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Authors: Howard Marks
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touch.
‘Warm. Make me warm.’
And still there was no rush, no hurry at all. Louie pressed the hypo down to the cotton; the stuff came too high these days to lose the fraction of a drop. ‘Don’t vomit, student,’ he taunted Frankie to remind him of the first fix he’d had after his discharge but he was too cold to answer. He was falling between glacial walls, he didn’t know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-colored walls of Private McGantic’s terrible pit.
He couldn’t feel Louie probing into the dark red knot above his elbow at all. Nor see the way the first blood sprayed faintly up into the delicate hypo to tinge the melted morphine with blood as warm as the needle’s heated point.
When Louie sensed the vein he pressed it down with the certainty of a good doctor’s touch, let it linger a moment in the vein to give the heart what it needed and withdrew gently, daubed the blood with a piece of cotton, tenderly, and waited.
Louie waited. Waited to see it hit.
Louie liked to see the stuff hit. It meant a lot to Louie, seeing it hit.
‘Sure I like to watch,’ he was ready to acknowledge any time. ‘Man, their eyes when that big drive hits ’n’ goes tingling down to the toes. They retch, they sweat, they itch – then the big drive hits ’n’ here they come out of it cryin’ like a baby ’r laughin’ like a loon. Sure I like to watch. Sure I like to see it hit. Heroin got the drive awright – but there’s not a tingle to a ton – you got to get M to get that tingle-tingle.’
It hit all right. It hit the heart like a runaway locomotive, it hit like a falling wall. Frankie’s whole body lifted with that smashing surge, the very heart seemed to lift up-up-up – then rolled over and he slipped into a long warm bath with one long orgasmic sigh of relief. Frankie opened his eyes.
The Man with the Golden Arm , 1949
Christopher Mayhew MP
An Excursion out of Time
W HAT HAPPENED TO me between 12.30 and four o’clock on Friday, 2 December 1955? After brooding about it for several months, I still think my first, astonishing conviction was right – that on many occasions that afternoon I existed outside time.
I don’t mean this metaphorically, but literally. I mean that the essential part of me (the part that thinks to itself ‘This is me’) had an existence, quite conscious of itself, enjoying itself, reflecting on its strange experience, in a timeless order of reality outside the world as we know it.
And I believe this in spite of the fact that the experience was induced by a drug, the much-discussed mescaline.
People who are drugged, of course, often suffer from delusions; and the common-sense explanation of my experience is simply that I took an hallucinogen and had an hallucination. And if I dispute this now, when I am undrugged, there is, says common sense, nothing strange about that either. People who have hallucinations often cannot believe that they are hallucinations.
This common-sense attitude is persuasive, but I don’t think it is wrong; and at the risk of making a complete fool of myself, I would like to put forward an alternative explanation. At least this may stir up some controversy, and perhaps even encourage some research along what seems an extremely promising line of scientific inquiry.
Let me first explain how I came to take the drug. I am an old school friend of Dr Humphrey Osmond, who is the Medical Superintendent of a mental hospital in Saskatchewan. In his search for a cure for his schizophrenic patients, Dr Osmond has for some years past been experimenting with a particular range of drugs known as ‘psychotomimetics’, which produce in those who take them some of the symptoms of insanity. It was Dr Osmond who administered one of these drugs – mescaline – to Mr Aldous Huxley in the fascinating experiment described in Huxley’s The Doors of
‘Warm. Make me warm.’
And still there was no rush, no hurry at all. Louie pressed the hypo down to the cotton; the stuff came too high these days to lose the fraction of a drop. ‘Don’t vomit, student,’ he taunted Frankie to remind him of the first fix he’d had after his discharge but he was too cold to answer. He was falling between glacial walls, he didn’t know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-colored walls of Private McGantic’s terrible pit.
He couldn’t feel Louie probing into the dark red knot above his elbow at all. Nor see the way the first blood sprayed faintly up into the delicate hypo to tinge the melted morphine with blood as warm as the needle’s heated point.
When Louie sensed the vein he pressed it down with the certainty of a good doctor’s touch, let it linger a moment in the vein to give the heart what it needed and withdrew gently, daubed the blood with a piece of cotton, tenderly, and waited.
Louie waited. Waited to see it hit.
Louie liked to see the stuff hit. It meant a lot to Louie, seeing it hit.
‘Sure I like to watch,’ he was ready to acknowledge any time. ‘Man, their eyes when that big drive hits ’n’ goes tingling down to the toes. They retch, they sweat, they itch – then the big drive hits ’n’ here they come out of it cryin’ like a baby ’r laughin’ like a loon. Sure I like to watch. Sure I like to see it hit. Heroin got the drive awright – but there’s not a tingle to a ton – you got to get M to get that tingle-tingle.’
It hit all right. It hit the heart like a runaway locomotive, it hit like a falling wall. Frankie’s whole body lifted with that smashing surge, the very heart seemed to lift up-up-up – then rolled over and he slipped into a long warm bath with one long orgasmic sigh of relief. Frankie opened his eyes.
The Man with the Golden Arm , 1949
Christopher Mayhew MP
An Excursion out of Time
W HAT HAPPENED TO me between 12.30 and four o’clock on Friday, 2 December 1955? After brooding about it for several months, I still think my first, astonishing conviction was right – that on many occasions that afternoon I existed outside time.
I don’t mean this metaphorically, but literally. I mean that the essential part of me (the part that thinks to itself ‘This is me’) had an existence, quite conscious of itself, enjoying itself, reflecting on its strange experience, in a timeless order of reality outside the world as we know it.
And I believe this in spite of the fact that the experience was induced by a drug, the much-discussed mescaline.
People who are drugged, of course, often suffer from delusions; and the common-sense explanation of my experience is simply that I took an hallucinogen and had an hallucination. And if I dispute this now, when I am undrugged, there is, says common sense, nothing strange about that either. People who have hallucinations often cannot believe that they are hallucinations.
This common-sense attitude is persuasive, but I don’t think it is wrong; and at the risk of making a complete fool of myself, I would like to put forward an alternative explanation. At least this may stir up some controversy, and perhaps even encourage some research along what seems an extremely promising line of scientific inquiry.
Let me first explain how I came to take the drug. I am an old school friend of Dr Humphrey Osmond, who is the Medical Superintendent of a mental hospital in Saskatchewan. In his search for a cure for his schizophrenic patients, Dr Osmond has for some years past been experimenting with a particular range of drugs known as ‘psychotomimetics’, which produce in those who take them some of the symptoms of insanity. It was Dr Osmond who administered one of these drugs – mescaline – to Mr Aldous Huxley in the fascinating experiment described in Huxley’s The Doors of
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