‘Exterminate all rational thought. That is the conclusion I have come to.’
-Bill Lee (Peter Weller), Naked Lunch
Oh God, here we go again. I’m not doing myself any favours, but fuck it. This shit has to be documented.
Only the nicest of taxi drivers allows you to hoover up coke in his van while he canes it through twenty miles of rural Britain. Destination: Huddersfield, population 146, 234. Mission: to get absolutely twisted for Hicks’ birthday.
Hudson held open the tiny bag with a forefinger and thumb and scooped up a bump of powder with the nail file of a Swiss Army Knife. A pothole in the road sent the coke back into the bag.
'Oh... Cobra! Nearly lost it then, pal!'
Hudson uses this taxi service so much he knows all the drivers by codename.
'That driving's venomous, Cobra,' Hicks shouted. 'Venomous!'
Hudson scooped a lump of coke onto the metal again. I closed one nostril, sucking the powder straight into my head as it mixed with the early naughties dance music and mucus.
The minor paranoia of drug ingestion was magnified last night- I’ve been having slight headaches since I blacked out practicing ‘triangle chokes’ at the gym a few nights ago. The triangle is not even a choke- it’s a sleeper, meaning it cuts off blood to the brain.
My training partner wasn’t quite putting it on right. The setup was good- he was on his back; I was kneeling between his legs. One leg was over my shoulder, the other under my armpit. He hooked one ankle behind his opposite knee, completing the triangle shape, and then pushed my arm out straight across my neck. This cuts off the blood to the head, finishing the submission. My arm was still in front of my chin though, stopping the submission from coming on. The guy is a big lad, so he was squeezing pretty hard because I wasn’t tapping to it. Then when he moved his hips slightly to the side and my arm slipped down onto my neck it came on with a vengeance. My head felt like it was going to explode. My vision turned to static. I had electricity pylons buzzing loud in my ears. Later, my training partner told me I looked at him ‘like I was really scared of him.’
He let go fast and I stood up. My knees gave way and I staggered to the side, slumping on the edge of the boxing ring. The noise- loud and unnerving- started to fade and colour started to pour back into the world again.
‘Oh,’ I mumbled, mostly to myself, ‘I didn’t like that.’
My trainer said it happens every now and then and that it’s nothing to worry about. I hope he’s right...
We were wired in Huddersfield, surrounded by students. It was apparent quickly that the men outnumber the women- there was so much sausage in the first few bars that I started to think I was walking around a German market. I was caning Jack Daniels and talking to these two guys from our group.
‘Well, if you’ve already got Chlamydia and you go and get AIDS as well, you really are fucked,’ said one.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That would only, uh...’ I stared at the floor, trying to keep shit together and praying I don’t pass out or anything dumb. ‘...Exaberbate the situation.'
They laughed.
‘I’ve gotta write this shit down,’ I said. None of us noticed I'd mispronounced Exacerbate. Particularly not me.
Later on, as more chunks of coke found their way down my throat, I for some reason described the feeling as being ‘like a lump of jizz on a leather handbag.’ I’m not too sure what I was thinking, in retrospect.
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