Mashed

Do you know that place between dreams and consciousness, the hypnopompic haze, where emerges the dismay that you are still you, that nothing’s changed, that the world you left when you closed your eyes is the same world you're about to wake up to? A great part of me was to remain there, always, as though my physicality was a holographic projection, and the real me was wandering around a strange inner maze of oblique self-perceptions. Lost, indifferent, just humouring my apparent existence, playing an endless, no-stakes game of poker with myself on the inside of a giant cylindrical mirror.

~

It was a Friday. Which made no difference at all. All I wanted to do was get fed, get stoked and get stoned, and that wasn’t difficult to do on any day of the week. The difficult part was getting out of bed. For a while I just lay there smoking cigarettes, anxiously wondering where the hell I’d been the night before.

Drawing a blank, I wrenched my body from the mattress and found my way into a pair of creased up Iceberg jeans. I really couldn’t remember. The Visage Club, was it? The Bumble Bar? I slid two clammy hands into my back pockets, fumbling for a receipt or a promotion’s flier, producing the torn-off corner of a beer mat. Written on it, some girls name and a phone number, underlined with neat little cross-kisses. I flipped it over; it was a Guinness mat, could have come from any bar in the city.

Casting it into the wilderness of socks and crap that was my ever-rising bedroom floor, I dug into my front right pocket and yanked out my wallet, a red leather Freitag which cost more than it ever usually carried. Keys were missing though. No hassle, if I made it to bed then they’d be around here somewhere. I’d either dent the sole of my foot or listen for the clink in the washing machine.

Before I could find a t-shirt that didn’t stink, a pair of heavy fists started pounding the door like a silverback gorilla pounds it’s chest.

“Yeah, it’s a door, it has a handle”

I wasn’t in the mood for this, my throat felt like I’d swallowed a cup of sawdust.

Good thing it was Rob. Rob always wore those arresting, smiley eyes, like they had some odd ability to catch and diffract all the light in the room. Or maybe it was just his daily diet of water bongs glazing him over. I liked him from day one.

“EZ geez, I’m out of Rizzlarrrrrr… Sort it out”

He always talked like an MC, kind of made me feel like I should too, but I’d only end up sounding like a dick.

“Yeah, giz a sec. Just woke up”

I turned and swept a clutter of lager cans off my PC desk with my forearm, instantly forgetting what I was looking for, but clocking the time on my Fossil wristwatch. 3-22PM. Turning back, Rob was opening the small horizontal window through the blinds, observant enough to consider daylight might effect me the way salt does a slug.

“Was I out with you last night?”

Rob stifled a laugh, but his eyes laughed out loud.

“What? What happened?”

He shook his head dismissively, patting his thighs, then his shins, then his calves, looking for something in his beige combat trousers’ pointlessly copious array of pockets. I felt dizzy, rolled back onto my bed, feet scraping the sheets up around my legs.

“C mmm, le avee nnn”

Rob finally found his shrink-wrapped skunk and simultaneously spied a stray pack of Rizzla on the floor, grabbed it and planted himself at the foot of the bed, skills and Cutters at the ready. I lifted my head, a wisp of drool bridging my bottom lip to the pillow. Almost time to puke. I really didn’t need a whiff of blazing Moroccan grass right this moment.

“Say what, boi?”

“C’mon, let’s ‘ave it then”

Rob was a proper junglist. He could skin a spliff in about 30 seconds, been smoking weed since he was eleven. I didn’t even dare try a regular cigarette ‘til I was fifteen years old. My step dad was a medic in the armed forces - a heavy handed, fully institutionalised disciplinarian - for him to catch me so much as dragging my mam’s dog ends, I may as well have hotwired the Volvo and crashed it into a statue of Florence Nightingale. Sometimes I wished I had.

“Ha ha, you were mashed up!”

Rob’s voice was croaky, with a kind of surreal brass reverb. Might have reminded me of a hammy Darth Vader if not for the South London garage boy accent. I never knew if it was a put-on.

“My word, Sean da Mess. Gurnin’ like a rem boi, yes yes!”

I wasn’t surprised. I’d fast developed a habit for over-doing it Ecstasy-wise. Apparently it was becoming a reputation. 'Sean the Mess'. Whatever.

“Where’d we go to?”

I let out a watery belch, momentarily relieving the urge to spew; the aftertaste quick to revive it.

“Me went to Bumble’s, you went to da hard house night at da Honey Club innit. Got ‘ome at four and you was a fuckin’ state, could have left you in da corridor. Ha ha, you was tryin’ ta get da key in da hole for gosh knows, breda! Proper mashed”

He unhooked my keys from his belt and jingled them tauntingly around my head. I opened one eye, snatched them and lobbed them in the general direction of my desk.

“Cheers. Stick some tunes on if you want”

“Yeaa-ee-aa-ee-ah”

He oscillated the word in his gullet, half in reply, half in foretaste of the sprucely constructed blunt. If there were no drugs present, his tone might be construed as bombastic sarcasm.

“

The frail crackling sound of the first toke, like crushing a sheet of baking paper, and the mantric exhalation. It was a comforting sound and the smell didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would, in fact; I felt a little better.

Rob loaded up my PC music library and hit the ‘random play’ tab, which was an act of faith on his part since our music tastes varied more than a nuance. Since meeting Rob at the start of the academic year, though, I’d warmed immensely to the drum ‘n’ bass scene, and if someone were to judge me by my recent flux of listening habits, they might conclude I was a nascent junglist.

A lot of people my age chapter their past by fusing a soundtrack to it. Old timers seem to order it by the tally of political parties in office through and after their working lives. I always figured my step dads generation was the final cut in segmenting history by term of ruler, and ours the first generation to be wholly and inescapably defined by media. Media and drugs.

Then, out of hangover hell, surfaced the dreaded leviathans ugly fuckin’ snout. I jack-knifed, like I’d been standing gormless at the arse-end of a bucking mule and my guts started tossing around whatever chemical dogshit cocktail had been brewing in me.

“Fuck”

The cheque was being cashed. If puke was pennies, my sink was about to turn into a Celtic wishing well.

It was no longer the case that media could be considered ‘an authoritarian tool for class control’ (as your average Social Theory Goth might bite your ear with) because the internet was taking off just about everywhere. At the same time, ‘drug abuse’ had also switched; if you weren’t packing coke in your Calvin’s around city nightclubs you were getting very decent uppers and downers straight from your local G.P. ‘The secret epidemic’ they called it. I just called it England.

These were the kind of thought’s I’d learned to keep to myself. I’d arrived in Southampton a closet geek, and finding myself arse-deep in viral lechery, accompanied by a nightly choice of fit, negligible women and rude boy Asians, I consciously bricked up that closet as best I could.

Rob didn’t stir as a gout of bile filled the sink. I guess he was used to it. He may have been judging me a nascent junglist, but the correct verdict he’d already uttered - I was a fuckin’ state. I was mashed.