The end of every fork

A morning and early afternoon spent fulfilling necessary obligations on campus. The last day of term meant handing in Conflict and Consensus extended essay titles (on the Beat Generation), putting in travel claims and seeing my personal tutor to collect my report.

This was quite poor—a 4 from Pugh and Gilbert, and a 3/4 from Colin Pasmore (“he has not fulfilled his promise,” etc.). Don Carwardine expressed doubts about my unorthodox style of accommodation, and said he fears the inherent instability of most squats is likely to disrupt my final year, but I placated him by promising to get rented single accommodation after the summer.

After getting back from campus, Pete and Lee and I took the LSD in the toilets of the Art College. It was Lee’s first ‘trip’ so I was curious to see how he’d receive it. We had a prematch meal of bacon, eggs, and sausage at a café at the bottom of Hatfield Street, a buzz of expectation within us as we ate. I went for a shit in the College (anxious not to crap out the drug) while Lee and Pete waited for me beneath a tree. . . .

We walked to the seafront and wandered aimlessly along the beach, watching seagulls wheel and turn in the sun which streamed in ghostly shards through the gaps in the bright yellow and grey cloud, dappling the sea. We could feel the first, tentative effects of the drug in our nervous systems, a slight alteration of observed reality, the beginnings of hallucinated awareness. I think we all felt the same way, anxious lest the trip failed to produce.

We met Lindsey on the now chilly and wind-bitten pebbles outside the Admiral. She was on her way to work behind the bar there and she railed at us about her “shitty job” and “exploitation” and we were sheepish, aware of the first fluttering sensations of drug-awkwardness and wooden paranoia. I could sense Lee fighting it, unwilling to admit that anything was happening; later, almost overwhelmed, he admitted he simply “had to compromise” himself to the inescapable acid distortion of time-space. We ventured briefly into the amusement arcades on the promenade where Lee was overcome with yawns, watering eyes and excessive salivation.

He was literally foaming at the mouth.

Then TV at the Grey House, a pop programme hosted by Mike Read, a Queen video—monstrous faces distorting rapidly—and "Uptown Girl” with Billy Joel, an ugly strutting circus dwarf, the girl in the video tempting us almost beyond endurance, melting inside, transfixed before the screen. Lee’s room appeared enormous, the doorway a vast distance from where I sat in the opposite corner, Lee and Pete perched gingerly on the bed as though there were on beams of wood high in the air.

We clambered up through the loft and onto the roof, Pete and I having a momentary dread in case Lee hurled himself to his death. What is it that happens? Blotches, marks, smudges on walls, floors and skin, are all joined in a delicate softly shifting tracery of patterns, the carpet a two-dimensional mechanical pattern, vibrating gently, my own face in the mirror blemished asnd red, overlaid by shimmering networks of lines and swirls.

We walked through the grounds of the Cathedral, the summer crowds thick around us. Lee and I had the simultaneous impression that we were being propelled forward, as though we were high up on a scaffold which was being pushed along on wheels, the crowd at our backs awaiting a public crucifixion. We couldn’t help ourselves for laughing.

In the Pembroke we tried to play chess, which was an impossible task, as if the entire dead-weight machinery of the universe blocked every move. The pieces were like lead, the infinite permutations and juxtapositions of possible moves an impossible-to-unravel complexity and mystery. We stared hard and our brains beat themselves uselessly against the brick walls of illogic. Upstairs in the toilets the flowery-pattern wallpaper swirled and blossomed and Lee saw a black-gloved hand tearing away the wallpaper as he took a piss.

Back downstairs, more fun with spatial distortions, and we perched miles high at the bar, the trough of the booths far below. Everything was either vast, or small, or a puzzling, fascinating mixture of both. Landlord Joe watched us with a bewildered and wry look as we gulped fizzy lemonade. A couple behind Lee’s shoulder took on the guise of insects, crustaceous, furtive, crawly as they talked, the man trying to pick up the woman, his high speed bug-eyed, square-jawed insistence striking me as particularly insect-like. Joe became a sphinx and we crouched in our seats as he looked down on us with sly elongate Arab-eyes.

The next moment Lee said he couldn’t move and so he sat there in a dread paralysis, telling us where to move his chess pieces. He said that his left arm felt as if it no longer belonged to him and he could feel his own arm moving inside the mechanical outer skin. Then, as we packed the chess set away, his arms completely lost their connection with the rest of his body and for a moment we all three saw them as belonging to someone else. I held my own hand up before my face and realised it was possible to coolly and cleanly slice away each successive layer of matter with my eyes, cutting through outer dermis, muscle, tendon, the sub-skin muscle pulsing with life, until at last I reached the stark, out-splayed skeletal fingers.

We decided to go to the Bat and Ball, a dim idea in our minds to meet Stu, Gareth and Barry; we seemed to walk for a long time and cover no distance at all, but if we glanced away and glanced back, the scenery directly in front of us had leaped yards closer. It was a strange, strange sensation walking each one of us alone together past people with hawk faces and spindly spider legs. Each person we passed presented a physique and facial appearance more laughable and pitifully deformed than the last, and we laughed so loudly and immediately that I feared we were about to get beaten up.

Finally, after what seemed an interminable length of time and an endless cavalcade of freaks and grotesqueries, we reached the vast road junctions next to the Bat and Ball, great deserts of tarmac which we ran across feeling conspicuous and anxious. I went into a ‘phone box to ring Barry and Stu, but almost suffocated on the thick piss smell. They weren’t answering.

We went in the pub’ briefly but couldn’t bear the hostile cartoon faces and so walked out to the grass, walking through green rubber trees with cauliflower leaves into a great amphitheatre. A pregnant woman walked towards us, her blue dress stretched tight over her protuberant belly, and we were disgusted when we saw the domed head and the line of spine of the curled up foetus inside her. Lee said everything looked like a cheap ‘60s ciné film. He seemed uncomprehending and confused but eventually came to terms with the things he saw. As we sat on the grass I chewed a root but had to spit it out when it turned into a worm.

We wandered back to the seafront, our movements now fluid, now mechanical, our bodies not our own. We ate burgers and drank lemonade and dropped in at the Admiral to see Lindsey behind the bar being leered at by disgusting old alchies. At a loss now. Pete looked bored, so we ended up back home at Maynard Gardens watching TV. We could see through it all, plumb the blatant advertising come-ons and the cheap pretences with a weary ease.

Lee and I rounded things off by going to an all-night café for a plateful of semi-cold leftovers and a look at the freaks, funsters and derelicts, which at this time and in our state was a terrible place.

Next to Lee a bleary-eyed drunk slumped over a plate of congealed baked beans, his cigarette burning down in the ashtray as he tried to pick up an unresponsive and cold faced girl who sneered and smile-snarled at his pathetic stories and chat-up routines, humouring him, just passing the time of night—with a flash of recognition, we could see what is “on the end of every fork,” cleave through these poses, acts, charades, masks and fancy costumes and reveal the chittering human organism beneath, squirming naked in its unlovely insect gore, see humanity and all of human life as it really is—harsh foul-mouthed laughter, black fingernails, feeble dirty hands, grubby sweat-bright faces, the smear of cheap lipstick amid the greasy plates, all the contemptible vanities of fashion and hairstyles transfixed by the eye of understanding.

We left feeling tarnished and unclean, the town alive with racing police cars.

A slow wearying comedown . . . bed soon . . . it’s almost three.