Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

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.

My drug use could slide in a single dose from the medical to the slyly recreational. In terms of pain I had my good days and my bad days. That summer I preferred the bad days. On my bad days I could gobble down the hundreds and thousands of nothingness with a clear conscience.

A great advantage of the wheelchair was that it masked many of the effects. If my movements were poorly coördinated, who would ever know? Not everyone expected prodigies of mental alertness from me either. At home with Mum and Dad, ritual exchanges were the norm. I could fit in perfectly well while being, to be blunt about it, off my head half the time.

So much for drugs. There was also a sex-scandal component to the family bust-up of summer ’72, and again it had its origins in the tapestry shoulder-bag. That bag grassed me up pretty thoroughly. It provided the authorities with evidence of more than one kind. There were any number of occasions in which my CHAPs acquaintances could have availed themselves of the convenient storage I innocently provided. Josh Tosh had entrances on more than one street, and could be used as a short cut. This short cut would inevitably turn into a long one, since we would end up dawdling by the perfume counter to try out fragrances from sample spray bottles. If I tried to hurry the party up, I too would receive squirts of clashing fragrances, asked which I liked best. There was sometimes a certain amount of rummaging in my bag, which meant that I was being used as a sort of mule in a narcissistic, mercifully small-scale shoplifting operation, smuggling an expensive bottle of Eau Sauvage or some such elixir past the gates of the shop and into the street.

A stray copy of Nigel

There was no cologne forgotten in the Greek tapestry shoulderbag, but it turned out to contain, along with the ancient roaches, a magazine. It was a picture magazine, and the pictures were of young men arranged in dreamy poses on piles of cushions, wearing socks and not a lot else. Looking sultry, if thumb-sucking strikes you as a maddening come-on. Some CHAPs fellow or other, some friend of a friend of a friend, had slipped this tentative smut into the community pocket and forgotten to retrieve it. So there I was, delivered into my parents’ hysteria by a stray copy of Nigel . Or was it Rupert ?

I can remember only too well. It was Jeremy . Mum brandished it at me often enough, waving it in my face as if she was a street-hawker trying to get me to buy the bloody thing rather than a mother losing her always elusive sense of proportion. ‘Where did you get this? Who else knows about it? Who sold you the drugs? Who sold you this filth?’

I wasn’t going to admit to them that the magazine wasn’t mine. I refused to be ashamed. Of course it was stupid that Mum and Dad would think I had a secret life based round those insipid images. If I was going to overcome all the practical obstacles in the way of getting hold of a dirty magazine, I’d want something properly vile for my trouble. And someone who looked as if he’d been shaving for more than a week. Mum and Dad were both angry and upset, but through the chinks in the oblivion I had so patiently contrived for myself I could detect a complicating emotion. In some way Mum was partly blaming him for the rotten way I was turning out.

Once again the Inquisition was on the wrong track. If Mum and Dad had wanted a sex scandal, they could have had one, and it would have been a little bit spicier than a few pictures of dreary ephebes languid on the pillows. I’d broken the law in a public toilet on the A505 outside Royston, on the way home from Cambridge. It wasn’t a private place, and still I had dared to have carnal congress with another man. No one had interrupted us, so my exhibitionistic streak was mildly frustrated. I wanted to shout out to the shocked air of Trees, Abbotsbrook Estate, Bourne End, ‘It only lasted a few minutes and it happened in a public bog, but it was bloody beautiful!’ Knowing that the words ‘bog’ and ‘bloody’ would have as much impact as the deed itself.

The man who was my first real sexual partner said something wonderful to me. It wasn’t wonderful in a conventional way. He didn’t say, for instance, ‘People fear you and turn away from you, yes, and they are right to do so, since love flows in implacable streams from your eyes and loins alike. Your gaze and your desire pierce the fogs of matter. You must forgive people for feeling inadequate to such splendour.’ What he said was a thousand times better. He said, ‘If anyone comes in, I’m helping you out, okay, mate?’ Mate! We mated and he called me mate . He certainly was helping me out, though no one disturbed us so I couldn’t pass this revelation on. He was helping me out and no mistake. Afterwards he helped me to wash my hands. I let him, though I didn’t feel the need of any cleaning up. I didn’t feel soiled. I felt elevated, charged up. This too I would have liked to pass on to Mum and Dad, not in a spirit of boasting, but humbly wishing to share.

About the time that even the most ardent fan of androgynous pop might have been becoming sick of ‘Starman’, Maya took a surprising turn. The scene that I was absorbing through drifts of medicated meditation suddenly shifted in a way that made me sit up and take notice.