That one time I went to Heaven (I know, a clever name for a nightclub one must admit) I saw Kenny Everett dancing frenziedly and happily. He coo-cooed and blew me his special brand of extravagant kiss and threw back his head as if to say ‘Dahling!’ before being swallowed up in the bopping mass.
I saw too my friend from Cambridge, Oscar Moore. He was to go on to write A Matter of Life and Sex under the pseudonym Alec F. Moran (an anagram of roman à clef) and to edit the film magazine Screen International. Everett continued to be sacked and rehired, sacked and rehired, sacked and rehired every six months or so by the BBC.* Before too long both Moore and Everett would have died painfully and unhappily.
SEX
I do apologize for leaping about like this, but I did warn you. In my mid-twenties a sexual relationship, aside from the usual schoolboy larks and nervous cottaging, had come to me but once. It took the shape of my partnership with the aforementioned remarkable, brilliant and loyal friend Kim. We were lovers at Cambridge, and only the necessity of driving weekly up to Manchester to work on my first television series, Alfresco, kept us apart. Perhaps too much, for this marvellous lover in one arena loved what I exactly most didn’t: the ‘scene’, those gay clubs and pubs and their music. Conversation was what I adored. Sometimes even other people’s. How can you converse with ‘Pump Up The Volume’ vibrating your tummy and hoarsening your voice to a whisper that wouldn’t be heard in a nun’s cell?
Well, I returned one weekend to find a Graeco-American young man there, called Steve. In a perfectly happy, loving way I moved to the spare room in the Chelsea flat, while they took the master bedroom. Yes, in those rosy years one could live in a two-bedroomed flat in Chelsea just between the King’s Road and Brompton a year after coming down from university. Well, I say ‘one’ – Kim’s parents had money, and not all my contemporaries were as lucky: some had to live as far out as Clapham and Islington. To have been born clutching the coat-tails of the baby-boom was to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life. I am quite sure the young don’t want my pity, but they do have my wanted or unwanted sympathy.
Everything continued swimmingly, Steve was very charming, I didn’t feel the least betrayed, and Kim and I have stayed the best of friends ever since.
A perfectly accidental advantage of this celibacy and my loathing of gay clubs and pubs was that at precisely the same time I emerged from university HIV emerged into the world too, although the first name I ever heard it given was GRID – Gay Related Immune Deficiency. By the decade’s end I would have sat at the bedsides of many friends and attended the funerals of more. There is no virtue in my having survived the swathe of death that AIDS cut through a whole generation of gay men and intravenous drug users any more than I am prepared to say that there was any vice in the infection and deaths of those who did succumb. Once the facts were out, it was pretty dumb to be caught by the virus, it must be admitted, but my fiercest feelings at the time were for the hysterical untruths and myths perpetuated by the tabloid newspapers. I began to involve myself in Britain’s first AIDS charity, the Terrence Higgins Trust, and have worked with them ever since.
We mounted in the late 1980s and early 1990s three or four benefit shows for THT called Hysteria, two of which were televised. In one of those Eddie Izzard made his television debut, in another Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. At these packed-with-stars benefit evenings the audience will be very stoked up, and when one comes on, as master of ceremonies, to announce, ‘And now ladies and gentlemen, loosen your girdles and clamp your thighs, it’s … Mr … Rowan Atkinson!’ or ‘… Miss Jennifer French and Dawn Saunders!’ there will be an explosion of cheers and foot-stomping and whistles of joy and welcome that hit you like a force field. Unless the material they perform is entirely astonishing, the sound that accompanies their exit is necessarily a little less wild. That is no sign of failure, naturally. It was then a thrilling pleasure to announce, ‘I know you’re going to love him, please welcome the extraordinary Eddie Izzard!’ There wasn’t exactly the lone cough, tolling of a bell and bouncing of tumbleweed so beloved of Simpsons scriptwriters and others, but the reception was little more than cheerfully polite. His exit though – oh my word. The audience actually stood as they cheered him off, and I, in the wings, had to push him back on to take another roar of approval. I turned to one of the producers, and we both mouthed simultaneously, ‘A star is born.’ I know: what a cheesy showbizzy cliché, but you have to accept some.
Weird truth: since I began this paragraph an email just hit my inbox, reminding me of this June’s Terrence Higgins Trust Gala Dinner. For the last twenty-odd years I have made a fundraising speech on these occasions and before each I have the same panic attack about what I’m going to say. It becomes harder and harder not to repeat myself. Maybe I’ll cheat this year by reading out passages from this book.
A surprising number of you (surprising to me because I think, despite the evidence of my passport, that I still hover somewhere between my mid-twenties and early thirties) won’t really know quite how disastrous, ugly, desperate, upsetting and frightening the AIDS epidemic was. The transition from being ‘HIV positive’ to having ‘full-blown AIDS’ – always ‘full blown’, no one ever managed to find another phrase – meant that death was a certainty. Well, not entirely a certainty. I have two friends who were diagnosed early and seem to possess some inbuilt antibody. Naturally, virologists have swarmed all over them, attempting to determine why they are to all intents and purposes immune.
Those dying of AIDS resembled the survivors of Nazi death camps: the gaunt, hollowed cheeks, the total emaciation, the dry, crusted lips, the dull glimmer of fear and pain and hopelessness around the eyes. And always the shallow panting from infected lungs that denied any conversation but the most banal and forcedly cheerful from visitor and visited.
Perhaps the most upsetting sights I ever saw were anxious parents sitting on one side of the bed, looking down at their wasted and withered child, while on the other side sat the (for whatever reason) healthy and uninfected partner. The parents would flash sidelong glances that seemed to say, ‘You did this to our boy. You killed him. Why aren’t you dying too?’
If I had enjoyed the ‘gay lifestyle’ and cruising and bars and clubs, it is very probable that I would be long dead. Anyone who ever saw someone suffer from AIDS knows it was not the release of death but the agonizingly drawn-out manner of dying that was so cruel and unendurable.
Very often friends of mine had to give their parents two pieces of shattering news in one.
‘Mum, Dad, I have something to tell you. I’m gay.’
‘What?’
‘Yes. And, um, I have AIDS.’
Imagine a family having to deal with that. I met some heroic parents along that troubled fifteen to twenty years, when to test seropositive, as doctors called it, was to receive a certain sentence of death.
Religionists from pulpits and evangelical TV stations announced that this was all God’s punishment for the perverted vice of homosexuality, quite failing to explain why this vengeful deity had no interest in visiting plagues and agonized death upon child rapists, torturers, murderers, those who beat up old women for their pension money (or indeed those cheating, thieving, adulterous and hypocritical clerics and preachers who pop up on the news from time to time weeping their repentance), reserving this uniquely foul pestilence only for men who choose to go to bed with each other and addicts careless in the use of their syringes. What a strange divinity. Later he was to take his pleasure, as he still does, on horrifying numbers of women and very young girls raped in sub-Saharan Africa while transmitting his avenging wrath on the unborn children in their wombs. I should be interested to hear from the religious zealots why he is doing this and what kind of a kick he gets out of it. But we are wasting time on those beneath contempt.
I suppose we will return to sex at some later point, but for the moment, where are we? Before you distracted me with your fevered and filthy red herrings and irrelevant erotic diversions
, we were examining that first intranasal introduction of cocaine into my system. I wrote that the effect upon me had been between zero and minimal. A slightly increased propensity to talk and a little jigging up and down of the knees. Nonetheless that momentous evening will never leave me. We all had a second line, finishing up our friend’s supply – he was only an underpaid actor after all. It was that second line that got hold. Don’t misunderstand me, it didn’t hook me and turn me instantly into an addict. Just a few smokes or shots of heroin won’t make a junkie out of you, even if twenty or more just might. The second line gave me enough of what Freud had called ‘euphoria’ and enough of a sense of energy and optimism to make me think that this was a drug tailor-made for me.
The strange thing about cocaine is that it is said to cause a dependency rather than an addiction. Tallulah Bankhead put it this way: ‘Honey, cocaine is not addictive. I should know, I’ve been taking it for twenty years.’ Alcoholics, smokers and junkies are addicts. That is how I looked at it as the habit grew after that first simple encounter. Not one of the others in that room, all close friends, responded in the same way. There was ever something darker, more dangerous and – let’s be frank – more stupid about me than about my friends. Socially, psychologically and inwardly stupid. Imbecilic. Self-destructive. More of a fool.
By the end of the 1980s I would no more consider going out in the evening without three or four grams of cocaine safely tucked in my pocket than I would consider going out without my legs.
Yet I was after all able to find it perfectly simple to go to the country and write my first novel, The Liar, sitting at the computer in Norfolk for four months without even the thought of cocaine crossing my mind; and this was when I must have been already regularly using it for five years. Just about daily.
I dare say cocaine was ready and waiting for me, but the real reason I embraced it is that I found it could give me a second existence. Instead of performing and being in bed with a mug of Horlicks and a P. G. Wodehouse at 11 p.m., coke gave me a whole new lease on nightlife. It made me for the first time in my life actually enjoy parties, though still never parties with music, no matter how wired I was. So long as I had two or three wraps in my pocket and access to a lavatory that wasn’t too squalid or have too long and obvious a queue for the stalls, then I was a new, sociable, fun-loving Stephen. No longer the Stakhanovite drudge, producing column after column for magazine after magazine, voice-over after voice-over for face creams and dog biscuits and TV appearance after TV appearance for anyone who asked, I was Stephen the party animal, always to be seen at the now defunct Zanzibar in Great Queen Street, Covent Garden or its famed and ‘storied’, as Americans would say, successor, the Groucho Club in Dean Street, Soho. Bed by four or five in the morning and then up at ten feeling fine, ready to get through the backlog of magazine articles, reviews, radio scripts and whatever else the day demanded.
There again, I was lucky and unlucky. I know many, many people who profess to liking coke but who just can’t recover the next morning and will feel like hell for two days afterwards. For some reason it never had that effect on me. I would awaken with a spring and a bounce and Tigger my way down to the kitchen in search of breakfast, much to the grumpy annoyance of Hugh, with whom I still shared a house at that time, along with his girlfriend and other Cambridge friends. Never the larkiest bird in the morning sky, Hugh, after a day in the gym, bed at 11.30 and not so much as a gin and tonic in between, still managed to feel like hell until mid-afternoon and seven coffees the next day.
I felt blessed. I was meeting new people at all kinds of parties, not just coke parties with fellow cokeheads, but ambassadorial, political, social and geeky-digital parties. I would never have accepted invitations to any kinds of parties like that without the little friend in my wallet.
PARAPHERNALIA
Not the most important issue: if you’ve got a gram or two about you and any available surface on which the powder won’t get trapped or soaked in then frankly a currency note and a credit card will get the job done perfectly adequately. Or you can even transfer by the corner of the card or a pinch of the fingers a ‘bump’ on to your fingernail or the side of your clenched fist and sniff it in like a Regency snuff-taker. Nothing can keep an addict from his supply. But for a cleaner, neater, altogether purer experience I had put together quite the little kit. During my visits to the sound studios of Soho for the purposes of lending my larynx to the allure of L’Oréal or the double-action brilliance of Bold Automatic, I had taken every opportunity to snaffle, when no one was looking, a useful collection of those editor’s razor blades with a protective bar on the top that they used for cutting tape back in the days of old analogue reel-to-reels. Whenever I passed a McDonald’s I popped in to make another haul. Ronald McDonald’s red, white and yellow drinking straws, stored in glass carousel jars by the napkin and ketchup sachets, were the coke sniffer’s ideal. Hygienically protected in paper with a wider bore than the average straw, fistfuls could easily be taken home, and each straw neatly snipped in half with scissors to make the best possible sniffing tube. Washable too. I mean, for heaven’s sake, when one is generous with one’s supply, as I always prided myself on being, who knew what germs lurked within the snotty nostrils of the user to one’s left as one passed on the straw?
Storage? I won’t believe a single coke user who tells me they haven’t at least once opened their wallet only to watch, with a shudder of horror, their precious packet or baggy fall out and splash into the lavatory bowl below.* So, aside from the obvious advice to make sure you always close the seat before opening your pockets and getting down to business, consider the container. For a short time I favoured the highly fashionable, for sadly obvious reasons, condom holder. You could slip three well-packed wraps and a blade in this two-piece plastic container and then slide the two halves together. It was compact and safe. I would keep two straws in the other pocket. In later years I discovered Californian head shops, where simple grinders were on display in the window. Even smarter ones allowed you to grind out a dose and then quickly sniff it up, concealing the action behind a handkerchief. No visit to the loo, no waiting for said loo to empty so that the sounds of one’s chopping and snorting went unnoticed, just a simple indiscernible action. Of course, buying such a thing and several spares too is an unspoken – even to oneself – concession of one’s addiction.
Incidentally, using the phrase ‘getting down to business’ when describing a men’s lavatory may seem a little ‘ho ho’, but during the 1980s the epidemic of cocaine fever sweeping through the mewses, squares and side-streets of Mayfair had reached such a pitch that I remember sitting one evening in the bar of the wildly successful nightclub Annabel’s when a friend, a great wit, known by just about everyone in the world of London fashion and parties, a man one could genuinely call a playboy, came up from the men’s room with a look of outrage on his face.
‘Do you know what just happened?’ he asked, a frown of indignant disgust clouding his otherwise fair features.
‘No.’
‘Some arsehole just came into the coke-room while I was chopping out a line and, without so much as a by-your-leave, he took his cock out and had a piss in one of those porcelain bowl things … I mean, should we get Mark to fling the man out and have him thrashed on the steps of the club?’
That really is how prevalent the white stuff was then and how utterly unremarkable the taking of it in public was. Inasmuch as the gentlemen’s lavatories of Annabel’s can ever be called public.
Incidentally, some of the paragraphs above look like I am writing out a template of instructions and encouraging advice for the coke novice. It should go without saying and must be apparent if you read on and find out what damage I believe this noxious yet maddeningly beguiling substance did to me that I wouldn’t recommend cocaine to my worst enemy. Which won’t, of course, stop someone taking it out of context and damning me. Goes with the turf. Chap gets used to it. Barely a day goes by without someone on Twitter favouring
me with the information that ‘I thought better of you than that’ – the ‘that’ being anything from passing on the blandest of off-colour jokes, to employing a swear word that ‘offends’ them (don’t get me started), to using a epithet that apparently slights a minority of some kind. Which I don’t really get. ‘God, there have been a lot of clever yids’ doesn’t seem in the least problematic. Nor does ‘Amazing how many of the greatest ever American comedians have been kikes – must be something to do with their 2,000-year need to stay together and keep themselves amused’, or whatever. Perfectly charming observations that don’t need someone to say, ‘Excuse me, those words are offensive. Kindly use the word “Jews” or better still the phrase “Jewish people”,’ (as if the latter takes the sting out of being a Jew, as if even that word is too strong). ‘All Jewish people should be beaten up’ and ‘Fucking Jews run everything – you know they conspire to keep others out?’ How is it better that whoever writes something so ghastly is using ‘acceptable’ words? It is the sentiment expressed that is repulsive or not repulsive, not the words. Hell, I’m turning into a foaming ‘political correctness gone mad’ animal. I shall shush on that topic. Paraphernalia then is described not for the purposes of an instruction manual, but as a warning: permanent sniffles, blood from the nose and other unwelcome parts, sleeplessness, diarrhoea, headaches, itchy skin … and on top of these indignities, that of dealing with your dealer. We’ll come to that interesting, intriguing and inscrutable being in a little while. Hold that thought.
UNEXPECTED DIVERSION AHEAD