A terrible shared love
By Chris Petit
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2093333,00.html

Heroin used to be taken as the ultimate drug. It was like kissing God, John Belushi said, but in these accelerating times it is often relegated to a back-up fix, to counter the brutal comedown of crack, or taken with crystal meth for the perfectly balanced sex drug. "I only ever stopped when I was scared that someone was outside my door," James Salant writes of one masturbation marathon spent watching porn on a laptop computer. He compares injecting meth (originally prescribed for narcolepsy) to being submerged in a rough ocean and unable to surface until it lets you. His awed reaction to the drug's effect is typical of the genre in its mix of the religious and the profane: "I rolled my head against the thin, artificial-wood wall, mouthing the words 'Holy shit. Holy shit.'"

For all their renouncement, these rehab memoirs show what graft and ingenuity - by way of dishonesty - it takes to give oneself up to a life of drugs. Mark Johnson and Salant abandoned themselves completely. Patsy Palmer disguised hers with the lifestyle of a party animal. Anthony Loyd came up with the most ingenious solution by becoming a fancied war correspondent: abroad he lost all craving for smack.

In a series of restless foreign assignments, Loyd found escape from the suburbanisation of the soul, and in war (as in drugs) a sense of completion. It still left him frustrated, as correspondents were, like him, usually white, middle-class and childless, and what he calls great pretenders. On top of that, he found his dandyism exposed by conflict because - however tested - he was there as observer and non-participant, which reduced the job to extreme tourism. Being shot at might not be the same as shooting-up, but war offered Loyd more of the same: dangerous simplifications, a recession of the normal, heightened awareness and flirtation with mortality. There was a vanity to the quest, too, because war's initiation precludes all outsiders: "The best-kept secret of battle - the shared and terrible love of it all."

True of drugs, too, he might have added. Loyd's biggest problem was going home: waiting there was the real brute, his battle with addiction "the most complex war of all".

Drugs create the illusion of connection and exemption, taking you both into and out of yourself, an alleviation that appears to users to be transcendental. Everyone talks of getting unhooked in quasi-religious terms, the only liberation from the self-imprisonment of addiction as a choice between death and getting saved. Johnson lost a partner to Christian reformers, who sent him scuttling back to his habit; Salant's brother cleaned up and became born again. Loyd's struggle to get clean was also a refusal to accept the tedious self-denial systems of most rehab programmes, which Johnson shows as often inadequate and third-rate. Salant, on the other hand, concentrates on the transforming power of drugs and is droll about it. He was such a fashion victim in baggy, half-mast trousers and untied boots that he was incapable of running away from the cops. Protected by middle- class naivety, he survived his pioneering trip into the drug subcultures of Southern California thanks to a spell in rehab, the outcome of which was a monster crystal meth binge, financed in part by gullible liberal parents. A dutiful reporter, Salant is alert to any whiff of nostalgie de la boue : "What I enjoyed even more, though, was the seediness of the motel."

Meth promotes extreme paranoia, known as "sketching", and, given paranoia's propensity for repetition, he got lots of chances to watch how meth-talk slides with no clear indicators from inconsequential to loaded to violent. The remainder consisted of bullshit and suspicion, spaced dialogue, false intimacy and a heightened acquaintance with bathrooms: "The off-white, smudged caulking that ran along the bottom was peeling." Salant learnt that waiting is an integral part of the score, like the time he found himself in a strange house at 2.30am, minding a kid he had never met before, and, in a typical moment of distraction (another side effect) noted a TV ad for an abs machine, "just 15 minutes a week". The book's monstrous suburban angst shows you don't have to go to war to scare yourself silly. Salant writes with the mild puzzlement of a man surprised to be still alive. If the drugs hadn't killed him it was small wonder some of the company he kept didn't.

Palmer is so positive about everything it's amazing she needed drugs. "From the start I loved everything about EastEnders ... but it wasn't enough to stop me partying and taking drugs ... huge amounts of ecstasy, vomiting all over dance floors and then taking more drugs." She admits it was a miracle she was never rumbled by the press. All of Me is clearly in her own words, but who taught Mark Johnson to write so snappily, given an education system that did him no favours and vice versa? Compared to Palmer's cheerful soap, keen on resilience and the importance of family, Wasted is the grimmest British social realism, from abused childhood to homelessness in London, far removed from Loyd's middle-class swanning. As Johnson sets off down the recidivist trail there are signs of the sensitive child trapped inside, but one thing leads to another. His brother graduates to being a smart football hooligan, mixing with lads who are quite middle class with their ironed shirts and Kouros aftershave, hanging out in new wine bars "as though Mrs Thatcher's been all over the country scattering wine-bar seeds".

In prison there's evidence of the sensitive boy again: "I like baking and I'm good at cakes." While the book holds nothing back there's an uncomfortable sameness - beyond the intended point of the deadening effect of drugs - that makes the remark about baking no different from one about kicking the daylights out of someone. In prison Johnson listened to acid house, puzzling over how the music, the drug and the scene were all fitting together. Once out, he got caught up in the excitement of early raves: "Tens or hundreds of us congregate, and whatever binds us together thickens and swells into something that is identifiable and unique to us. We are Thatcher's children, grown now and leaving the 1980s behind."

Thatcher is bogey and exemplar, and Johnson turned out to be a more enterprising child of hers than he ever could have imagined. Even on the skids he was stealing enough DVDs from West End stores to support a habit of pounds 300 or pounds 400 a day. Of those stepping over him in Oxford Street, he writes: "They don't realise I've collapsed because I'm working harder than they've ever worked in their lives." Whatever else, Johnson was no slacker and enterprise found its reward. Cleaned up, he received the sponsorship of the Prince of Wales and secured an advance for his book larger than most writers hope to earn in a lifetime.

¬… Chris Petit's The Passenger is published by Simon & Schuster