It’s February 1998. You are a 19-year-old undergrad student in England. The building society that holds your money becomes a PLC. You receive a £1,800 payout. A friend you made a year earlier receives one, too. You decide to visit New York together. Why not? You go for dinner with your girlfriend the night before your flight. She lives just around the corner from your friend. So, after spending some quality time together, you leave her bed and walk the two hundred yards to your friend’s house. Your taxi is booked for 4 am. You decide there’s no point in going to bed. Don’t want to sleep in and miss your flight, so you both wrap small amounts of amphetamine sulphate inside Rizla cigarette papers and swallow them. These “speed bombs” will keep you awake until you land on American soil. It’s breakfast time when you walk out of Newark Airport. The first thing you do is buy a foil pack of Marlboro cigarettes from a kiosk at the bus station. You’re amazed by how cheap they are compared...
In a room without windows, strange things can happen. And, in a cavernous cellar bar buried deep in the city’s underbelly, the heavy mix of rain and pressure in the Friday night air can warp a man's mind. That’s what happened to someone before my very eyes. He lost his shape. He seemed to know everybody, but was a friend of no one. The room moved around him like he was the eye of a storm. But he couldn't be. He lacked the calm of a storm’s eye. He may have been physically still, yes, but inside, emotionally, there was turbulence. I'd seen him hopping between people and the bar throughout the evening. Never long with the people. Always long at the bar, trying to pick up drinks and conversations. Not many conversations—not long ones, anyway. But plenty of long drinks. When I found myself next to him, he claimed to know me. At first, I thought, maybe he did. I sort of half-recognised him. But then I realised he just had one of those faces. I'd never met him in my life. I...