Give the Anarchist a Cigarette

by Mick Farren

  After a reasonable period of mourning, he went back to a previous and longer-running fixation. He had somewhere acquired a junk-store epidiascope, and he would spend long hours projecting images onto Hilary’s wall, distorting, flashing and strobing them in time to albums like Charles Mingus’ Mingus Oh Yeah and Jimmy Guiffre’s Train and the River. Although no such term yet existed, Alex was actually attempting to invent the psychedelic lightshow. In this, of course, he was not unique. Later we’d discover that other people in other parts of the city – indeed, in other parts of the planet – were doing the self-same thing. Such thinking-in-common duplication was uncannily prevalent around that time, and was certainly the priming for the hell that broke loose when we all became aware of each other’s existence. The kind of multimedia environment for which Alex and all the others were instinctively heading would ideally need psychotropic drugs to complete the equation, but, having smoked marijuana for the previous couple of years, this wasn’t a problem. If anything, it merely increased the sense that something was out there, just out of reach; something we couldn’t exactly define, but something that absolutely must not be missed.

  The Safari Tent, the Rio and Finches

  It can only be self-evident why marijuana was and is illegal – back then, right now and continues to remain so. For me, the first puff was enough, and all subsequent and repeated indulgence never failed to recapture that first careless rapture. I inhaled to the deepest, and immediately experienced a drastic revision of my perspectives. As Valentine Michael Smith might have put it, before he was eaten by his devoted followers, I groked the fullness of my role in the cosmos and didn’t like what I discovered. One of the very first revelations was why those in power wanted to keep this herb well away from the likes of me. The truth, as I saw it, was that they feared the resulting shift in perspective. The habitual dope smoker ruthlessly imposes the rules of fundamental logic on those who seek to control him or her. Marijuana prompts repeated asking of the question ‘Why?’

  As small children we learn that ‘Why?’ is the one response guaranteed to drive parents and guardians rapidly apeshit. Why? Because it’s the question that ultimately forces the answer ‘Because I goddamned well told you so’, and reduces all social contracts to the base level of ‘Because I’m more powerful than you, and can make you very unhappy if you don’t obey me’. Those wielding power really can’t stand to make that admission. In the nuclear family, it’s the final fallback. In global politics, it’s the fall of democracy to tyranny in drag, even if a bovine electorate did hand the sons-of-bitches power in the first place. That’s why Vietnam was such a mess. The grunts got high and asked why. Some outsiders contend that dope makes you stupid. A serious misconception. It may cause a certain vagueness and short-term memory loss but, basically, those who get stupid behind reefer are invariably stupid in the first place. It just manifests itself to a greater degree.

  Cannabis reduces the user to a more child-like and innocent state, and sooner or later he or she tends to get round to wanting to know why we have to fight the communists, why we need a policy of mutually assured destruction, why the pubs have to close at eleven o’clock, and ten on Sundays. At least, that was how it was in 1965. Today, of course, we have MTV, Mortal Kombat and MAC 10s. Many kids today appear mesmerised. In my youth, however, it was definitely dope that prompted the refusal to accept the reality of the Emperor’s new clothes, or, for that matter, his new guided missile, his new economic policy, his new law-enforcement measures or his latest soundbite.

  A study of sufferers from aphasia, conducted during the Reagan administration, showed that these individuals, as a result of a kind of brain damage akin to cortical thrombosis, place less reliance on the context of words and glean more information from the visual aspects of the speaker. They also turned out to have a very unique attitude to politicians. A number of young aphasics were placed in front of a TV, shown tapes of broadcasts by Ronald Reagan and asked to record their impressions. The almost complete consensus was that the man on the screen was shifty, manipulative, deceitful, of only moderate intelligence and had a conman’s contempt for his audience. To put it crudely, stripped of the massage of a Hollywood-trained voice reading a Washington-crafted script, Reagan came across as a dreary shill. Marijuana would seem to produce a similar effect to aphasia, making it easier to penetrate the tailored doubletalk of persuasion. The brain on pot is less easily washed, so to speak.

  I know there are those who will now jump all over me, accusing me of seeking to imply that dope creates a kind of brain damage. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but look before you leap, pilgrim, because you will then be expected to explain to me why, when not a single cannabis-related death has been recorded (except maybe for that of an unfortunate Afghani porter who had forty pounds of gold-seal hashish fall on his head), it is outlawed as a social intoxicant. Similar benevolent claims can hardly be made for the two judicially sanctioned highs of nicotine and alcohol. Anyway, it’s my book and I’ll be the one to twist the facts to suit my arguments.

  About the only drawbacks to marijuana I’ve ever noticed, aside from going to the fridge and then forgetting whether you wanted beer or a cheese sandwich, are that it makes you a little paranoid and has to be obtained by extra-legal means. Obviously this must beg the question whether the former is merely a result of the latter, and are we talking current environment instead of an intrinsic property of the high? At the time under discussion it was possible to do six months or more in an overcrowded nineteenth-century prison for a single joint. About the only consolation was that everyone and their uncle wasn’t smoking the stuff, and law enforcement wasn’t as obsessively clued up to stop-and-search as a means of social control. Of course, us proto-hippies had to totally negate this safety in anonymity by growing our hair down to our feet and wearing our most freakish costumes, which was about as intelligent as carrying a sign on our backs that read ‘Search Me, I’m Holding’.

  The rule in the early Sixties was that white dealers had hash and black dealers had grass. The twain rarely met and, when they did, it wasn’t always amicable. Since, drugwise, Ladbroke Grove in the mid-Sixties was solidly entrenched black turf, my first couple of years as a novice hophead were devoted solely to the herb. Even the places where black and white interacted were fairly few and far between and not without a certain tension. Although West Indian hustlers came and went freely and were welcomed in white hipster territory, in the reverse situation the white boy had to move with circumspection. To hang out in any of the Jamaican shebeens – the illegal drinking joints that dotted Lancaster, Golborne and All Saints Roads back then – you pretty much had to have a specific invitation. Common ground existed in the West End r&b clubs, like the Flamingo in Wardour Street, but one had to be out of one’s mind to score in the Flamingo. The big Friday Allniter featured in its frenetic, ashtray interior not only Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames and the coolest dancers in town, but a whole rainbow of footpads, cut-purses, plausible thieves, serial rapists and knife-wielding rip-off artists – both gangsters and gangstas, to make a fine crosstime distinction.

  One place that did specialise in facilitating cultural mix-and-match was a Caribbean restaurant called the Safari Tent on Westbourne Park Road. The owner was a West Indian with a Harry Belafonte lilt called Johnny Millington, who affected a white tux and lived in a James Bond island fantasy. With an ingratiating charm, he made reasonably sure his customers all got along, and his place scored big as a protected no man’s land where Swedish au pairs could meet rude boys and get into trouble, and where the likes of Alex, Hilary and I could eat chicken and bananas and wonder if we might be able to cop a quid deal of grass off one of the sinister characters in pork-pie hats and Ray Charles shades staring impassively as we white youth aspired to cool. Johnny Millington took a definite shine to me, and his food probably saved me from serious malnutrition, living as I was on bread, salami, chocolate and beer. He was also extremely tolerant of ‘characters’. He seemed to accept me as some
kind of up-and-coming ‘character’, which I didn’t believe back in those formative days, but maybe he knew something I had yet to learn.

  Another ‘character’ of whom Johnny was overtly tolerant was a woman called Bobbie. Somewhere in her mid-twenties, Bobbie was the daughter of a sergeant in the US Air Force stationed at the base at Ruislip. She had dropped out, allegedly to have an affair with Miles Davis. On good days she was vivacious, flirtatious, dressed to the nines and looked like Diana Ross the day after she got rid of the other Supremes. On a bad night she would be doing a weak imitation of Billie Holiday’s corpse. That I would sit and talk to her in either condition resulted in us becoming firm friends, and I valued her greatly.

  It was Bobbie who eventually took me to the Rio. The Rio was further west on Westbourne Park Road and considerably more heavy-duty than the Safari Tent. Its vibe was not improved by it being known to a coterie of idiot teenage mods, who only went there to score, and usually committed at least six faux pas per visit, generally fouling the atmosphere. Just to make matters worse, the joint had been the hangout of Lucky Gordon of Profumo scandal fame, and was well known to the West London Drug Squad. Here the Ray Charles shades were hostile rather than impassive, and the Swedish girls had long since enlisted in the Legion of the Lost.

  For hash, as opposed to grass, we had to go out of the neighbourhood. Sometimes, when private contacts failed, the required trip was to Goodge Street, in the north-eastern wastes of the West End, which, after gentrification, they called Fitzrovia. Our destination was one of the pubs in the Finches chain. Finches attempted to give all its pubs an individual name, but no one bothered to remember them. Finches was always Finches, differentiated only by the name of the street on which it might stand – Finches on Portobello, Finches in Holborn, Finches on Notting Hill Gate, and so on. Finches in Goodge Street was the pub frequented by lank-haired, transient young men with scrubby beards, bedrolls and names like Gyp, Dosser or Junkie Paul. It was a stop in the metropolis on the rather drab, hitchhike trail of the home-grown English beatnik. (A grey and fatigue-green creature of sullen countenance, more beat as in beaten than in what Allen Ginsberg called beatitude.) Donovan attempted to immortalise the place in the song ‘Sunny Goodge Street’, although I can’t recall a sunny day on Goodge Street until Felix Dennis moved Bunch Books there. Up until then I had only visited after dark or when it was raining. Bert Jansch, the only real contender for the title of ‘Britain’s Bob Dylan’, had also created his first album under the Goodge Street ethos. (That’s the one called Bert Jansch, with the songs ‘Needle of Death’ and ‘Running from Home’ on it.)

  Finches in Goodge Street was frankly depressing. Its gloomy, almost cave-like interior smelled of wet wool, unwashed humans and morning-after beer, and many of its patrons – the first youthful heroin addicts I ever encountered – looked to be really hoping to die before they got old, although, of course, being the dreariest of folk fascists, you would never catch them listening to, let alone quoting, the Who.

  Akin to the Rio, Finches was also well known to the drug task force out of Tottenham Court Road nick. Unakin to the Rio, where too many heavy manners on the part of the constabulary could spark screams of ‘rassclat’ and run the risk of a violent incident, the cops thought they had the Finches’ clientele sufficiently cowed that they could safely prowl through, two or three times a night, a squad of both uniformed plods and narcs in trenchcoats, like Jack Hawkins in Gideon of the Yard, flashing electric torches and radiating overt intimidation. The only whimper of protest came when some fool with a guitar, with ‘this machine kills something or the other’ stencilled on the body, started into the Liverpool folk song ‘Johnny Todd’, which also happened to be the theme tune from the BBC cop show Z Cars. Finches’ only marginally redeeming feature was that one could usually score a quid deal of tinfoil-wrapped hash, Oxo or dried-up boot polish, depending on the condition of the market and the honesty of the traders.

  A secondary consideration was that it was a magnet to runaway young women who had hitched from God knows where seeking bright lights, big city and some kind of English Jack Kerouac. All Junkie Pete had to offer was a night of nodding out in some shed with a broken lock by a railway yard. We Grove boys actually had homes, and even the House of the Chinese Landlord could look good from that perspective. Unfortunately these would-be beatnik maidens were prone to depart suddenly, stealing everything they could get their grubby hands on.

  I hope the picture of these formative days doesn’t seem overly idyllic, implausibly without practical worry or financial challenge. We were young, and times were relatively good. Rents had yet to go through the roof, but if you think we were worthless parasites living off the legendary post-war welfare state, forget it. Never having a legitimate job, I didn’t qualify for the dole, and what was then called National Assistance came with far too many strings and inspections by social workers. The need for money nagged constantly: money to survive, money as mobility and money to turn fantasy into reality. At times we became like the Bash Street Kids in our obsession to get some fucking money. In one desperate period I went so far as to try casual labour at the Caby Hall, the Joe Lyons food factory at Hammersmith. After two days of tying up bundles of flattened cardboard boxes with hairy string and dropping them into a chute – I presume for some kind of recycling, although no one ever saw fit to tell me where the chute went – I decided factory work was definitely an enemy of the human psyche and resolved never to do it again.

  This also marked my philosophical divorce from the thinking of the traditional Left. I saw no innate virtue, and certainly no vestige of dignity, in mind-numbing labour. I quickly observed that the majority of industrial jobs were given to humans only because the moves involved were too complicated for an economically viable machine. We had the technology for a leisure society, goddamn it. All we lacked was a system of exchange and distribution. So why destroy ourselves in the satanic mills when the New Jerusalem was so obviously there for the building? Unfortunately the only writings on the subject were archaic utopian fancies like Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism. Given the Old Left’s condition of homophobia and cultural benightedness, these were not articles to wave around at a meeting of the Socialist Workers’ Party as if they were Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book.

  In our bouts with factory work, and the telling of it later, Alex Stowell had me beaten hands down for pure absurdity. Maybe I had bundled boxes, but he had managed to snag this supposedly brilliant gig painting Father Christmas-shaped cakes of soap at a novelty firm called Chiswick Products. Unfortunately, his artistic bent caused him to take the entire afternoon to paint one soap, when the expected piecework target was perhaps fifty or so. To the hilarity of the women who made up the rest of the workforce, he was let go after the first day, and thus his career as an industrial worker actually came to an end twice as fast as mine.

  I tended to fare better in the service industries, and experienced a couple of bouts of retail larceny. I also worked for a good part of one summer in the catering department of the London Zoo, during which time I became a reasonably proficient short-order cook. I quite enjoyed this stint of cooking hamburgers in the zoo. It meant constant interface with other humans, and, on my breaks, I could go and watch the different species of animal cope with the madness of permanent incarceration and inflict what payback they could on their captors. The chimpanzees were especially ingenious in the way they exacted their revenge on gawking humanity. Their best trick was masturbating openly in front of the visitors, and laughing as said visitors then freaked out and covered the eyes of their offspring. The chimps had a highly tuned and instinctive grasp of the level of sexual repression in the mid-twentieth century.

  At other times I did the typography on a radical Hindu newspaper – bizarre, since I couldn’t understand a word of the text or headlines – and I also worked for a theatrical designer gluing huge fake gems onto a set for King Lear. (See, Mum, the art-school training didn’t go to waste.) For two ill-co
nceived weeks I actually acted in some Greek director’s faux-Godard movie with a script so dire it mercifully never saw the light of day and which, I hope, was long ago destroyed by fire or celluloid decomposition. Periods also went by, though, when I merely drifted. During one of these bouts of shiftless depression I was adopted by an Australian lesbian couple who invited me over for meals and countless drinks, and tended to treat me as a pet, but then the younger and prettier of the two crossed over and had an affair with the editor of the Hindu newspaper, who was married anyway, and I decided it was time to exit that can of worms before the meltdown. If all else failed and the time of the year was right, I would drift back to selling shoddy novelties on the tourist streets of the West End, maintaining as I did my contacts among the street-trading fraternity.