cowley Road and quickly found a dealer in the park.
Once home with the dope, Mongo gathered his gear and stood in the middle of the bedroom. He removed his shirt, exposing a gnarly rash across his abdomen. He strapped his arm up with his belt and prepped the drugs in a dirty spoon. I snapped away. He drove the needle in and I took a few more pictures. Then he gave us the balloons of heroin that I paid for, and backed out of the room to go nod out on the couch…
Which leads me to now. Me bodily relaxed for the first time ever, Andy eagerly filling pieces of foil with the silky brown powder. We will stay here on this bed in this room until all that silk is gone, fucking and smoking. We are not sleeping or eating and the days are running together. I am dirty and hungry and completely in love; with Andy and with freedom from pain.
Most of my days are spent on the couch watching Andy’s roommates and friends inhale dried Ketamine from a Pyrex plate. I am more interested in the heroin and getting more of it, than I am in cat tranquilizers. Irish Travelers keep the house stocked with narcotics. They drive through Oxford every week to unload the goods and sell to the locals and college students.
Adi, a legendary traveler in his late 40s, carts along a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl named Emily, and her eleven-year-old brother Tom. To the average passerby they might look like a happy family on holiday. In reality, their car is lined with crack and speed, and the kids are experts at rolling joints and cutting lines.
When they roll through the house, I keep my mouth shut, for fear of saying the wrong thing. I sit on the couch and take photos with a wide-angle 28mm lens.
Sometimes they pose for me, sometimes their faces are buried in a Pyrex dish full of drugs.
Adi finally lets me shoot his portrait on my last night in Oxford.
When we go to sleep, Adi shows his affection with a huge line of speed on the coffee table along with a note that reads “for you and the missus.”