All names, times/dates have been altered to protect the not guilty, there are of course, no innocent bystanders.
Location. The side of the autobahn.
Time. The middle of the night.
Personnel. Lots of heavily-armed cops, a musician, his girlfriend and me.
Somewhere in Europe, a mullet-haired traffic cop, replete with porno moustache and that particular style of euro-English vernacular which causes the speaker to sound like one of the comedy cops from The Fast Show, (it’s a 90’s thing kids) is busy going through the possessions of a rocknroll star. ‘We’ are stationary at a very impressive looking roadblock, our transport, slightly less impressive looking, is clearly as suspicious as it is dilapidated.
The rocknroll star is currently dressed in a silk smoking jacket, the smoking jacket is possibly insufficient attire to keep its owner from freezing his tits off, were it not for the fact that said guitar-hero is absolutely spangled on high-grade heroin and crack. In his current condition he could walk through the eye of a hurricane without noticing that the wind had ‘picked-up a bit’.
Such is the allure of certain substances, and it is exactly these drugs, the providers of instant and thorough insulation from the real world, that the young policeman is currently looking for. Our hero has just had a bit of a toe-curling hit, in layman’s terms, what one calls, “a fucking big one” it’s what he does when he’s not writing songs that a LOT of people love. He writes them regularly and it rarely seems to take him very long when he’s ‘in the mood’. He is currently, very much in the mood but possibly not for what’s currently happening. Nobody is ever in the mood for getting busted by the cops. Except the cops of course, they love that shit.
The police also have some associates with them manning their roadblock. The reason that there is a roadblock on this, and many other highways and byways of continental Europe is that yet again, some religious nutjobs have been killing innocent people with bombs. So, this situation is really something everyone present could do without. The cops, soldiers, and various other factions of the ‘man’ or indeed ‘woman’ (for all you non-binary literary critics out there) representing the country we are travelling through, are all a bit ‘twitchy’ and quite possibly more concerned with catching the Jihadi terrorists currently still at large, than the one-man war on his own veins that I’m currently looking after, or tying to.
It doesn’t take very long for whatever combination of narcotics you prepare then inject, to hit your bloodstream and do their thing; it takes our ‘clearly done this sort of thing before’ mustachioed cop even less time to find what he’s looking for, because ‘It’, is everywhere. When your innate ability to string together words and music resonates with enough people, from all (street) corners of the globe there is money to be had, or at least there was back in the olden days when people valued such talent enough to actually pay for the resulting work. These days, unless your one of those dull as fucking dishwater but highly successful Spotify uber-streamers, you’ll need to get in the van/tour bus/campervan from time to time if you wish to avoid getting a ‘real’ job like working in a shoe shop or stacking shelves for a living. Of course, they might not be your only options should the adoring fans that once lauded your every word, collectively fuck off to bestow their adulation upon the next two-bob junkie musician they fantasize about getting close to. There’s also McDonalds and teaching and writing blogs (and music) that nobody reads (or listens to) of course.
Anyway, back to the motorway of very little vroom vroom, but currently possibly some doom.
So, if there is money to be had, whether by touring or writing songs that people actually pay you for, then the quantities of drugs you can afford to spill all over the inside of the vehicle that you are currently travelling in, increases.
There is an expression in certain circles “I’ve spilt more gear than you ever took”, well, I can assure you in this particular case, that may well be the truth. So yes, the eager young copper is somewhat surprised to see an impressive pile of powder and several other, slightly smaller but still enough to get lots of people fucked-up on, piles of powder, of two very distinguishable colours, all over the surfaces of the kitchen area of our travelling house of fun.
Our lyrical gunslinger is holding a big metal tin that once contained protein mixture but ‘possibly’ now contains something else, the cop enquires.
“Ah, so, in this tin, it is the cocaine, yes?”
“No mate, bicarbonate of soda in here, that’s coke, on the kitchen table.”
“And the heroin? You have some of that too?”
The cop looks at the brown powder on the kitchen table, the ‘owner’ of the piles of powder suddenly looks a bit cold and slightly alarmed, his girlfriend who has just woken up and has never been remotely involved in any of this behaviour, looks really pissed off, positively fuming actually. The is a brief silence so melancholic and poetic in its suggestion that for now, all words are probably futile. This situation is what in old money, you might describe as being caught bang to rights.
“I fought the law and the law, wriggled his luxuriant moustache from side to side and asked.
“So, who’s in charge here then?”
Our boy looks over at me, it would appear it’s showtime, mine not his, his finished a few hours, several hundred kilometre and a few less agitated policemen ago.
I feel it is time I went to work. By which I mean get involved with this situation beyond just supplying the other cops with my driving licence and blowing into various receptacles to prove that I am neither drunk, nor under the influence of the mountains and molehills of dangerous drugs currently being inspected by their colleague. The remainder of what seems like the entire security services of this nondescript part of Europe, are by now all busily chatting about the apprehension of my client, my client seems somewhat unsure about how he should be feeling whereas I have more than a ‘bit’ of a sinking feeling that ‘we’ might be in a spot of bother.
To be continued…
Bring it on, great story