I survived heroin addiction and took on the Mexican cartels
After he had stopped blackout drinking, stopped injecting heroin, Tim MacGabhann went swimming. It was early 2015, and the Kilkenny-born writer was by the Pacific, 500 miles from Mexico City, where he was living. 'I was on my first drug-free holiday,' he says. 'And I got in a rip tide off the coast of Sayulita.' The fast-flowing current carried him rapidly out to sea. 'I was thinking, 'F--k, this could be it',' he recalls. 'I ended up willing myself to stay calm and not thrash and not even waste oxygen shouting for help, because that just makes you panic.' When the rip finally released him, he was a long way from shore. Spoiler: he was able to make the swim to the beach.
There's a reason he's telling me this story, beyond its pay-off ('The next sandwich was great'). MacGabhann had felt that sense of terror before, and staying calm was something he'd learned to do. 'I was like, 'Just do what you did every time you were very scared of dying. Just watch your own panic as if it was happening at a remove.''
Before that near-death moment, there had been nine years of finding escape in oblivion, a period that the 34-year-old writes about in The Black Pool, a deadpan, poetic account of his time as an addict that will be published on May 22. 'In those days, waking up was a roulette wheel,' he writes. He could be in a cantina, a courtyard, a cemetery, on 'floors crunchy with broken glass in postcodes that I'd had no idea existed'. Just writing about that time would bring on the physical sensations of it; he'd find himself sweating with anxiety, a fluttering panic widening across his chest, the same terror that he'd felt in the riptide.
There were other moments, working as a freelance journalist in Mexico, which brought close the threat of death. Writing stories about gangs, drug trafficking, corruption or organised crime could get you killed, especially if you were local. MacGabhann wrote about priests murdered by 'narcos'; human traffickers and vanished women; gangs kidnapping endurance runners from indigenous communities then forcing them to cross the US border with backpacks full of heroin and fentanyl. He met one of the victims, who had been 'immediately arrested, went to jail, returned, totally taciturn about the experience'.
The White House's justification of punitive tariffs against the country for its failure to stop drug smuggling ignores an inconvenient truth, he believes. 'It all goes through [US] ports of entry, the big influx of substances is at customs.'
He describes how danger arrived at his door in The Black Pool, in an encounter that begins with a red pickup waiting outside his flat, with four men in it, 'eyes blank as river pebbles'. He soon realised that 's_______ myself or pissing myself or begging or panicking was not going to make this moment any better' and all he could do was 'take a last look at the coiling fog, the dark blue air, the cobbled streets, try to make it look the way Kilkenny looked'.
He walked away from that encounter. Yet it was the murder of a photojournalist friend, Rubén Espinosa, and four others, that provoked MacGabhann to write his debut novel, the thriller Call Him Mine (2019), about what can happen if you upset the wrong people in Mexico. 'While I was stressing out about my stories, my neighbours were being tortured and beaten and finally shot to death,' he wrote in the Irish Times. He sees crime fiction as 'the flip side of modernism', employing the same techniques and manipulation of form. 'It's a great way of investigating class and power, money, politics, without people feeling that they're being preached at.'
He's loved the genre ever since he read Conan Doyle as a boy, marvelling at Holmes and Watson racing through London in a hansom cab, with 'Sherlock Holmes mapping the city as they go. I just felt whole worlds shooting off from the little details that he's pointing to.' He remembers thinking, 'this is Dickens, only faster.' The modernists, meanwhile, remain a 'constant presence'. 'That period feels like the Big Bang,' he says. 'We're still picking through the cooling meteorites.' He shows me the heavily worked manuscript of the PhD about Joyce, Beckett and the anti-plot novel that he's working on for a doctorate at the University of East Anglia.
We're not in Norwich or Mexico, though. MacGabhann (it's pronounced MacGowan) moved to Paris a year ago and meets me near the Jardin de Luxembourg. Close by is the beautiful, high-ceilinged apartment he shares with his girlfriend and her two children. He's a flamboyant character, with very long hair and a huge drooping moustache that would have allowed him to move incognito around Laurel Canyon in the early 1970s.
His knuckles bear the legend Y N W A and his arm a Liver bird that explains its provenance ('You'll Never Walk Alone'). He's crazy about football, but there are tattoos of birds and 'religious stuff', too. ('I really have a problem with Catholic stuff, but I feel branded with it.' He found the passing of Pope Francis very affecting. 'I didn't expect to be so moved by it.') Details from Dürer and Caravaggio, also on his arms, nestle near a heron from Ovid's Metamorphoses and a cormorant, his favourite bird.
Before Paris and Mexico, there was Brasília and 'all the bad stuff that happened there', where he hung around bus stops to score crack or 'a crap injectable heroinlike syrup', and where it was 'a false economy to try to negotiate, or shop around, or head off into the undergrowth, because you might leave your phone or your bank card or even your shoes behind you there'. Before that was Barcelona, where he first began shooting up heroin. And before that was Trinity College, Dublin, source of the book's title (Dubh Linn means 'black pool' in Gaelic), where he won a scholarship and academic prizes, and began drinking away an inheritance from his grandfather, who had made his money from a business that turned scrap corrugated metal into barns. His parents had both been primary school teachers, his father a principal.
Post-university, MacGabhann began teaching English abroad. In each place, there are memories of humiliations that become progressively more extreme in the memoir, culminating in him being grabbed by Mexican police at a protest about 43 'disappeared' student teachers. They dumped him miles from home without cash or bank cards. The depredations of the journey back are exquisitely vivid. By the second day, 'I was hungry, but stuff rots so fast in the heat that going through the bins didn't seem worth it,' he writes. 'I had become everybody I'd ever refused to give change to, everybody I'd looked through, everybody I'd shaken my head at and said, 'Sorry, another time' to.'
A chance meeting during that harrowing episode brought him to Narcotics Anonymous. It is a plot twist, he says; had it not happened, 'I think I might have been able to patch together enough excuses to think that this isn't the worst. I could have found someone who'd let me sleep on their couch and have me exhaust their patience for another while longer. It could have kept going, definitely.' Going to NA convinced him to go through withdrawal. He still goes to meetings.
'They should feel more ghostly than they do,' he says. 'Everyone's like, 'Oh, I should be dead' – it could be a bunch of ghosts.' They have helped him to understand the telling of his story, though. 'You'll tell something really straight, just really grimly, you know. And you hear everyone laugh. It's not the reaction you were looking for… they just laugh at you, or laugh with you, or they laugh in recognition… and you're like, 'that's good, actually.''
Does the book fit the mould of a 'misery memoir'? 'I really hope not,' he says, smiling. 'Not the Irish ones anyway.' He wanted to avoid the redemptive narrative – 'I came through this thing, and now my life is so good' – too. 'We're addicted to plot, you know, as readers, as watchers, I'm addicted to plot, and I think addiction stuff that has a plot can fall into that.'
Anyway, he realised that the blackouts had been too severe to impose a traditional structure of 'what I was like, what happened, how it is now', as 'I couldn't remember the bits in between': the book's subtitle is A Memoir of Forgetting. A fellow addict in recovery told him wistfully how he'd been reading up on the effects of a particular drug on brain chemistry: 'He said, 'it's like 300,000 orgasms at once… We'll never feel that good again, physiologically.' And I said, 'well I can't f--king remember it, anyway.''
The cravings were very quick to go, because 'it just wasn't worth it,' he says. There is lasting regret about some of his 'a--hole behaviour', but as to his addiction, he says. 'I don't ask 'why?' any more. I don't feel sad about it… it helps me connect to people who've been through horrible stuff.' He's certainly not keen to cast it as part of the writerly experience that shapes fiction and memoirs stretching back to Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), via Mary Karr's Lit (2008), Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) and William S Burroughs's Junkie (1953). 'It's not, like, 500 grammes of suffering equals one kilo of art or something good.' Besides, he notes, Burroughs 'had a lot more fun than I did.'
His rejection of plot and causality in The Black Pool does have its roots in his drug experience, though. 'When you live in that space where you do one thing, you take a drink, you do a line, or bang up, whatever, and then mad s--- happens… it's like, 'I just wanted to get high, why is all this other f_____ up stuff happening?'' The idea that 'you do X and Y happens' no longer made sense to him.
He elected to write something more experimental, although the memoir's hallucinated encounter with Marcel Proust, he insists, actually happened. The book was 'just about the sentence', he says. His 'tuning forks' were the 'flat, relentless drive' of Greg Baxter's 2014 novel Munich Airport; Colm Tóibín's 2019 essay in the LRB about his testicular cancer ('he was telling it so plainly, but with this quiet force'); and Cathy Sweeney's response to motherhood, Breakdown, published last year, which he says, takes the 'noir urgency' of a great detective novel 'and applies it to a domestic escape'. MacGabhann wrote 'with the sound in mind rather than the sense', finding that it 'unlocked other depths of memory'. It's not a surprise that he's been working on a poetry collection, Found in a Context of Destruction, to be published early next year. A book of short stories, Saints, is coming out, too, later this year.
In the book he is struck by the thought that he has read versions of himself written into literature for 200 years – the 'superfluous, overeducated young idiot who hadn't been consumed by a war or a revolution… Pick up the end of any century and you'd shake out a million of me,' he writes.
'I think there's a huge amount of alienated and despairing people who do feel like they're just copies of one another,' he explains, 'and if they could just connect, they wouldn't feel like they're a copy of a copy.'
Writing the book exhausted him. 'I just have nothing left to say about the topic of addiction, or me, or recovery,' he says.
He's found alternatives, such as meditation, to the ones he pursued back then. 'I wasn't very good at doing drugs,' he insists. 'I went to this really cool cloud forest once, and I got a load of [the psychedelic drug] DMT. Then I spent the night lying on the porch on a cushion, watching the rain and listening to Electric Light Orchestra.' He starts to laugh. 'Like, if I can't do that properly…'
The Black Pool is published by Sceptre on May 22
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