Drunken Angel (9781936740062) Read Online Free PDF Page B

smoked Newport menthol cigarettes and were obsessed with the thought of either scoring methadone in Piccadilly—the Brits handed it out to addicts gratis—or else obtaining some large quantity of pure H in Marseille, a drug trade crossroads made famous by the film The French Connection .
    Because they dealt smack, they lent me enough money for the summer, and then some. I purchased my ticket on a Freddie Laker flight for a ridiculously low sum, proud that they had let me come along.
    In London, we headed over to Hyde Park and fell in with a band of hippies who offered us giant rolled cigars of cheap tobacco sprinkled with stingy pinches of pot. It didn’t work well and we all began to jones. Barry and Jimmy went off, and in no time returned with bags of H, passed them around. I snorted too. Then
we crashed with a hippie couple. Jackie Mod, with bangs and go-go boots, worked in a Chelsea boutique. Royal Richard drew amateur cartoons. He hadn’t much patience, and after fiddling with pen and ink he’d sigh, slap his thighs, rise, and say: “It’s all bollocks! Off to the pub!” We’d get hammered on pints of piss-warm bitters. Jackie Mod, coming home and finding us regularly smashed, grew understandably upset and left, she said, to go bang his best friend, Corey. Outraged, Royal Richard stalked off after her. Soon, my friends also melted away into the ulcerated underbelly of London, cruising for meth. They always found it and stumbled back to Royal Richard’s and Jackie Mod’s to boot up and nod.
    I drank pints of bitters in a local pub and went to see my first play by Samuel Beckett, Endgame , at the Young Vic. It affected me profoundly because his characters inhabited the same lonely madness that I felt.
    Often, I dropped in on Granny Takes a Trip, His Majesty’s clothiers to the Who and the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart and the James Gang. The Gang happened to drop by one day. There we were, sitting side by side on little Shanghai stools, as long-legged SoHo girls in hot pants and teensy sweaters helped us try on patchwork leather kicks and snakeskin shoes, velvet two-toned jackets and embroidered silk shirts. What are you doing tonight around two? the James Gang asked me. Nothing. Here’s a pass to our after-hours club. They were some of the most ferocious rock-and-roll guitar gunfighters of all time, wielded their Gibsons like Colt .45s. Even the fearsome Winter Brothers, Johnny and Edgar, wouldn’t draw on them. Two days later, eardrums stunned, I crawled out of that club on hand and knees, converted.
    Not long after, we shot up north to Gloucester, to this commune I heard of, and there were sheep and foul communal stews and everything looked Dark Ages gray.

    One night, I escaped to a pub with a single motorcycle parked outside. Inside was a gang sporting patches on cutoff denims. I sat down at their table and introduced myself as a visitor from the Bronx. Impressed, they asked me what it was like. I told them about working at Eddie’s motorcycle shop. “So you met the Angels?!” They fell over themselves to stand me drinks. “Where are your bikes?” I asked. “I saw the BSA outside. What about the rest?” They laughed. There were no others. Too poor. One bike between the whole club is all they had. That night, I went back to their clubhouse, a welfare flat on a crooked street in a dingy slum. We drank cider, dropped mescaline, listened to the Rolling Stones. We tripped, and told each other jokes that made us vomit out our guts with mirth. Come morning, I joined a biker named Flash as he followed a horse-drawn milk wagon, filching the bottles from doorsteps and bringing them back for the club’s breakfast. The rest of the day was spent groaning in the crapper.
    Back in London, reunited with my original group, we bought a broken-down tiny green-and-white station wagon, which we registered using the Cornwall YMCA as our home residence, and