Story: Part 2

NOW BEAR IN MIND at this time everything about me screamed out "straight" or "square". Although you cannot, of course, tell whether somebody takes drugs merely from their appearance, first impressions are often correct. It's easier, actually, to tell who does not take drugs. And I did not back then. And it pretty much showed ...

My hair was short (and this was a good year or two before close cropped hair lurched into fashion). This was 1991, the era of the rave. Hair tied into stubby pony-tails. White gloves, whistles, fluorescent workmen's jackets. Sportswear. Hooded tops with fractals or puns on household products and foods. Especially "Coke". Cocaine at that time was often uttered in the same breath as "heroin"; "heroin and cocaine". Hardcore. Some of the posher students did do coke, but it was hush-0hush behind closed doors. Speed was way more popular. But the drug of choice at dance parties was a little white pill stamped with a little bird ("doves") or a love heart (because E was the love drug and the hug drug) and so on....

SO THEN - THIS SATRUDAY NIGHT PARTY was to be my kind of official introduction to drugs. I was to bring £15 and ask for "E". From a pitch-black strobe-flickering room emerged noises that sounded to me like aliens being slaughtered under a chainsaw. How anyone could actually enjoy this music was far beyond my comprehension. Anyway... the drug dealing seemed to be gonig on in a small side-room lit by a red light (how cliched can you get?) I asked for "E" - the man said he'd sold out. So I asked for "A" - acid, handed over £5 and received a torn-off piece of blotting paper the size of a postage stamp. I put the whole thing in my mouth and swallowd. Little did I realize how small (and cheap) an acid "trip" actually is. I had just swallowed four at once ...

My introduction to LSD wsa so mindblowingy intense that away from the party, during the peak of the trip in somebody's kitchen, I couldn't understand a word anybody was saying. Lips seemed to utter one thing; yet the most amazing fantstical remarks were over-dubbing everything with randomness about sausages, baked beans and gravy when actually people were supposedly asking me whether I was all right. (I was not.) At one point, crossing a grassy field between "blocks" of the student residences I came to believe I was in New York City. Yellow cabs drove past as plain as today as a crazed gnome juggled skittles in the middle of the street.

These are the amusing parts. It all went badly wrong when I returned to my room to look for something. Already by this stage - so I was told later - my eyes were about as wide as wide eyes can be. Glancing to the wall I realized the poster had turned into a gruesome long-fanged demon. I nearly jumpd out of my skin and for some reason ended up walking through bushes in pitch darkness with space aliens telling me they had been following me. I was running away because I believed they were coming from the sky to beam me up. At one point a lizard-like entity was actually riding my shoulders, laughing in my ear as long-clawed fingers tightened round my throat.

If you're tempted to say to me, "That never happened;" you're right. It didn't. As the Beatles sang in Strawberry Fields, nothing was real. But on such psychedelic drugs anything you imagine becomes "real". So I'd have to disagree because in subjective actuality it did indeed "happen" to me.

Thankfully, because I'd taken the drug in one single dose it did at least peak and taper off in fairly distinct stages and began to lose strength after three or four hours of this nonsense. I was then reduced to the more standard "trippiness" that most people associate with acid. I was still out of it: but the monsters had gone.

At the end of the night I found myself in a rom full of hippies skinning up spliffs as joss-sticks burned. This was the very first time in my life I'd been surrounded by such people. Up until this point they had been a total mystery to me. The room, I remember, was so crowded that there was literally no more leg room at all on the floor.

One girl, who had taken ecstasy, kept jumping up saying how happy she was and dancing to no music at all. She then took to turning the television on and off, to watch the white dot disappear exclaiming "ooo" and "aaa". (TVs with disappearing dots! Those were the days!)

Even though I was tripping, I found it sordid to watch someone so carried away by the experience of drugs.

When the music did come on it was a track specially for me and I still remember it to this day: Oceanic's Dream Tripper ...

So that was my introduction to drugs. Lost and depressed afterwards, I realized that none of the friends I'd met thus far had any experience of the drug I'd taken so I took to hanging out with the new crowd I'd met last weekend - more for the sense of solidarity than anything else. Also, in someone's room, somewhere, there was a big hash-smoking session every night which put me in my element. I quickly got a liking for being stoned, although it sometimes brought back the LSD experience. One night I was trying to run the tap: I remember standing transfixed as water droplets held still in mid-air like glittering spheres, then, as they hit the sink, burst into crown shapes ... Never before or since have I seen this phenomenon with my naked eyes.

As soon as they threw another party I was back there. This time I did get my hands on ecstasy. And when the music came out of the speakers in a vector-pointed sphere I thought, "Wow! This tune really is 3D!" - not realizing it was actually a first effect of the drug. The full effects really hit me under the strobe light in the middle of the dancefloor when I suddenly realized I was experiencing a vivid, rushing feeling of happiness. I had never felt joy so intensely before. The music was suddenly wonderful, and far from being self-conscious I actually fond myself dancing. Hours seemed to pass in a delirious dream of flashing lights and music. I felt like I was shimmering with pixie-dust from the inside. Somehow, somewhere, I managed to catch hold of one thought because suddenly a lot of things made sense: "Ah - this is why people take drugs!" And a lot of mentholated people were hugging me. Which kind of throws on its head for me that NA phrase "hugs not drugs" because as the saying went "Everything starts with an E" - it certainly did for me - E for Ecstasy, the Hug Drug.

For months afterwards I found myself living in a netherworld split between starry-eyed fantasy of rainbows, cosmic nebulae and friends across the universe in unity and a bleak and grey reality of a university course that did nothing for me. Compounding this it took me a long time to make many real friends, though I always had people to take drugs with. Plus I was haunted with an overwhelming feeling of wanting to be somewhere else all the time.

The one philosophy I knew (or the excuse I went with) said that if you fall off a horse the only thing to do is get right back on it. Which is why despite such a bad trip I did take acid again and again and again ... Ecstasy gave me horrific comedowns but I persisted with that, too. Speed I discovered I could take during the day on no special occasion and a bland afternoon seemed suddenly exciting. The downside of all this came afterwards. Payback time. A chemical overdraft that had to be worked off. Lying in bed so badly drained I could barely get across the room for a glass of water, let alone make it to seminars on time.

Eventually, following weeks of non-attendance and an exam where I simply scribbled an obscentiy across the paper and walked out, it became clear that the only thing I could do with this course was drop out of it.

I spent months in an unemployable stupor of depression. When I smoked cannabis I got so paranoid I felt the world was coming to an end. I gave up the spliffs when I got an office job. And there was neither time nor the chance to take anything else. My head had got so messed up I didn't realize it was unusual to spontaneously see visions of flowers springing up from the kitchen floor...

For a time, with cannabis put to one side and ony very occasional ecstasy, I almost managed to put life on track. One autumn a friend and I taught ourselves the art of magic mushroom picking, and so a new diversion was discovered. Mushrooms were indeed fun. Way more fun than acid had ever been, and much much easier to control the dose (one piece of paper, less than a cm square imprinted with how much LSD? You didn't know until it was too late sometimes ...) I must say, however, that I did use these mushrooms infrequently and in moderation. My system should have been pretty clean ...

But I became increasingly run down and tired. Eventually I realized I was not merely tied but ill. The doctor diagnosed "post-viral fatigue syndrome" a diagnosis later amended to "chronic fatigue syndrome" (CFS). In despair I upped sticks and moved to London.

London, of course, is where I eventually found heroin.

To be continued ...