The Destructive Path of the Category Five Moron

I was expelled from school at 15, mostly for being a bit of a tit (probably the nipple), the details of which are for another post, but I barely went to school after the age of nine anyway.

I spent the next few decades going to bed at 8am and waking at 3, or similar. My usual experience with mornings was coming home as people went to work and I loved swimming against the fish. I still do, I’ve just find more interesting ways of going in the “wrong direction”.

I look back now at the waste of my previous life and my stomach aches.

I was pretty high up on the moron scale, but some flicker of common sense usually had me pulling the brakes at the right moment.

Unfortunately, the curse of the category four is that there's usually a category five moron in tow.

One evening, aged around twenty, I attended one of those spontaneous parties that somehow sprouted from nowhere, like a mushroom in your plant pot that startles and disturbs at first sight but you end up enjoying. Just me?

Little did I know that this was the AGM of the category fives and before the end of the night, a friend would die in my arms … for a bit.

Who Are The Category Fives?

I was a category four, in part because I don’t think you can be category five without a cruel narcissism that has little care for others' wellbeing.

Category fives are those who always take it one step too far, turning youthful frolics into some bloodied mess. If someone lets off a silly streamer, they’ll feel the need to set alight to the sofa.

The temptation as an adolescent is to compete, but you quickly learn that the framing has little to do with the joy. These are unhappy people who always feel the need to perform and to deform.

Back to the party.

Pharmaceutical Deformities

I was well on my way to drunkenness, probably on a fifth can of some gut rotting, 9% beer in a garish gold tin, the drink of choice for tramps and teens in the early 90s.

I made my way up the stairs, past the various expressions of pharmaceutical deformities. Those on amphetamines were annoying everyone, upping the ante on the drunks who usually win the empty inanity awards but haven’t the energy to compete.

The weed smokers sat in their uniform, cross-legged guru pose and preached psychedelic nonsense, claiming wisdom that they could never have accrued.

The group upstairs, where my girlfriend at the time sat (not a user herself), were the junkies, the main choice of substance for the category five. After all, what better way of making it all about you than a significant chance of dying?

The New Hepatitis Range

For those who have never been around junkies, watching dribbling fuck ups falling into diseased flaccidness makes you feel like you’re living in an insect infestation. Your skin crawls looking at the scabs, needles and abject misery, always one accidental spike away from hepatitis.

My girlfriend sat next to my friend and his junkie girlfriend as he lost consciousness from the last hit. As we talked, his lips started to turn dark and the weather followed suit.

When the police might get involved, junkies show remarkable agility. A party that had just held 40 left only me, my girlfriend and a few teens who still held to that “in it together” principle that I too thought was unconditional.

This was pre-mobile phone, so the teens constructed a human chain of likely inaccurate communication from the top of the stairs to the landline in the restaurant downstairs, none of them brave enough to enter to the room.

I have vivid memories of one of them, Paul, appearing like a discombobulated head at the top of the stairs, relaying the latest development to another at the bottom.

And then there was Greg.

Never Trust A Hippy Sidney

Greg was the perfect encapsulation of an early 90’s stoner who thought it was 1972. Posh, pretentious and walking like marshmallows were stuck to his feet, he never missed a chance to preach, posture and pose. He was even more annoying than the junkies and was trying to help, but was mostly just trying.

Not knowing what to do with a dying friend, I tried picking him up and taking him for a stroll, as I’d seen on TV. What television didn’t tell me is that it’s almost impossible to carry a dead weight, pun intended, of an unconscious body and we fell to the floor like a newly married couple crossing the threshold after too much champagne.

Greg was having a panic attack, showing an animation almost as surprising as the agility of the now-departed junkies. It was an understandable panic, but it betrayed his carefully cultivated persona. Watching him run back and forth from the bathroom with glasses of water, that he threw at my friend’s face with varying accuracy, would have amused me greatly in other circumstances.

The whole time I was speaking to my friend, reminding him of his daughter (category fives breed earlier than most) and hoping that he could hear.

The Uncanny Cliché

I made the mistake some years ago of reading the DaVinci Code. It was a fun enough romp but the cringing became so violent that I was worried I’d pull a muscle. The worst part was the naming of the English villain, Sir Leigh Teabing. It’s the equivalent of me naming an American Character Jim-Bob McNugget.

But life has a way of being uncanny, and my friend’s face of death was one of those occasions. His lips were dark blue and his general pallor an eerie but artificial off-white. If I saw it in a film I’d suggest they should sack the make-up artist.

Eventually, after what seemed like hours, the death mask started to warm.

Much like when in desperate need for a pee, the closer to life he got, the more the panic set in as I slapped his face and shouted, fearing he might slip away again.

As it became clear he was going to live, Greg took the opportunity to regain his dignity, patting me on the shoulder and saying “It’s OK maaan”, in the most patronising tone. Something that might have been more convincing if we weren’t all covered in the water he’d been throwing like a priest with Parkinson’s.

When the ambulance finally arrived, we could truly exhale, but Carry On Overdosing wasn’t yet over.

Carry On Shooting Up

It being a junkie’s flat, the disrepair was widespread, including in the bedroom, where an extension lead lay across the room to the only source of light, a lamp in the corner.

As the first ambulanceman entered the room, his arse went over tit after tripping over the lead, his kit bouncing off the wall opposite. Watching the poor bastard splayed across the floor, trying to contain his anger like an infant school teacher whose pupil just smashed him in the shins with a mallet, was, as inappropriate misfortune often is, glorious.

Unfortunately, he had also broken the only source of light.

And so we sat back exhausted, watching the two ambulancemen attend to my friend’s still prostrate body under the flame of a Zippo and wondering why their knees were wet.

Is There Life After Death?

My girlfriend and I stayed behind when they took him to the hospital, looking for any stray illegal substances to dispose of in case the police turned up. As if a junkie would leave a speck of the heroin behind.

When he returned a few hours later, six or seven of us shared some weed as a melancholic fatigue took a hold. He told us that when he died he felt nothing, just darkness. Junkies don’t go to hell, they just leave it in their wake.

The Feint Smell Of Vomit

Paul The Discombobulated Head ended up an acid casualty, in some ways a more wretched figure than my friend. The last time I saw him, a year or so after Carry On ODing, he exuded paranoia and darkness. He would have been no older than 18.

I saw Greg about a decade later, hair a little thinner, flanked by two much-younger girls and affecting the same marshmallow walk as before. It’s hard to develop when you already know everything, I suppose.

As for my friend, I slowly cut him out of my life. It was galling watching the pride he took from the chaos. It was another Johnny Thunders legend that I used to be so impressed with from afar, but was risible in reality.

I’d see him around for years, his face increasingly resembling a latex mask and his words a back of the nasal passage drawl, the hallmarks of long-term heroin use. The faint smell of vomit told me it was ongoing.

Sometimes I wonder how many lives were negatively affected by his surviving that night, from hepatitis infections to sharing the gift of heroin. Nihilism casts a false, romantic glow to the young and sits so well on the shoulders of adolescent self-pity.

Choose Life or Choo Choo

Decisions that you make in your youth have an uncanny way of setting trajectories for a long time to come, as if we’re laying rails we’re destined to follow.

Eventually, with maturity, other avenues open up, avenues always ignored by the category five.

It takes a lot of commitment and a complete lack of imagination to be a category five moron and I’ve frankly never been that dedicated. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, that night was the end of an era, as it should have been.