The other night I was having a pint with someone and our conversation turned, for some reason, to the subject of hallucinogenic drugs. I shall identify him only to say that he was old enough to have seen it all but young enough to remember it. This already seemed to put him way ahead of the field. Many have fallen by the wayside, fallen off the perch or fallen into a dark place. He’s still very sane: or whatever passes for that these days.
He told me a harrowing story about his only seriously bad trip, out of many good ones, at a festival many years ago which involved delayed-action LSD, a mobile skeleton and Hawkwind in full heavy-metal paranoia mode. Colours changed; perceptions shifted; time expanded and contracted, often simultaneously. Every bad vibe fed into the bad vibes that were already happening, creating a feedback of negative waves.
Then, the next day, he woke up, dunked his head in a bucket of cold water and hitched back home.
Many escape less lightly from such experiences. I could, as Shakespeare observed, “a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, thy knotted and combined locks to part and each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine.”
And here it comes – when aged about twenty-two, a young man I know embarked upon a ten-day bender which even Keith Richards might have baulked at. When it was over, he realised he had unwittingly prised open a trap door to the haunted cellar of his mind where the demons lurk. Once released, they cannot be returned.
Ever since, they have been shouting the most terrible nonsense at him. Only strong medication, which he doesn’t always take as it reduces the world to two-dimensional monochrome, can keep them at bay. From being a lively, intelligent jazz musician he’s now unable to conduct a normal conversation, hold down a job or participate in social engagements. The demons have won.
My drinking companion was luckier, and also shrewder: one night of hedonism can be excused but ten consecutive ones looks like carelessness. He also knew this was a bad trip and moderated his behaviour thereafter.
I admitted that, although I was in my youth no stranger to various second-division stimulants, I shunned halluninogens. I’d always feared that I might, perhaps through my inveterate pessimism, pass into a dark place which I could later neither ignore nor forget. At university and afterwards, opportunities were presented to me. I always turned them down.
Except, as I was forced to admit in the pub chat, once.
This happened in about 1984 when I was working for a man called Simon (whose job I was soon to take over) in a publishing company called Columbus (which has been fictionalised under the name of Goldswan in a number of stories on this website). My Columbus/Goldswan episode was a complex one. One result of this was that one June evening in that year, I accepted Simon’s invitiation to attend a party in a windmill in Norfolk with about twenty other people, none of whom (or so I thought) were known to me. We set off and, a few hours later, there we were.
As the rather dissipated evening progressed, I learned two surprising facts.
The first was that Simon’s girl-friend was there. This wouldn’t have mattered were it not that four months earlier she had sent me what can only be described as an erotic Valentine’s card. A mutual friend had explained who had sent it and where she would like to meet. Because she was my boss’s girlfriend, and for no other reason, I declined. At the time, this seemed like a reasonable reaction.
In the windmill, fuelled by God knows what, I realised my mistake. Twenty minutes groping and kissing and recriminting for llost opportunities with this lovely woman under a harvest moon on the banks of a dyke a few yards from the building did not, for either of us, express what either of us might have wanted. None the less, it had to do.
The trip, if I can describe it as such, went downhill from there.
Back in the event – dishevelled and lipstick-smeared – I was listening to the lion of the gathering, a man of my age called called Andrew, describe two genuinely preposterious co-incidences that the evening had exposed regarding two of the other guests. I forget what these were becuase I suddenly realised, as soon as he announced his surname, that I had another one: we had been good friends at school when aged about ten.
I tried to remain cool. I had to pick my moment for announcing this. Then I did. For a brief moment, I felt ecstatic. I’d nailed the occasion.
Unfortunately, none of the recollections of me he described painted me in the way I recalled or would have liked. He was running the show: I was not. I didn’t have the energy to contradict him. There was also the suspicion that he might have been right about me. There was my version to assert but I couldn’t bring myself to do so.
At this point, Simon brought out the magic mushrooms. I was this time so bonkered that almost anything new could have tipped me over the edge. I wasn’t at all sure what I was ingesting and am not to this day sure if the long, strange time that followed – which included something rather like Morris dancing and something else which more resembled one of the darker scenes from The Wicker Man – was the result of the mushrooms or the emotional demands of the evening.
At the end, I felt a number of emotions, none of them particularly great – drained, dissatisfied, restless and sad in roughly equal measure.
The next day, we all got up and made no reference to what had passed. The woman, my childhood friend, my fellow dancers – all were as nothing. She revealed herself now to be uninterested in me, the previous friend to be unlikeable and the others unmemorable, as in both cases I probably was to them. All in all, there seemed little good I could take from the event aside from a distaste for hallunicongens. The night in the windmill could have been a hinge on which my life swung. It wasn’t.
As one ages, it’s impossible not to reflect on the moments that might have changed us. In truth, these happen every second: in our subjective memories, however, there are only a few that seem to afford these options. This appears to have been one.
People who’ve had good experiences with these things can speak with an almost religious awe about them, as if they had been briefly able to reach up and touch the face of God. My experience in the windmill was more like reaching down and touching a damp flannel. Given that I probably also have a locked trap door in my head, below which lurk demons that only the wrong combination of brain-twisting drugs can release, perhaps that’s just as well.
Brian Quinn
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