Senor Nice: Straight Life From Wales to South America

by Howard Marks

  Psychic Dave came in, accompanied by Leroy and Martin Baker. ‘Well at least Psychic Dave has agreed to do an interview, as long as I let him read my palms,’ said Martin, looking at my smoking spliff. ‘That smells fantastic. Can I have some?’

  ‘Sure. Be careful, though, it’s really strong.’

  ‘Five minutes,’ shouted Ian. ‘Everyone out of the dressing room, please.’

  I always needed five minutes of peace before the show to collect my thoughts and calm the butterflies in my stomach. I achieved this in various ways: shouting at myself in the mirror, snorting a line of cocaine or briefly meditating.

  My guests left, each wishing me good luck. I sat down and smoked the rest of Polly’s Super Silver Haze spliff. Christ, it was strong. I started giggling. I thought of my dead father and dying mother and cried a bit. I paced up and down and gulped some whisky.

  ‘Okay, mon. Dem a wait pon yo.’

  I followed Leroy to the side of the stage.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome on stage Mr Howard Marks.’

  Adrenalin pumped through my brain and body. Shouts, hoots and catcalls greeted me as I took my place behind the microphone. The noise subsided.

  ‘Are there any plain-clothes cops here?’ I asked the audience. ‘Because if so, now’s your fucking chance. Just fucking try it, motherfuckers.’

  Loud cackles of laughter cut through clouds of marijuana smoke. I picked up my script and began reading ‘The Dope Dealer and the Terrorist’, my stage version of the passages in Mr Nice about my dope importing activities into Ireland with self-professed IRA gunrunner Jim McCann. September 11, 2001 had just happened, so the piece was appropriately topical and outrageous. My Belfast accent left a lot to be desired, but the show was working.

  ‘I’ve cracked it, H’ard. Send me all the fucking dope you want. I got the man I needed. He fucking examines everything coming into Shannon Airport and, if he values his fucking Guinness, he’ll let through what I tell him to. His name’s Eamonn. He’s a true Republican.’

  ‘Does he know we’re going to bring in dope?’

  ‘Of course he fucking doesn’t, you Welsh arsehole. He thinks he’s bringing in guns for the IRA cause. He’s dead against dope.’

  Relieved to be speaking to a responsive audience, I relaxed and looked around the stage. Behind his camera, which was pointing at the ceiling, Martin Baker had gone white. Leroy was at the side of the stage looking at him with concern and worry wrinkling his magnificent face. Suddenly, Martin lost his legs and began falling into a giant spaghetti of electrical cables. Leroy dived, caught him, saved his life, and carried him off. Martin had done a whitey on Polly’s skunk. Fuck! I hoped no one else had. It would be bad publicity. And what would happen to the DVD? Never mind, the show had to go on.

  ‘Jim, the consignment’s left and it’s addressed to Juma Khan, Shannon, Ireland.’

  ‘You stupid Welsh cunt, what did you put my fucking name on it for?’

  I suddenly realised the similarity in pronunciation between the names Jim McCann and Juma Khan.

  ‘Jim, Khan is like Mister in the Middle East. And it’s Juma, not Jim. Juma means something like Friday in their language.’

  ‘Jim McCann might fucking mean Man Friday in Kabul, but in Ireland Jim McCann means it’s fucking me, for fuck’s sake.’

  I announced the end of the first half and went back to the dressing room. The sight that greeted me was appalling.

  Martin Baker was trying to convince two St John’s Ambulance men that he had suffered a migraine attack while Leroy kept repeating, ‘Im woulda dead, mon. Im woulda dead, mon.’ Polly was lying semi-conscious on a sofa and whispering over and over again, ‘Never happened to me before, and I’ve been smoking dope for over forty years, and I grew this myself.’ Psychic Dave was reassuring three other comatose bodies with carefully worded predictions of their imminent recovery based on the tarot cards, while Marty and Taff at his side were crying with laughter.

  ‘Ten minutes to show time,’ cried Ian.

  The ambulance men shuffled out scratching their heads.

  ‘Taff, can you skin up another joint?’ I asked. ‘Better use the hash this time. It’s for me to smoke on the stage during the second half.’

  Ian popped his head around the door.

  ‘Five minutes. Clear the dressing room.’

  This time I just snorted a huge line of cocaine.

  Leroy came to get me, still repeating, ‘Im woulda dead, mon.’

  ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome back on stage, Mr Howard Marks.’

  I decided not to read an extract about life in a United States penitentiary as originally planned. I would read the Egyptian delegate’s speech to the League Of Nations Second Opium Conference (1926) on the need to make hashish illegal. That always went down well and would be more in line with my legalisation agenda, which judging by the dressing room needed some support.

  ‘Hashish is a deadly poison against which no effective antidote has ever been discovered. Users suffer from two serious medical conditions: one, acute hashishism and two, chronic hashishism …’

  I pulled out the spliff from my top pocket, lit it and smoked it until nothing but ash remained. The crowd went wild. Leroy and the Pavilion’s own security looked around anxiously. I put a red fez on my head.

  ‘The chronic hashish user eventually becomes hysterical, neurasthenic and completely insane. Hashish is beyond any doubt the principal cause of insanity occurring in Egypt.’

  To rapturous applause, I sat down for the question-and-answer session, which always started with the same questions:

  ‘What’s the strongest dope you have ever smoked?’

  ‘Nepalese hash from a place called Mustang.’

  ‘Do you have any regrets?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who was your best shag?’

  ‘Your mother.’

  ‘What is your favourite method of hiding cannabis?’

  ‘In a container.’

  ‘What are your favourite munchies?’

  ‘Sugar Puffs.’

  ‘Which is the easiest skunk to grow: White Widow, Purple Haze or Jack Herrer?’

  ‘I don’t know; I’m not a gardener. I just deal with the finished product.’

  Then some peculiarly local questions:

  ‘What do you think of today’s performance by the Welsh rugby team?’

  ‘Complete shite. If they wanted to score, they should have given me a call.’

  ‘If Wales was independent, would there be a better chance for us to legalise marijuana?’

  ‘Absolutely. Tom Jones has already sung our new anthem, “Green, Green Grass of Home”.’

  Ian’s voice boomed from the side of the stage: ‘One more question.’

  ‘Howard, how can we beat the piss test?’

  I was hoping this would be asked. Now American-style piss tests were becoming the bane of every pot smoker’s lifestyle. Convicts on parole, kids on probation, members of the armed forces and even ordinary employees of certain corporations were being asked with increasing regularity to demonstrate that their urine contained no traces of drugs. The British government had considered plans for police to be given the power to randomly stop any car and insist the driver step outside and piss into a bottle. Pot heads throughout the world had been experimenting with all sorts of foodstuffs, chemicals and minerals in the hope of neutralising evidence of dope in their urine. None seemed to work but recently, while on parole, Gerry Wills, my former Californian marijuana smuggling partner, had successfully invented a contraption to beat the test. Gerry called it the Whizzinator and sold them for $500 each. For old times’ sake he had given me one for nothing. The Whizzinator is an extremely lifelike false rubber penis (in a range of colours and sizes) which contains a small plastic bag of drug-free urine. Straps hold it in position. The instructions suggest you find some people who don’t take drugs, and take the piss out of them. When asked to do a piss test, all the smoker has to do to produc
e a stream of clean urine is to pull it out and squeeze it.

  I took out the Whizzinator and explained the principles to the guffawing audience.

  ‘Show us how. Demonstrate it,’ someone yelled.

  Clumsily, I stuck the Whizzinator down my trousers, pulled it out through my fly, stuck it in an empty pint glass and squeezed. It worked perfectly, but I couldn’t stop the flow. Nor could I pull the fucking Whizzinator out of my trousers without taking my clothes off. There was no chance of my doing that in front of the home crowd, who were now roaring with uncontrollable laughter. Ian switched off the stage lighting and put on the walk-out CD, and Leroy took me back to the dressing room, my trousers drenched with pristine piss.

  The dressing room had recovered but, as a result of my enormous guest list, was quickly filling up and well on the way back to its former emergency-ward status. Everyone except Leroy (‘Mi neva touch di shit, mon’) and Martin Baker was smoking a joint. Polly had fully recovered from her whitey but not from the embarrassment.

  ‘According to the tarot cards, you are both going to make it really big time in show business,’ said Psychic Dave to the bemused Kelly Jones and Gruff Rhys.

  ‘That Whizzinator stunt is pathetically sexist,’ a female reporter from Wales on Sunday complained to Taff. ‘How on earth could that rubber cock possibly help women beat the piss test?’

  ‘Look, love,’ said Taff, a master of lateral thinking, ‘if your car was stopped by the Old Bill, you were asked to do a piss test and you pulled the Whizzinator out of your knickers, the cops would soon be on their bloody way. They’d fuck off, I can promise you that.’

  Letters, cards and little presents were thrust into my hand. They included lighters, home-made Welsh cakes laced with hashish, home-brewed booze, several expertly crafted spliffs, a box of Sugar Puffs (the donor had seen the show in Liverpool the week before), a Welsh lady’s traditional top hat to be worn at future Welsh gigs instead of the fez, jars of honey and a bag labelled Goddess Juice Grail Drop Mushrooms. I quickly tore it open. Inside were about a hundred tiny Welsh psilocybin mushrooms – about two full doses. These would definitely come in handy. Governed by the operating hours of local public transport, many people began to leave, much to Ian’s relief, and soon there was just the hard core that had been there from the beginning.

  ‘I’m knackered, Ian. I think I’ll stay in the same hotel as you rather than go back to Kenfig Hill. Which one is it?’

  ‘The Seabank. It’s just up the road.’

  ‘Mi wi tan de, too, mon. Maybe mi wi fin mi family ya. Ow far Cardiff de?’ asked Leroy.

  ‘Only about twenty-five miles. I might go there myself; I don’t have a show for a few days.’

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon, Howard,’ said Marty. ‘I’m busy in the morning.’

  One by one they disappeared into the blustery night air. I took my bag of goodies to the Seabank and fell asleep listening to the crashing of the waves.

  After a sleep full of dreams of ships and Welsh fezzes, I got up, had a full Welsh breakfast and took a cab back to Kenfig Hill. In the attic I rummaged through the bookshelves and cabin trunks and sifted through mounds of school exercise books, cuttings from magazines and yellowing documents that had once held some significance for a now-forgotten ancestor. I knew little about my family history and for the first time in my life wanted to learn more. I had better start soon before all my aunts and uncles passed away.

  The oldest surviving member of my maternal family was my Grandpa Ben’s sister, Afon Wen, as precious as the roughest of diamonds. Much to her dismay, she now lived in an old people’s home set between Kenfig and Kenfig Hill, close to the M4 and adjacent to a sewage farm which she referred to as the perfume factory. By the strangest of coincidences, Afon Wen was also the name of the deep-sea salvage tug that during December 1979 landed fifteen tons of the finest Colombian marijuana on the western Scottish island of Kerrera. I was accused of masterminding the operation but after a nine-week trial was cleared of the charge by an Old Bailey jury, having persuaded them I was a spy. Although it was just a bizarre coincidence, I feel convinced that if Her Majesty’s Customs & Excise had been aware that the offending boat had the same, very unusual, name as my great-aunt, my acquittal would never have happened.

  I walked into the home and found Aunt Afon Wen’s room.

  ‘Good God all bloody mighty! Howard bach! What the hell are you doing down here?’

  ‘Hello, Auntie ’Fon. I did a show last night at the Royal Pavilion in Porthcawl.’

  ‘Never! Well, I don’t know. No one lets me know bugger all these days now I’m stuck here with all these half-dead moaners and groaners. I’d have come along. Our Glyn would have given me a lift, I’m sure. Although I don’t know; I haven’t seen that bugger either for months. Come to think of it, why the hell didn’t you let me know yourself? I sent you a bloody Christmas card every year when you were in jail.’

  ‘I know. And yours was always the first I received. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Never mind. You’re here now. And looking all right too, except for that bloody hair of yours. I always used to tell your mam she should cut it in the middle of the night when you were sleeping. I’ll just make us a cup of tea. Help yourself to a fag. I think I’m going to have to give those up soon too. I’m coughing like a bloody hyena. But it’s hard to break an old habit, isn’t it? I’ve been smoking for over seventy years now.’

  ‘Well, I’m not the one you should ask for help. You know that.’ It was time to ask the question. ‘Auntie ’Fon, is there anyone famous in our family on Mam’s side?’

  ‘I don’t think so at all, unless we count you, of course. If they weren’t down the pits digging coal for the bloody English, they were writing poetry – a load of tommyrot most of it was, too.’

  ‘So none of them actually became famous?’

  ‘None except Dyfnallt Owen, who was a great-uncle of Nanna Jones, your mother’s mother. He became the bloody archdruid of Wales. A bit of a wizard, too, according to Nanna Jones.’

  ‘A wizard?’

  ‘Well, you know how people talk, Howard bach. How much to believe is another thing. But there were no end of stories from Nanna Jones about him boiling up magical potions and doing all sorts of tricks with them, tricks he had learnt from his mother’s father, Dafydd Rhys Williams, a brother or first cousin of none other than Edward Williams, better known as Iolo Morgannwg.’

  ‘Well, he’s definitely famous, Auntie ’Fon. I’ve heard of him.’

  ‘I’m sure, but it’s pushing it a bit to say he’s part of the family, he’s a very distant relation if any at all. Mind, I’m not surprised you have heard of him. He was a bloody opium addict. Clever though, by all accounts. They say Iolo invented the eisteddfod. That’s how Dyfnallt Owen became its archdruid. It’s always been the same, hasn’t it, Howard bach? It’s who you know not what you know. There’s a book about Iolo on the shelves somewhere. Have a look when I get some milk for the tea.’

  Iolo Morgannwg (Ned of Glamorgan), born 1747, was and is a glorious pain in the arse. Dead for nearly 200 years, this bard, visionary, genius, literary forger, field archaeologist, opium head and jailbird is still the cause of passionate debate in Wales and elsewhere. The arguments usually revolve around perceptions of Iolo’s establishment of the Gorsedd of the Bards in 1792 at Primrose Hill, north London, where he and a few of his mates stood within a circle of pebbles brought from Wales and mirrored Druidic rites that Iolo claimed to have uncovered in ancient manuscripts. They spoke prayers, sang hymns and founded the still-existing Gorsedd to promote Welsh language, folk culture, literature and the arts. Some historians now think that he wrote the rites while serving a prison sentence for debt and that the material derived from his opium-crazed imagination. Nevertheless Iolo’s rituals are still performed every August as part of the Welsh National Eisteddfod and his Gorsedd prayer is still used by Druids. Recent initiates to the Gorsedd include Dr Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, while the Qu
een is an ovate, and actor Richard Burton and prime minster David Lloyd George were past members.

  To many, Iolo is the victim of an English revisionist attempt to oppress Welsh culture and tarnish the image of what was once a great civilisation. To others, he lived in times so dangerous for an outspoken republican anti-slavery campaigner, pacifist and hater of English tyranny, he had to hide behind the names of dead poets and writers to mask the subversive nature of his literature. He was followed by spies, arrested for sedition and widely viewed as a heretic. Ensuring he offended the tastes of everyone in power during his lifetime, he was also an opium eater, a vociferous religious dissenter, a political liberal and a supporter of the American rebels and the French Revolution. Iolo was also a witty guest and a brilliant storyteller, who wrote anti-war poems and drinking songs. He was a vegetarian, herbalist and tea addict, and walked the length and breadth of Wales accompanied by his horse, which he rode just once in his life. Although he received money from wealthy patrons in London and Wales, every now and then Iolo had to work for a living. During his life he was a stone mason, a farmer, a bookshop owner, and a grocer selling ‘East Indian Sweets: Uncontaminated by Human Gore’. Iolo’s main ambition was to cross the Atlantic in search of the Welsh Red Indians referred to in various manuscripts by Sir Walter Raleigh and other European explorers. By way of preparation he slept rough in the fields near his home but became ill, never recovering enough to make the trip. During his last days Iolo begged the surviving members of his family to fulfil his unfinished ambition.

  ‘So, Auntie ’Fon, is there no one else interesting in our family on Mam’s side?’

  ‘Come to think of it, Dyfnallt’s ancestor William Owen was quite famous in his time. Well, infamous would be a better way of describing him, as it would with you. They say he was the greatest-ever Welsh smuggler, not drugs mind. He was executed in Carmarthen. I think he wrote an autobiography, too. They discovered it quite recently. Now that’s a coincidence, isn’t it?’