A really good fucking shot. They come along rarely these days. And they come just when you are at your limit, bitching about how the tax office is about to repossess your flat. When you're so fucking over the two hour drive in peak hour traffic to score. When you're fighting all the time with everyone, and work is your only relief.
Then bam. A shot is mixed up, like any other shot. Just add water, heat, stir and suck up. You aren't expecting too much - it's only $200 after all, just that bit to keep you going, that fuel that keeps your legs moving till payday and a decent shot.
The girl mixing it up tries to hide a rock, thinking the whole bag's a bit big. Perhaps the dealer made a mistake - he told you he had no scales and had to do it up by eye, so there's a glimmer of hope in your mind that just this once the scales have fallen on your side of the fence. But you're not really thinking about it. You wheedle the spare rock out from under the mixer's knee, scoffing at her suggestion to keep it for the morning. Into the mix it goes, your lighter with your first initial on it to keep it out of the smoker's clutches (what, a junkie who doesn't smoke? Unheard of!) wavers under the spoon and then you're flicking out the air with your thumb and forefinger in that subconscious ritualised motion seen by kids the world around on a thousand hospital TV series. Even though (they say) you need at least a mL of air (that's a whole sharpful), you get rid of the air more from a fear of it clotting the blood in the fit and wasting the shot rather than fear of heart attacks.
The bit where it goes in your arm is so ritualised you don't even recall doing it later.
You remember walking to the PC to record the time of your shot, with the fit dangling to fulfill some wanker model of a junkie. And then the really good fucking shot begins. Of course, at the time you don't realise it's happening. It's one of those things that you only notice in retrospect, like a good relationship.
So a day later your body is still feeling decent rather than trashed, and you spend ten minutes arguing with S about whether your boss rang last night just after the shot or was that the night before?
She argues that it was the night before and you accept this as her memory is usually better than yours. But later as you wash up you realise that the night before last night was a public holiday so your boss would never have rung. Which means that a phonecall around 24 hours ago has etched itself in your memory as something that happened twice that long ago. The miraculous filtering property of good smack. All bad shit recedes into the distance and your present becomes a comfortable settee of timelessness.
All those cliches you've heard repeated in movies and by curious friends come to mind - "better than sex". And you realise that cliches often have a source of truth. That really fucking good shot was better than sex and it did make any problems in your life seem insignificant. Tax office coming to take the house? Well come over dude, do what you've gotta do. We've all gotta do our thing, and if yours is taking my flat then go for it.
As long as there's the chance of having one more really good shot again before I die I'm happy to be unhappy!