It blue my mind
By the time the needle reached the end of the side I had remembered that I was likely, in the course of the coming intoxication, to become atrociously hungry. That much I had learned about the effects of the drug. It would make me into a monster of appetite, and all I had to appease the monster was a Mars bar tucked away in a desk drawer. I should really have been keeping it in a fridge anyway, as a homage to the Mars bars of my childhood, but there were no fridges for students then. I decided not to wait until the eating mania struck before I fetched it. I should make the trip while I was still Mr Jekyll, more or less in charge of my faculties, before Mr Hyde took over and started bellowing for ratatouille.
Even as Mr Jekyll I had trouble foraging for the hidden snack. The Mars bar felt oddly springy in my hand, like something made of an elastic syrup, or as if there were a thousand Mars bars in a loose association, so that I picked up just the first one, and there was an appreciable delay before the others caught up with it — and then of course there’s always a straggler.
Finally I was back in the Parker-Knoll in the relaxed position. I had pulled up my drawbridge and was alone on the ramparts with the phenomenon of tender howling (against jazzy strings) that was Astral Weeks. I already knew this was the record I had been waiting for all my life. It blue my mind. It blew through my mind. It blew my mind.
I didn’t know how many times the needle had traversed this amazing music. I had no idea what time it was anywhere on earth. I only knew it was time to eat the Mars bar.
If I’d given it more thought, I would have cut the bar into chunks or slices and used a fork. As things stood, with my arm extended to its maximum and my teeth angled forward (it certainly felt as if my teeth were angled forward) I could just about nibble the front quarter-inch of the Mars bar. I got the giggles, remembering something that I’d heard a girl asking rather coquettishly in the Whim on Trinity Street — ‘Why do Mars bars have veins?’ I suddenly saw that this was a question that needed to be asked.
A Mars bar does indeed have veins, chocolate tubes breaking the surface of the bar, as if caramel was circulating through them, supplying the nougat core with vital nutrients and access to unthinkable sensations. The whole ridiculously penile confection was alive. It was a soft hard-on. It was Cadbury’s Flake that had the fast reputation, and its adverts always portrayed Flake-eaters as oral nymphomaniacs, but the Mars bar was every bit as concupiscent. It was shameless, and it knew what it wanted.
What a tease it was! But two could play at that game. By now I’d eaten as much as I could reach of the bar. It would have to wait for its consummation. I decided to put the rest of it down while I worked out how to convey it to my mouth. My coördination must have been affected by the action of the drug, because I immediately managed to nudge it off the arm of the Parker-Knoll and onto the floor. It annoyed me that I had been so clumsy, but there seemed no point in mounting a rescue expedition just then. The Mars bar wasn’t going anywhere.
Now my thoughts were tending in a different direction. It was time to masturbate. It wasn’t really my idea, and it certainly wasn’t Van Morrison’s. I felt it was the Mars bar’s idea. Those five inches of chewy sweetness had put ideas in my head.
With a little effort I retrieved my own organ from my flies. In the position I was in I could just about flick my fingers against the glans. My mind wandered, though, and I kept losing the thread of arousal. Then suddenly I was ejaculating, without the usual run-up, and with the pleasure oddly scattered and silvery. It was the anagram of an orgasm. A morgaso, perhaps, or (stroke of genius, this, I thought) Om ragas! I suddenly wished I had one of Dad’s crossword puzzles within reach. In this state, surely, I would be unstoppable — though of course, since I’d added extra letters in my anagrams, I was only on my normal dismal form.
I sat there for a few seconds, then decided that I shouldn’t put off the cleaning-up operation any longer. I wriggled to make contact with the lever of the Parker-Knoll. Nothing happened. It wouldn’t budge. That’s when I realised that the drawbridge had malfunctioned and I was trapped in my plushly upholstered castle. The Mars bar on the floor wasn’t going anywhere, and nor was I.
I began to get cold, particularly in the groin area, where I was slick with genetic information, the signed confession of my self-abuse. I tried to doze. It was hopeless. The Dream-Cloud was out of reach. Van Morrison burbled lyrically on, unperturbed by my desperate situation. He kept on singing at me that he was beside me (‘and I’m — beside — you —’) with the most extraordinary intensity, but that was no real consolation. I was beside myself. My fear, of course, was that I’d still be marooned in the Parker-Knoll, pubes crackling with my own dried seed, Mars bar skulking on the carpet like a bowel movement, when Mrs Beddoes arrived to do her morning rounds.
I must have slept. I woke up in the early morning chilled to the bone. I gave the lever of the chair one last try and it yielded. The drawbridge swung smoothly down and I was free. It was as if I had been applying pressure in the wrong direction. I suppose that’s possible.
The first thing I did was to turn the stereo off. Then I had hell’s own job cleaning myself up. Finally I wriggled under the Dream-Cloud to get warm.
And that was pretty much the beginning and end of my student experience of C. sativa. It was also the beginning and the end of my Van Morrison phase. I had listened to Side One of Astral Weeks (‘In The Beginning’) non-stop between about 8.30 and 5.15 the next morning. I never got as far as Side Two (‘Afterwards’). ‘In the beginning’ was more than enough. In the beginning just about finished me.
When Mrs Beddoes came I groaned, and she cleaned round me with theatrical tact. She asked if I needed the doctor and I made stoical noises. When I woke up again it was after eleven.
Like every other undergraduate I had formally been assigned a doctor, in my case one at a medical practice in Trinity Street. I can’t say I was impressed. He didn’t know anything about Still’s Disease, and by now I suppose I was used to doctors who had the good manners to pretend they knew more than me.
Slowly rolling goosebumps
I was used to Flanny’s little ways by now, and whatever her other shortcomings she was a good sport when it came to prescribing drugs. So I let her do the donkey-work of writing my scripts. There was no point spending the time it would take me to break in a new medical professional just for term-times, when I had Flanny so well trained.
During the summer holidays of 1971, though, Flanny took a holiday of her own, so I saw another doctor in the same practice, Dr Bailey. The summer break was the ‘long vac’ in Cambridge parlance, and certainly I anticipated a long vacuum which medication might help to fill. I thought this new chap might not be so biddable, so I decided to play safe.
What I wanted was a prescription for Mandrax, a widely prescribed drug of the period, much maligned since then. I still give it high marks. To me it’s pretty much the Jesus Christ of prescription drugs (meaning no offence, or not much). Mild and loving, but reviled and rejected, and all for trying to help.
The name, granted, isn’t well chosen. Whoever came up with it must have had mandrake in mind, which isn’t reassuring, and then finished off with a Bond-villain flourish (isn’t Drax the baddie in Moonraker?). Give a drug a bad name.
It’s not actually one of the barbiturates, though it shares some of their properties. The great thing about Mandrax is that you can take an awful lot of it with very little in the way of side-effects. Naturally the question of ‘side’ effects is wholly subjective. What’s at the side depends on your angle of vision. Some people lead decidely off-centre lives, and a side-effect can be right up their alley.