Over the Edge With Pete Doherty

With a purposeful stride, Johnny Headlock approaches the black metal security gate and quickly pulls himself up and over, dropping into the parking lot of a shabby-looking apartment complex. We're in Hackney, an East London borough that is far from posh. For the past ten hours, we have been looking for Pete Doherty. Johnny pauses at a door with a broken window. The window has been boarded over with an uneven square of wood, and someone has scrawled a message on the white border: "Hello faye and lo here we came round to see you we love you not in an obsessive way good fucking job xo."

"Pete!" Johnny shouts. "Pete!" It might be appropriate to note, here, that it is 3:30 in the morning. The only lights in the area come from Doherty's flat. The windows are covered with bedsheets.

"He's only got three real hide-outs," Johnny murmurs. They call Johnny "Johnny Headlock" because he is not a person it would be advisable to fuck with. In Johnny's thick East End accent, "three" comes out as "free." The accent, coupled with the ever-present, unnervingly intense gleam in his eyes, bring to mind Ben Kingsley's psychotic gangster character from Sexy Beast. Johnny has worked for Doherty for several years, in a capacity somewhere between wrangler and personal assistant. Finally, one of the sheets is yanked aside and Doherty thrusts his head from a second-story window, bleary-eyed and confused. "Johnny," he croaks, "you can't --" Nothing else is intelligible. Then he disappears.

At that moment, the door bursts open and a young woman races past us. She is crying hysterically and not wearing enough clothes for this frigid night. Johnny frowns, then shepherds me inside. "Take off your shoes," he orders. Upstairs, a long, graffiti-covered hallway leads to a door. Someone has spray painted "Toilet," in enormous letters, above the entrance to the bathroom. Someone else has written "All of us are in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." Someone else has written, "I love you pete love brooke (the blonde one)." A mountain of garbage bags has accumulated near the stairs, and the rest of the floor is littered with discarded objects: amplifier cables, an empty guitar case, loose coins, a container of Johnson's Baby Powder, a torn copy of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. Droning, atonal music seeps from beneath the main door.