Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (35 page)

He leaned forwards, laying down his hand, a royal flush. Top lizard leaned over the crap table to take his winnings. He looked up at me, grinning insanely. He wore a pair of those cheap imitation black Ray-Ban sunglasses, £2.99, as I last recall.

The other three lizards lunged for him, losing their footing. All four tumbled out of the wall and on to the floor. As they hit, the lizards sprouted torn ears, dirty brown fur, wormlike tails and huge yellow claws.

‘Jesus God! Rats all over the floor . . . nasty-looking fuckers too.’

They instantly started scampering round insanely and eating the carpet. I looked back up at the wall, unable to grasp the idea of four giant rats eating everything in this room, possibly even me. They were sure to spot me soon enough.

There was now a hole in the wall where the crap table had been. Through the hole, darkness. No, wait, I could see things moving. Eyes, no, a body, something hairy. Hundreds of huge dirty brown rats began throwing themselves out of the hole. Others clambered down the wall, widening the hole. They were everywhere, fat, foul-smelling, eating everything in sight.

I jumped up. ‘Jesus jumping H Christ, this room is full of rats!’

All the rats stopped eating and turned to stare at me. They seemed unsure as to whom I was talking about.

‘You better calm down, man,’ came a voice. ‘I’d say you lost it right about now. Look at the state of you.’

From then on things got very hazy, a resting room filled with bong and pipe smoke, music and the disjointed aspect that life takes at four in the morning when you’re high on LSD, hash and marijuana.

The television was on. It spilled freaked-out Nazi dustmen, who spoke of loving children and killing any man that wronged him. On the news, the London nail bomber, David Copeland, had just been caught. A quiet and polite young man who looked like he spent a lot of time in his bedroom. A classic case, I thought, that’s what happens. The good people are in their rooms building huge explosives and then there are the bad freaks like us, wrecked from an acid binge, turned to primeval jelly on a floor and being eaten by giant rats.

The revelations of the bomber’s involvement in a Nazi organisation and his attempts to start a race war wouldn’t be told for another year, but I think people already knew. His targets had been London’s Brick Lane and Brixton, both multi-ethnic communities, and a Soho gay bar. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen. At that age I had my first joint. A late starter by all counts for this country. With no one around to teach me, I decided I’d have to dive straight in on my own.

By the end of 1993 the people, including myself, and the landscape had become very ugly. But the summer of that year was the height of my drug frenzy. Quite a good summer by British standards too.

There wasn’t a drought all summer. Everything flowed through that fated top-floor flat all summer and I took my fair share. It was a time of anger, happy hate, the discovery of Ween and rejection of all that normal everyday life could offer. There was no real culture to it, just a bunch of chemically confused young mutants that took it as far as it could go, for the plain and simple reason of why not? Some of them never came back from what I heard. Others are still going.

The world is a very different place now, seven years later. Everything ‘sexy’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘mobile’. A world where business and money control everything. It’s economically viable to rip that person off. All the men in the office aspire to be Bret Easton Ellis’s
American Psycho
, axing your work associates to death for fear that they may be just that bit better than you. Got to have the right car, the right clothes, the right woman, the right position in the office. They all seem to aspire to be this 1980s yuppie ideal. It’s now hip to be in Grey business; no matter what it is, you can always ham it up when asked. Everything all your 1980s punk albums told you it would be. Is this what we are supposed to aspire to? Is this what adult life is meant to be in the twenty-first century?

If so, I want no part of it, this gig ain’t for me. The only enjoyable thing in the very corporate world of the computer-game industry is watching all the other stray mutants crawling out of the woodwork. And you can spot the mutants a mile off, it’s like they look at you and they know. Monsters from the dance and acid generations of the late eighties and early nineties.

I sit in that office most days and it feels like my head is going to burst. I want to dance naked on my desk and hurl the monitor through the window into the building site below. I haven’t, not yet anyway. Maybe that day will come, maybe not. But for now things were peaceful. Life was good. Guapa Morena sat next to me glaring at the TV like she wanted to kill it. We were stoned, ripped, broken, wrecked and we were more the wiser for it.

‘Acid: The journey through living-room walls’, 2001

Henry Fielding

D
IPPING MY HEAD
into the bath the other night, I was strangely reminded of an experience some years ago, when I had more sensory assaults of such intensity and ferocity in several hours than I ever had before or since. I did repeat the experience, innumerable times, but then it was just crazed, repetitive drugs-by-numbers; combined with several day-long binges, featuring far too much cheap alcohol in the style of ‘King’s Acre’ industrial cider, and standard-issue mental collapse.

I was seventeen years of age, from a small Northern Irish town specialising in unqualified sectarianism and political bigotry; relatively sheltered from the effects of very strong hallucinogenic chemicals, but a town nonetheless. As far as I know the town is still in situ today.

That night was probably 30/31 October ’88. As a virgin of serious drugs (I had, like, you know, smoked a bit of ‘hash’ like), it was time to ingest with the big boys; or at least in this case, a big boy who was, and as far as I can ascertain, still is, my Best-Mate-Like. It was to mean lysergic acid dyethylamide, or acid to children.

It started with a phone call.

‘Hello, Stex?’

‘Alright? What’s up, like?’

‘Are you comin’ up tonight for some nonsense?’

‘For your birthday? What have you got in mind?’

‘Ho! Ho! Hee! Hee!’

‘Right, see you around nine.’

And so it began. This was going to be a wee bit different, because he wouldn’t tell me what was going to happen. But it obviously involved: a) drugs; b) huge amounts of drugs; c) high jinx.

I was left off by a mother who would gain a very different son come the next morning (and, of course, probably didn’t notice); a morning when I had to go down the town and sit in the car to put off the traffic wardens, after having my mind well and truly refitted.

We must have ventured down the town before the act, because we had bought some booze (undrunk), and bizarrely, no, sadly, rented a ‘blue movie’ entitled
China White
, starring Ron Jeremy; a gentleman who was to cause amusement, excitement and, ultimately, confusion in the opening salvoes of the campaign. Years later, when Friend was in LA he met the said porn king, and recounted this sorry tale; the reaction of Mr Ron Jeremy was not noted. We also pathetically rented a horror film of some description, featuring a clown type, replete with comic ‘afro-dazzler’ wig and clownesque foldedols. I think he killed people.

By the time the porno show came on, it was time to laugh, giggle, scream, and then latterly, during the tail end of ‘stage one’, to meoow at the lyrics and hairy façade of Ron Jeremy: ‘Oh baby, you’re still the best,’ (rewind that bit), sqigglywigglywigglyblurp, ‘Oh baby, you’re still the best.’ And on it went. I still have the copy we made, or should I say remixed, possibly creating some kind of sad teenage seminal porn-acid crossover gonzo flick in the process. A rather poor start to one’s first trip, I know, but I didn’t have to tell you that, so stay with it.

Of course things are really getting out of hand now:

‘I can’t see! I can’t see!’ they chirruped in stereo-super-surround-o-vision-thing . . . It was time for music . . . it was time for . . . and . . . and . . . and that as well! Putitonletslistentoanddoyouwantsomecheeseontoastokayi can’tfeelthebutterthistasteslikeidon’tknowlookatyourface! montypythonmusicfuckmedidyouhearthat? DID YOU HEAR THAT! Oh shit! Hippy freak-out. Freeze-frame two mindless youths in a seventies-style kitchen holding cheese on toast at rakish angles in a late-eighties kind of way. Something outside. And outside the spectrum of things-you-want-to-hear-on-acid. But then again, how would we actually know? STOP!

The successful tripper will instinctively know at this stage to either a) ignore whatever the noise or ‘thing’ is and make a smart comment to the rest of the group’s delight, or b) embrace it as a new experience and meet it head on and busk it without involving the ‘security forces’. This experience featured a scary tattooed man with moustache, lurching disconsolately on the street looking for all the world that he has one foot nailed to the ground and doing a Shakin’ Stevens, slurring wildly; drink taken: ‘Seriously, Cathy, you crack me up,’ reply: ‘Augh, would ye ever fack aff and get back in the fackin’ hoose before the neighbours see ye, ye auld fackin’ hoormaster!’

It is at this point that one realises alcohol is evil, pubs are a control to keep the masses happy, and couldn’t we all just understand each other that wee bit more? Yes. We are now at stage three; the I-have-more-ideas-and-revelations-than-my-drug-retarded-mouth-can-cope-with-but-I-will-try-to-communicate-in-as-deep-and-meaningless-a-way-as-possible stage. Not great, but nonetheless an important step for our young trippers, because, dear reader, we are about to discover the meaning of Jesus. Praise his holy name!

This would be about the time when we fell UP the stairs. Yes, it is possible – if LSD is not available try a couple of ten-glass bottles of good vodka. Or both! – I seem to recollect the use of tongues, possibly as some kind of steering device, but at this stage things really go into, well . . . If you are a veteran, you will know, and I can only tell you baldly what we said or did, but to really feel it, well, take a pinch of psychedelic.

Things will be getting a bit wild at this stage and you’ll be really into them at this point, and you’ll be really falling through the floor at this point, and you’ll really be laughing like a demented hyena at this point, and at this point I love you, please, and now I’m gurning my eyes out, but it’s only because I feel nothing but love! And I understand suffering. And I’m such a cunt thank you. Allluurhurheeeah! I’m swimming! Look! I can swim! Quick! Throw me a pen! Laughing. Laughing. What are you doing? ‘Jee-ee-sus, say-ay-ve meeee.’ What was I doing? Grapple with a pen. Why does the pen move so funny? What’s so funny? I need to do something. What do I need to do? Ah! I need to do a big pish.

This gets rid of any pre-trip stuff in your system and lets the drug hit you with renewed vigour. That is, if you ever get over your first pish on acid. Better than sex? Certainly better than pissed sex. Of making an acid ‘toilette’ for the first time, imagine your first slash, then multiply it by an eternity encased in soft French gloving leather passed through a velvet urethra with orgasmic notes and the merest hint of loganberry toilet cleaner. The drug has now indeed hit me with a renewed vigour, so as my companion hits the lavatory, I busy myself by watching the lyrics of some song waft gently around the room, wearing the rapt expression of a Victorian moth enthusiast seeing his first really big one for the first time. I have no net, however.

This is the time of the most fantastic hallucinations. One has to appreciate the effect of all this on two idiot youths from a town where all limits are strictly defined and imposed. All gone, with one deft movement of a centimetre square on a tongue. Now we are grappling with our completely fucked minds, rather like those drunk men fighting in pubs – in slow motion and under water. We didn’t expect THIS. Trying to make sense of a door, and doing so. Do we suddenly understand physics and quantum mechanics? Of course we do! We know everything. And instantly forget it.

And so on to the main event and, it must be said, most enjoyable part of the evening, due to its lack of thinking quality: the music mong.

This involves the old, old ritual of trying to roll joints, or even one joint. To each drug is ascribed its own inherent brand of user shitness. Ask any acid eater of their joint-rolling activities and invariably it will involve long trips through darkened, insalubrious areas to fetch skins from the twenty-four-hour garage, meeting the ubiquitous madman (see above for details), and returning through the rain to a hell-hovel strewn with the last six months of your acid-brained existence, only to find that Tunnocks Tea Cakes and twenty Marboro cannot be used to fashion a joint. Still, have a fag (or ‘straight’ to our American pals), and be prepared to go back out. That’s number-one tripper’s classic. The other is the fact, the money-down cert, that when tripping furiously one’s hands go into a complete funk (‘Tripper’s Fingers’), they suffer from an odd convulsive sweaty palsy, thus rendering joint rollage ineffectual at best and downright surreal at worst. I have seen grown men eat good hashish in resigned desperation, and these were seasoned campaigners: ‘Mon, I just can’t get it together, I’m so out of my mind, mon.’ After several attempts with blotting paper and Sellotape we manage an ersatz spliff. It’s odd how the hardest-wrought joint tastes the sweetest.

And then the song. One artiste that night stands out in particular, more for their glaring inappropriateness than anything; and also the inescapable fact that I had never heard anything quite as insanely forceful before. The song, the song. Who could forget the lovely voice of Mr David Yow, of the now sadly demised Jesus Lizard singing the lovely lines: ‘
Would you like to have a blockbuster up your ass? Do you think you’d like that, do ya, mutherfucker?
’ Yes, indeed. This caused a minor how-do-you-do in the bedroom at the time. Cautiously a conversation emerged.