Bad Dreams (continued)
Chapter 4 continued
“You stupid bastard. I told you:
these aren't ordinary downers like you get at home, these are
Quaaludes -- they don't balance things out they fucking
obliterate them! You were so gone we couldn't even wake you. In
the end the radio guys were getting pissed off so we got you to
that room to sleep it off while they did the interview. We had
to carry you, it was fucking embarrassing…”
I mentally tried to stem the flow, but the
tedious, unwanted truth was now seeping into me like blood
through a bandage. Funnily enough I did have a dreamlike memory
of sitting there with the cans on my head and my eyes shut. But
I thought that was just while they were playing a track. I
hadn't realised I'd actually zonked out.
“Why didn't you come and check on
me?” I said. “I might have puked and done a
Jimi…”
“I did come and check on you. I even
spoke to you.”
“You what?”
“You woke up at one point and I told
you where we were and told you to come back when you felt
better.”
“What did I say?”
“You told me to fuck off.”
“Oh…”
He led us back down the various corridors
to where I'd begun, at the door to the locker room. Then we
went five feet further down the corridor, turned left and there
was the silver soundproof studio door with the red light
outside it. If I had only turned left instead of right out of
the locker room I'd have been safe and sound. I saw it as a
metaphor: if I had only turned left instead of right on so many
things… but who can't say that?
We walked in and there they were -- the
band, the DJs, the college hangers-on. They all laughed and
applauded. I smiled and jived and made 'who me?' hand gestures.
“Here he comes,” said Richard
the singer, “the man who snored the world.”
It didn't make sense but everybody laughed
anyway. It wasn't about making sense; it was about grooving on
the riff. Though we didn't know it then these were the final
days of the pre-AIDS era and as long as nobody let the side
down and ever stopped laughing one hell of a time would be had
by all, of that we were fairly damn sure. And nobody ever left
the party early. Which is how blacking out became such a common
practice for those of us too heavily under the influence of the
age. The idea was you never stopped: why would you want to? You
just kept going until the darkness descended upon you; the
candle, having burnt itself from both ends, now extinguishing
itself with the same self-destructive haste of the snake that
devours its own tail.
You became like Dr. Who -- you never quite
knew where the Tardis was going to land next. Sometimes it
could take you to strange, faraway places. One Saturday night
in 1977 I started out at a punk gig in London -- but when I
alighted from my ship the next day I had travelled back in time
to the late sixties and now found myself at some infra-dig
hippy pad out in Buckinghamshire. Once again, how I had gotten
there I could not recall. More unsettlingly, neither could any
of the other people there. There were about 12 of us -- eleven
hairy hippies and their bosomy old ladies, all clinging to a
now distant, smoke-ringed past. And me: a spiky-haired teenage
dickhead in a No Future T-shirt.
Of course I asked all the usual, age-old
questions: where am I? How did I get here? But nobody was
certain. They didn't even know my name. They merely assumed I
had turned up with a party of people the night before; people I
could not remember that had now left without remembering to
take me with them.
“I think maybe you crashed out,
man,” one of the weird beards speculated. “I don't
think they could wake you…” Always the same tedious
fucking story.
Being conscientious hippies, they had
invited me to stay for lunch -- nut roast, salad and brown
rice. Ghastly shit but I was glad to get something in my
stomach. Then after lunch they took me out to a shed in the
back garden and showed me this ludicrously large, telescopic
bong they had made. It was about eight-feet long, had to be
held up by two men to be operated, and would be filled with a
quarter ounce of grass -- about a week's supply -- each hit.
Very high maintenance but entirely worth it, they assured me.
“This will literally blow your
fucking head off, man,” the one called Nigel told me
gleefully. It sounded like a challenge. I told them to fire me
one up but first I had to buy the grass off them. I only had a
fiver and some change. They took the fiver and loaded her up.
The mouthpiece was so large I could barely
get my gob around it. I stood there at the end of this long
cardboard canon with my mouth as wide open as I could get it,
waiting for whatever was supposed to happen. I had to get rid
of all the breath in my body first and, at their signal, get
ready to inhale deeply. They set to work stoking up the fire.
It took a few moments but just as I thought I could hold it no
longer Nigel gave the signal and I inhaled.
All at once, this eight-foot column of
bush-fire came jetting down my throat. It hit me so hard it
felt like one of those Tom & Jerry routines where the cat
has swallowed an anvil and you get the exaggerated outline of
it going down his neck. I felt like I had swallowed a bomb. I
had. Cartoon stars dancing round my baffled, cross-eyed face,
smoke rings streaming from my ears…
It wasn't until I left them and tried to
make my way home, though, that it really hit me. The hippies
had given me directions; the train station was only a 15-minute
walk away, they said. Probably it was but this was countryside
and I was a city freak. What's more, a now seriously stoned
city freak. I couldn't tell a lane from a road or a tree from a
lamppost. Almost instantly, I was lost, wandering beside a
field that stretched as far as my sore eyes could see over
rolling green hills. It was winter, a cold and brittle Sunday
afternoon, and it was already getting dark out there. I needed
to hurry up but I was so stoned I kept forgetting what I was
doing and would wake up every few minutes to find myself just
plodding along enjoying the view. In the distance, across the
next field, you could see a tiny farmhouse. There was a light
coming from one of the windows and a thin plume of smoke
curling from its chimney. You could picture the scene within...
the large open fire, the black-and-white sheepdog asleep in
front of it, the old farmer and his wife at the table, tucking
into a big side of beef and a jug of homemade ale. I wondered
what it must be like to live there like that. Away from
everybody. I bet the old farmer's wife had big red rosy cheeks
and nice plump tits on her, too. Maybe those farmers knew
something…
The road began to broaden as more and more
cars began zooming past me. Now there were street lights and I
could see where I was going again. I came to a sign. It said:
London, 35 Miles.
I've come the wrong way, I thought. This
is the road leading out of town. I need the station. That means
going back into town…
I turned around and began walking back the
way I'd just come. It was now a couple of hours since I'd set
off from the hippy house, the sky was black and the high was
seriously starting to fade. I counted the change in my pockets.
A bit under three quid. Enough for the train and a
pasty-and-chips when I got home. Maybe things weren't so bad
after all. If I could just figure out where the fuck I was
going…
Chapter 5
Sometimes, though, you can simply go too
far. Like Little Joe did that time. That poor fucker flew so
high we thought he was never going to land. I'd never seen
anyone zero-out like that before and it shook me up much more
than any of my own little detours into oblivion ever had. I saw
for the first time what it looked like from the outside.
We all shared a pad on the fourth-floor of
a falling-down, slum-dwelling in Acton. Across the street there
was a chip shop and a pub. Below us was a minicab office. Every
Friday and Saturday night as soon as the pub closed the
punters, mainly black and Irish, would spill out onto the
street. Some would end up in the chip shop; some would make for
the minicab office. Most just seemed to stand around on the
corner, shouting and swearing at each other.
The minicab office was run by Asians and
whether that was part of the problem, none of us knew, but
about once a month there would be a big fight out in the street
between the Asian minicab drivers and the black and white
punters from the pub. We used to watch them from our windows.
The pub guys would smash beer bottles and use them as weapons
and the cab guys would come out with cricket bats. It was a
hell of a floorshow. The chip shop was run by Armenians and
sometimes they would be out there too with their knives.
Sometimes an ambulance would show up and there would still be a
blood in the street the next day. But the police were never
anywhere to be seen. It was weird. We decided they knew about
the fights but didn't care because to them it was only paddies
and blacks versus pakis. We weren't bothered, we liked it
there. The rent was dirt cheap and as long as you paid it on
time every month the landlord never came around.
Little Joe wasn't one of the guys actually
living there paying rent, he was just one of those people who
used to come by, maybe stay two or three days, then disappear
again until the next time. That's how I'd started out only I
didn't wait for the next time and ended up staying two or three
years, eventually graduating from the couch and a fiver in the
kitty now and then to a room of my own and full rent-paying
duties.
We called him Little Joe not because he
was short -- he was over six feet -- but because he was only
nineteen, a few years younger than the rest of us, and he had a
very boyish, innocent face. All except for the eyes, which were
like the young Chet Baker's: much too old for that baby face.
So at first he was Baby Joe, then Little Brother Joe, then
simply Little Joe -- after Little Joe Cartwright, the kid
brother in Bonanza.
Little Joe was a talented little fucker
too; he drummed in a funk-rock band. And he was always a big
hit with the chicks, particularly the older ones in their
twenties. Some real babes, too, jammy little bastard. His only
downfall was what he called his “sweet tooth” for
smack. That fucker couldn't stay away from it. It'll kill ya
one day, Little Joe, we told him, but of course he just laughed
and carried on…
Then one afternoon when the flat was
unusually empty -- the band we shared it with were away doing a
gig and the rest of us had gone down the pub -- Little Joe
fucked-up and went too far. Whether he just got greedy and put
too much in the spoon or the gear was just unexpectedly strong,
I never bothered to find out, but when we came back we found
him lying unconscious on the floor of the dining room, the
needle still sticking out of his arm. continue
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