John Niven

John Niven

Rock Biographies Lied to Me

It is the early nineties. I have just graduated from university and am living with my then-girlfriend Stephanie in a one-bedroom flat in the west end of Glasgow. We are returning late one night when I see that our neighbour Calum’s door is wide open. Calum is in his fifties and very much a loveable rogue. He’s a Glasgow journalist of the old school: a hard-drinking bon viveur who is never happier than when he’s typing up a no doubt heavily padded expenses claim on the battered Amstrad computer that sits on his desk in his front window. Calum is prone to the usual stuff that accompanies his lifestyle: locking himself out of the building and so forth. ‘You go on up,’ I say to Steph. ‘I’ll just check he’s OK.’

I knock lightly on the open door and, getting no response, wander into the hall. ‘Calum? Calum?’ I shout. ‘Your front door’s open.’ There is noise and movement coming from the bedroom. I walk in.

On a chair in the corner sits a fairly rough-looking Glasgow ned in his thirties: crew cut, shell suit and dirty trainers all present and correct. He looks somewhat … glazed. Calum is laid out flat on his back on the bed. Standing over him, frantically slapping his face, is his elder brother, Duncan.

Duncan is an equally hard-liver – a fisherman from the north of Scotland (where both brothers come from) who occasionally visits Calum in order to tear up the town. ‘Ah, hey Duncan,’ I say. He stops slapping his brother and turns around. ‘Everything OK?’

Everything is not OK.

Some backstory here that I already knew about. Calum had recently been researching a story about drug gangs in Glasgow and had got to know some lads like our shell-suited friend in the corner. Over the last few months, he’d gone from just being a boozer to occasionally doing some cocaine as well to, more recently, asking me if I can get him some Es now and then. His Jimmy Corkhill-esque trajectory has reached its apotheosis in the scene now being played out in front of me. Duncan fills me in.

Earlier that night, they had been drinking with some rough lads Calum had gotten to know when he decided to front Shell Suit the money to get some heroin in. They’d retired here to the flat where Shell Suit shot up Calum and then himself. Duncan – sensible old fisherman that he is – stuck with the whisky. This was not long ago and apparently Calum is ‘no handling it well’.

I go over and my first thought is that this is correct – he’s dead.

Calum is chalk-white, his eyes closed. I prise open an eyelid and am astonished to see something I have only read about in rock biographies – the phenomenon of being ‘pinned’. His pupils are microscopic, tiny little pinpricks. His chest is barely rising and falling. He is breathing. Just. ‘I … I think we need to call an ambulance,’ I say.

Finally, Shell Suit speaks up. ‘Naw man. Fuck sake. You’ll get us all the jail. He’ll be awright.’

Of course, with hindsight, I should have called the ambulance there and then. However, I don’t want to get Calum into trouble. I don’t know how it works when an ambulance crew arrives at the scene of a heroin overdose. Do they automatically call the cops? I’m in my early twenties and massively out of my depth here. I do know one thing though: he is very, very far from being ‘awright’. ‘We need to wake him up,’ I say.

‘I’ve been trying that for half an hour!’ his brother replies. Indeed, I see now that Calum’s hair and shoulders are soaking wet from the water that has been thrown over him. His cheeks are reddened from all the slapping.

It occurs to me that Duncan is paralytic and Shell Suit is smacked out of his mind. Early twenties or not, I’m the only adult in the room. It is now that something else comes back to me from the yards of rock biographies I have consumed, something that I read about in connection with Gram Parsons, the country-rock singer who died of a heroin overdose in a Joshua Tree motel in 1973. ‘Right, strip him off and get him in the shower,’ I say. I run into the kitchen and root in the freezer until I find the ice-cube tray. I run through to the bathroom where they have the naked, still unconscious Calum laid out on the floor of the shower stall. We start running it as hard and as cold as we can get it. Nothing. No response. It has to be done.

I begin trying to insert ice cubes into Calum’s rectum.

Have you ever done this? Either out of necessity or for pleasure? (There are more things in heaven and earth and all that, Horatio.) It is not as easy as you might imagine. After a few cubes have been refused entry to his tightly puckered anus and have gone skittering uselessly off across the lino, I realise that my instinctive technique – to try and press the cube home with my thumb – is defective. Better to slightly spread the cheeks with one hand, place a cube in the palm of the other and gradually try to work it home.

Of course, the process is nowhere near as calm and measured as I make it sound here: there is the cold, pouring water soaking me, Shell Suit laughing his head off and Duncan screaming, ‘WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!’

Finally, I pop one home and the effect is immediate: for the first time Calum opens his eyes. I ram another one in there. And another. He’s awake now. And looking confused. As well you might if you’d drifted off on a rainbow cloud of opium and woken up in a freezing shower stall with your neighbour brutally ramming stuff up your fucking arse.

We get him out and wrapped in a towel and start walking him around the flat, trying to get sips of black coffee into him. Exhausted, wrung out, I say, ‘OK. I’m going to bed now. For God’s sake, don’t let him go back to sleep.’

I head up to the top floor. Stephanie – who already disapproves of Calum as an occasional drinking partner of mine – is asleep. I turn in too, already working on the lightly bowdlerised version of events I’ll present over breakfast in the morning. I drift off but am soon woken by Steph elbowing me in the ribs and hissing, ‘There’s someone at the door!’ Not the main door, the buzzer. The flat door. I go and open it to see a guilty, despairing-looking Duncan. ‘Sorry John, he’s gone again.’

I throw a dressing gown on and head back downstairs. Calum is naked on his back on the bed and, if he didn’t look great before, I am now effectively looking at a corpse. I muster all the authority I can and say, ‘We’re calling a fucking ambulance.’

Shell Suit immediately stands up, nods (my memory wants to add the embellishment that he formally zipped up his shell suit, as though buttoning a topcoat) and bolts out of the flat, down the hallway and off along the street. I ring 999 and tell them we have a heroin overdose. Duncan slumps into an armchair, head in hands, and I wearily retrieve the ice-cube tray for the second time.

I am busy at the coalface once again when I am tapped on the shoulder. I hear the crackle of a radio as I turn to see green uniforms and medical bags. ‘Uh, son, what are you doing?’ I begin to babble – probably about Gram Parsons in Room Eight of the Joshua Tree Inn – but am simply moved out of the way. The paramedics shine a light into his eyes. They quickly find a vein, produce a pre-loaded hypodermic of some kind and inject Calum. Two years later, watching Pulp Fiction in a dark cinema, I will bark with laughter at the Mia Wallace scene. In reality, it was nowhere near as dramatic. He didn’t leap six feet across the room. Calum simply gasped as he sat up, looked around him and said very clearly, ‘Hey! What’s going on?’

‘You’ve had an overdose. We’re taking you to hospital.’ Calum nodded. Perfectly content to submit to this plan.

And with that, they helped him off down the hall and towards the waiting ambulance – these men who came out of the night and who saved his life as casually as delivering an American Hot, these heroes who would shortly be on their way to some other hell unfolding while most of us slept peacefully. At the door, one of the paramedics turned around and faced me. ‘The ice cubes up the bum thing, son? Urban myth. Just call 999 next time.’ It would not be the first or the last time rock biographies lied to me.

And off they went, blue-light circles strobing in the dark.

The cost? Nothing. And god bless the NHS.

The anecdote value? Priceless.

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