Litkicks Message Board Archive

Roger The Lodger

My lodger Roger is doing my head in. I like some of his music, and he can tell a good story, but he just lives day to day, joint to beer, fuck to meal. The future is a vague possibility, a blur at the edge of now. He’s very good at living for the moment. He can extract the maximum out of a Tuesday afternoon, which is why I put up with him. And it’s a Tuesday afternoon when I arrive home. Roger, skinny in baggy jeans and rank dreadlocks (don’t dreadlocks look ridiculous on white folk) is sitting in the lounge like some albino Rasta, watching Rikki when I arrive. He loves those shows. He’s an expert on other peoples problems. He’s suffered from most of them himself at one time or another. As soon as I walk in the door, he’s rolling a joint and telling me that we are off down the pub in ten minutes. I’d called him from my mobile on the way home. His beetled eyebrows squint at me as he sucks on the joint, before passing it over to me. I’d stopped smoking dope years ago. With someone like Roger about you don’t stop anything for long. It took him a week after he moved in to turn me on to the magic of home-grown skunk, which had not existed when I’d smoked dope. The stuff just defied description. I’d been brought up on hash, which made you dopey and stupid, sent you to sleep in front of the white noise of the TV, made you leer stupidly at women in the pub. Skunk sped you up, reamed you out, made you feel that, although you were probably psychotic, it did not really matter. I still don’t consider myself a druggie. Ken was always the one for that. We’d go out together, and it was always him who scored the drugs. He’d wander over and tell me to put some piece of paper in my mouth, some pill. Sometimes I’d do it, other times I’d gently decline, wondering what drove him to hate reality so much. I’d look at him losing it on the dance floor and wonder what it was all about. As soon as our parents split up, that was it for me with drugs. I’ve always maintained that drugs are a personal choice, and there is no such thing as fucking up and getting away with it. I’ve seen too many people think they have it under control only to find that they missed a stop sign you’d seen and waved your finger at vaguely when maybe you should have shouted.
Not that it would make much difference.