Monkey House Blues

by Dominic Stevenson

  But for us the jail had less in common with a Louisiana chain gang than a mental hospital. It was more Cuckoo’s Nest than San Quentin. Though the wing was eerily peaceful, due to the strict regimen and threat of collective punishments, there were a number of prisoners who clearly belonged in an asylum. One named Dougou Liang spent much of his time trying to catch invisible butterflies, a task he pursued in a waltz, plucking the unseen miscreants out of thin air. He was reaching the end of a 20-year stretch for killing a burglar who tried to rob his house. This was no Tony Martin case; I doubt he would have got a custodial sentence in the UK. A tragic figure, he’d spent more than ten years in a hospital for the criminally insane but had been moved to a ‘normal’ prison for the last few years of his sentence. One of the more poignant moments of my time in Ti Lan Qiao was seeing this cheerless soul walk free after some nineteen years inside.

  Another prisoner acquired the nickname ‘Scarleg’ due to a number of bloody scratches he had down the side of his thigh. He always looked as if he’d just walked out of a thornbush wearing shorts, but that was the least of his problems. I had no idea how it had happened, but his skull had a hole in it the size of a small melon. The surgeon had made a pig’s ear out of the stitches, too, so it looked as if he’d had the top of his head chopped off with a machete. He was chubby and had a robotic walk that made him look like a fat, drunken duck. He was also clearly more than a bit simple. One night he was put on night-watch duties with another prisoner the foreigners liked to call Grumpy. Grumpy was in the neighbouring cell to my own and was disliked by the Chinese, having been convicted of raping his ten-year-old daughter. When Scarleg went to wake him for the nightshift Grumpy wouldn’t wake up, so Scarleg hit him over the head with a wooden chair. Rather than wake up, Grumpy started to bleed profusely from the wound and Scarleg became convinced he’d killed him. Terrified he’d be executed for murder, he attempted to take his own life by sticking his fingers into an electrical socket – which proved unsuccessful. Eventually a guard heard the commotion and sounded the alarm, and within minutes the whole wing was woken to the sound of Grumpy being taken on a stretcher to the hospital wing and Scarleg to God knows where. A few days later Grumpy was back with a bandaged head, and then news arrived that Scarleg had been exiled to a prison farm in the countryside.

  The blurring of boundaries between prisons and asylums were a feature of Communist rule all over the world. Like the Soviet Union, which often sent dissidents to mental hospitals, Mao’s China had a similar strategy that reasoned that if you didn’t like living in this socialist paradise you must be mad. The endless reform and self-criticism sessions were delivered as a kind of therapy, and the atmosphere this method of reform inculcated owed more to the realms of psychology than criminology.

  To the foreigners, the notion of reform was a joke. Nobody felt they’d done anything wrong, other than getting caught. If there were sins to atone for, they were a private affair and certainly not the business of jailers or cadres. And so the Westerners remained outside the apparatus of state ideological guidance and were generally left to their own devices to navigate their own ideas of reform, which suited them. For me it was a blessing to have got this far, and my first weeks in Ti Lan Qiao were a happy time as I came to terms with the last eight months and began to map out what to do with the next two years of my life.

  [7]

  Some Kind of Eden

  Jürgen and I were learning new blues riffs. A mate of his in Germany had sent over a box of cassettes, so he’d written out the lyrics of a few choice tunes for me to sing. His friend had sent a bottleneck slide, too, so I played rhythm and sang while he did his Ry Cooder thing. Blues legend Robert Johnson’s ‘Hellhound on my Trail’ was a favourite, as was Lowell Fulson’s ‘Reconsider Baby’. Jürgen was very intense when it came to music and took it extremely seriously. The songs had to be perfect, and he’d devote many hours sitting in his cell getting his lead part right before we played together.

  McLoughlin bought a guitar, too: I think he was feeling left out. It was a bright-blue Chinese guitar that he’d got the consul to buy him with some cash his brother had sent. He asked Jürgen and me to give him lessons, so we showed him a few basic chords to practise. I doubt he spent more than an hour and a half practising before he gave up.

  Larry was writing his diary, which seemed to be an exposé of the Chinese prison system. He wanted to smuggle it out of the prison up his backside, and I told him he’d better keep it brief. I think he saw himself as more of a human-rights campaigner than a dope smuggler, and if he’d been rich I imagine he’d have worked as a volunteer for Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch or some other organisation. His handwriting was barely legible and the text was interspersed with serial numbers of boxes leaving the prison workshops to go to the West. It seemed like a pointless exercise to me, but it gave some meaning to his life. I think he’d convinced himself that rather than being an ageing failed dope smuggler who’d got caught yet again, he was actually working undercover for some benign organisation shining a light on the dark secrets of the Chinese state.

  One day, I’d got a postcard from a friend in Goa and Larry’s eyes lit up.

  ‘Maybe you could get one of your pals to send us some trips. You can get at least one hit under each stamp.’

  It’d been a while since I’d had any acid, and I couldn’t think of any place in the world less conducive to taking the stuff. The thought of walking down the wing watching the bars bend freaked me out. If something kicked off in the jail with the Chinese, it didn’t bear thinking about.

  The postcard was a picture of the Anjuna Flea Market: a place I knew well. It was shot through a wide-angle lens and you could see the rows of traders amassed on the paddy field, with the palm trees of the beach fading into the horizon. In some respects, Goa had been a key location in my eventual downfall, having introduced me to a new subculture of scammers whose idea of work was to cross a border with a few kilos of dope once or twice a year. The more I visited the place, the more it occurred to me that most of my friends were drug dealers.

  I’d arrived in Goa in the middle of Mescaline Ronnie’s birthday party. Ronnie was a well-heeled Goa regular from Amsterdam whose parties were legendary. My cab driver took me directly to the party site in a bamboo grove in Anjuna and pulled up beside a sea of Enfield motorbikes strewn across a paddy field. He hooted his horn at a couple of kids trying to siphon petrol out of the tanks, who looked up briefly before continuing with their work. I climbed out of the car and could feel the pulse of the music in the distance as I slung my guitar bag over my shoulder and headed towards the monotonous beat. The sun was coming up but nobody had noticed, and every chai mat had paraffin lamps burning along the pathway towards the dance area. The coconut palms were painted in fluorescent colours, with Day-Glo streamers dangling between them, and plaster of Paris busts of Shiva and Ganesh had been placed strategically beneath ultraviolet lights. The daylight was unkind to these decorations, and it looked more like a Hindu kids’ jelly-and-balloon party than a rave.

  Jonathon, an old English friend from Thailand and Japan, appeared looking like something from Lord of the Flies, with a Technicolor bandana and Errol Flynn-style Robin Hood boots. We hugged, but I could tell he was too out of it to speak as he careered off towards the dance floor with his arms flailing in the air.

  I found a shaded spot under a tree where a guy was making sugar-cane juice from an engine-driven mangle, crushing the sticks into a greenish-yellow liquid, with ice cubes bobbing about on top. I sat and drank the syrupy potion, surveying the party from a safe distance. I’d been sitting on a bus all night from Kerala: a bumpy, sleepless journey during which I’d banged my head repeatedly as the back of the bus leapt off its wheels with every hill we encountered. I was in no mood to party and wanted to find a beach and some breakfast. I’d been in India a month and had fallen in love with the place. I’d stopped over in Bangladesh for a couple of weeks on the way, so the culture shock was minimal after t
hat benighted country. From Calcutta, I’d made my way down the eastern seaboard to Madras, where I stayed in the beautiful Broadlands Hotel. There had been some adventures, and I’d overdone the opium and found myself strung out in the fishing town of Puri waiting for the stuff to wear off. After a week of visiting temples and off-licences in Tamil Nadu, I’d made my way by bus and riverboat through Kerala towards Goa.

  The beach was deserted apart from a few party stragglers dipping their feet in the ocean while coming down off their trips. I sat in a beach cafe eating grilled prawns and drinking banana lassi with a Swedish hippy from Gothenburg. We shared a spliff as tattooed, suntanned couples on Enfields began to appear, riding down the sandy tracks towards the beach. The party was still going, but the heat of the sun was too much for most, and gurning, Lycra-clad ravers began arriving for breakfast. Riding motorbikes in Goa while on LSD is fun, but you feel like you’re going much faster than you actually are. If you’re not careful the bike falls over in the deep sand, as happened to one of the party-goers I was watching. I recognised him from his gangly walk and thick spectacles as he left the bike on its side and staggered towards the beach bar.

  Alexander, an old South African friend whom I’d met while living in Kyoto, had come to Goa to see what all the fuss was about. He’d been here a week and was just getting into the swing of it, wearing tie-dye Lycra leggings and loud paisley shirts. It took him a while to recognise me, as his trip was still raging and his eyesight was lousy at the best of times. We’d taken acid together many times and had started to have our own Goa parties in clubs on Kiyamachi Street with a small, close-knit group of Japanese drug fiends. LSD was posted in sheets from contacts in California and Amsterdam, or else brought in by ‘condom express’ from friends who’d been to India. Full Moon parties had yet to take off in Thailand, but Goa was the party mecca in the late ’80s, and small groups of party people were spreading the word.

  We bought a couple of green coconuts with a straw sticking out of the top and wandered down to the beach for a swim. It was good to be amongst friends after my solo travels, and Goa was much more tourist-friendly than most other parts of India. By lunchtime I’d rented a motorbike, found a room and bought a ten-gram stick of charas. All I needed were some colourful clothes. By day two I had the clothes to match and my first ‘Goa tattoo’: an inside-leg burn from a hot motorbike exhaust, a ‘rite of passage’ scar that everyone seemed to have.

  By day three in Goa, I’d settled in and found myself a place to sleep on a friend’s porch in Anjuna. Rather than paying for a room, as I had for my first couple of days, it made more sense to stay in one of the big houses my friends had rented. Alexander was staying in the same bungalow, and we went down to the Wednesday flea market to score some psychedelics. Within ten minutes we’d bought a two-hundred-and-fifty-microgram blotter and a strip of synthetic mescaline of indeterminate strength, with the idea of going halves. The mescaline didn’t tear in half, and one piece was bigger than the other, so I had the big half of the mescaline, while he had two-thirds of the acid trip. We wandered around the flea market waiting for the drugs to kick in, looking at the jewellery stalls and drinking warm Kingfisher lager. As is often the case, we started to question whether the stuff was working. It must have been an hour since we’d taken it. Perhaps we’d been ripped off?

  Then it started, and the flea market melted before my eyes, exploding into kaleidoscopic fragments. I felt sick, too, and then I lost Alexander and had to go and sit by the beach and get away from people whose faces resembled the characters in Francis Bacon paintings. It was getting dark, and I was getting paranoid. How long ago had I taken this stuff? Was it ever going to wear off? I went to look for Alexander, but the flea market had gone and everyone was staring at me or, worse still, asking me if I was OK. The palm trees all had faces, and they weren’t happy with me at all, bending over and wagging their palms at me. I took refuge in a beach bar.

  ‘Drink?’ said the owner, whose face I couldn’t look at.

  Why would I want to drink? I thought. I can’t even feel my tongue. I scanned my brain for words for drinks, but there were none there. The owner went to another table, sensing I was lost for words.

  ‘Kingfisher,’ I spluttered, finally finding a word.

  A beer arrived, and I stared at the green bottle that was breathing in and out as if it were alive. People across the bar were looking at me and giggling amongst themselves.

  ‘Oh dear, look at the state of him,’ I could hear one of them saying.

  ‘He’s lost the plot,’ said another.

  I left the bar without touching the beer and wandered towards the beach, which I found less intimidating. I decided I was desperate to go to the toilet, and it couldn’t wait. I’d have to dig a hole in the sand and do it there and then. There was no other choice, so I started to dig, and then they arrived.

  Dogs! Mangy dogs, rabid dogs, dribbling hellhounds with gnashing jaws, and they were all around me, growling. This is it, I thought. I’m going to be eaten alive by a pack of wolves. I was terrified, and they knew it. They could smell my fear, and I could smell the yellow pus of the sores on their skin. I stood up and bent my knees, trying to see eye to eye with them while walking backwards towards the water. I couldn’t see how many there were, but their barks brought new recruits, and by the time my feet touched the wet sand of the water’s edge they were well into double figures.

  They followed me into the water, and I started to see them more clearly now. The phosphorus in the water lit the scene, and I quickly turned and ran into the deep and belly-flopped as it got above waist-depth. Turning round again I could see they were still coming at me, swimming out of their depth, paws pounding the waves, but I had the advantage now. I was standing waist-deep and I lunged at the first dog in the pack with the full force of my fist, and the psycho mutt squealed and started to swim back to the shore, taking his gang with him.

  It was freezing. I must’ve stood in the water for ten minutes, waiting to see if they had gone, and finally I ventured out and walked along the beach in knee-deep water towards some lights up ahead.

  ‘Your beer is warm. Would you like some ice in it?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  I could talk. The trip was finally wearing off, and I was cold from the sea. The beer was foul, with a nasty glycerine aftertaste, but the bottle was no longer alive and people no longer stared at me. I’d survived my first Goa trip, but it’d been pretty hairy. The faces on the palm trees might have been the drugs, but the dogs were very real. They were the hellhounds of blues folklore that Robert Johnson had sung about, and now they were on my trail.

  It was my first and last bad trip in Goa. After that the whole place turned into a psychedelic dream, and it was one of the happiest times of my life. I couldn’t believe I was so happy; was it all a bit too good to be true? So what: we were having a ball, and the parties just got better and better. Goa in ’89 was unbelievable. Perhaps it was akin to being in San Francisco in ’69; there was a feeling that you were in exactly the right place at the right time. I’d been into punk music as a teenager, but I’d been at boarding school at the time and was too young to get fully absorbed into the culture. In Goa, however, we’d hit the bulls eye. If you were into music, motorbikes, drugs and so on it was some kind of Eden. I’d never experienced anything like it, and still haven’t 20 years later.

  Everyone was euphoric, and people walked around with giant grins on their faces, as if we were all privy to a well-kept secret. I was aware that the delirious joy of everyone was at least partly drug-fuelled, but the geography and timing of the ‘happening’ seemed to have a momentum of its own. Some of the older crowd had overdone it in the ’70s and had given up drugs altogether, but they still looked like they were on Ecstasy all the time. Many in the ‘scene’ were intensely fashion-conscious, too, and it took a while for people like me who’d turned up from travelling around the subcontinent to get with it. Different nationalities tended to gather in groups, so there wer
e ‘the Italians’ and ‘the Americans’ and, of course, ‘the English’, who probably comprised the single largest group.

  One of the oldest Englishmen in Goa was Acid Eric, a white-haired Yorkshireman with a furry freak-brother’s beard and a single waist-length dreadlock. He’d lived in San Francisco in the ’60s, where he’d hung out with such counter-culture luminaries as the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead, and had ended up with a ten-year jail sentence for tax evasion. Eric was something of a local legend and would hold court at parties and dispense liquid LSD to the faithful. At one of my first Goa parties, I made the pilgrimage to a small bamboo shack on the hillside above the mayhem, where he sat cross-legged with a couple of young girls by his side like the Maharishi. He handed me a shot of the fruity potion as a preacher might give Communion, and I felt the strychnine burst into my bloodstream in an instant.