Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (36 page)

‘That’s fuckin’ amazin’,’ my fellow blunderer quipped, pillow-eyed, and I, for one, had to concur, that indeed, it was, truly fucking amazing.

Stex Kelloggs and The Man With
No
Nickname tripped courtesy of Purple Ohms (aka Mind, Body and Soul), available from all reputable paramilitaries Province-wide
.

‘I Talk to Cows, You Know’, 2001

I
WALKED INTO
the
Loaded
office at about 10.30 a.m. The place was strangely quiet. There were a lot of people about but no one was talking. I asked Michael Holden what was going on and he informed me that James Brown had burst in a few minutes earlier and announced that the place was going to be raided by the police at any second on account of our reputation for taking lots of drugs.

‘But no one brings ’em in here,’ I said.

‘I know,’ replied Michael, ‘but James is convinced there’s gonna be a raid any minute.’

I started checking my drawers for unwanted contraband and then realised it was ridiculous. As far as I knew, no one at
Loaded
was stupid enough to hold up a load of drugs in their desks. I certainly knew there was none in mine and yet here I was checking the things as if I was clearing out my crack den. There was no doubt about it, cocaine paranoia had us in its fearful grip.

The mid-1990s was the era of Oasis and
Loaded
. Everyone was ‘up for it’, ‘mad for it’ and rather partial to the odd line of charles charlie charles. If Ecstasy was the drug of fancy-free acid-house ravers, cocaine was certainly the drug of the mid-1990s boy about town looking for a good time and to hell with tomorrow.

Everyone who’s ever taken coke will know that it doesn’t do you any good. It fills you full of confidence and Arthur Daley-speak for a couple of hours and then in the following days steals your sleep and tampers with your soul.

Yet for the Oasis/
Loaded
generation it was, Noel Gallagher famously said, ‘As natural as having a cup of tea.’ Well, maybe we’re not all millionaire pop stars but at some stage everyone was having a go at it because there suddenly didn’t seem any reason not to.

Loaded
was no exception. Personally, I’d never even touched cocaine before working there. Suddenly, everyone you met was talking at breakneck speed all over each other, not listening to a single word anyone else was saying, except when they ventured ‘not too bad, is it?’ or ‘fancy another one?’

Blimey, it was like the stuff had just been invented. For £50 you could snort up the finest mixture of baby laxative (interspersed with the odd grain of Bolivian marching powder) in the land.

In terms of performance enhancement, coke had very little to do with
Loaded
’s success. It kept you sharp and got you into ‘good copy’ scrapes on trips, but it was never really an office thing. For
Loaded
the drug was, as far as I know, an occasional party thing, rocket fuel for when you really wanted to cut loose and go crazy. It wasn’t big and it wasn’t clever but it added to the very real sense of adventure and created more than one caper.

But there’s more to it than that. A couple of years prior to
Loaded
’s launch I never even knew anyone who touched cocaine. Now I don’t know anyone who hasn’t. And it’s not just media types either. Everyone’s at it. People who you’d never imagine: schoolteachers, doctors, builders, traffic wardens, shopkeepers, lollipop ladies, they’re all round the back sorting themselves out.

Getting Away with It
, 2001

A
ND THEN THE
guy in the bandanna asked if anyone needed sorting, and Harry said yes.

So, maybe Harry wasn’t actually fucked from the day he was born. Maybe it was just the drugs. Later, when he was about to take his third line, I did my friendly duty and pointed out to Harry that he, Harry, had always said that junkies were just very unhappy people who would be addicted to something else if they were not junkies: did that not mean that he, Harry, being about to hit the booster and go finally to Escape Velocity, must logically be deeply unhappy? And if he was, at this time, for whatever reason, so deeply unhappy as to want to whack his frontal lobes through the top of his skull with charlie on top of E, maybe it would be better to knock it on the head right now and come for a walk home with me, his old and trusted friend?

He looked at me and said:—Do you want a line or not?

So maybe this is not a story of inescapable destiny but a simple morality tale whose point is that it would never have happened if not for the drugs. Or maybe that if you are going to do drugs, you should do them rather longer before your fortieth birthday, and somewhat closer to your own home turf.

So let’s assume, for the time being, that we could have turned the drugs down and escaped. It would have been easy for me, at any rate. Honestly, I haven’t touched drugs for years, except on Harry’s False Birthdays, for three very simple reasons: (a) I don’t need them, (b) I can’t afford them and (c) I never come across them now. The bubble I live in never even bumps up against the bubble of the people for whom drugs are just part of Friday night. I’d never dropped an E in my life, actually. Too old to have. Or the wrong place? The wrong bubble? I mean, I had been mid-twenties, single, slim and fit, earning pretty good money, with relatively large amounts of free time and living in Zone Two . . . and I had never even bloody
heard
of the supposedly earth-shaking Summer of Love until I read about it in the papers the year afterwards. I suppose it was probably like that with most people in 1968, too.

We did coke sometimes, back then, but rarely, because it was bloody expensive. Even then I always thought charlie has only three social functions: one is to make you want to shag everyone while talking about yourself, two is to make you want more charlie and three is to make everything else seem ridiculously cheap. I mean,
why on earth not
pay hundreds of quid for some crap designer jumper, darling, if you confidently expect to put that much up your nose over the coming week or two? Why not have a Porsche? It’s only a kilo, for Christ’s sake. The ultimate consumer label. And since I never bought labels of any kind these days (I didn’t shop any more, I went to M&S) I didn’t long for this one either. Seriously, I had not even thought about drugs for years.

And yet, and yet even as I saw Harry pay off Mr Bandanna and a palm teeny envelope and four little pink pills, even before he reached over and handed me three of them, without a word, I could feel cold waves of change rippling up and down my body in expectation, as if I was one of those kids’ transforming robots. It couldn’t have been physical addiction, so what was it? What was I addicted to?

All addiction is mental. No, not mental: social. It is
people
we are addicted to, hopelessly: the crap that we think we need, that carries the signs of our addiction, is just whatever particular brand of crap we associate with the people we have met and liked and now need. If they are into old cars, we will start helplessly ogling glossy magazines in order to store up facts about vintage Aston Martins we can never own; if tennis is where we found them, we shall start to obsess about racquets which are infinitely, comically better than we are; if movies are what we talk about, we shall become film buffs, just to be able to talk to them. And if they happen to be coke fiends or smackheads, or E-chicks, then we shall cultivate a semi-addiction just to make sure that when we sit with them, with these people we like to sit with, we are never short of a subject for a chat. A sure subject for a chat: that is all we want, and we will pay whatever price we have to pay to get it. Whether it is your poshy Soho cokehead club or some horrible ten-pound-bag party in a council flat that rears above the station in Sheffield, it is always the same: we do it because the people we are with do it.

So we chat, about philosophy or fitness, French lit. or soft furnishings, just to keep hearing the sound of the voices we like. We don’t care what we chat about, because in the half-lit depths of our heads, all we see are their lips moving, their eyes looking, and the soft, unsynched, meaningless sound of their presence with us. Which is why people become smackheads or coke fiends: what security! When you find your smackhead or coke-fiend pals in your bar, be it marbled swankery or some dive one step up from the park bench, you know instantly what to say the moment your arse touches the still-warm seat left by whoever just got up.

And there you sit: secure as any born-again in his chapel, snug as a bug in a rug.

Dead Long Enough
, 2001

Y
OUNG WOMEN
(
THUS
) reflected the immaturity ascribed to them by opinion and by electoral law. The questions of citizenship and sexuality were intertwined: the principal symbolic quality of young womanhood is nubility, which casts an interesting light on the denial of the franchise to younger women. Politically conscious women of all ages saw the restriction as demeaning, and demanded universal adult suffrage. Young women also made an unformulated demand for autonomy in the shape of a style that identified freedom with the absence of adult responsibility. Its androgynous aspect emphasised that this was the active freedom of boys, rather than the traditional sequestered passivity of girls.

Against this movement, the forces of reaction were not only weak, but arguably counter-productive. Churchill remarked that it was Joynson-Hicks who got young women the vote. And as James Laver’s contemporary verse suggested, there were other ways of voting besides the ballot box:

Dope Girls
, 1992

I
HAD NEVER
been particularly keen on women. The few love affairs which had come my way had been rather silly and sordid. They had not revealed the possibilities of love; in fact, I had thought it a somewhat overrated pleasure, a brief and brutal blindness with boredom and disgust hard on its heels.

But with cocaine, things are absolutely different.

I want to emphasise the fact that cocaine is in reality a local anaesthetic. That is the actual explanation of its action. One cannot feel one’s body. (As everyone knows, this is the purpose for which it is used in surgery and dentistry.)

Now don’t imagine that this means that the physical pleasures of marriage are diminished, but they are utterly etherealised. The animal part of one is intensely stimulated so far as its own action is concerned; but the feeling that this passion is animal is completely transmuted.

I come of a very refined race, keenly observant and easily nauseated. The little intimate incidents inseparable from love affairs, which in normal circumstances tend to jar the delicacy of one’s sensibilities, do so no longer when one’s furnace is full of coke. Everything soever is transmuted as by ‘heavenly alchemy’ into a spiritual beatitude. One is intensely conscious of the body. But, as the Buddhists tell us, the body is in reality an instrument of pain or discomfort. We have all of us a subconscious intuition that this is the case; and this is annihilated by cocaine.

Let me emphasise once more the absence of any reaction. There is where the infernal subtlety of the drug comes in. If one goes on the bust in the ordinary way on alcohol, one gets what the Americans call ‘the morning after the night before’. Nature warns us that we have been breaking the rules; and Nature has given us common sense enough to know that although we can borrow a bit, we have to pay back.

We have drunk alcohol since the beginning of time; and it is in our racial consciousness that although ‘a hair of the dog’ will put one right after a spree, it won’t do to choke oneself with hair.

But with cocaine, all this caution is utterly abrogated. Nobody would be really much the worse for a night with the drug, provided that he had the sense to spend the next day in a Turkish bath, and build up with food and a double allowance of sleep. But cocaine insists upon one’s living upon one’s capital, and assures one that the fund is inexhaustible.

As I said, it is a local anaesthetic. It deadens any feeling which might arouse what physiologists call inhibition. One becomes absolutely reckless. One is bounding with health and bubbling with high spirits. It is a blind excitement of so sublime a character that it is impossible to worry about anything. And yet, this excitement is singularly calm and profound. There is nothing of the suggestion of coarseness which we associate with ordinary drunkenness. The very idea of coarseness or commonness is abolished. It is like the vision of Peter in the Acts of the Apostles in which he was told, ‘There is nothing common or unclean.’