The Drifters (61 page)

I remember that each Thursday, why that day, I never understood, she would get high on helipon—two ampules shot into her left arm—and then storm into our room, even if I was in bed, and pull all his dress shirts into the middle of the floor and jump on them with her high-heeled shoes, after which she would pour hair tonic over the pile, cursing him in Japanese and English as she did so. When
he returned after work he would find her curled up on the ruined shirts, sobbing in remorse. There would be a passionate reconciliation, which always ended with her emptying her purse of helipon ampules and crushing them with her shoe … right in the middle of his dress shirts. ‘I never take helipon again!’ she would promise, but next Thursday she would be back with an armful.

I followed her antics with a kind of detached amusement until the Thursday she dragged out my shirts, too, and crushed her ampules into them. I announced, ‘Hirokosan has got to go,’ but the Denver man said, ‘More better you go. I think I can straighten her out.’ Since I had only a limited number of dress shirts, I decided to scram.

The point I’m trying to make is this. If I were a young man working in the Orient and intending to do so for some years, I would want to know the basic facts about opium and its derivatives. I had spent time with about two dozen American newsmen specializing in East Asia for our journals, and most of them at one time or other, when stranded in places like Bangkok or Saigon, had experimented with opium, but only the Denver man had ever gone back for a second try. Not one of my friends had become even remotely addicted. They had more sense than to punish themselves voluntarily with such a hateful burden.

On balance, I think I would have missed a significant part of that mysterious procession of the Orient—Buddhism, the great temples, the bamboo trees at dusk, the gongs, the warlords, the buzzing new machinery—if I had not taken a cursory look at opium too. Use it? I could not imagine myself doing so even if I lived in Phnom Penh for a hundred years. And actually puncture my arm to inject a foreign substance into my bloodstream? Impossible. I even use alcohol sparingly, because I feel no desire to enhance my capacity for sensation; I already experience things too deeply. Also, I have always had a special loathing for anything that might contaminate my blood, for I have seen too many friends die of leukemia or blood poisoning not to respect my blood, whose delicate balances had better not be disturbed. It has always perplexed me that our young people, who have been so judicious in opposing the pollution of rivers, should be so indifferent to the contamination of their own bloodstreams,
which I would suppose to be of at least equal importance to them.

So, because I had circumspectly investigated the drug culture of the Orient, I found it impossible to condemn with an old man’s moralizing those of the younger generation who were investigating theirs. But never did I feel inclined to tell them, ‘I experimented, with no ill effects. Go ahead.’ Because the game they play is much rougher than mine had been.

When I tried opium and heroin in Phnom Penh, there was no likelihood that I would continue living in that city, or in any other where drugs would always be easily available if I happened to develop a craving. Nor would I have friends who were pestering me to continue with the habit if I wanted to retain my membership in their group.

But the young people today do live in such a society. The drugs are available. Their friends do proselytize. Their problem is thus more acute than mine had been, and when the unknown factor of LSD is added, more dangerous. I therefore tried to avoid dogmatism, which explains why, when Monica asked my opinion on LSD, I had replied. ‘I can’t understand …’

But that was before I had witnessed its effect on Gretchen. Even now I cannot erase from my memory that small room, with her writhing on the bed and crawling across the floor. That experience convinced me that sensible people ought to stay clear of the drug, and now I had no hesitancy in warning Monica of its dangers. She laughed at my fears. ‘My trips have been stunning,’ she said.

Since the young people were inviting my comment on their behavior, I had to crystallize my thinking on the matter. What did I believe about drugs? My reactions were divided into three categories: heroin, LSD, marijuana. To understand my total rejection of the first, we must go back to Tokyo, where pretty Hiroko-san continued to put on her helipon act. It continued to be amusing until that Thursday when the Denver man shouted in the hall, ‘Fairbanks, for God’s sake, help me!’ I ran to his room, where Hiroko-san, loaded with the drug, had piled his shirts in the middle of the floor, doused them with hair oil, danced the broken ampules into them, then thrown herself upon the heap and with a razor severed her throat. To me, heroin would always be the sight of Hiroko-san’s blood on the white shirts.

Looking back upon a fair number of cases, I never met anyone who took heroin for any extended period whose life was not ruined. There may be people who have broken the habit and returned to productive lives, but I didn’t know them. The penalty heroin exacted was so devastating that anyone who carelessly stumbled into its use was condemning himself to misery; those who knowingly entrapped others ought to be jailed. I would rather lose
my left arm
than risk the terrors of heroin, and when the young people asked me, I said so.

When LSD first appeared on the medical horizon, I heard hopes that it was to be the cure for certain specific types of mental derangement, but this did not eventuate, and its widespread abuse by young people, with devastating effect on many of them, convinced me that it should be left strictly alone. Monica and Cato might seem to be able to handle it with what appeared to be minimal effects, but it could have destroyed Gretchen. I myself would not touch LSD, principally because I would be afraid of its impact on my nervous system, but also because my mind was already so expanded with ideas and music and the joy of nature that if it were further expanded by LSD, it would probably burst.

Marijuana raised problems which were especially difficult, because we had so few hard facts about the drug, even though it had been used for more than two thousand years. I had now watched at close hand many marijuana users, and the effects did not seem destructive, but two nagging questions persisted: Did marijuana escalate to more dangerous drugs? Did it induce a general lassitude which destroyed will? Medical testimony appeared strong that cannabis was not of itself addictive, and I had found no user who admitted that he had picked up a craving that could be satiated only by stronger drugs. But it was obvious to me that the social milieu in which it was smoked did encourage further experimentation. Monica smoked grass in Vwarda, preached the doctrine in Torremolinos, and actively looked for
LSD
in Albufeira, principally because she was in an
ambiente
which enhanced her mood. What I am trying to say is: Marijuana itself might not lead to LSD, but the gang with whom one smoked it, might.

As to the question of lassitude, I was something of an expert. I had worked in seven countries where the use of
marijuana was so common as to be almost a national habit, and I was disgusted by the society these countries had produced. Where were the libraries, the child-care centers, the elementary education, the highways, the committees on social justice? I saw only lethargy, both in individuals and in the society as a whole, and I concluded that marijuana was antithetical to the good life. It did destroy will.

I was not much impressed with the argument that marijuana was to the young what a martini was to the adult, for this was a false analogy masking a discrepancy: the milieu of martini-drinking neither led to heroin nor induced an anti-social lethargy. In other words, the martini drinker could still function constructively, even though he might be damaging himself personally. As for the repeated argument that taking opium did not prevent Thomas De Quincy from writing well, I had never been excited by his results.

The young people had said they were coming into Albufeira for a lunch of
caldeirada
, so I went to the bar to meet them, and as I waited, Churchill started the gramophone. I wasn’t aware of it at the moment, but he was preparing to show me up for a fool.

Since this bar was not a port of call for Clive and his purple carpetbag, it had none of the new records I had grown to like in Torremolinos, which meant that the things Churchill played were outdated and unfamiliar. I didn’t appreciate them until, as I was listening with one ear, I heard that crisp, hammering sound which pleased me, and I asked, ‘What’s the record?’ and he said, ‘ “Sergeant Pepper,” ’ and I asked, ‘Who’s he?’ and he looked down at me with that weary contempt which only an Oxford man who is pushing LSD in Algarve can muster. ‘It’s the Beatles,’ he said.

At Torremolinos I must surely have heard records by this famous group, but in those days I had not known enough about popular music to identify them. Now I listened with extra care to a sardonic number in which cellos sobbed and violins played nineteenth-century obbligatos while a girl from an English middle-class family
ran away at dawn to live with a gentleman from the motor trade. It was devastating.

‘I didn’t know the Beatles would use a cello,’ I said, and he looked at me with a cold expression. ‘My good man, they use anything.’ Then he said, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard this either,’ and he turned to a savage number in which a callow young man reflects upon the suicide of a member of the House of Lords … or something like that. His own alternative is to turn on with acid, but this doesn’t accomplish much either, for in the end the world collapses in an atomic explosion. It was a powerful statement, bleak as a desert, and I suspected I would like it when I knew it better.

‘That’s pretty rugged,’ I said.

‘It was big news two years ago,’ he replied contemptuously. ‘In Portugal we get everything late.’ I asked if he was a Portuguese national, and he said, ‘Do you think I’m insane?’

I was pondering an appropriate reply, when I heard one of the most delightful songs I’d come upon in the last dozen years. It began with the tremulous voice of a young boy reciting nonsense images: tangerine trees, marmalade skies, marshmallow pies. Normally I detest such songs, finding them mock-childhood, but this one carried a stamp of authenticity, as if the boy had actually seen these visions.

The song then moved to a more serious level, for the singer meets a girl with kaleidoscope eyes; not only was this conceit a most happy one, for it reminded me of those dizzy, dainty girls with fluttering eyes who had befuddled me when I was young, but it was accompanied by music that made the image leap with vitality. This boy had truly met such a girl.

The fairy-tale mood was broken by three sharp raps on a drum, whereupon a chorus of voices—the full contingent of Beatles, I supposed—broke into a rapturous cry consisting of the girl’s strange name, repeated several times: Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. That’s what her name was, and its effect upon me was mesmerizing, and I said, ‘A century and a half ago John Keats described that kind of phenomenon with words almost as strange.’

‘You like it?’ Churchill asked, with the only show of pleasantness I was to see him display.

‘It summarizes our age,’ I said, for it captured the fine,
free-moving form of the young people I had seen in Europe and Asia.

‘It does indeed,’ Churchill said benignly. He asked again if I really liked it, and when I nodded, he said cryptically, ‘Then you must visit the room one day.’ I saw no connection between my liking a popular song and visiting his room, but before I could pursue the matter, the six young people arrived and we ordered our fish stew from across the square.

‘Listen to what your Mr. Fairbanks has chosen as his favorite song,’ Churchill said maliciously. When the strains of ‘Lucy in the Sky’ sounded through the bar my companions broke into raucous laughter, and Gretchen said, ‘I’ll never understand you, Uncle George,’ but Monica said, with an evil little leer, ‘I knew you were a dirty old man!’ When I asked what this meant, the young people teased me but made no attempt to explain. Churchill played the number twice again; apparently my group knew it well, for they chanted the words. I was about to insist upon a clarification when Monica said, ‘I’d love to know the things you do when you’re alone, you filthy old devil,’ and the waiter from across the way appeared with our seven tureens of
caldeirada
, from which Churchill exacted his usual tax of baby octopus.

During the meal I forgot the song, but Monica, who ate little, finished first and put the record on again. ‘You still don’t know what it is?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘The name! The name! “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Are you stupid?’ I must have looked quite blank, for she said, ‘LSD. It’s the national anthem of LSD.’

I grunted. I had completely missed the point of the song. Listening anew, I could not believe that the Beatles had played a trick on me, but Monica’s interpretation of the words proved that it was indeed an evocation of an epoch, but not in the sense that I had thought. Churchill, having wearily disposed of his last octopus, said, ‘That song did more to awaken the young people of the world to the wonders of LSD than any other one thing.’

‘Your theme song?’ I asked, angry at having been made a fool.

‘Indeed. It’s helped my trade enormously.’

I was irritated with the lunch. Even the fish stew began to taste ordinary and no longer could I find pleasure in
my new-found song. When Monica replayed it, her eyes closed in adolescent ecstasy, I was disgusted. Why? Because popular music, which ought to be a major and beautiful force in our society, was being perverted for the corruption of youth.

Reacting automatically, I strode to the record machine, jerked away the tone arm, grabbed the record, and smashed it across my knee.

The young people were aghast at my behavior, and Monica, her eyes opened by the rude interruption, cried, ‘Uncle George! What in hell are you doing?’ But Churchill explained unctuously, ‘Forgive him. He’s an old man in a new world.’

Reading Portuguese is quite simple. If you can read Spanish you can decipher Portuguese. But speaking it? That’s something else.