WAITING FOR MY MAN
I have always, since I can remember, been a – what word does one choose? A handful? No, that’s a bit nannyish. A rebel? Too cool. A transgressor? The John Buchan generation would’ve called me a wrong’un. An outsider is the closest I can come to it. Perhaps it is just that, as those who had the pleasure of reading the opening chapter of The Fry Chronicles will know, I was a pre-teen crazed with a love of sweets and never felt I had enough money for them; this triggered an addictive path upwards, a desire for the illicit and the unattainable. Next came cigarettes. Being caged in prison took my mind off this, and I concentrated on getting out and getting into university. Once at Cambridge, I barely drank anything more than coffee and certainly didn’t take drugs: I just threw myself into comedy, drama, smoking and writing.
So, two or three years later – already lucky enough to have a TV show in Manchester with Ben Elton, Robbie Coltrane, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson – Hugh and I were also starting on Blackadder II. Physically, I was, if it can be believed now, lean; socially, given to few nocturnal exploits: parties, as I have said, being abhorrent to me.
But those two toots of cocaine had awoken a long-sleeping giant. The same dragon that got me expelled from so many schools and that landed me on the flagstones of a prison cell was beginning to uncoil and rear up at me, snorting flame.
I cannot understand why, from the earliest days of my childhood, I had always been a problem. No uncle, godfather or family friend or (thank heavens) family member dandled me on his knee in a way which would prissily be called by my generation ‘inappropriate’ and more gracefully by the younger generation ‘awkward’. It is true that I had, from the first, grandiose plans to be a scholar, a writer, an actor, a somebody. But I was never discouraged in these fields of endeavour. Only my own frantic wild behaviour got in the way until it seemed, lying on that previously evoked straw-strewn prison floor, something in my brain snapped, and I knew that I had one last chance, if I may mangle Tennyson, to rise on the stepping stones of my dead self to higher things.
And so we come round again to the unbelievably good fortune to have got that scholarship to Cambridge, to have been all-consumed by the acting and then writing bug and foolishly to have allowed myself to believe that every problem, propensity to bad behaviour and temptation to library book theft and wild destructive pranks was way behind me. I didn’t really like alcohol so very much; I didn’t like late nights, I liked work. My last book, The Fry Chronicles (I’m simply astonished and only slightly wounded that you haven’t read it), had written on its title page a line of Noël Coward’s: ‘Work is more fun than fun,’ something I am lucky enough still to find true. ‘Young men sow wild oats, old men grow sage,’ Churchill is reputed to have said. It almost never is Churchill. In fact collectors of quotations call such laziness in attribution ‘Churchillian creep’. I made the mistake of thinking all my oats were sown and falling asleep on my watch over myself.
Unless you have been a user of illegal, street, or recreational drugs yourself at any time in your life, you probably have a clear view in your head of what a drug dealer is like. As younglings we were sat in front of terrifying films and taught to call them ‘pushers’; they were rated on a moral scale somewhere between Fleet Street royal correspondents and dung beetles.
‘I Blame the Evil Pushers,’ parents and editorial articles would squeal, wringing their clean hands in despair, incapable of even imagining such unalloyed evil. ‘Pushers’ hung around the school gates, waiting for a chance to get a child addicted. At first they weaned them on legal solvents like glue, fast-drying wet cement, toluene, butane and propane. Once the dopamine and norepinephrine and noradrenaline – I am not an endocrinologist, but drug use is all about the body’s pleasure/reward system, as I’m sure we all know – have introduced themselves, offered a handshake and a moment of bliss, usually followed by a wild arc of vomiting, the substances bind themselves to the young users’ brains, who find their pleasure centres tickled and massaged and unconditionally adored as they roll on the grass of the local park and look up at the sky with new loving eyes that ice cream and family life won’t give them. Next, according to this mythical and inevitable wicked process (cheap cider aside, the most dangerous and most overlooked of them), illegal weed is offered and before the defenceless infant has a chance their ‘friendly’, ‘low-price’ suppliers are introducing them to cocaine and heroin. And once those dependencies are formed, the price ratchets up, the threats for non-payment become very real and Little Jack is raiding his mother’s purse, burgling gran’s flat, snatching mobile phones from younger kids, and the monstrous social malaise that we call drug culture is upon us. Sink estates, gangs and random violence, Ladybird Book Britain transformed into a moral, civil and derelict wasteland in fewer years than my lifetime, which, dear reader, despite this being my third autobiography, is not really so very long after all. That is what drugs have done to blight Britain.
All the foregoing is, of course, horse-shit. No, it’s worse than horse-shit; horse-shit is strawy and pleasant smelling. It is human shit, which is malodorous in the extreme. Successive government-employed ‘Drug Czars’ who knew what they were talking about physiologically, sociologically and neurologically have been fired for telling their masters of either political stripe the real truth. If drugs are not soon legalized and controlled, taxed and categorized, the situation will get worse and worse and worse. Coca bushes are now immune to the vile airborne pesticides sent over from America to Colombia in the 1990s; the drug wars in war-torn Mexican drug-gang cities like Juárez in the noughties and teens of the twenty-first century make 1980s Medellín in Colombia look more like Moreton-in-Marsh in the Cotswolds; the profit margins have become so colossal that at every stage of ‘cutting’ or diminishing through additives the purity of the original cocaine block, each player in the journey from peasant leaf-grower up to the nightclub dealer is going to make a pleasant living.
From what I believe are unimpeachable sources, the end purity level for the user who doles out £50 or £60 for a gram (twenty-eight and a third grams constitute one old-fashioned imperial ounce) usually comes out at between 20 and 30 per cent. The dealer is a tiny fish in all this. He or she (and yes there are plenty of shes) may have taken a career path that goes something like this: not having done so well at school, they drifted perhaps into the music business as a DJ or bouncer and found that they liked a gram or two of coke in the evenings. So they went into business with an existing dealer they knew, having a different circle of friends. They told some of their friends they could be relied on for whatever they wanted, and those friends were overjoyed. It’s a sellers’ market, they don’t need to push drugs on people. They are more likely to need to push people away. They frequently don’t have enough on them to supply a clubful of desperate potential clients (dealers often like to use the word client) keen to party away.
I cannot tell you much about what goes on further up the chain. Of course, there is violence, just as there was in America during the blockheaded days of Prohibition. A gap is left when a desired substance is banned; that gap will offer such profits that no amount of violence will be considered too great to get hold of a great share of the market. But I can tell you I have yet to meet a doctor, policeman or probation officer who does not believe that street drugs should be licensed, legalized and controlled. Only politicians who stick their fingers in their ears and go ‘La, la, la, la!’ until they think the people who actually understand the problem will shut up are obsessed with the unwinnable ‘war on drugs’. That, of course, is because voters are misguided.
Aside from anything else, just think what coke is cut with in order to maximize profits at every stage. In my early days it used to be baby laxative, with an all-too predictable outcome. More recently sugars, creatine, benzocaine (to mimic the numbing effect on the lips that makes you think you are getting plenty of the real deal) were favoured and especially these days levasimole, a cow dewormer, is now found in anything from 50 to
90 per cent of street cocaine. Not only does it dilute, but it also uses its own properties to stimulate and set off our inbuilt happy drug, dopamine. Other additives include hydrochloric acid and potassium permanganate. Not nice.
If alcohol were banned today, you can be sure criminal gangs would do the same with their bathtub gins and moonshine whiskies. Ethyl and isopropyl alcohol, methylated spirits and all kinds of cheapening and dangerous additives would go into the illicit brews. We know this because history has shown us that it was so. Cocktails were invented to sweeten and diversify the rancid effects of chokingly foul speakeasy booze.
But let us return to the dealer – Mitch, Nando or Jacquie we’ll call them. I have known dozens of Mitches, Nandos and Jacquies in my time. Not one of them violent, not one of them morally inferior to me or anyone else I know. In fact they have often stood out as incredibly decent friends, wonderful parents, kind, attentive, funny people, no more branded with the Mark of (Co)Cain than your mother is.
Business is straightforward. You, the user, have your wad of cash; you meet in a café, bar, the dealer’s flat or (less likely) at your home. If it is a public place or space, you have already secreted the money in a newspaper, which you oh so casually slide across the table towards Nando, and he returns by pushing over a packet of cigarettes which contains the gear. This is followed by talk of football, music, fashion, gossip, friends, children and a hasty draining of the cappuccino mug before we go our separate ways. Most dealers follow the rule ‘don’t get high on your own supply’, but a user will be slightly uneasy in the presence of a Mitch or Jacquie who never took a line. At their flat, say, when you pop by. On the other hand, one tends not to like a dealer to come to one’s own house, especially dealers who really like the stuff. How do you converse with them in a personal way? When is it decent to ask them to leave? How much of the expensive powder that you have bought from them and are now sharing with them is she going to hoover up? All in all, it is a most strange unwritten contract. You are anxious not to treat them like servants and probably overdo the deliberately non-patronizing talk, just as one does in conversation with bin-men and builders, yet all the while one is slave to them and the service they provide.
There has only ever been one significant and maddening problem with dealers: it is almost unique to them as a class and it drives one insane. Punctuality. Hence the quotation from Lou Reed that heads this section. The poor, late-lamented rock god must have put together, as have I, hours on street corners, in cafés and bars wondering if ever the hell they’ll come. Have they been arrested? With your phone number in their directory? Please God they use a code name for me …
I know you want to think of the dealer as the evil link in this chain, but the truth is dealers spend most of their time pushing clients away. Their phones are ever buzzing (pagers back in the day): ‘I need four grams now, where can I meet you?’ ‘Be at the usual café at ten.’ ‘I’m having a party tonight, six of us want two grams each.’ The dealer dashes from client to client, getting cash up front before they can then visit their suppliers (who are the big, scary, silent ones who don’t take credit and you really don’t want to mess with), pick up the gear, go back home to cut it to whatever degree they can get away with, fold it into wraps before haring round town, dropping off to each client as discreetly as possible. That is your average dealer, caught between gangsters and clients. It’s a sellers’ market, yes, but that doesn’t make life easy. They never have enough to meet demand. Some bullying rock star, pockets stuffed with currency notes, will catch sight of them and buy all they’ve got: ‘No, but I’ve promised Jack and Rosie and Bill and Tom …’ the dealer will protest, but to no avail. Now he or she has to start the whole process again. That is why they are always late. No wonder Lou Reed wrote that song.
A dealer’s five minutes is therefore, if you’re lucky, an hour and a half. Well, you have to wait for the good things in life, I suppose. A pleasure deferred is a pleasure increased.
The good things in life? A pleasure? Stephen, have you run mad? Are you telling your readers that cocaine is one of the good things in life?
No, no I’m not. Do believe me. I’m treading that difficult balance here. When I started taking coke my life was more or less perfect. I had enjoyed preposterous success.
So let us just return one more time to that first evening, where our actor friend introduced our little group to two lines of coke. I think – if I remember it rightly, and you really must forgive me either if my memory is faulty or if it is correct – I think that I wanted from that moment to define myself as a coke user. What a ludicrous and incomprehensible ambition. Many of my ‘life choices’, looking back, have been incomprehensible from today’s viewpoint, so this is just one more. Perhaps a little more sensational, but no less incapable of understanding.
A few days after my first encounter with the Devil’s Dandruff, as Robin Williams so memorably dubbed South America’s glittering granular gift to the global billions, I embarked upon the first of what were to become regular appearances on Ned Sherrin’s Saturday-morning BBC Radio 4 programme Loose Ends, along with Emma Freud, Victoria Mather, Victor Lewis-Smith, Brian Sewell, Robert Elms and many others. I had invented for the show a character called Donald Trefusis, who claimed to be a fellow of St Matthew’s College Cambridge and the Regius Professor of Philology there. I used him as a vehicle for what may as well be described as derision or querulous indignation about this Thatcherite thing or that dismal dumbing-down disaster that was beginning to infect the BBC. Being in my early twenties but satirizing in the voice of a piping old man somehow took a lot of the offence out of what I was writing. My natural speaking voice at the time, when I hear it now as it might occasionally survive on some scrap of old MP3 or YouTube material, shocks me with its fey public-school youthfulness. You will be happy to know that a collection of the Professor’s thoughts is still available in the in-print masterpiece Paperweight. The ideal lavatory book, and one where you can decide for yourself how the voices of Trefusis and other characters I made up should sound. While in mercantile mood, I believe there is an audio book on the market too, read by myself. All proceeds to the cattery of your choice. That is negotiable. Actual offer may vary. Terms and conditions apply.
I am not comfortable writing about the dead, or upsetting the public’s preconceived view of them, but I noticed in the Broadcasting House studio the Saturday following my coke experiment that there was a little flake of white in Someone Who Shall Remain Nameless’s nostril and the occasional telltale snuffle. At the George, the pub round the corner from Broadcasting House we all flocked to after a recording, I managed to get SWSRN aside and shyly asked if he could recommend a dealer.
‘Oh my dear,’ SWSRN said, putting his hand on my leg and shooting an almost pitying smile at my naïveté, ‘you couldn’t do better than ask Mitch.’ This particular Mitch was well known to me, and it was a surprise that such a brilliantly educated and literate person dealt in a highly illegal Class A substance. Never having bought it before, I was in paroxysms of fear when I called her up and asked if she might have some ‘COFFEE’ for me and that if I popped round maybe a couple of jars of ‘COFFEE’ would be possible? Mitch giggled that this would be fine and that it was ‘SIXTY PENCE A JAR’ and very high quality. These codes used by dealers and users alike can be absurd. Jezzer is a common one, as a reference to Jeremy Clarkson, who I’m sure has never snorted except derisively, but the title of whose programme, Top Gear, suggests precisely what the client was seeking of the seller, material of the least-cut highest quality: absolute top gear …
So for my first drug deal, I called up Mitch from a phone-box to confirm the time, found a cash machine, took out £240, which was a matter of two credit cards in those days, and, after rapping lightly on Mitch’s door (convinced there were police snipers on every rooftop), found myself shortly in possession of four grams of my very own supply of coke, in four tightly, neatly folded wraps. A part of me wants to show you what a wrap looks like, usin
g an origami-style diagram with dotted lines, but I really do not think that necessary or desirable. The point of a wrap was that any square of reasonable-quality paper could contain the powder without there being any chance of it spilling from the corners. Some dealers, in an almost foolhardy manner you might think, had their signature wrap paper. Lottery tickets, for example, or squares cut from specialist magazines.
Mitch had, and has, a very successful broadcasting career, and I think in those days she and her boyfriend were having trouble making ends meet, and this little business on the side helped keep the wolf from the door. I always had too much respect for them to use them as regular dealers; it seemed like an insult. Soon enough they had introduced me to Nando, who worked in the Petticoat Lane market, a corner pub nearby being our regular meeting and dealing place. Nando introduced me to Midge, who passed me on to Nonny, until I had quite the network, and I don’t think a day could go by without my being sure of a supply of a wrap or two in my pocket. Nonny was a great girl, and she had the best supply. The B-quality Charlie for her ‘ordinary’ customers and A-Charlie for actors, comics, musicians, loyal regulars, Eurotrash, wild childs (children seems wrong in that context), supermodels and aristos.
I didn’t take coke because I was depressed or under pressure. I didn’t take it because I was unhappy (at least I don’t think so). I took it because I really, really liked it. Most of my friends screwed their face up at the thought of it, or at most had one or two lines at weekends. Over the years they began, I think, I know, to worry about me. But I had drug friends, very well-known artists and musicians and actors with whom I would regularly hang out and play snooker, smoking, drinking and snorting day after day after day. Amongst this crowd there was always a friend wilder by far than me, one who could pull two or three all-nighters in a row and then go filming on the third day bright as a button. I cannot tell you how much better that made me feel about my own growing dependency.