Complicated Vistas

Scary Boots is a beautiful and delicate zine, risograph printed with a small-scale, handmade feel. It’s not ‘about’ addiction, but lots of its stories revolve around the desperation and vulnerability that come from losing control of your life. It doesn’t ask for pity, but it does insist on empathy, as you’ll see in this piece that finds light in one of the darkest places on Earth.

I was walking home yesterday and all the clouds looked like veins and I was thinking about Romana.

Romana was a woman I used to know in West London. You could tell that at one point she had been a great beauty. Romana had two obsessions: the luminescent fish that dwell in the deep recesses of the ocean, and crack cocaine.

I first met her in the summer of 2011. A good friend had, in AA-speak, ‘fallen off the wagon’, and one sticky evening a series of madcap escapades culminated in us chasing Romana along the Harrow Road; us on foot, her on a bicycle. He had assured me that we would be meeting a brilliant woman – mad, but brilliant. He failed to mention that the two were locked in the kind of petty squabble characteristic of relationships built on a shared fondness for hard drugs.

“There she is” he said, pointing at a woman screaming at us from across the road. He hurried over to her as she continued berating him, before swinging a leg over her bike frame and pushing off with a little wobble.

“Come on, we need to follow her”. So there we were, chasing Romana along the Harrow Road, for reasons that weren’t clear to me. It was, I later understood, a pantomime of sorts, one to engineer restitution with the pledge of money or drugs; the final boss of making things right. We jogged behind Romana for around 15 minutes, fielding abuse tossed over her shoulder, until we reached her flat on Lanhill Road and a brief summit meeting was held. Soon after, an accord was reached and all was well with the world.

As a mini Martell bottle rushing with milky clouds passed between beleaguered hands, Romana spun great yarns about her life – how she was descended from Polish aristocracy, her time spent living in New York and Persia, her connections to aesthetes of the art underworld. Sure Romana. Years later, I found out that everything she had said was true. She cohabited with Klaus, an old Swedish alcoholic with gossamer hair and a face like crumpled Kraft paper. Klaus didn’t take drugs, but he did drink endlessly, and as empty cider cans accumulated around him, he’d talk about his role in organising the first tour of British punk bands to Scandinavia. He told us that John Lydon slept on his mother’s kitchen floor. Looking back, that was probably all true too.