They thought I was on dope, simply because they had found a couple of roaches in the tapestry shoulder-bag. Pitiful stubs of joints long gone. Fossils — antiques. They should have been in the Fitzwilliam Museum, properly docketed: Marijuana leavings of the Unknown Student, early 1970s. Private collection. My collection, though, was no longer private.
Mum and Dad wanted to know how long I’d been using reefers. The demon weed, wrecker of young lives, bringer to its knees of the undergraduate brain. Cannabis sativa, a plant I respect for its hardiness, but not one that has ever done much for my consciousness.
They didn’t actually bother to ask if the joints had anything to do with me. Even a policeman would have done that, just for form’s sake. Mum and Dad jumped to conclusions instead. They jumped to their own confusions.
They really were the leavings of the Unknown Student, if he (conceivably she) was even a student. How much control did I have over the Greek tapestry shoulder-bag, really? It was anything but a private preserve. Friends thought nothing of using it as a communal asset, a shared pocket, even a portable dustbin. What were their reasons? Laziness, disorganisation, reluctance to spoil the line of their trousers by putting things in pockets of their own. So there was nothing unusual about people slipping their joints into my bag for safe-keeping, or their roaches for eventual disposal (which of course they never got round to).
If I had no control over what went inside the bag, the same was true of what went on it. Members of CHAPs who lost their nerve in mixed company, for instance, would slyly pin their more confronta-tional badges to its unprotesting weave. After a while it was almost armour-plated with revolutionary slogans, GAY IS GOOD, SAPPHO WAS A RIGHT-ON WOMAN and, more mysteriously, THE ENGLISH THINK LIBERTY IS A SHOP ON REGENT STREET.
I hadn’t much enjoyed my bag becoming a dumping-ground for the flotsam of the counter-culture. I particularly resented the one that said HOW DARE YOU ASSUME I’M HETEROSEXUAL? being transferred from the denim of my colleagues to the faintly stinky wool of my bag. In common with the world at large, no one in the CHAPs revolutionary echelon assumed I was sexual in any way whatever. That was one issue of exclusion that was never going to be freely discussed and worked through in our little independent forum on Glisson Road. No one ever asked about my erotic past, or imagined that I might run to such a thing as a present, perhaps even a future.
The pin fastenings on the backs of the badges were well beyond my powers to undo. When I arrived home for the summer it was a priority to have them removed, but Peter, the obvious choice of helper, had already left on his travels. I had to draft Audrey in for the job, though I wondered what she made of the slogans. She didn’t need telling that this was something to be kept quiet. That didn’t worry her — she liked a secret, did Audrey.
Looking back, of course, I would have done well to ask her to sanitise the contents of the bag as well, but I hadn’t realised there was anything in the bag that might cause embarrassment. I had forgotten my lack of privacy, on two fronts. It didn’t occur to me that Mum and Dad would search through my reticule with their prehensile digits, screeching and tut-tutting as they went, like moralising spider-monkeys.
‘Are you on drugs, John?’
Mu. ‘Just tell us. We want to help.’
Mind your own Mu.
‘Are you on drugs?’
Well, of course I was on drugs. Ask a silly question! The only question was what kind. I had steered clear of hallucinogens since my trip to the Salley gardens, and I wouldn’t have considered indulging without Peter there to lean on. But I was self-medicating as if there was no tomorrow. I was self-medicating because there was a tomorrow, and I wanted to take a short cut, avoiding today, even if tomorrow turned out to be no better. There was always the day after tomorrow, and the day after that.
The black dot marks the tree line
I had learned my lesson from Write Off Tuesday, to the point where I was able to write off whole clumps of days, and all without a drop of liquor passing my lips. Everything that was entering my system was legitimate and prescribed, but those are judgements which are subject to revision, and in any case, legitimate and prescribed can be very different from sane and sensible.
When Flanny first took charge of me she put me on mefenamic acid, trade name Ponstan. It’s a member of the aspirin family — call it the family’s rich eccentric uncle. She also tried me on Doloxene, which is the trade name for dextropropoxyphene. That was all very well for a while, but then I was in the market for something stronger. So she moved me up to Fortral (pentazocine), which has been a controlled drug for ages now but wasn’t then. In that innocent time there was no warning black dot against such things in MIMS, meaning ‘restricted’. It had an unblemished reputation. It was freely prescribed, and no one ever said it wasn’t good at its job.
In those days the MIMS was very straightforward about side-effects. It didn’t hesitate to spell them out. The Monthly Index was lagging behind the times. There were a good few toxicomanes out there (apart from me) for whom the desired effects were only part of the story.
These days the MIMS is very cagey about (for instance) hallucinations, for fear of tipping the wink to people who are actively seeking them out, homing in on the extras and indifferent to the main thrust of the drug. One man’s poison is another man’s meat. One man’s sideeffect is another man’s illicit buzz.
These were perhaps no longer the nursery slopes of analgesia, more like the middling pistes, but still far below the dizzy peaks of Mount Morphine. The black dot in MIMS marks the tree line, if you like, the point where the chill becomes permanent and life approaches the point of no return.
If the phrase ‘a cocktail of drugs’ had been invented by this time, I hadn’t heard it, but I was already a dab hand with the shaker. While I was playing doctor with myself in this wholly irresponsible fashion Audrey would sometimes pester me to let her play nurse. She was a good girl. She wanted to help. In fact earlier in the day I had let her help me get my tablets out of their bottles.
Medicine bottles weren’t childproof in those days, they were only John-proof. My hands can’t easily deal with any assignment much more challenging that manipulating a snapdragon. Pressing the cheeks of the flower, making its jaws close and then open again. That’s my style. Audrey helped me to line up the numerous antidotes to the day, Maya’s little cancellations of herself. Her expression was solemn and eager, as if she was concentrating on a tricky exam question.
There was a mocking symmetry about the whole operation, all the same. Maya was having fun at my expense. In the past I had dosed Audrey, when she was a fractious child, with hundreds and thousands, sorted by colour and consequently charged with magical power. Now she was lining up the medication for me in her turn. The drugs weren’t sweeties any more, though I was wolfing them down no differently. I was treating the medicine cupboard, lavishly stocked from the local pharmacy, as if it was the Pick’n’Mix counter at Woolworths.
Analgesics kill pain, and any excess of such drugs performs a function that can be every bit as valuable, mopping up consciousness, promoting oblivion. By this stage I couldn’t honestly have said which part of its operations was the more precious to me, suspension of joint pain or of the poisonous boredom of home.