Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (9 page)

‘We may be wrong. We may be right. Drive what way you will,’ I said.

She stopped to ask a policeman the way. And, after what I believe now was a real half-hour’s car drive, we arrived home.

The psychiatrist explained the situation to my wife. ‘He can’t help talking,’ she said, gave a brief résumé of the case, and then drove off.

‘No, thank you, darling, I think I won’t come in just now,’ I said to my wife. ‘I will go for a walk. Keep the children away from me, will you please?’

I had a compulsive urge to do violence to my children and did not like to tell her about it.

‘Are you safe? Can you get back?’ she asked. For her, the situation must have been extremely distressing.

‘I haven’t a hope of crossing a road with traffic on it. How can I possibly judge speed?’ I replied. ‘But I can go round the block. I will always turn left. It is about half a mile round, so you will see me going past from time to time!’

And I set off.

Although the nausea was still present, the muscular system felt in order, and the exercise was more pleasing than usual. Also, the concertina effect added interest. I had a feeling, too, that the exercise would help work off the effects of the drug. There was no difficulty in recognising the different streets, and no question of becoming lost.

I must have gone around a great many times. I remember passing some people to whom my wife and I had previously made a friendly approach, but who had snubbed us decisively. Should I now, with the licence, as it were, of being able to blame any peculiarity of behaviour on the drug, go and tell them what I thought of them? But no, I did not. The ordinary natural human reserve prevented it. I noticed this myself and regarded it as a most excellent sign that the drug action was abating.

I still could not stop talking to myself on the way round. But I could not sense when I was really talking and when I was merely having verbal thoughts. To find out, I would place a hand to my lips. I could then tell from the movement felt whether I was talking or not. Whenever the test was made, I was talking, but could not stop.

I got into conversation with one gentlemen who was cutting his hedge. For an Englishman to speak to a near neighbour after passing him six times during an evening since there was no one to introduce us, suggests a certain lack of reserve, but the fact that the conversation did not start until the sixth encounter was an indication that recovery had started.

After walking around the block, at a brisk pace, for about an hour to an hour and a half, I went into my own garden.

‘Keep the children away from me, please!’ I said to my wife. I could not convey to her how important it was that she should do this, nor do I know myself to this day how great the gap was between the violent thoughts in my mind and their possible execution.

Most fortunately, the children were both in a blessedly and amenably happy mood. When Patricia called they ran into the drawing-room, settled around her, and she began to read to them, having explained that Father was not well and that he wanted to sit undisturbed in the garden. I settled down in a deckchair, bathed in the evening sunlight, and looked at the happy little group in the drawing-room which I could see through the French windows. The children could see one looking at them, and waved to me.

That scene made a big impression. I felt that I was a long way off, and that no effort of mine could bring me any nearer. But I knew it would be all right if I waited; so I waved back to them, and settled down to wait.

The nausea wore off and other effects of the LSD seemed to be abating. So after a while I agreed to read to the elder child, Robert, in bed. The reading was a failure from his point of view. His father seemed inattentive, and to be reading so poorly and slurring his speech so badly that the story was barely intelligible. From my point of view, the concertina and stretching effects were troublesome again. The boy seemed to have such peculiar limbs. While I was reading to Robert, Patricia was ringing up some friends, both doctors, who had invited us to have dinner with them that evening.

‘I would much rather bring him along than leave him at home with the “sitter-in” and the children,’ she explained, ‘if you don’t mind.’

So off we went to dinner.

Over coffee, in my slow and boring way, I began to address my host on the subject of fireplaces, and the theory of heating dwellings.

‘There is a little man on the roof,’ I said, and paused, confident that I could resume without being interrupted. There are few who dare pause in a conversation. Most of us have to scurry on desperately, fully conscious that if the flow weakens someone else will nip in. It is rare to manage the pause. Two very effective constituents of the technique are, firstly, to get your audience to lose the thread of the conversation, and that had been ensured with my opening remark, and, secondly, to have the confidence not to mind boring the audience. This I had to the full.

‘He has a thermometer in his hand,’ I continued. ‘He measures the temperature of the smoke. “Bad,” he says. “Too hot.” Now, with any convenient apparatus he measures the mass of smoke and of hot air, i.e. the mass of all that comes up the chimney. Knowing the mass and the temperature change he calculates the amount of heat entering the sky.’

My host politely adjusted his features to simulate interest but his distress was apparent. Furthermore I knew he had got me quite wrong. He thought that I thought there was a little man on the roof with a thermometer and a telephone. I knew perfectly well there was not. My mental processes, with respect to thinking of the little man, were approximately normal. That is the way that I, and probably many others, would normally consider the question of heat waste in fires. The only abnormal aspect was reporting the mental processes directly, instead of transposing them as one normally would by saying, ‘The heat loss to the sky is equal to that absorbed by raising the temperature of the waste gases from the temperature of the room to that in the chimney.’

‘He phones down,’ I went on. ‘He says “How much fuel have you burnt?” You tell him. “Your efficiency is only five per cent,” he replies. Don’t you see? The only thing he needs to know is how much fuel has been used, and how much heat has gone into the sky. Then he knows what the efficiency is.’

We went home, Patricia driving of course, and so to bed. I did not take the barbiturate sleeping tablet I had been given. I had had enough drugs for one day.

The night was very wakeful, but it did not seem too long. An eye was seen very clearly from time to time in the darkness. This was neither distressing nor particularly interesting. Just an eye – rather diagrammatic.

Next day, unfortunately, I still was not right. There was no question of getting out of bed. I just lay there talking, babbling rather, mostly about my past. Often I cried, which was very distressing for my wife, who naturally thought it represented a condition of deep grief. As far as I can remember it did not. It was as though my body were crying and I was outside it, admittedly feeling rather hopeless, but not moved to tears.

The colour distortion was still there. The psychiatrist and others from the laboratory came to see me, looking very worried – and green. All their faces had that unpleasant green tinge. I still wanted to jump out of the window, but had no feeling of wanting to commit suicide. It was an absolutely specific compulsion to jump out of one particular window in the bedroom. I was no longer split into two, and the very strong character who had been so easily able to resist the temptation before had gone. The temptation was vaguely associated with the naughty character but he was not very distinct from me now. It was more as if I myself wanted, in a purely irresponsible way, to jump out of the window.

I was in bed for a few days and when not babbling or crying, I lay very limp and completely apathetic. I must try to convey why I made no attempt to get up and generally pull myself together, because the reason was interesting and important. I saw my own mind divided somewhat in the way that Freud sees it, divided into parts having different functions at different levels. As in his scheme, the different functions and different levels were represented as having different positions in the diagram. In this case the diagram was not drawn, but was thought of as being in the head. Now one part of this diagram sees ‘will power’. It was rather low down, and lines went vaguely from it to other parts of the brain which represented different channels through which the will power could exert its effects.

I could see quite clearly in the diagram that this drug had paralysed the ‘will power’ section. I can remember saying, ‘I’m prepared to do battle against the ordinary afflictions but hell – I’ve nothing left to do battle with. This drug has cut me off at the source. It’s completely knocked out the will power.’

After a fortnight I was still very jumpy and susceptible to illusions. In the bathroom, I could see pictures made from the irregular condensation of steam on the walls. The pictures in steam were noble, and reminded me of the strange sweetness of the women by the seaside.

Then there was the insect.

One morning, on looking into the sink, I saw this enormous creature, standing at one edge. It looked so real that I frankly did not know what sort of action to take. Rather feebly I blew on it, and to my horror it made grotesque movements, impossible for any normal insect to achieve; and with these movements it fluttered around the sink. The illusion of the movement lasted only about one second. But one second can be a long time and the sensation in the solar plexus was felt very strongly indeed. Then, with immense relief, I could see it was only the black charred remains of a piece of paper.

The most striking illusion of all was the Christmas card on the mantelpiece of the nursery at home. One day, coming down to the nursery stove before breakfast I saw a horrific face looking out of the card. Again, there was that shock of fear. I braced myself to look this damned face straight in the eyes. It would not change into any other kind of picture. I walked up closer, and then I could see it was really nothing but a little drawing of a cottage. I took a step back and again the horrific-face interpretation reappeared. At a certain critical distance the two pictures alternated just exactly in the same way as the cubes commonly shown on inlay patterns will alter suddenly and independently of any effort of the will. I began to practise obtaining the cottage and repressing the face. I used to do these exercises for perhaps one minute every morning, to try to learn to suppress the horrific images. It would make a nice story to say how I thus became master of my fate, and cured myself by my own determined efforts. But things didn’t happen that way.

For several months I was dependent on barbiturates in order to get a reasonable amount of sleep. After that, I could manage to sleep from 12 midnight until about 4 a.m. most nights without any drug. From then on the time passed pleasantly enough, and the insomnia was not a thing which mattered much. Normally I was a very heavy sleeper, and it was surprising to me to realise how much time is wasted in bed. One morning, to reduce this waste, I got up at 5 a.m. and spent three hours breaking up old bricks in the garden before breakfast. Whether it was the bricks or a coincidence will never be known, but that day marked the end of the insomnia. A great sleepiness overwhelmed me by 8 p.m. the next evening. For the first time in months a full night’s sleep was obtained, and a normal sleep rhythm was established very shortly afterwards.

The only definite permanent effect which has been observed to follow my taking thirty-millionths of a gram of lysergic acid is that after-images are now always seen more vividly than they ever were before. But if the condition I had been in was schizophrenia, my sympathy for those so afflicted has been increased many times.

P
RECIOUS FEW ATTRIBUTES
distinguish humans from animals. Sheep shag, monkeys wank, pigs snort, wolves piss, dolphinstalk, tigers fart, dogs throw up, skunks drink, elephants sniff, horses count and leeches suck. But no animals smoke. It’s not merely because they can’t skin up. Animals, other than reindeer and dragons, are terrified of flames and smoke and stay away from chimneys and tobacconists. I began to research the origins of smoking.

There were two main theories, the first scientific, the second religious.

In the scientific theory, the Welsh Wizard Merlin was the first human to smoke in the western hemisphere. Merlin shagged witches, used broomsticks as dildos, shat toadstools, and guzzled a mixture of liquid psychoactives from his Holy Grail. Merlin time-travelled to twenty-first-century Cardiff and smuggled in a catatonic leek, a stereophonic spliff, a zygotic monkey, a slice of Caerphilly, a bag of magic mushrooms, a manic street preacher, two super furry animals, and a sixty-foot blow-up doll. Back at King Arthur’s Round Table, one super furry animal got dizzy and started doing things backwards. Smoke poured out of his nostrils, the spliff went away from his mouth and he roared, ‘Drag On.’ The other super furry animal grew horns, had a huge piss and fucked off to the North Pole shouting, ‘Reign Deer, I’m a leek.’ Since then the Welsh haven’t stopped drinking and smoking and producing things vaguely connected, like coal, reservoirs, crematoriums and sheep-shagging. They honour the smoking dragon and a leek after a good skinful.

Smoking wasn’t exported from Wales until the twelfth century, when Prince ‘Mad Dog’ Madog ran aground in America long before Big Chief Lying Bullshit had thought of an Oval Orifice. Mad Dog’s stash hadn’t run out, so he offered a pipe of peace. Six weeks later, Mad Dog was back in Florida with a load of seeds, and all the Red Indians spent several centuries having squaws rather than wars, bongs rather than bombs, and perfecting the art of communicating and signalling over vast distance by smoking enormous spliffs and emitting an ordered series of smoke rings.