I Just Wanted to Be Loved: A boy eager to please. The man who destroyed his childhood. The love that overcame it.. Stuart Howarth
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a hole in my soul – and I kept taking different substances to try and fill it.
Drugs had always been a comforter to me, especially cocaine. That white powder seemed to wrap its arms around me and take away all the demons. I could find it at any club I went to, often without paying. I'd slip off to the toilet with a snappy bag of white powder and a house key and snort a couple of lines inside a cubicle, then I'd feel uplifted, confident and comfortable. The abuse I'd suffered faded into the background and I'd chat away animatedly, living in the moment.
The buzz doesn't last long, though. Fifteen minutes later you have to slip back to a cubicle for another couple of lines or you'll plummet down further than you were before you started. You feel elated and energetic while it lasts, then knackered when you come down. While there's plenty of white powder around, it's easy to stay up all night chatting and drinking and smoking the hours away, but when you get home and crawl into bed you feel as though you've been knocked over by a juggernaut.
I'd been offered ecstasy several times but was wary of trying it after the case of Leah Betts hit the headlines in 1995. She'd taken an ecstasy tablet at her eighteenth birthday party, collapsed into a coma and subsequently died. It was reported at the inquest that it wasn't, in fact, the ecstasy alone that killed her; she had died of water intoxification. You're told to drink lots of water to avoid dehydration at ‘raves’ but she had drunk too much and the ecstasy prevented her kidneys being able to deal with it, so the combination of the two proved fatal.
Her parents mounted a huge campaign to raise awareness in young people that it could happen to them too. There were posters with the slogan, ‘Sorted: Just one ecstasy tablet took Leah Betts', and I think it had a big influence at the time. It certainly made me stop in my tracks.
But then, as my mental problems worsened, and after I'd made several suicide attempts anyway, I thought ‘What the heck? If I die, I die.’ And the first time I took an ecstasy tablet, I thought, ‘You bastards! All this time society's been keeping me away from this drug and it's wonderful!’
It was a good substance for me because I loved the universe when I took it. I felt loved-up and not at all angry or depressed. I'd stand in the club saying to Tracey, ‘I love you, I really love you,’ for hours on end. You don't feel ‘drugged’ on ecstasy – you feel as though you are thinking really clearly for the first time in ages and you are acutely aware of little things, like the curve of an earlobe or an individual melody in the music that's playing.
The main component of ecstasy is MDMA, a drug that causes abnormal quantities of serotonin (the ‘happy hormone’) to be released in the brain. A few hours after taking a standard ecstasy tab, you'll have no serotonin left in storage because it will all have been released into the bloodstream, so it's obvious that it's going to mess up your moods. It takes a while for your body to produce more serotonin so that you can feel cheerful again without chemical help and in the meantime you can get very low.
MDMA makes you feel speedy and energetic when you're still up, and much more sociable than usual. It's all very intense, so sometimes you need to drink a couple of pints to bring you down a bit, and if you go down too far you might need a couple of lines of coke to bring you up again. Finding the right mood can be a delicate chemical balancing act.
And this wasn't all I was taking. Some bodybuilder friends introduced me to GHB (gammahydroxybutyric acid) because it promotes REM sleep, during which your body secretes growth hormone so it helps you to build muscle. I soon found it had plenty of other effects as well. GHB was used as an anaesthetic during World War II, when they had to perform amputations on the battlefield. It's also been used medically to treat depression and insomnia, and to help recovering alcoholics. At the levels you take in clubs, it produces a sense of euphoria and increased libido, and it can make the effects of ecstasy even more intense. It was first used as a recreational drug in the gay community in the 1970s and 1980s, and River Phoenix (star of My Own Private Idaho) had some in his bloodstream when he collapsed and died outside Hollywood club The Viper Room in 1993.
GHB is a colourless liquid with a slightly salty taste, a bit like pee. If you have more than two capfuls of it, it will knock you out for four to five hours, so it can be a good way to come down at the end of the night when you want some sleep. I have also heard of several cases where it has been used as an alternative to the date-rape drug rohipnol because it's easy to slip into a drink yet it can't be detected in the body more than four hours later. It's a very dangerous drug, especially combined with alcohol, and it's also addictive after a while, causing withdrawal side effects of insomnia, anxiety, sweating, chest pain, aching muscles, and even convulsions and hallucinations.
Of course, it was all a ridiculously bad idea to be tampering with my mental state in this way, feeding myself a cocktail of uppers and downers to try and achieve oblivion. I didn't think I had a problem, though, because I only did drugs at weekends and I always got myself back to work first thing on Monday morning.
In a typical weekend Tracey and I would go out together on Friday night but she'd want to come home around midnight while I stayed out all night with my mates, going from club to club drinking and drugging. I'd stagger home at some stage on Saturday morning, sleep all afternoon, then go out on Saturday night to get off my face again, and sometimes I'd do the same on Sunday as well. Monday to Wednesday were my days for recovery and I felt like shit, but I went to work, came home and had a protein shake, changed into my gym gear, went to the gym for a workout, then came back for dinner and bed. By Thursday I'd be feeling better again and raring up for another ‘lost weekend’.
As you can imagine, Tracey was very unimpressed by this behaviour. In the months before I went to prison she'd known I took drugs occasionally, but nothing like this. She says that my chemical-induced moods were so unpredictable that when the front door opened she had no idea which Stuart was going to walk in. I could be aggressive and argumentative or, occasionally, loving and affectionate (but this was becoming quite rare).
Looking back, I've got no idea why she stuck around because there was nothing in it for her. She was getting nothing back from me except grief. One minute I'd completely ignore her and the next I'd be all upset and needing comfort and love. She'd try to talk to me and I'd either respond with a grunt or by bursting into tears.
Tracey's never been a nag but she began to try to get me to calm down and think about what I was doing to myself.
‘You can go out and have a few pints, Stuart, but just come home with me at a normal time and we can enjoy the rest of our weekend together.’
She was never a big drinker and she didn't touch drugs so I thought she was just trying to spoil my fun. She'd try to pin me down, asking what time I was coming home, calling me on my mobile when I was out drinking and drugging with the lads – all perfectly reasonable behaviour when you think about it, but the more she tried to change me, the more I resisted it.
‘What are you doing later?’ she'd ask, and I'd ignore her.
‘Stuart, what's going on? Why are you not talking to me?’
‘It's your own fault,’ I'd say. ‘You never stop bloody nagging.’
I'd often start an argument deliberately on a Friday night because I wanted the freedom to drink and drug as much as I chose over the weekend. If I managed to manipulate the situation so that we had a row and I stormed out, it left the coast clear to party.
‘Anyway, it's your fault I go out and get drunk,’ I'd say. ‘If things were right between us, I wouldn't need to.’
Everything was Tracey's fault, to my mind: the reason I went out, got drunk, took drugs – the reason why my life was so horrible. The bottom line was that no matter how hard she tried, it seemed as though she couldn't save me. I'd thought that if she loved me enough, really loved me to the core, then I would get better, but instead I was getting worse. I was having more and more flashbacks of the abuse, and my sleep was disturbed by horrible nightmares that left me dizzy and hyperventilating when I woke.
I was stark naked and my stepfather was tying me up with ropes at the back door. He twisted me so that my feet were trussed up to my neck, secured my arms behind my back so I couldn't move a muscle, then just laughed and laughed