Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (29 page)

He takes my ticket and passport and goes into a back room. Oooh, he’s shaken me up a bit. I suck in some air right down into my lungs, charging through bronchial tubes, swelling those little aureoles down there, squeezing the oxygen into my bloodstream, powering me up. I let the air hiss back through my teeth. I mustn’t grind them. Jesus, they’re clenched so tight . . .

Then he comes out again. ‘Put your bags back on the trolley.’ I’m free! Then his clean young face crumples up when he sees the ruined cap. He points! In the back of the net!

‘Follow me!’ The Search Scenario. Here we go, Round Two.

‘Can I have your clothes?’

So I strip off in a flash. I feel like my body’s in perfect nick, honed down by careful years of drug use and the good life. I flex my muscles gently and stare into his face, still with that nutter’s friendly look.

‘I see you are used to this,’ he sneers.

‘It’s the Box isn’t it? That’s why you’re doing this,’ I say.

‘Ah, you know it is my job. You know what I’m looking for.’ He’s on his trip now, the justification (you’re sick with your acid house and children dying in the clubs).

He gives up. I’ve kept my cool and I’m clean, although a urine test might tell another story. I pick my passport and ticket up and fuck off to the bar on the other side of customs. The ice-cold lager tastes so fucking sweet I feel like eating the glass, so I order four more and tip them down my throat. As the last one goes down I catch a glimpse of myself in the bar mirror. My face is streaked with sweat, there’s beer foam round my chops and my eyes are bulging out on bleedin’ stalks. What was in that wrap I found? I guess it must have been PCP.

But Sweden made me feel kind of cheap. The punters have to pay over the odds to get me in their club – wouldn’t they be just as happy with one of their homegrown DJs? Isn’t this all part of the cheapening of the scene? It makes me yearn for the simple underground. I just want to play house.

From:
Disco Biscuits
, ed. Sarah Champion, 1997

Rowland Hill

I
WENT TO
the Reading Festival. The Super Furry Animals had promised me I could drive their tank, which had been converted to a giant technoblaster with a gun barrel modified to fire sliced bread into famine stricken pockets of the festival crowd.

‘Creation Records won’t let you drive the tank, Howard. They won’t let any of us drive it,’ said Daf, the Furries’ drummer.

‘Why the fuck not?’

‘Something about it not being insured, I think. Anyway, we’re thinking of getting a Spitfire once Creation get shot of our tank.’

‘Why are they getting rid of it?’ I asked.

‘Economics, I expect, Howard. You know what these record companies are like. Nobody we know can actually drive it, it’s too big for most roads, a transporter has to carry it with a special police escort, parking fees are bad, and we never charge for anyone to listen to it.’

‘So this is our last chance to drive it.’

Someone interrupted.

‘Howard, have you taken Ecstasy yet?’

It was a guy I’d met some weeks earlier at the Bar Lorca in Stoke Newington. We’d got drunk and stoned for most of one night, and I’d talked about how I’d been busted in the eighties, had just got out of nick, and had missed the whole rave culture: the music and the psychoactives.

‘No, I haven’t. I’m still funny about pills. I have to be sure what I’m taking. I can do that with weed and hash, but not with pills.’

‘What if I guaranteed you with my honour that this tab is pure unadulterated Ecstasy.’

I looked into his eyes. I trusted him totally.

Half an hour later, I was gazing at the tank. Its name was Think. DJs were inside its body, letting loose tidal waves of hammering, honking and hoofing techno. Frenetic, serious and beautiful humans were dancing on its roof and all around. The tank pulsed to the lowest bpm, focused, and began heavily bonding with me. Think had had a pretty shite life lumbering through Northern Ireland, the Falklands and Bosnia. Think must have witnessed immeasurable misery, death and sadness. Think had been stuck in trenches, overturned in bloody mud, covered in muddy blood, shot at, given headaches by hand grenades, impounded and busted. Now God had given it a heart transplant. Gone were the arteries of artillery. This was a different kind of smoke that filled its lungs. Joy boom boom boom-boom-boomed from its veins. Sex danced on its head.

‘We’re on,’ said Daf. ‘Come with us, Howard. You can stand at the back of the stage. The view’s great.’

‘Can I bring the tank?’

Eighty thousand people heaved and swayed while I hid in the shadows of speakers and scaffolds and while my Nepalese joint and ego simultaneously exploded.

‘Now I’d like to introduce Howard Marks,’ announced Gruff, the lead vocalist.

‘He’s going to sing his favourite Beatles song.’

The fuckers! They warned me about this. I was cornered. I could slope off, lose my street cred, and be for ever mocked and reviled in the valleys of my homeland. Or I could walk to the front of the stage and sing a Beatles song with roughly the same result. A few refrains fought each other in my mind, but I couldn’t remember how they started. Then I lost the concept of language. The tank was winking at me from the distance. I tried to grab some pre-Ecstasy reality and started counting: one, two, three, four . . . that was it. Nine. Number nine. The Beatles once wrote a song whose only lyrics were ‘Number nine, number nine, number nine . . .’ I’ll sing that one. I grabbed the microphone, screamed ‘Number nine’ nine times, ambled down from the stage, and went off to the Notting Hill Carnival.

I
T WAS LATE
spring, maybe early June. Night-time. It had just stopped raining. Varnish and myself were out on the orange-black wet Derby streets. We were by the hospital on Osmaston Road, looking down Keble Close that ran down the side of the hospital. There were wet, glistening cars on both sides of the road, all the way down to a dead end, a high kerb and fences with just a small alleyway to get through.

‘It’s a tight gap,’ I said, ‘but I think we can get through. Gotta mind that kerb though.’

‘I don’t know,’ replied Varnish, ‘it looks like a big kerb, and at that speed. I don’t know, besides I’m not completely with it.’

Several hours earlier back at the flat we were on the nightly shift when, just before closing time, we had a late caller. I’d served her before, brought up by a good friend. The woman was probably early thirties, once good-looking, not just a worn-out shell, eaten away by heroin and a rough life. She had bleach-damaged shoulder-length hair and a cropped black leather jacket.

‘I need some hash but I haven’t got much money,’ she told us.

I saw Varnish’s face of money joy drop. He got up, sat on the couch and loaded a bong.

‘Are you asking for a lay-on?’ I asked, not sure what she was expecting me to say. There was no way she’d get a lay-on, she wasn’t regular enough and we didn’t know where she lived.

‘Oh, good God no, I have these.’ She pulled out a pack of ten pills. From the packaging it looked pharmaceutical.

‘What are they?’ Varnish jumped in, his eyes lighting up at the sight of class-A drugs.

‘It’s methadone,’ she replied, ‘ten of them. You see, it’s my script but I’d rather have ten quid’s worth of hash, it does a better job keeping me away from the smack, and doesn’t mong me out as much.’

I turned to Varnish, ‘What do you think?’ After all, it was his money behind it all.

‘I say go for it.’ Varnish never took his eyes off the small silver packet of pills.

‘Looks like you got yourself a deal,’ I said. ‘Ten quid’s worth?’

‘Yeah, if that’s okay with you.’

‘Believe me, it’s fine with us,’ I said. ‘We got something to do tonight, now. Fancy a trip out on the skateboards, Varnish?’

Varnish replied but the words were lost trying to hold down the vast amount of hash he’d just inhaled through a glass bong.

I cut the hash up for the woman. As she left she warned us not to take more than four each. ‘. . . You’ll end up puking your guts up.’ With that, she left; she said she had something waiting.

We sat and ate five methadone pills each and sat smoking for a while, listening to Ween blasting out of top-range speakers with no regard for the neighbours whatsoever.
Pure Guava
, a damn fine album. Nothing happened after an hour so we cracked open a few beers; besides, it had started raining, so we figured the skateboard trip was out the question. I had gotten into skateboards and narcotics back in ’91, spending most Saturday nights high on LSD skating the deserted streets of Derby, always ending up in the haunts of Markeaton Park around dawn.

No, there was nothing for it; we’d just have to sit it out in the time capsule, a ten-by-eight-foot room with a sloping roof and no windows. The floors were covered in hairy rugs, empty beer cans and bottles, and overloaded ashtrays. Varnish had two of his paintings on the non-sloping wall. One look at those and you knew he was a drug fiend. They were good too. One thing that I never understood about Varnish, he was a damn good artist, a little mutated by his intake of narcotics, but good all the same. Yet he never really used his talents to do anything, as far as I know. The last I heard he was a nightwatch security guard, on the gates of some factory or industrial estate.

But I’m being sidetracked here; I should be talking about the time-capsule room. The bottom end of the room was completely filled with Varnish’s stereo equipment, laid out on a long flat coffee table. Unknown to Varnish at this point in his life was how wrecked everything in this room would get over such a short space of time. So wrecked that he would end up retreating all his belongings to the safety of his bedroom. I’d already managed to set fire to his sofa with a Zippo lighter while loading a bong. Thinking I’d snapped the lid on the Zippo lighter shut, I laid it on the sofa next to me. There it burned for several minutes until I noticed the flames lapping my leg. After that, a fat speed freak sat back on the sofa, breaking the back supports. The sofa moved to lean against the wall.

I was vegged out on the floor. At some point the methadone had kicked in real heavy, fuelled along with the beers we’d sunk earlier.

‘Hey, it’s stopped raining,’ I said.

‘I feel sick.’

‘Don’t worry about it, everyone gets that, it’ll pass.’

‘Is that normal then, to feel sick like that?’

‘Well, sometimes, I guess, yeah.’

‘Oh, that’s fucked, that is, who would want that? Pay for a drug and it makes you sick. It’s wrong, there should be a goddamn law against it.’

‘Just calm down, you’ll be okay in a minute, everyone gets it.’

This was the first time Varnish had taken methadone; I had failed to mention how dirty it makes you feel, or the waves of nausea that hit you. I got the feeling Varnish wasn’t handling his first hit of it too well.

‘Listen, it’s stopped raining,’ I said. ‘Let’s go out on the skateboards, the streets will be empty this time of night, easy skating.’

‘Will it stop me feeling ill?’

‘It might work, worth a try I guess.’

‘Okay, let’s go.’

It was late, I had no idea how long we had been stood on the top of the hill, in the middle of the road, arguing about board speeds and wet roads and what could possibly happen to you if you came off at that speed.

‘I still don’t know. How fast will we be when we hit the bottom?’ Varnish was still uncertain about the downhill skate.

‘Hell, I don’t know. Look, when you get close to that kerb kick the back of your board and you’ll go over the kerb.’ The impatience in my voice was very apparent, well, to me anyway. I needed to be somewhere, but where that place was I wasn’t too sure. Just any place but here, we stood out like sore thumbs under a bright orange street light in the middle of the junction. The police were everywhere on this street and we were carrying enough smoking implements, hash and joints to be hauled straight into a cold cell. Then they’d set on us, knowing damn well that we were on something and try to extract some piece of information before the drugs wore off.

‘What’s that?’ Varnish was looking back up the main road into town. I could hear something too. It was coming closer. From the scrambled mess I could make out distant voices, loud, abusive, drunk.

‘Come on, let’s get out of here,’ said Varnish.

Walking towards us were five brutish pub types, they’d seen us and were shouting something at us. I could make out, ‘. . . eh, skateboarder . . .’ – it sounded like that looping every two seconds.

‘Why?’ I replied. ‘We’ve just as much right to be here as anyone else. I’m not moving just because of them.’

‘Then you stay, I’m going.’

‘Well, if they want to get funny, remember we’ve got skateboards. Have you ever felt what it’s like getting one of those in the head?’ Of course he hadn’t and neither had I, for that matter.

‘Look, there’s five of them and there’s only two of us. They look really big and mean to me from here and drunk too. Fuck it, I’m going.’

Varnish scooted off down the hill, accelerating faster than I had expected. He shot down the wet road, soon reaching twenty miles per hour.

‘Hey, this road may be steeper than I thought,’ I shouted after him. He didn’t hear but it was too late for him anyway. The five gorillas in white shirts were about fifty feet away. I could still hear them shouting ‘skateboarder’, but now I could also hear what Varnish must have heard: ‘WANKER!’

‘Oh shit.’

I stepped on the board and accelerated down the steep slope, parked cars rushing by, I felt like I was stationary and the whole world had speeded up around me, everything becoming a blurred motion, a time lapse. I could see Varnish ahead of me; he had one foot trailing on the floor, trying to decelerate his board. The drunks were somewhere at the top of the hill, we were well out of their range by now. The melodic shouted abuse had stopped. I had nearly caught up with Varnish; he brought his trailing foot back on to the board, glanced back at me, grinning insanely and hurtled towards the kerb. He kicked the tail of the board, the rear trucks clipped the kerb, but he was over. He fought to keep on the board, his arms and legs flailing everywhere.