LIFE STORY OF TERRY DONALDSON CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

ON THE HIPPY TRAIL- FROM CHALK FARM TO KANDAHAR

Well, somehow I managed to make it through the course. I sat through the three week long exam period, with the temperature outside up into the nineties. It was the sweltering summer of 1976.
Hardly a breath of wind in the air, all summer long. People were passing out, in the street, and in their homes. There was a water shortage, and use of hose pipes to water gardens was strictly banned.
I staggered through the Finals and just about passed, not particularly distinguishing myself with a Third. Still, it could have been worse. Even so, I felt like a total failure.
When the admin stuck up the pass list on the notice board, there was my name just resting about the thin red line below which were listed all the real failures. There was only one other name below mine, and that was John Carr, who had passed with the grade of Pass. John was one of my old pals from the Broad Left, one of the socialist caucus groups of which I had been a member. I recently saw John on the television, being interviewed in his capacity as Internet Advisor to the National Childcare Helpline. I was pleased John had made it. Many of us had taken off huge amounts of time for our political beliefs, and in so doing had seriously imperiled our grades. Glynnis Thornton, also a Labour Society member, and currently the Leader of the Labour Party did well, coming out with an Upper Second. Glynnis was the bright young thing that I always sat next to when we held our Broad Left meetings. A gorgeous beautiful Yorkshire lass, her dark hair and beautiful accent had never failed to hold me in hypnotic sway.
Charles Clarke, the current Minister of Education, and probable future Prime Minister, although not a student at LSE himself, used to come along to our meetings, as did Trevor Philips, then a young black man in his early twenties, and leader of the London University students union. Even then he was distinguishing himself with his razor-sharp intellect and fiery orator skills.

Feeling like a complete failure, I went and got myself a position as trainee accountant to a firm of Chartered Accountants in the City of London. But I couldn’t get into it. It was like wearing a pair of shoes that just didn’t fit. Each and every little thing would rub me up the wrong way. Probably had the same effect on those that I worked with.
I still had my very left wing beliefs.One of the turning points was after I had been working in this office a couple of months, one of the senior accountants asked me what I would do with my accountancy qualifications should I actually make it through the three years’ worth of exams.
I answered that I would join the Inland Revenue, and spend the rest of my days persecuting all these capitalistic bastards.
‘If I had my way, I would put them all on a big cross and hang them out to dry’, was my answer. His face was thunderstruck.
The next day I was assigned to the prestigious job of cleaning out one of the cupboards in the entrance way, when who should walk in but Sir Keith Josephs, the notorious Tory Minister of Education. This was the old fuck we were demonstrating against, who had had the temerity to try and do away with student grants. Immediately thoughts of assassinating this old shit ran across my mind. But there was no way I would be able to get away with it. Balls. Just then the old sod had disappeared from view, deep into the interior of the office. Still not sure if I wasn’t seeing things, I went into the room containing the client files and found to my amazement his name there, along with details f his banks, his addresses, and so on. I thought to write down some of it, in case of a possible future need, but in the end I thought fuck it. We’d find him when we needed to. Probably trying to scurry out of the country once we had taken over, suitcase full of money. I used to dream of being one of those bastards in a peak cap, with a big red star on the front.
‘Hey you, you cunt’ I would pull him over in the queue for the plane. ‘Get your fucking scrawny arse over here!’ I would be able to shout, humiliating this lackey of world capitalism in front of his wife and family. Then I would rip him and his suitcase apart, shred by shred, inching it all over the floor, before tearing his clothes off his body and doing the same to them.
Many of us on the hard left in those times dreamed of the Russian army to come steaming in. I know I did. The thought of putting all those fat cats on the end of red army bayonets beckoned like the mirage of an oasis in the desert.
It must have been fun back in the days of something like the Russian or French revolutions. What a wonderful experience, to turn everything around and stroll around as public safety invigilator, grabbing all those reactionary elements and throwing them off to labour camps. There they would learn the penalty for exploiting the people!
I had around this time put a huge poster of Stalin up on my bedroom wall, with one of Chairman Mao right beside it. They were both really big posters, three feet by four, roughly. But when my mum came into the bedroom and saw these two big bastards looking down on her she did her nut and ripped the fuckers clean down, on the spot.
I remember one of her finds around this time was also my inflatable doll, which would take me half an hour to inflate and then about ten minutes to successfully screw. I panicked one night when, as I was screwing it in the bathroom, with the lights off, the thing seemed to come to life. I had been smoking dope prior to the shag, but when it seemed to come alive it freaked the shit out of me. It actually seemed to suddenly become human. Even the face seemed animated, and the eyes as if they were looking at me. I jumped up, my heart racing, my dick beginning already to wither. It wasn’t long after that that I accidentally punctured the thing. But I didn’t have the heart to throw it out. To me, that would have been like getting rid of a loyal and trusted friend. So, I stashed it behind the bookcase. How my mum found it, I’ll never know. But mums have a way of finding things. Arriving home one evening, my dolly was proudly on display, as if awaiting an introduction to each member of the family for when they came in.
I was also having problems getting sets of figures to tally. I could add them up horizontally, and then in their individual rows vertically, but getting them to tally was always virtually impossible for me.
I became quite famous for displaying this unique gift. The qualified accountants would give me sets of figures, and still by the end of the day I could not get them to tally. It was almost as if people were taking out side bets on it. Then, after I had been struggling for most of the day, my manager would take the sheet from me, and give it to one of the young temps in the office. Hey presto, the flash cow would trot out a set of beautifully tallying figures after half an hour had gone by!
The other problem I kept having was not being able to find the right place. Once a week we would be taken out to some remote building somewhere, for audit practice. This is when the accountants go out and test the accounting procedures of a company or organization. Test the sales ledger, see that it works. Test the invoices, see that they are running properly. Test purchases, test cheques, test petty cash, see that they were not abused. Companies are required by law to have external audits done, and for this only Chartered accountants are allowed by law to carry them out.
But I could rarely find the place I was supposed to get to. It was always some far-off the map hole in the world where you needed a car, usually miles from any underground station. And when I got there, it turned out that I had written it down wrong. Maybe someone was fucking me up. In hindsight, people in the office who wanted me out might well have been playing a little game of sabotage. There you go, true arsewipes for the system.
I was also having problems with some of the basic accountancy concepts. How a debt that someone owed you could be considered an asset was beyond even powers f comprehension. There didn’t seem to be any real justification for many of the basic ideas behind accountancy, only little conveniences which made it easy for rich folk to fuck off with everyone else’s money. I remember going out on one audit, and being told that what I was now going to be told was a great secret. In the small team of five directors, four of them were on about fifty grand each, and the poor cunt that was doing all the running around was on about four grand. The cheeky cunts at the top of that firm had set it up so that the silly bollox couldn’t actually find out how much they were earning. They were all smug cunts, all little looks to each other, little smirks as the silly bollox went past, trying his best to be a busy bollox.
I waited till the audit was over and then sent an anonymous note to him with all the proof from their own company records. I don’t know what happened, but hopefully e went in there and killed the shits.
So, sooner, rather than later, I was presented with the Royal Order of the Boot.
‘About fucking time too’ was all I said, when they presented me with the fact that my services were no longer required.
The senior manager had a bad heart condition, so on my way out I barged into his office to give him a piece of my mind.
‘You are one big fucking capitalist agent!’ I roared at him, before people started piling into and around the office to see what was happening. It made their day. The bastard on the other side of the desk was huffing and puffing for breath. I started pounding on the desk with my fist, repeating my sentence over and over again. I was praying inwardly that I could at least take out this son of a bitch with a heart attack before I got fucked off out of the building. To my mind, that would have been fair-do’s. A good day’s work. A result.
But, unfortunately, the slimy lizard regained his composure and lived to see another day. As for myself, I found myself being unceremoniously escorted downstairs and past the lobby.
At last! I was back on the street!

It was shortly after this that I said my cheerios to mum and dad and set of with some new-found friends in the world of squatting. You didn’t need a job. You could just walk in and take over an empty place and make it yours. I bumped into Scouser on the London Underground, where he was walking around offering to help carry people’s bags. I let him carry mine.
‘Do you need a place to stay?’ he asked me. Although short, he was very stocky, his arms heavily muscled, with wild tattoos emblazoned all over his biceps.
His face was nearly completely covered up with his bushy blackbeard, and over his head he wore a black leather cap, with the peak pulled down over his face.
By the most amazing series of coincidences, I did, and told him so. We changed course I midstep, and began moving along a different, slightly darker and more lonely set of tunnels that ran off it what I later discovered was called the Northern Line. It was rather symbolic, I hindsight. We got off at a stop called Chalk Farm, and, taking my cue from him, bowled through past the puny ticket collector with a snarl fixed to my face.
Past a few old tenement blocks, and up the stairs we went. We were now in a place called Ferdinand Street. The stairs seemed to go on for ever. Here and there we had to be careful in where we stepped. There were discarded syringes all over the place, where junkies had just flung their old ‘works’ on the ground just in case the local kids found themselves with nothing else to play with. Scouser led me into a really dreary place. But, as they say, it was home. Admittedly, there was an unoccupied bedroom, as he had promised. There was even a spare mattress in there, lonely-looking, waiting patiently for someone to come along and sleep on it.
I went in and started making myself comfy.
Scouser, though, wanted get moving. He asked me for some dosh, so he could go out and score.
‘What’s available?’ I asked him, cheerfully.
His reaction was as if someone had clicked their fingers and a glass of brandy had suddenly appeared in his own hand.
‘Well’ he began, man unused to being speechless, ‘there’s speed, downers, uppers, whites, browns, greens, benzies, Charlie, dots, pyramids, and nembies’. Many of these I was unfamiliar with.
‘What’s the speed like?’ I asked, as if I knew anything about it.
‘Not bad’ he said, rubbing his chin, looking at me as if I was a hundred yards away.
‘Okay,’ I said, pulling out another tenner. ‘Let’s try out some of that, then!’ I slipped the other tenner into his hand. I hadn’t actually ‘done’ speed before. This would be a new experience. Scouser went out of the door, slowly at first and then with a gathering momentum.
‘I’ll be back’ I heard him holler from halfway down the staircase. Cunt. He hadn’t even shut the fucking door. There was a cold breeze blowing in. I got up and went to close it myself. Bollox, I thought to myself……… there wasn’t one!

Scouser returned after a few days, which wasn’t bad for him, apparently. When I asked him what happened he launched into an energetic rehearsal of having been stopped by police, and having had to throw away all that good stuff, and so on.
Anyway, that was then.
In the meantime another lad had turned up. A strange lad with great shiny black eyes and long black hair by the name of Blue. He was surprised to find me in his room, I his bed, in fact, but didn’t seem too put out by it, especially when it transpired I still had some money left over for us to buy some drugs together. While we were talking a police car pulled up outside and he leapt down the stairs as fast as his thin legs could carry him. It turned out that a local friendly bobby was just passing by and wanting to check on him, just to make sure he was alright. I saw him from the window jump into the panda car which then revved off and pulled over round one of the corners. Blue then came back up the stairs with a fiver in his hand.
‘Wow’ I thought to myself, how rare for a policeman to be so helpful and concerned.
Blue recommended not handing any more money over to Scouser.
‘He is a rip off’, was all the explanation he offered.
Instead we walked right past him and into the street. Camden Lock market was just starting up, and it was amazing to walk past all the colourful stalls with their displays. People were making their own jewellery, clothes, and crockery, to mention but a few. Others were bringing rugs back from India, leather goods from south America, all manner of things from almost every place in the world. It was a teeming, hubbub, bee-hive-like place crammed with young people from all over the world. Just walking along through the narrow alleyways crammed with stalls and people was an experience in itself. The air was thick with incense, then was replaced with the aroma of Chinese and Caribbean foods. People were walking around in all manner of strange fashions, with great platform heels on some to the leather and rubber Catwoman suits on others. There was an atmosphere of something going on here.
Along the adjacent Camden High Street huge objects such as giant chairs, or giant boots, were affixed to the front of shops. It looked like a scene from Alice in Wonderland.
My friend Blue and I walked along and past this, then took a detour along some dingy streets till we came to what looked like a fortress. It was really an old Victorian house that had been substantially barricaded.
Going up the steps Blue kicked hard against the front door. About twelve pairs of eyes appeared at various windows. For one frightening moment I considered the possibility that all the eyes belonged to one single beast that resided there- some huge, hydra-like monstrosity that had come down from outer space and incarnated inside the house in a pod.
‘It’s me’ Blue shouted.
‘What do you want?’ someone shouted back. They were clearly not a very trusting bunch.
‘We want a bit of whizz’, Blue answered.
After a number of muffled conversations, a series of door bolts slid back. We went in, and a stick of something rotting hit our nostrils.
‘It’s the drains’, someone said to me, obviously spotting my reaction. ‘You’ll get used to it, if you come here often’. I looked through the gloom and made out in the dim light what looked like Gollum from ‘Lord of the Rings’.
‘I’m Mixer’ he said to me, his rodent-like face appearing almost human for a moment.
I looked to see if I could see his hands, in case there was any webbing between his fingers. No there wasn’t. He hadn’t got to that stage, yet.
I almost expected him to use the word ‘precious’ but he didn’t.
Blue gave me a quick frown as he looked at Gollum- I mean, Mixer, and then away.
‘This way’, he said. We walked of and found ourselves in the Court of the Acid Queen.
She sat upright in her bed, with some sort of bear’s rug spread over it. She was sitting cross legged, and over her knees was a great mirror. Although not old, she was still neither young. It was as if she had become ageless, like one of those female vampires you see in horror films. I doubt if her face had seen sunlight in years. Up at the windows huge heavy drapes kept out the natural daylight. Around the room it looked like a scene from Miss Havishams in ‘Great Expectations’.
Around the room were a few indistinct people, barely visible, hardly registering in my field of vision.
On the mirror was a large pyramid of white powder. The girl’s ultra-thin hand held a large razor, and with it she proceeded to demolish the pyramid, running the powder into furrows, up and down the length of the glass. I could see her reflection in the glass itself, like a face on a faded photograph, looking back at someone across the mists of time.
I felt like I ought to have known her. Did I recognize her from somewhere? No, I didn’t. Maybe I would after trying out some of that crazy white lightning she was stroking into action. I had a vision of handjobbing the mysterious god of Speed, El Amphetamino, with her spidery fingers. It was sexy beyond belief.
She seemed in a world of her own. Looking down on her beloved, I saw a High Priestess from some ancient moon worshipping cult, humming to herself the ancient hymn that would invoke into being the presence of her demon lover.
Suddenly, she was done. No one said a word. I became conscious of my own breath.
Line by line she dissected the lines into tiny white paper bags, which had already been cut up and prepared, and closed them up, like little envelopes.
These then went out to the outreached hands of the congregation. Like the scene from Da Vinci’s painting, in which God reaches out to take the hand of Adam, unseen by human eyes a small paper envelope slips from hand to hand.
The worshippers were handing over their pieces of silver into the bowl, now, tenners, fivers, pieces of eight, here a pile of assorted coins from that one. A slight frown on her face as, with amazing speed, she scans and adds up the value of the coins. Faster than a speeding bullet, she has ascertained that it is short by two bob.
‘Short again, Ernie’ she says, a cold hard edge to her voice.
A nervous scared voice answers back.
‘Sorry babe, I mean……is it? Oh, I’ll make it up to you next time. Promise.’ The voice is almost disembodied, as if Ernie has already OD’d and left behind this mortal coil.
Ernie meanwhile has busied himself cooking up his bag of powder. I can see from the light of his candle that the powder is strong, even though I have never taken it before. It fulfils all my prior knowledge of what good speed should look like. There is a glitter to it, like it is cut or ground up glass in the spoon. It refracts the light and I can almost see tiny rainbows gleaming here and there, as if I am now looking at the inside of a treasure box, or Alladin’s cave.
Ernie unwraps his syringe, and from a grimy glass of water fills up the barrel of the syringe with a measured precision that would be worthy of a brain surgeon.
The water is squirted, very slowly, almost painfully, into the awaiting spoon. It is almost sexual. It is almost magical. The magical union of male and female, of yin and yang. The spoon below is the receptive vagina, into which the water is squirted. The powder is the egg, waiting for the summer’s rain to blossom its harvest, and bloom its fruit.
I am transfixed by what I see before me. I feel like a small mouse in the presence of a cobra, or a sheep caught in the middle of a road by the headlamps of an oncoming car. My friend Blue is busy alongside me performing an identical ritual. There is no rush. Everything here is taking its due time. No one is going anywhere. We are in a timeless zone, with no past and no future. Blue has filled two syringes by now, one alongside the other. As I look at them they become like two wedding rings, or the two little characters on the top of a wedding cake. One for him, one for her.
What am I getting into? Is the thought that flashes across my mind, moments before I let Blue tie a thin black cord around my arm. There is a sudden pressure in the cordoned-off end of my arm. Then, a flash of sharpness, as the needle slices into the flesh and hits a vein. I see a thin red tree branch out in the barrel of the gun, then fill it, turning all the water to red.
Blue is pearl-diving like a good ‘un. He knows how to go in deep to get the big juicy vein, the mainline where all the traffic is coming home from work.
Something hits my lungs. I feel something like love flooding through my body, sweeping away all my thoughts in its ecstacy, filling my head with devotion. I can actually feel the presence of God. I have found love after all. I have entered through the heavenly gates of my lord’s kingdom. I look up at Blue’s face, and he is smiling at me. I can see how much he loves me. Foolish that I could never really see it before. I note to myself that it is amazing how much Knowledge is out there, just waiting for you to reach out and pick it from the Tree.
And yet we humans choose to live our tiny lives in ignorance rather than stretch forth our hands and know that we are gods ourselves.
I can almost begin to feel like a missionary; maybe the great mystical being behind all altered states of consciousness has a Path marked out for me. A purpose to my existence.
My thoughts in this direction are swayed by something that Blue is saying to me……….it is not so much what he is saying as the way that he is saying it to me. He is talking to me something, but almost as if I am in some great collusion with him. Who knows what he is thinking? I am away with the fairies, and someone is kissing me now. The sensation on my lips is overwhelmingly pleasurable. I look up and it is the girl. She has taken off her clothes now that she has had her hit, and is putting her head down in my lap.
Somehow my clothes seem to have come off too. I see from the side that Blue has helped this goddess undrape me, in preparation for the mystical union. This is more holy than getting married. The girl’s head is bobbing up and down on my dick. It is a so ecstatic I could almost come immediately, but somehow I manage to hold off.
She is getting up now, and I find myself looking up at her pussy. It comes down with a determination right into my face. She is pulling it wide for me to suck on it. My tongue licks from side to side. Then across her clitoris. She is writing in ecstasy, as I am. Then the two of us are coming, she in my mouth and me in hers. As she rolls off me the two of us are out of breath, gasping for air. I find my legs have twisted up, I can’t seem to move them so easily.
The girl is up now, leaning across to sort out Blue, giving him some of the same treatment that she has given me. Others in the room are engaged in all manner of practice. One guy is wanking himself off, while holding a hand mirror to his face. What he sees there is clearly more erotic than the scene that has just unfolded before him. Ernie is still struggling for a vein. Or maybe it is the same vein, maybe he still hasn’t found a hit. But he doesn’t care. Each person here has got their own trip on, and not always do these trips converge. When they do, the results seem to be dramatic.
The trip is over, and we are all coming down now. Everyone is edgy, tense, irritable. The atmosphere is terrible. Like something really bad is about to happen. Like a murder or something.
I look at Blue. Some form of non-verbal communication passes between us, and we are both on our way out.
The money is finished, the trip is over. Somehow each worshipper must pick themselves up from the floor and make their own way home. See you at the next one.
Yeah yeah. Gow an’ fuck ya’self are the unspokens as we don our clothes and wheel off out the door. And no, I haven’t got the price of a cuppa tea.
As we walk way into the cold night air, some faceless nameless drone of the underworld is at work, securing the door behind us with its thousand and one locks.

I am in need of some extra dosh, and I don’t fancy my chances as a dealer. I’ve moved into a new squat round Ladbroke Grove. It’s different to Camden. Neither better nor worse, but different. There is a grandiose quality of some kind around here. Down Portobello Road there are a number of pubs that I hang out in. There’s the Princess Alexandra, the one where the Hell’s Angel’s all hand out. Where their really fat mommas sit with their big fat bums on the back of those Harley Davidsons knocking back cans of lager. They all wear those skimpy tops that show lots of wobbly tits, their colours etched on the back of the sleeveless Levi jackets. Road Rats. Devil’s Disciples. The Outlaws. Nomads.The names of ancient tribes regrouping and realigning after eons of disembodiment.
Mind you, watch your p’s and q’s around them, son. One wrong word and they’ll fuck you up faster than you can shit yer pants.
In the summer this is an amazing area to live in. tattoos emblazon almost every visible body part. Dragons swirling across women’s shoulders, their tales draping around
one another. Back up a bit and there’s the Earl of Lonsdale. Look’s a bit more laid back. Further down the road there’s the Mangrove Club if your feeling brave. It’s the best place to score a piece of weed, admittedly, but it is very black there. Like most white boys, I don’t mind a few shades of darkness but when it gets jet black that’s when the heat can switch on for me.
I make my way up to BIT. BIT is a free information exchange. If you want to know something about where the next squat is, where to get natural bread, or just to meet fellow ‘heads’, this is the place to come to.
It is up on the corner of the Great Western Road and Westbourne Park Road. As you go in, you realize that is one very run down building. There are phones going off left and right. People are talking into them. It is like a hippy version of the interior of Dr. No’s volcano. If you didn’t know better, you could be fooled into thinking that there was a revolution going on, and that this was the (cunningly disguised) centre of it. It’s just as well that we know better. Young pregnant girls, on the run from their foster homes are sitting in one corner, smoking a spliff. One scarecrow –looking lad from Scotland is trying to toast a few slices of bread over a face-up electric heater. His eyes are fixed on the slowly browning sides of the Hovis slices he has commandeered from somebody’s front doorstep.
I spot one girl on one of the phones and recognize her as the girl that was on three days ago. The fact that she looks as though she has in the meantime lost about three stones in weight tells me that she ought to lay off the white powder. Unless she really does want to get that free ride in an ambulance.
Lo and behold, I run into Mixer. His face is almost transparent now. There is a weird glow, like a nimbus, around him. Is he a saint, or a sinner?
He tells me he’s got some speed for sale. I slip him the required tenner, and he slips the packet into my hand. Within the blinking of an eye he has vanished, leaving me wondering if he were ever really there.
Just then Bonnie turns up. Bonnie is down from the north, on the run, and has recently kicked a smack habit. He still likes a bit of whiz though. I tell him I’ve just picked up. His eyes light up with a green flame. We scuttle back to what he refers to as ‘his place’, It is a tiny room at the top of an old squat just yards down from the BIT building. We go in through a back window which has a Warning We are Squatting sign pasted up. One of these always goes up whenever a place gets squatted as it tends to make the owners think twice before trying to get back in. Bonnie takes me up about fifteen flights of rickety stairs before we arrive, huffing and puffing, at his attic.
It is freezing cold in here. For some reason it is colder in here than outside. Maybe it’s haunted. We crouch down and from nowhere a couple of syringes are produced.I show Bonnie the stuff. His face frowns. He puts out his right forefinger, and slightly licks the end of it. Then he dabs this gingerly into the powder, brings his finger back and puts it in his mouth.
‘Fuck me, you cunt!’ he cries out, ‘It’s Vim!’
jesus, that would have killed us if we’d banged that up. When I tell him I bought it off Mixer a look of understanding dawns across his face.
‘Mixer is one fucking rip off’ he says, eventually. His breathing is heavy. I think of how I might have died if I had just gone straight in and shot this shit up. It would have been a nasty death. The shock of that stuff, running quickly through the system, the pain from the burning, the sense of despair and failure as I would realize what had happened, moments before falling down in absolute agony. And all so one man could get a quick tenner together. Mixer by now is probably handing that same tenner over to a dealer for a bag of the real thing. Ina minute or so he will be feeling the rush of amphetamine, blossoming out throughout his blood like a great flower, like the kind you see in those nature programmes when they speed up the camera, and you see in seconds what has taken days or hours to happen.
I feel shock, anger, rage, helplessness wash over me. My life has been spared. If we all have nine lives to start out with then now I have only eight. Something in me feels as though it has died. A part of me is older now, or has just gone. I begin to wonder whether it is sucha good idea, running around with these people, shooting up drugs I know fuck all about, thinking that nothing can happen to me.
But it doesn’t stop me.Within a week I have got a set of yellow an purple bruises ruinning up and down the length of my arm. The pin pricks make me look like a pin cushion. I begin to get scared that I might have gangrene. I pick up the phone I a phone box and dial the Release helpline.
I am freaking out now, as I describe to the concerned voice at the other end what state my arm is in.
‘Have I got gangrene?’ I ask him, my heart beating almost out of the rib cage. He says in al honesty that he doesn’t think so, and arranges for me to see a doctor who can give me a once-over. That is all I want to hear. He doesn’t think so. He says you only have gangrene if you smell like rotting meat. So I am OK then. But there is a guy I know who does smell like rotting meat. A guy who hobbles about on crutches, having lost one leg already. Probably the same thing. This guy parks himself along the Portobello Road every day, waiting for people to drop money in his hat. He never looks at tehm, even when they put paper money in. He never says anything, even. He just looks straight ahead and then through them. Maybe it’s his technique. If so, it s a technique that seems to work, because make money he does. Enough to get a bag of smack each and every day. That is all he wants. All of his life pleasure is wrapped up in that moment. He doesn’t care if he has to sit in the cold or the rain or the sun all day, each and every day. None of that counts for anything. He is not interested in any conversation, or any fragment of friendship. There is nothing anyone can do for him, nothing that he is interested in doing, other than what he does. There is something about this guy that is seriously scary. He has long gone past the stage of doing drugs for a laugh. Now all that he is left with is a long wait for another needle, his life a little pile of dust at the end of each long and lonely day.
But the smell. It wasn’t even with my nose that I first noticed something. It was with my stomach. It juts heaved, as I was walking along, and past him. He was outside the bakers, sitting on the ground, and as I walked along my guts just jumped up inside me and wanted to empty out, right there on the pavement. Even I wondered what the fuck it was, what was going on, was what my brain flashed, at that moment. Then my nose caught scent of it. Like rotting meat. He must have noticed, because though he didn’t actually observably move, there was a slight shift in his posture, a slight self-consciousness about him now. Like when someone farts, and you come back into the room before the smell has had a chance to clear.
Phew.
Fucking hell, there’s no fart can come close to this smell. The smell of rotting meat. Human meat. Human flesh. While it is still on the human, too. Not even of a dead person, of a dead body. But the rotting flesh of someone while it is still on them, while they are still walking about with it on. I looked down at the guy. He didn’t even give a fuck. Probably working out how much extra benefit he would get from the social security by having that one off, too. Like a matching pair. Two for the price of one. Buy two now, get one free. Fuckin’sicko. I walked away, leaving him staring into the middle of nothing.
One of the other good ones was the dog and string. Sound likes the name of one of these modern pubs. British pubs have been through their many phases. At one point they all had royalist titles- the Queen’s Head, the King’s this, the Princess that. Then that gave way to almost every pub trying to get ‘with it’ and become more modern. They had done their market research, see, and that told them that young people perceived pubs as ‘for the older generation’. Youngsters then were deserting the alcohol thing of their parents for dope, and this was beginning to cut deeply into the profits of th breweries. They had to make pubs into a new image, something that made it fashionable to come into them. So, away with the old spit and sawdust, and pictures of Prince Edward, and instead in with the wall to wall carpeting and pool tables. There you go. Let’s have a few girls with their arses bending over. Always a winner.
Out go the old pianos. In with the juke boxes, and live music. Then they went through another phase, at least around my area. Every pub suddenly becomes Irish. Back in the 70s and 80s, you would never have known that it was so fashionable to be Irish, with their Celtic football colours emblazoned everywhere and even the tricolour standing standing to attention over in the corner.
But the dog and string was what we called the scam of borrowing someone’s dog, and sitting with it in the blistering cold until you got enough to score. The English are very sentimental about their dogs. One look at a pooch in a shop doorway is enough t break down the defences of the average Englishman. Junkies have no morality. Just get the fuckin’ money. Not having a dog, I still admire the artwork of the scenario. I get to know one guy called Henry . He is sitting there so still, huddled under his blanket, or, as we call it in the trade, skillet. The dog, an ultra-thin Lurcher, is – or should I say was-a fairly big animal. It’s ribs are sticking straight through. Along the back of its hindlegs I can see a thin string under its skin connecting the upper leg to the lower part. What do they call that? I don’t know, but I have hard about it, from somewhere. It’s where you cut if you want to hamstring something. Ugh.
Henry and I strike up a conversation. He invites me under his skillet which is supposed to be a mark of supreme hospitality. But I don’t trust it for fear of getting bugs all over me. Fuck that. Once you’ve had that once or twice you really don’t go looking for it again. The itching starts in your bollox, and around the upper pubic hair. At first you don’t really notice it too much, but then it starts to get really insistent, and persistent. Pretty soon, you are scratching away all day long, and everywhere you go. You are also doing it in front of people you really shouldn’t, like little old ladies at bus stops. You try to tell yourself it’s nothing. Just need a change of underwear. Haven’t had one in a quite a few weeks. So, it must be that. Yes, that’s it. Only it’s not. In the end, you have to face it, and with a visit t a doctor, or a free clinic, get your pubes cut off and throw this powder all over your shaven nuts. The old jeans, they have to go, and as for your bedding, well, often that too. Next time be a bit more careful as to who you let crash out on your bed.

Back in the squat we’ve got a new girl moved in. A pretty young thing. Breezy disposition. Long chestnut hair, and tight jeans. In this squat we all have a liberal attitude towards what others might call ‘space’. We blow merrily into and out of each others’ rooms, smoking this her with X and then doing something else over there with Y. On her wall there is a photograph of some little fat Indian boy.
‘He’s great, isn’t he?’ she says, her voice gushing with love. Her eyes are raised upwards, admiring this fat little fuck. He must be about fourteen, and looks like one of those Americanized Indians. It turns out that this is exactly who and what he is. My intuition sometimes is amazing.
‘He’s the Guru Maharaji’, she says, as if imparting some great secret.
Now all is revealed. I look around, half expecting to see a ray of light come in through the window and hit the picture, angelic choir music in the background, a real Cecil B. De Mills thing.
‘But he’s just some wanker’ I reply, without thinking. The girl looks shocked. I have just pissed all over the altar, eaten bacon in the mosque, wiped my arse with my right hand.
I make a swift recovery.
‘Well, when I say wanker, I don’t actually mean ‘wanker’. I mean that is how he might be perceived, by others that is. Looking at him I can see he’s brilliant. Does he have a temple nearby, or something?’
I have saved the day. Redeemed myself. The girl’s body language warms up again. I might be onto a winner here. Could do with a shag.
‘Yes, there is a place where we hold puja’, she says, looking at me now a bit like a cat looks at a canary.
Puja, it turns out, is the place where satsang is held. Satsang is a Hindu version of prayers. They also sing hymns there, and, in the case of this mission, show video films of the great man Guru Maharaji himself.
‘Do you fancy a shag?’ she asks me. I am bowled over by this frankness of manner. Phew, if only I’d met her years ago. She peels off those spray-on jeans and we roll into the hay. It’s like replaying a past life back in medieaval France or somewhere.
After that she hauls me off to the satsang,
I begin to realize what it must have felt like for one of those bulls the ancient Britons used to hunt and then truss up en route to the bonfire.
She takes me up a flight of stone steps, and we go into a really ‘together’ house, No squat this. There is the sense of real dosh in the air, too. It’s nice to actually come into a place like this, after so long in rough houses. Nice carpet. Nice tables. Nice clean toilet. Now that’s a change. No piss all over the floor here. Even the bog rolls got paper on it.
I begin to remember my life before I graduated into squatting. It’s slowly starting to come back to me.
The meeting starts, and there’s about eight or nine of us.
On the wall, and on the table is a picture of the Guru, smiling that wide smug, fat boy smile. Part of me would like to give him a good kicking, but I know I’ll never get the chance.
We are singing some ancient Hindu song. Well, the rest of them are, including Chestnut. She is getting into it, her voice blending quite sweetly with their. Only I am the odd man out. The One who doth not know the tunes here, mate.
I feel like a new boy. Some girl has got out a silver flute now and is playing it. With her legs in-folded in the cross-legged position of the half lotus she looks like a figure out of a legend. One thousand and one nights. Sheherazade.
The music from the flute is lilting, it takes your thoughts and kind of does things with them, turning them this way, now that.
We come to the end. She brings the rod down from her lips, but remains sitting in that position. That looks good, I note. I’ll have to remember that one and practice it. Then I too could look the business the next time I get to another one of these satsangs, or whatever they are called.
They put on a video of this guy. The most Americanized voice you could ever imagine comes through. What an anti-climax. Oh, how can these people fall for this old bollox? This little fat Indian boy is talking in his fake way about how much he loves us all. Cunt. I keep the thought out of my eyes but deep within me I’d like to trigger this one. I’d like to see all these self-made pedestals brought down.
It turns out this guru runs an empire, has dozens of chicks, all admiring him like fuck, and loads of Rolls Royces. He’s been fourteen for years now, so I later hear, and his empire is being fought over between him and one of his sisters. His immediate family are pampered and virtually treated like gods by an army of slaves, most of them young women, not just from India, either, but many of them from the States, or Europe.
If only I knew what he knew.

In a hall down over Notting Hill side I meet a couple of black fellas who tell me they can get acid at a much cheaper price. So far I have been meeting people who quite me £200 for a thousand trips. They are talking about £140, so I think it looks good. We meet up at the venue an take a stroll into a corridor of some council flats.
‘Where’s the money?’ one of them asks me.
I immediately know something is wrong.
‘Where’s the fuckin’ stuff?’ I say back to him. In my right pocket my hand has already slipped inside the pocket to bring out the knife I always carry. Man No. 1 really shits himself.
‘He’s gotta gun, he’s gotta gun!’ he starts shouting over and over again. He is standing there, his face frozen in fear while my hand does the walking.
But Man. No.2 has leaped at me, only it’s not me. He’s leapt at my right arm, holding it tight, stopping me from getting it out. He’s kind of stuck himself onto my right arm. Man No. 1 by now has recovered his wits and is brandishing a thin wooden stick. It’s far too light to do any real damage. By now I’ve shaken off Man No.2 and my right arm is out, only it’s the wad of money my hand is holding onto, not the knife. It’s funny what happens when your body rather then your head starts doing the thinking.
Man No. 1 is raining blows down onto my head with Stick. I can feel Wet down the back of my head. From far off I can hear someone screaming. It takes me a while to realize that it is my own voice. I am down. There’s blood everywhere. My blood, I note, as 1 and 2 scamper off out the doors. I look and realize that I am still holding the money in my hand. My grip on it is so tight that it takes the ambulance crew that turn up half an hour to get my hand open. The money, along with everything else, goes into a plastic bag. I see it being sealed as the ambulance trundles along and into the gates of a hospital. The last thing I remember is a large coloured woman, one of those that have a really kind face and voice, speaking to me as she gives me a shot of something, in the head.
‘What’s in it?’ I ask.
‘Cocaine’ she says. I think she’s having me on, but I fall for it and go to sleep.
I wake up the next morning, and it’s a miniature bowl of corn flakes I’m being given. It looks like a portion for one of the seven dwarfs. The milk it comes with is absolutely freezing. So cold I can barely take it in my mouth.
I look up and I am in a ward with about a dozen others. Someone I have acquired a pair of pyjamas. O dear, there’s a Mr. Plod at the end of my bed. From the bored-to-death face he is wearing I think he’s been looking at me all night long.
I call out to the red-skinned nurse that’s giving out the bowls.
‘Er, is there any sugar?’ I ask, as nicely as I can.
‘There is NO sugar’ the girl answers to me. All ultra-irritated. It is clearly a big thing, here, the sugar. Although I haven’t heard a murmour out of anyone else in the ward so far, the way she answers me hints that this is perhaps the MOST often asked question of the day.

I’ve had enough. I am on my way. Getting rolled by the black guys might have had something to do with it. I moved out of my place, anyway. I just felt that it was going to get turned over, and, lo and behold, it did. Just had a feeling that the place was about to get attacked. So, I shifted. Surprise surprise, when I heard the news that the same black guys that tried to roll me tried to roll the squat, too.
Squat-rolling was always a winner. The people in squats were often on the run themselves, so unlikely to go to the Plods. Even if they did, the police in those days never had any time for squatters. If you got raped or murdered, then they might do something, but just getting turned over, well, have a nice day.
Apparently they and a few more stormed the place, and held everyone up with knives. Everyone, even the chicks, got a strip-search and all the money, jewellery, even someone sewing machine all got carried away.
My intuition had saved me yet again. When I was first told the story of what had happened, I just laughed. The guy telling me looked shocked, that I didn’t give a fuck.
I just found it humorous, imagining all those selfish bastards back in that squat getting ripped apart by those sharks. Prior to my moving out, the atmosphere there had gone rally bad. Whereas before people would make each other cups of tea, since Married Couple had moved in all of a sudden everything went really proprietal. People would walk down to the kitchen with their own tea bags in one hand, and walk back to their little dinky room with a fucking tea pot steaming with freshly-brewing tea in it, on their way back. They wouldn’t even offer any more. You can’t live like that in a squat. It puts peoples’ back up.
So good luck to the mugging bastards, is what I thought. Someone had to teach those cheeky fucks a lesson or two.

But I wanted to be off, anyway. So, gathering together what tiny bits of money I could, I found that it all added up to a few hundred quid.
‘I want to do some traveling’ I said to my mate, Bald Head. We mooched further down the Portobello Road as we talked. The market was just winding down. Through the windows of the antique shops could be seen the most gorgeous creations of art and style. Chandeliers that would probably never grace my front room ceiling, I knew that. Great clocks wrought in embellished metals, china vases that looked hundreds of years old.
‘Why not go to India?’ Bald head said. I’m not sure whether he actually did say it, or if the idea just came from his mind into mine. We all thought he had certain powers not known to the rest of us. India? Okay, then. I started to think about it. BIT actually produced a travel guide, telling you where to stay, and what to do/ not do, for each leg of the long journey from London, through to Istanbul, and from there to Katmandu. I got a copy and started reading it. Soon, I knew certain sections virtually word for word. It became like my bible. One thing it recommended was that as you went along, it was always nice to try and fit in a prison visit to someone in each town, or at least as and when you could fit it in. It described the sentences and conditions in the nicks out there that Britons- and other transnationals- had to endure, and how big a blessing it was to those inside for someone – a complete stranger, even- to just turn up and visit them in the prison. Especially if you could afford to give them something, too, such as a piece of money, or even some fruit. It was a practice I was later to develop, in the course of my travels through India and Pakistan.

Bald Head was the one we all looked up to. I suppose there has to be someone like Bald Head in every group, for it to survive. And we in Squatland were trying our damnedest to do just that- survive. It wasn’t easy. You had to survive the drugs, the cops, and then the people that wanted to turn you over. Big Danny was one of these much-to-be feared rip offs. An Irishman, I’ve never seen hands so big. He stood at about seven feet- literally. He had just come out for a murder, so the word was. In matters such as this, the word on the street really is as authentic as it can be, and just looking at this huge guy I could well believe it.
He used to go round to certain squats on giroday, and force his way in. Then he would hold each person, one by one, up by their ankles until all of their money and cheques were turned over to him. And if you tried lying, he would start to become annoyed. Which was distinctly unhealthy. Week after week this went on, and the people in the next squat up from us were despairing. The social wouldn’t even let them collect their cheques from the DHSS office. No. They HAD to go out by post, so what the bent postman didn’t siphon off, Big Danny would. It was a food chain, with a small pool of increasingly thin and desperate victims at the tail end of it. It was like going for two weeks to get a piece of food on the end of your fork, and just as you brought it up to your mouth. With all your saliva running thick and fast, a bird would swoop along and vanish of with it. Thankfully, though, for some reason known only to the demigods that are delega5ted with the task of overseeing all incarnating squatters , junkies, drunks and robbers, Big Danny never darkened our door with his unholy presence.
Only one day he did.
He and a known gambler we called One Ear George suddenly turned up. One Ear was on crutches this time. He looked fucked. Really bashed up. And he was known as a fairly tough fighter. But with Big Danny right behind him it was like turning up with your own pet bear.
One ear had heard that I was doing a nice little earner with student cards, getting piles of them from the old LSE student union office, and, along with the stamp, knocking them out to budding travelers for a tenner a time. With these cards, all the Aussies et al that I sold them too could get untold discounts off their air flights.
‘We want the fucking money, Tel Boy’ One Ear said.
He wasn’t fucking about, either. You can tell right away if you can fuck someone about, and if you can’t. This was the time when I knew I couldn’t. No fucking about.
Okay, One Ear, I thought.
‘Er………..there isn’t any!’ I cried out, as Big Danny wrapped his hand around my face. I could feel his massive fingers touching each other round the back of my head, probably even overlapping. Big Danny gave my neck a playful little twist, hinting at the ease with which my head could so easily be inclined to face backwards.
I suddenly remembered where I had stashed the money.
‘Mmmmmmmm’ was all I was able to get out, until Big Danny took his palm off my face. ‘It’s here’, I said, as I pulled out the entire wad from the plastic bag where I kept it, down by my balls. Big Danny’s eyes looked at me with an approving, fatherly interest. I had passed the test for wisdom.
I still felt gutted, though. All my fuckin’ money.
Deep inside me the bitterness welled up. In front of me the two of them were dividing up the dosh, as equals.
‘And you’re supposed to be a fuckin’ friend!’ I blurted out at One Ear. Bollox, I wasn’t going to let them get away with this clean out, not without at least venting my fury at One Ear. The traitor.
Big Danny wasn’t known as the sharpest tool in the box, but it took only a moment for him to realize the import of my words.
An expression of shock, then disgust, then rage filled his face.
‘What, is he supposed to be a friend of yours?’ he asked me.
‘Why, yes. Supposed to be. The cunt!’ I shouted, tears running down the side of my face.
With that Big Danny was up on his feet. He was big. But fuck me, he was fast as well. I have rarely seen a man as big as that move so quickly. To use expressions like lightning, or panther would be to understate the case.
He just picked One ear up by the scruff of his jacket, and proceeded to boot him to fuck. With a few punches thrown in, One ear was then unceremoniously kicked down the stairs, with his crutch thrown down after him. He dragged himself off somehow, while Big Danny came back to me and sat down. I was terrified. Violence I have always disapproved of, especially when potentially directed against me. I barely breathed.
Calmly, Big Danny took out the money, and proceeded to count it. One for you. One for me. He loves me. He loves me not. Then, finding this was too complicated, he just took out a piece of it and gave it back to me. It was about a third of what I’d had before.
‘Tel’ he said to me, warmly, ‘If anyone tries to turn you over again, I want you to come and tell me, alright?’
‘Yes, Danny,’ I said, ‘Certainly. I Promise’.
‘But Tel,’ he paused, wanting to say something but not quite finding the right words.
‘Yes, Danny’, I ventured, encouraging him.
‘Well……..it would be helpful if I could pop round and get a borrow off ya now and again. After all, we’re mates, aren’t we?’
‘We definitely are, Danny. Of course. One hand washed the other. Just let me get back on my feet a bit and then pop round and see me. No problem at all. Mates.’

It was just as well, I thought to myself, that my magic bus ticket for me was already paid for, and I was heading out of London the following day, heading to Afghanistan, where, so I heard, the laws were lax and the dope was for free.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.