Big blue duvet

Objective view: trouble with the cops. Last night, about ten-thirty, I dropped 2½ tabs of acid with Lee and Stu. Basically I fucked up. . . .

To begin with it was wonderful. I knelt on the floor before Stu’s hi-fi, hands extended in front of me like some new apostle as the music caressed me into near orgasm. Paroxysms of delight, unbearable ecstasy, sounds becoming shapes and coloured lights melting away in my mind—real revelatory stuff. I thought I’d found the answer, found ‘It.’ It was just so easy I couldn’t come to terms with it and I kept asking S. and L., how have we been mistaken into deceiving ourselves that this isn’t the way ahead? Just swallow a piece of paper and there it was, heaven on earth.

I knew at that moment that I’d tasted the ultimate in sensory pleasure and I could have died fulfilled right then, knowing I had had it all. I knew everything. 


But as I was lying on Stu’s bed on his big blue duvet, a seed of doubt grew in the very core of my being which I ruthlessly tried to suppress until I couldn’t. Already I was a long, long way from Stu and Lee, so I sat up and spoke.

“I am going to die.”

Lee tittered—it must have sounded so ridiculous. But the more I tried to fight it the worse it got, and the line of thought raced away into the infinite until I was holding on for dear life. I knew if I let go, that would be it . . . I can only indicate all of this in a very obtuse manner . . . I couldn’t sense my body at all. I felt for my pulse. There was nothing there.

I was as good as dead!

This was now a hellish nightmare that kept on and on and on. If I stopped breathing then my heart would stop. I started to panic and throw things, and screamed in my misery and by now Lindsey and her brother Ed (who was down for the weekend) were hovering on the stairs. I insisted they drive me to the hospital.

“I must hold on, I must hold on” I kept telling myself as I lay on my back in the car, my head in Lindsey’s lap, everything fragmented—I can only remember the journey through foreign and unfamiliar streets as a series of suffocating images. Stopped at traffic lights, Ed asking, scared now, if he should run them, me in the back shouting “Yes! YES!” and bracing my feet against the window.

About to expire. 


We found Watermouth General but it was deserted at this hour and I ran around in a panic, tearing off my shirt in, pounding at my chest in fear, trying to restart my heart. The caretaker called the police. On the way to Wessex County we got lost and stopped to phone for directions, and here the police picked us up.

At the hospital I remember a freezing walk across the car park in stocking-feet, naked to the waist, my baggy purple shirt hanging open, buttons gone. A kaleidoscopic of images: a hospital foyer with nurses, wheelchairs, geriatrics. I crawled across the floor, lost, then recovered sufficiently to be led meekly to a white windowless room. There I lay on a mattress on one corner until help arrived.

A cursory examination pronounced me saved and I again entered the world of the living. In the car I’d been convinced that normal life for me was at an end; at worst I would die, at best I'd be permanently incarcerated in an asylum—white gowns, strait-jackets, the lot. But now I began the slow descent to ‘normal’ thinking. 


Back at Westdorgan Road the police made a search of my room and grilled Stu, Lee and Lindsey. Lee, having handed over the one remaining tab at the hospital, was taken to the cells and spent a night locked up on acid, yet still stuck to his story that he was clean and an innocent bystander. He escaped charges on “statutory defence.”

I was OK within half-an-hour and spent an unreal night staring at the wall and feeling dirty.