way it all seemed of a piece. The cleanness of
it, for a start. I mean, look at it: this beautiful snow-white powder. Little yellow sometimes, but only the way really brightly
lit clouds are yellow though they start out looking white, from the sun. Bit of a joke it looks like cleaning powder, but
even that seems right somehow. It feels like it’s cleaning out your skull, know what I mean? Even how you take it goes along
with all this, doesn’t it? Clean, sharp, definite things like razor blades and mirrors and tightly rolled banknotes, preferably
new, as big denomination as you like. I love the smell of new notes, with or without powderage.
And it energises you, gives you what feels like ambition and ability in one easily snorted package. Suddenly nothing’s impossible.
You can talk and think your way round any problem, batter down anybody’s resistance, see the clear, clever way to make any
challenge work for you. It’s a doing drug, an enabling drug.
Back where I came from they were all into dope, or H, or speed, which is the poor man’s coke, and they were starting to get
into E. Speed’s like laminate instead of real wood, or faux fur not pukka, or a hand job instead of proper sex. It’ll do if
you can’t afford the real thing. Ecstasy’s pretty good, but it’s not immediate. You have to commit to it. Not as much as kosher
old-fashioned acid, though, cos I’ve heard people old enough to be my dad talk of these trips that lasted eighteen hours or
more and just turned your whole world inside out, not always in a good way, and you needed to organise everything, too, like
where you were going to spend the time you were tripping, and even who with. Support staff, practically. Like, carers! How
the fuck did hippies ever get that fucking organised, eh?
Anyway, compared to that time-consuming nonsense E isn’t that bad, like drinking spritzers instead of whisky sodas or something,
but you still need to organise everything to come up at the right time and it really is mostly about dancing, being loved-up
in amongst lots of fellow travellers and boppers. Fine for that long drawn-out moment of collective euphoria, but it’s more
like part of a sort of rite, a ritual. What was that song that went, “This is my church”? Something like that. Like a service.
Bit too collective, too chummy for my taste.
Cannabis was sort of similar in some ways in that it made you mellow, didn’t it? Though how that squares with the fucking
Hashisheen I’ve never quite understood. But it’s all that lying around like old hippies, wreathed in smoke and talking bollocks,
that I could never take. All that claggy brown tar gumming up the cigarette papers and your brains and making you choke and
splutter and wrecking you to the point where it seemed like a great idea to drink the old bong water for the final hit that’ll
really take you over the edge into some other realm of understanding. What a load of bollocks. I can see it was a great Sixties
drug when everybody wanted to smash the system by having love-ins and painting flowers on their bum, but it’s all too hazy
and vague and sort of aimless, know what I mean?
H is proper hard-core, got to respect that. It’s a serious lifestyle commitment for most people, and it’s like discovering
the mother-lode of pure pleasure that all the other drugs including the legal ones like drink have all come from, like finding
something utterly pure beyond which there can’t possibly be anything better, but it’s a selfish drug. It takes you over, it
becomes the boss, everything else becomes about the next hit and it takes you away from the real world, seems to say that
the one where the H is is the real world and the one you’ve lived in all this time and where everybody else still lives, the
poor fools, and where the money is, sadly, annoyingly, is just a sort of game, a kind of grey, grainy shadow-place where you
have to go back to
it, for a start. I mean, look at it: this beautiful snow-white powder. Little yellow sometimes, but only the way really brightly
lit clouds are yellow though they start out looking white, from the sun. Bit of a joke it looks like cleaning powder, but
even that seems right somehow. It feels like it’s cleaning out your skull, know what I mean? Even how you take it goes along
with all this, doesn’t it? Clean, sharp, definite things like razor blades and mirrors and tightly rolled banknotes, preferably
new, as big denomination as you like. I love the smell of new notes, with or without powderage.
And it energises you, gives you what feels like ambition and ability in one easily snorted package. Suddenly nothing’s impossible.
You can talk and think your way round any problem, batter down anybody’s resistance, see the clear, clever way to make any
challenge work for you. It’s a doing drug, an enabling drug.
Back where I came from they were all into dope, or H, or speed, which is the poor man’s coke, and they were starting to get
into E. Speed’s like laminate instead of real wood, or faux fur not pukka, or a hand job instead of proper sex. It’ll do if
you can’t afford the real thing. Ecstasy’s pretty good, but it’s not immediate. You have to commit to it. Not as much as kosher
old-fashioned acid, though, cos I’ve heard people old enough to be my dad talk of these trips that lasted eighteen hours or
more and just turned your whole world inside out, not always in a good way, and you needed to organise everything, too, like
where you were going to spend the time you were tripping, and even who with. Support staff, practically. Like, carers! How
the fuck did hippies ever get that fucking organised, eh?
Anyway, compared to that time-consuming nonsense E isn’t that bad, like drinking spritzers instead of whisky sodas or something,
but you still need to organise everything to come up at the right time and it really is mostly about dancing, being loved-up
in amongst lots of fellow travellers and boppers. Fine for that long drawn-out moment of collective euphoria, but it’s more
like part of a sort of rite, a ritual. What was that song that went, “This is my church”? Something like that. Like a service.
Bit too collective, too chummy for my taste.
Cannabis was sort of similar in some ways in that it made you mellow, didn’t it? Though how that squares with the fucking
Hashisheen I’ve never quite understood. But it’s all that lying around like old hippies, wreathed in smoke and talking bollocks,
that I could never take. All that claggy brown tar gumming up the cigarette papers and your brains and making you choke and
splutter and wrecking you to the point where it seemed like a great idea to drink the old bong water for the final hit that’ll
really take you over the edge into some other realm of understanding. What a load of bollocks. I can see it was a great Sixties
drug when everybody wanted to smash the system by having love-ins and painting flowers on their bum, but it’s all too hazy
and vague and sort of aimless, know what I mean?
H is proper hard-core, got to respect that. It’s a serious lifestyle commitment for most people, and it’s like discovering
the mother-lode of pure pleasure that all the other drugs including the legal ones like drink have all come from, like finding
something utterly pure beyond which there can’t possibly be anything better, but it’s a selfish drug. It takes you over, it
becomes the boss, everything else becomes about the next hit and it takes you away from the real world, seems to say that
the one where the H is is the real world and the one you’ve lived in all this time and where everybody else still lives, the
poor fools, and where the money is, sadly, annoyingly, is just a sort of game, a kind of grey, grainy shadow-place where you
have to go back to
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