OK. Once again I'd like to thank people from EADD who have been beautiful in their support and kind words at a hard time.
I'm sitting here writing shit on BL a week removed from Brad's death. It's a coping mechanism. I've now gone nearly two days without crying, though certainly not any length of time without thinking of Brad. And suddenly I thought 'enough shit', so let me tell you a little of what happened and where I am.
My dear friend succumbed to an accidental overdose of benzos and heroin. Although accidental doesn't really begin to describe it. And I'm posting it because I think it's relevant, I think this could happen here. Anywhere.
Briefly. Brad lived in what we call the Far East. He was English but, for reasons which are intensely complex but irrelevant here, he'd been brought up in Asia all his life. And because he lived where he lived, it caused difficulties sourcing drugs. Then along came Tor with Silk Road et al and Brad was basically like a pig in shit/kid in a sweet shop. I thought he was taking big risks just because of the country he lived in and there fairly hard line on drugs, but to him it beat the alternative, traditional methods of buying on the street corner or off taxi drivers. Indeed, just prior to his discovery of SR, his taxi driver meth dealer had just been nicked by the police with Brads money, Brads drugs and about 100 frantic texts from Brad saying where's my meth?
So, SR fan. But vendors won't ship to his home, due to strictness of laws there and high likelihood of drugs not getting through. Brad arranged a third party (in America of all places) to be postman in the middle as it were. I still thought this was mad. But it worked, for some time.
And then it didn't. On a big order. A parcel, not a letter.
I began to get more and more frantic, difficult communications from my friend. What to do? He had stockpiles and had, in the very early days, flushed $500 worth of things on a paranoid freak out when he thought police were breaking in his flat. This was not as idiotic as you are all thinking. The police were there, smashing in next doors flat. Anyway, this made him reluctant to do the same again. My understanding is he didn't have that amount of drugs in his flat, but he had enough, a big stock of various benzos. I began to worry when he said he'd necked 60mg Diaz and felt zero, zilch. I was as worried for the addiction he was building as much as the police coming for him because of his parcel that obviously had been intercepted.
The morning he died, evening there, he'd rung me, stupidly early, pretty incoherent. If not incoherent, slurry and slow as hell. He was talking of some really illogical, bizarre, stupid ideas to try and cover his back for if and when the police came calling. He was scared. But.
He'd also got a letter that day, just turned up before he rang me. The significance, for him, was that this letter was from the same source as the missing parcel. The same third party. So stuff was still getting through. And the parcel obviously hadn't. So here was more drugs...to take quickly before the cops came, as they surely would.
What can I do from 8000 miles away?
Just say no Brad. Don't do it. Put down the gun.
He didn't know it was a gun. He didn't see it as a gun. He had a system full of Benzos, chomping through them until the jail man came. He didn't see anything. Just a letter of drugs to take. Leave it man leave it. He's not even saying he's going to take it. But I know he will. Leave it man leave it. The call had to end sometime. Bye. Bye. Bye bye Brad. Fuck.
The letter was smack.
And where am I now? The missing link, the guy who made everything make awful, terrifying sense for his father, the one who Brad shared his real life and loves with, the only guy who knew what was going on (and still failed to save his friends life). But I gave his family some closure, however unpalatable it may have been. (His father rang me because he didn't know whether to have an autopsy because he had literally been handed his sons dead body by the authorities in a "you deal with it" manner because that's how it works there).
And now, because that makes me a "drug link", I am, inevitably, surplus to requirements come funeral day. I don't care it's half way round the fucking world, I would have gone. But. Accept it. And so I have to focus another way.
I love you Brad.
1ruv
