“A pint a-Carling yeah and whatever you’re havin’,” a white-spit mouth, mine, chums out familiar to the bar girl. I’m pointing at the tap and reaching my hand out as it pours, my fingers snatching at the half-filled glass. I can’t wait around. We’re in La Paz for 3 days. I’m counting pints in my head. We have to fit it all in somehow. I just been ridin’ down the World’s Most Dangerous Road on a borrowed mountain bike and I need a pint of England’s finest to savour the moment. Yeah I know. Top Gear did it in jeeps, the legends.

A gulp on the frosty pint. “Put on some fuckin’ Oasis” I shout at no one in particular.

“What else is there to do round ‘ere?” I ask the maid, some English nectar dribbling down and out the side of my mouth onto the corners of the St. George’s flag draped round my Aquascutum shoulders. England tastes good cold.

“Well,” she says, a sneer and a sip on the bottle of Inca Kola I just paid for, “you could head down to the San Pedro prison.”

“Yeah? What’s all that then? I don’t need to come all the way to Bolivia to see the nick.” These foreign birds love the cockney chat. Learnt some off the Internet before I flew ere. Desk job at Foxton’s funds me handsomely.

Her eyes roll back white before pulling up the tap and this thick black book from under the counter, pages all dog-eared like Chav, my bitch Staff I’ve left back home. “All in this book, Marching Powder. But you go down there and see it for yourself. There no other prison like it. I know a guy can get you in. I’ll call him if you want.” She walks off to serve some tanned flip-flop Aussie cunt.

I look at it. Books. I ain’t got no need books. Only book I need is the Lonely Planet. Gap year don’t finish ‘til September. Cambridge mugs better be ready.

I turn the black book over in my hands: “By Rusty Young”. Sounds amusin’ enough. This prison gaffe might be worth a shit.

“Oi you. Yeah, make that call. I’ll get the lads.”

“Too late today. Have to be tomorrow if you still want go.”

“What? A day?” Bolivian mugs. “Yeah alright. Tomorrow’s fine.” I lift my empty and show it to her, adding a belch for effect. Foreign birds love that. “Another Carling, ta.”

Morning. My mobile’s alarm is going off. Max and Paddy: “Wake up, fat slob. Wake up, fat slob.” £4.50 well spent that was. Funny though innit, a gram of Bolivian white set me back about the same last night. And the night before. Off my tits I was. Whoever’s churning out that gak must be loaded.

“Turn that shit off”, a voice from a top bunk in the 12-bed dorm.

“Your mum.”

“Nick, turn it off.”

“Yeah, yeah. Get your shit together lads, we’re off.” We bowl out of there looking for that bar girl.

“Turn the light off!”

We keep walking. “Fuck ‘em.”

We hit the bar and it’s two o’clock. We get a couple rounds in before she turns up. She gives us the time we have to be at the gates and makes another call to her contact for us, speaking colonial gibberish into her phone. She tells us it’s sorted, gives us the number for Kenneth and says that we should go now if we want to get in. Her broken English just about doin the trick. Will and Mickey, nursing their bottles of Cusqueña (foreign muck), quickly down them before we leave. I take my Carling with.

“You not comin’ along, darlin’?”

“Yeah, no thanks.” She walks off into the back room. We watch her leave.

We get in a cab and show the driver a piece of paper. Mickey bolt upright starts saying: “San Pedro prison, yeah?”

Drives eyes us and says: “San Pedro. Si.” Catching sight of my pint he speaks louder this time, turning in his seat: “No beber aqui. No beber aqui.”

“Yeah mate no baby a key. No worries mate.” Fuckin mug.

“Come on, Drives.” Will is pointing at the road through the windshield and mime-steers an invisible wheel then points at the potholed tarmac again. The cab driver sighs. “No hay dos sin tres,” he says as we roll out, looking into the rear-view at us: “Gringos.” I ain’t got a clue what he’s on about.

“Yeah mate. Gringo Starr,” Mickey.

“Bit stroppy this one, ain’t he?” I polish off the pint, some of it dribbling down the side of my face and onto the knot of the St. George’s flag round my Ben Sherman, tightening it around my throat.

We pay off Drives and get out in a lively part of town. A few beggars are in the square in front of the prison, lying in the sun. I light a cigarette, take a few puffs and drop it on the floor. One of the tramps comes up to me, gesturing an imaginary smoke at his lips and asks for one with his hands out saying “English? English?”

“Yeah mate.” I hand him the glass and we walk off laughing. The wind blows the corners of the flag into Will’s face. We call the number we’ve been given for Kenneth, the man who sorts the tours. He’s already there. No need to waste my credit.

“You ready to go in?” Kenneth is wearing sunglasses, can’t see his eyes.

“Yeah, how much is it, Ken?” Will is reaching for his wallet, drops some coins on the pavement and turns to see the beggar coming back moaning something with his hands out. The flag licks at his hair. Will picks most of them up and puts them back in his wallet, spinning away from the tramp. He kicks the rest into the gutter with the sides of his plimsolls.

“250 Bolivianos,” says Ken.

“Done.” We hand over the money and wait while he counts it. I light another cigarette take a couple puffs and drop it under my Reeboks and squash it, looking at the beggar and smiling.

Ken starts to walk off, “Vamonos”.

We go through these old maroon double doors streaked with blue, “They must be Hammers,” I says. Inside there’s a metal grill with a desk in front of it. Ken walks back out the door after a few words with the black Guard. Through the gridiron we see life within, prisoners and children. Will and Mickey start emptying their pockets for the guard pretty sharpish so I do the same, looking into the concrete courtyard of the jail and seeing the kids run up and down, middle-aged men round the edges sat under a hoop. The guard searches Will and Mickey then they put their stuff back in their pockets. The guard looks at my digital camera and wags his finger putting it in a wooden box and locking it. “Later”, he says.

He tells me to raise my arms for frisking by lifting his slightly. He goes to patting me down quick without really searching. Keeping up appearances. He misses the mobile in my pocket but handles the red and white cape on my back and tries to yank it off over my head. “Later”, I say, winking at Mickey. He keeps pulling at it over my head so I let him, then fold it up neat and tidy before handing it over. He stamps our hands and nudges us through the gate in the middle of the iron fence where this white South African inmate, Daniel, leads us to a tight spiral staircase going up to a hatch in the corner of the yard. Behind us I hear the word “Gringo” again and laughter.

Finding it a bit of a chore, I’m the last to climb through the hatch and the last to see the room of t-shirt boys sitting silent round a table. We take our pews at the patio table. I’m looking around and sniffing the loose snot up my runny nose, all the oily glitter of £4.50 sucked back up for a second wind. There’s a grey haired bloke standing over us with an accent I can’t pin down:

“Welcome. This is, as I’m sure you already know, San Pedro Prison. I’m Cisco, I’ve been in here for two years and I’ll be your gracious host for today.” He sits down on his double bed. “What we’re going to do is break you up into smaller groups so you can do the tour with whoever you came with. Daniel will take the first group down and show you around. You other boys will wait here with me…” His scrawny smacked up girlfriend with a running video camera takes a shuffled step forward from the side of the bed. He turns and smiles at her, “… and my girlfriend, Julieta. I’ll answer any more questions you have when you come back. And we’ll discuss the tip then.”

The first group fucks off quietly. They’re Dutch or something. They walk off speaking gibberish to each other.

It goes quiet. “Now, you boys. Where you from?”

“England, mate.” Will looks uncomfortable when he says it. I narrow my eyes at his weakness. Reminds me of Tyndall.

“London?”

“Yeah, mate” I say.

“Alright, mite.” This Cisco guy’s a bit of a joker. “What did you come here for?”

“Some bird told us about it, said we might wanna check it out.”

“So you know what goes on in here.”

“Not really.”

“This is a prison.” No shit. I keep schtum though. Don’t trust his long hair and scarred cheeks. “The prisoners run this place on the inside. The guards we pay off to let in tourists and people like you. It’s a democracy in here, we make our own decisions. We have committees and a forum on Tuesdays. Any problems, we sort them out ourselves. It is our little island.” He looks down at his hands then back up, “So, what about drugs, you tried our drugs over here?”

“Yeah a little bit, mate.” I sniff the snot again. “We tried a bit.”

“You like?”

We nod at him.

“You wanna try some of ours? We make it in here ourselves. The purest of the pure. Uncut.”

“How much?”

“50 for a gram. 25 for a half.”

“Yeah go on then.” I look at the other two, they start getting their money out. Cisco’s bird still has her camera on us.

“Don’t worry about her. We’re just filming for fun.”

“Yeah no worries mate. Don’t wanna see this on YouTube though yeah.” I don’t smile.

“Don’t worry about that. You know Brad Pitt is making a movie about us?” He smiles.

“Yeah?” We put the money on the table. “How many grams did he have?”

Cisco ignores the banter and hands Julieta the notes, who gets some wraps out of a black bin bag.

“We do it in here or what?”

“Yes, in here. Don’t worry about the guards. Just finish it all before you leave. You can’t take anything with you. You might have problems with the guards and end up in here.”

“No problem mate.”

“Here, use this.” He hands over a thick black book. Marching Powder again.

I loosen the wrap and tap out a trail, rack it up and pass the book to Mickey when I’m done. He does likewise.

“So, what you in here for?” Mickey makes small as he chops.

“Drugs.” He says. “Most of us in the foreign section are in here for drugs. Some of us innocent. But there is nothing we can do about our situation here apart from get on with it and wait. Drugs make money for us, yes, but in the end it is all shit because there is no other way to live in these conditions. We have some serious addicts in here. But when I’ve done my time, I’m out of drugs forever.” The book comes back to me and I rack another thick one. I hand it along again. I look at Will and Mickey and they’re both tense, chopping up and sucking it in. “Happy days,” Will says.

“What about weed, you like weed? 30 for a spliff. Good stuff.”

“Yeah, you got a drink though?”

“Beer or soft drink?”

“Beer if you got it.”

“Sure, 10 bolivianos.”

There’s the exchange of money and beer.

“So, how’d you get busted?” Will asks.

“Trafficking coke is a dangerous business.”

“Yeah? You always been doin that?”

“No, I used to be in the military.”

“Bolivian?”

“No, Argentina.”

“Falklands, yeah?” Cisco goes quiet. Touched a nerve. St. George safely wrapped up in his box downstairs.

“Get him his beer.” Julieta pushes the bottle across the table looking at me. Doesn’t smile much this one.

“This is fucking mental, mate”. Mickey looks up at me before he huffs another.

“Is there a toilet in here, blud?” Will looks around as he speaks. Cisco points behind him to a cupboard.

“It’s in there,” he says.

“Cheers, mate.” Will goes over and slides the door across and revealing a cramped shitter.

Two more guys come up the hatch with Angelo, a Dutch inmate. Black. “Two more Gringos,” he says looking at us before climbing down the stairs.

Me: “Alright lads?”

Them: “Yeah not bad.”

“Where you from?” Mickey puts the book down, his wrap half done.

“England.”

“Two more Brits”, Cisco.

“How about yourselves?” One of them asks, taking a seat. A fuzzy-lookin Chinese lad he is.

“Norf London, mate.” I say with usual charm. “Wait. Aren’t you in our hostel?”

“Not sure. We’re at the Wild Rover,” one of them says.

“Yeah that’s us,” says Mickey.

“You’re not the guy with that shit alarm, are you?”

“Nah mate. It ain’t shit.”

Will comes back from the bog straightening out his Evisu’s: “How do lads.”

This bloke Angelo sticks his head out of the hatch and says: “Ready?” We wrap up the rest of our gear and stuff it in our pockets. The Dutchies come back and I hear Cisco quizzing them about coke and how much they want. “See you soon,” he shouts as we’re slipping down the spiral, “Hopefully no one fucks you while you’re out there”.

Angelo laughs, looking at me: “Yeah then we’ll have to charge you!”

“Yeah, not funny mate.”

Angelo walks ahead of us and we’re looking at these Bolivians lounging around the courtyard in the sun. They mostly sit in the shade, chatting gibberish at each other.

“It’s not gibberish, it’s Spanish.” Angelo says looking at me and Will. “You speak only English, yeah?”

“Course, mate. Only language I need.”

Angelo skips ahead and starts speaking with the two lads from the hostel, “Right, so this is the courtyard, over there we have a basketball court, this is an open area where people hang out.” They are drinking cola ignoring us and killing time.

“Out here people sit and talk, play games, whatever. There are men who live here with their families so there are women and children too.” I look a kid in the eye and he looks happy to see me.

“The women cannot afford to live without their husbands so have to live inside. Of course the young children see some of the violence but that cannot be stopped. The violence would probably be much worse without them. Plus there are no guards in here, which keeps everyone a little happier. Then there’s the kitchen, a restaurant too over there where you can get food and drinks. Up there are some of the rooms. We’ll go up there later. If you are rich, or have a job in here to work for one, you can get your own room, like Cisco. He is one of the richest. Commands a lot of respect around here. Money makes the power. Like your democracy back home, right?”

I don’t get what he’s on about. But the other two lads smile and keep walking, not saying anything. The inmates look at us and greet us. When we get around the corner we go into a corridor with some cells along the wall. “These are some of the rooms where people share together. At the end here, is solitary confinement.”

I hear a shout: “Chino. Ey Chino!” This guy sitting in solitary, one of two in there actually, is lying on his bunk looking out a small opening, shouting at the Chinese lad. Chino ignores it.

“This is solitary?” Chino’s mate says. I hear him being called ‘Uno’.

“This isn’t a regular prison,” Angelo says. Will and Mickey rub their noses. “Right, in there’s the chapel if you want to have a look.” Uno and Chino poke their heads in and come back out.

“Nice is it?” Mickey asks from outside.

“Small”.

“So now let’s go upstairs.” Angelo leads and we go up a flight of stairs and look down on the scattered inmates in the courtyard. “Come in”. There’s a bloke standing in the room and he’s got these pictures in his hands.

“This man sells cards of Saint Peter and asks for a small donation if you want one.” We look at them, little holograms of a man with a beard and a halo looking up at something.

“Quite religious, aren’t they” I say to Will handing back the card. “You’re alright, mate.” Uno and Chino give the guy some notes.

“Let’s go upstairs.” The steps go up to the attic. There’s a wide skylight and far away outside there are snowy mountains.

“You can see the Andes from here. I come up here a lot to look out. Some people have tried to escape over this wall here.” It’s a big drop with craters and overloaded bins for a safe landing. Angelo shuts the skylight again and the view of the mountains disappears behind the dirty window. The noise from outside silenced.

“That’s pretty much the tour.” We turn to leave. Coke bars and beers waiting.

“But now I ask you gentlemen for a donation. A tip.” I look at Will and Mickey who are looking at the floor. “I’m in here but I’m innocent. I got put in prison because I took the rap for my girlfriend. She was pregnant. We are from Holland and I couldn’t let her go in prison. It is rough here. So I took the drugs she had and now I’m in here.” Coke bars fill with backpackers. “So I ask for just a little donation.” We’ve been cornered.

Uno and Chino do the honours. I ignore the heartfelt speech and start to make my way toward the steps again and ask where I can get a beer. “Cisco will give you one,” Angelo says.

“If someone else doesn’t first,” Uno says. Chino likes that one.

We go back to Cisco up through the hatch and sit with a few beers and the shift the rest of the gak skyward. We laugh and shoot the shit with Cisco, tell a few stories and chat to the quiet Dutchies. We’re the only ones laughing.

“Did you give Angelo a tip?” Cisco asks.

“Yeah mate. Plenty.”

“So now I ask you for mine.”

Cornered again. Swindle. I take out some coins and put them on the table, on top of Will and Mickey’s notes and pass it over. “Cheers yeah, Cisco. Take it easy.”

He says nothing. I run my finger over Marching Powder and rub my gums. Books ain’t so useless. We go down the spiral and get back to the gate.

“Later Angelo,” we shout. He doesn’t hear.

We step through to the other side of the gate and I get my digital camera from the box. I unfold the glory of St. George and lift it. I put it back over my head where it rests round my neck and we go out the West Ham doors. The cigarettes from the pavement, gone. The coins still reflecting a dull sun in the gutter.

The square is quiet. Shit engines chuck out fumes as they pass. I light another fag: “It’s the last night lads. Let’s get mashed. Route 36.”

I throw the unfinished cigarette and we walk off as my St. George chokes me to death in the breeze.

“Take it out of the bag,” one of them whispers, as a small mountain of Bolivian marching powder unfolds from the wrap. Forming peaks where it piles on the surface, the small patch of black bin liner is emptied into the soft light of the room. The backpackers lean in, pushing pure uncut white to and fro with an out-of-date health insurance card from some place far, far behind them now. Racked up with two fat lines, sat side-by-side along the blackened edges of a bootlegged copy of Appetite For Destruction, some stranger nearby leans in and assuredly urges: “Don’t use the straw, use this.” He hands over a softened and tightly rolled 10 Boliviano note. The newcomers eye their bounty and savour a last breath. They then begin judiciously disappearing it up their snouts, chattering and grunting between disjointed monologues that they might later call conversation.

It’s not surprising that with a flick through the guidebooks one soon realises the nightlife of La Paz isn’t for reading or researching, but for devouring – with one’s eyes, ears and, for some of the travelling crowd, their noses. This fact only hits you once you’ve arrived and, like any place worthwhile, what you find can’t be written up in a tourist handbook.

The buses ride in on La Paz’s vertigo high roads that encircle the valley metropolis of Bolivia’s capital, which sits pretty at 3,660 meters above sea-level, making it the highest capital city in the world. I’m in a crowded bus, heading for a hostel in the city’s centre. As we wind in from the mountain ranges, we’re afforded a final opportunity to peer down on the rabble below – because once we get amongst it, we won’t be getting any of the peace that the name La Paz suggests.

It’s getting late when I check in to the hostel. Upstairs in the bar, things are already heating up. I join a ragtag group of stragglers, all heavy from a night of drinking and trading coin in sporadic games of Texas Hold ‘Em. We’re told of a place called Julia’s, named for its sexagenarian ex-prostitute owner, which is apparently not favoured amongst backpackers due to its grimy interiors and knife-loving regulars. Not to mention the inelegant prospect of witnessing Julia inhaling savage charges of powder before indulging in a reminiscent rub up on some vagrant’s unzipped lap.

Incorrectly labelled the world’s first cocaine lounge, Route 36 is nonetheless one of the few lounges that exists in La Paz. Travellers opt for its relaxed atmosphere and welcoming attitude, and that night so does the hostel crew. A couple of more silent types from the other end of the room enrol when they hear the word circulate. We band together, and exit out of the bar’s warm confines to hail cabs. There are eight of us, but as we peer back and forth along the street there’s not a vehicle in sight.

We wait for a while until finally two short-skirted receptionists from the hostel offer us a lift. They have the contact, for Route 36 anyway. The location of the bar certainly isn’t common knowledge, and for good reason. Though it remains a poorly kept secret our eager escorts make the call to get us on our way. The first girl leads us to her car, half-mounted on the pavement at the side of the street. “We can’t take too many at once,” she says, “They don’t usually like that – it alarms the neighbours.”

Part of the group stays behind. The rest of us jump in the cramped hatchback, rowdy and curious, but by the time we arrive we’ve turned solemnly introverted, contemplating what the night has planned for us.

Suddenly Quincey, one of the fresh faced near-mutes, pipes up and offers, “What if it’s a full-on crack den? What if it’s all used syringes and withered bodies hanging from the walls?”

“Don’t worry,” one of the receptionists replies, turning from the front seat, “it’s more like a cosy little house – not so well lit but warm, with loads of backpackers.” The word ‘backpackers’ conjures a familiar scene, and this is a comfort at least, but our paranoia is hard to shake. The possibility of finding ourselves stranded in bandit country is all too real.

Dropped in some nondescript street in an unthreatening residential area, we pay the cabby and get out in silence, walking across the road. No one says a thing. We step up to a large steel gate, leaving it to our receptionist to knock. Apparently they prefer girls.

We wait. Nothing happens. Knock again. We listen to the metal shake in the crisp air. Someone makes a phone call. Slowly, an invisible door opens and the post-box slides across to reveal a pair of suspicious eyes. They look us up and down in a vague, uncaring way. We hear the other side of the gate unlock as the eyes disappear. But we’re still worried. We’re not in yet.

“What do you want?”

“We’re looking for Marco,” one of the girls says.

Pause. A quick look around.

“Come in.”

We get the nod. We’re nearly there. Walking through to a blue-lit corridor we enter stage left. The music seeps through to the hall as we track inside. At the entrance a middle-aged couple are chatting around what appears to be the front desk. Before them sits a table of unlit candles and ashtrays, alongside a glass full of chipped straws and a pile of pirated CD cases. It all looks extremely improvised.

“Do we take these now?” someone says, pointing to the CDs and straws.

“No, it’s okay, just come on through.”

The faces at the desk smile furtively, and we reply with an awkward nod, as they make us immediately conscious of where we are. We go through to the ground floor of an open plan house with all the appliances taken out. A selection of coffee tables and large, gray sofas has been put in their place. We soak in the action. Finding it hard to shake the surreal surroundings, we take some seats at an empty table close-by to another, where youthful faces plunge their heads into the dusted table. Conversation stagnates.

We’re greeted with an “All right lads?” from the only busy table in the room. The music stops. Everyone smiles through the silence. The room is dimly lit by muted disco lights and floor lamps, with national flags adorning the walls. They are black with marker pen, displaying messages like “Steve-o on tour”, “Gary loves boys” and our personal favourite: “REALITY WAITS” – just a flavour of what amount of brain cells have been left behind on these sofas.

At first it strikes us that the place is quite small. It’s 2am, but the few people here are really getting stuck into it. “It’s early yet, there’ll be more when the clubs shut,” someone sitting close by reassures us. Conversation, if you can call it that, drives out from between all the chattering teeth. Sentences are blurred in an unbreakable wall of voice, slurring and jittery. People sit deep in their seats, tense, trying to loosen up, with cigarettes going feverishly from mouth to ashtray. Music starts again; the rhythm from the sound system resonates through the bodies of those present.

“Good tune, this,” Quincey comments.

“Yeah.” The uninitiated sit tapping the offbeat while the well-schooled nod calmly out of rhythm. “Just relax, they’ll change the music if you want.”

We smile. Someone asks for Joy Division. They don’t have any. They put on Iggy Pop’s The Idiot. It breaks the ice. As the night bears down on us, the company grows in number and becomes increasingly erratic. Some youngsters suffer from a severe aggravation of mood, occasionally ending in a barely controlled wriggling frenzy. By nap-time, any agitation will have been soothed with a little Valium.

Due to the highly illegal wares on sale, the respectable-looking proprietors of this place have had to shift it every few weeks. Marco, though he’s dressed in a hood and jeans, is called the waiter. He fills me in on the details in perfect English, a language that he’s forced to practice by some of our fastest talking exports. “This is a new location; we’ve been here for a couple of weeks. We were raided not long ago; gas masks and smoke grenades, a whole SWAT team. But we received warning. We’re usually told by an informer beforehand so we get rid of anything illegal before they turn up. It looks like we’re just an after hours spot selling some drinks, and that satisfies them. Policing is like the theatre around here, it’s just a show.”

I stretch my legs and have a stroll, lighting one of someone’s lost cigarettes. Trying to talk to the actual owners is difficult. They seem to view their customers as wild beasts as they cash in on their cravings. I decide to go back to my table.

After some small talk, Marco gets down to business. He takes our drinks orders, and goes through the beers and spirits on offer. Water is the biggest seller, it costs nearly as much as what he offers next: “100 Bolivianos a gram for standard, or 120 Bolivianos for strong.” It’s about £9.

“What’s the difference?” Quincey asks eagerly, sitting forward and wiping his sweat-tipped fringe to the side.

“Not much,” Marco signals with his eyebrows and a wink, hinting at a business move that plays on the need for some to appear experienced in front of their friends and the roomful of strangers.

“Strong, please,” come the responses from around the table, “a gram each.”

The waiters and waitresses are chatty, amiable types. It’s their prerogative to be as personable and friendly as possible, and they let us in on some of their esoteric knowledge of the scene in La Paz. “Don’t try picking up on the street, you’ll get baking powder or worse.” Quincey lowers his eyes; he already knows.

After a few hours of serving and introducing strangers to strangers, Marco returns to our table and takes a seat. He offers us a tour around some of Route 36’s quieter areas for a chat. He tells us tired anecdotes of some who stay days at a time, with minimal sleep and maximal intake. “People coming out of Britain, America, Ireland and Australia are the most common, where cocaine costs a lot more. It’s a need to take advantage of the here and now – not just for the price, but for the transcendent experience,” Marco explains.

As he shows us the vacant disco room, reserved for weekends and lunch breaks, he speaks eloquently of his experiences. “I’m an autodidact; I’ve just been reading Moksha by Aldous Huxley.” He lifts his copy from his table, “You know it?”

I murmur in recognition. He seems surprised. “Huxley hates cocaine though, doesn’t he?” I ask. “He’s all for hallucinogens: acid, mescaline and mushrooms. The moksha-medicine.” Marco smiles a wide Cheshire and leads me away from the chatter to the other side of the room.

As we cross the floor he admits he indulges heavily in what Route 36 is known for. When we’ve found an isolated spot, he demonstrates with zeal by carving a thick streak of white around the corners of Gloria Estafan’s Greatest Hits ’84 to ‘91. He is from Peru, he tells me, where they have a similar drug culture. He’s seen the dangerous effects of cocaine – and this bar – first hand, on travellers and locals both. “I call it death row,” he says. He points back across the room to someone who has been drinking and loading heavily all night. The man talks incessantly about his newborn son, Seraphim. “Angel of Fire!” he shouts as tears well in his eyes.

“His wife has kicked him out,” Marco explains. “And they’ve moved to another city. But he still comes here every day, always talking the same shit.”

During a small break in conversation about Ayahuasca and Peyote, a laughing customer jumps up and starts dramatically punching the wall. I sit back, wary of the sudden tension. “What happens if things get out of hand in here?”

“We rarely have to ask someone to leave; people generally seem to behave quite well.” Marco delivers a sharp look to the table in question, gesturing with his hands to quieten down. “Even the ones that take too much, all they do is talk or joke. Usually it’s the drunks that give us more hassle. If we don’t like what they’re doing, we call them a cab and say goodnight. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves here.”

At times it seems as if Marco has been hardened by the things he’s seen. He talks unemotionally of the countless reformed coke addicts who have relapsed to excess in here, and the fresh faced gap-year students who cane it day and night, bouncing between sessions in the bars and lengthy bouts in the tombs of ’36.

I tell him that even Bolivia’s President is painted up as a coke fiend in the Western press. Marco nods. “They vilify Morales because he’s a man of the people,” he says, smoking his American L&Ms. “Don’t listen to that bullshit you read about him. He chews coca leaf, just like everyone else. It’s an ancient tradition going back thousands of years. It’s the ones that don’t know anything about it that want it criminalised.”

“Yeah, it’s the same thing as the War on Drugs in the US, they criminalise all the poor people and they throw them in jail.”

“It’s completely different here,” Marco tells me. “Cocaine is derived from the coca leaf in a lengthy and complicated process that makes–”

“Cocaine hydrochloride,” I interrupt a little ungraciously, eager to impress, perhaps.

He smiles. “Yeah, but it’s in a completely separate ritual that the normal folk of South America use it, and unfortunately many confuse that traditional act of growing coca leaf with the relatively new business of making cocaine.”

Morales made a similar argument when he stood before the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs in 2009, chewing the leaf to underline his point. “It is an important symbol of the history and identity of the indigenous cultures of the Andes,” he told the Commission. “Today, millions of people chew coca in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and northern Argentina and Chile. The coca leaf continues to have ritual, religious and cultural significance that transcends indigenous cultures and encompasses the mestizo population.”

According to Marco, the locals believe the US government exploits this confusion to sabotage the democratically elected governments of Latin America. He shakes his head as we take a last look around the hollow chambers of Route 36. It’s been a fast night; the morning is beginning to break through the one uncovered window.

As Marco leads the way toward the exit, he tells me it’s the rejection of these Old World values that the new democracies of Latin America are marching for. He paraphrases Morales as he explains: “For the first time in South America’s history, the countries of our region are deciding how to resolve our problems, without the presence of the United States. The increased support from his 2005 election win made the US-backed elite opposition turn violent. They assassinated a load of peasant supporters of Morales’ government. But you probably didn’t read that in the papers, did you?” Marco says finally.

A cab has been called, and we wait together by the door. “I guess we’ll see what new horrors Western democracy has in store for South American dictatorships,” Marco finishes, with a wry grin. The door swings open and we exit through the front garden, leaving behind the rising chemical heat and the sparkly noses of the death row inmates.

Real-life drug-busting narc Sonny Grosso was the inspiration for The French Connection, advised Coppola on The Godfather and cruised gay bars with Pacino. Story by Tina Bexson

A dozen or so shiny, black suits and their flashy women were enjoying the exotic floor show of Manhattan’s Copacabana nightclub, whilst the slick-haired man at the head of the table splashed the cash around. It was a sight that would change the lives of the two off-duty NYPD narcotics agents quietly sipping their drinks and surveying the scene from the terrace above.

The man with the dough was Pasquele “Patsy” Fuega, a major player in a Mafia-linked New York drugs ring. “I recognised a lot of the others as being dope pushers up in Harlem,” Detective Sonny Grosso recalls. “I told Egan and he wanted to put a tail of the Patsy at the end of the night.”

So Grosoo and partner Eddie Egan tailed Patsy and his bouffant blonde as they drove off on a stop-start tour of the Lower East Side, before heading across the East River and drawing up in front of a Brooklyn diner at 5am. Suspicion was aroused and they set up round-the-clock surveillance and wiretaps. That was just the beginning. During the next four months they uncovered an operation that had 50kg of heroin being smuggled from France to New York every six weeks for a quarter of a century.

The investigation culminated in one of the biggest drug hauls in American history, worth a mega ¢32m, all thanks to a chance encounter in a nightclub in 1961.

Shoot forward ten years, and chance changes Sonny Grosso’s life again. Up-and-coming filmmaker Phil D’Antoni and maverick director William Friedkin decide to turn the case into a film, The French Connection, based on Robin Moore’s factual book of the same name, and starring Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider as Egan and Grosso (renamed Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo). Once released it became a worldwide box-office hit, winning five Oscars and beating A Clockwork Orange and The Last Picture Show for best film. It had it all: realistic locations, spontaneous camerawork, an unromantic portrayal of policing, and unbeatably pacey action. All of which proved ot be a major catalyst in the revival of the cop genre in the ‘70s, evident in movies such as Serpico and Dirty Harry.

The French Connection’s authenticity was down to advice from the experts. Friedkin immediately hired Egan (who died of cancer in 1995) and Grosso. Not only were they the film’s inspiration – both played small roles – but proved unbeatable technical advisors and location scouts. In fact, they were cinema’s first cop consultants, earning $150 each for working every day of the 60-day shoot as well as continuing 12-hour nightly shifts with the NYPD.

It wa the weeks in pre-production that helped dictate the raw undertones of Friedkin’s feature. Not only did Grosso and Egan grow up in East Harlem, it was also their beat, they knew the score. And in the weeks leading up to the shoot, Hackman, Scheider and Friedkin were taken on a journey they would never forget.

Grosso: “We let them run through the whole gambit with us: the investigations, arrests, even the paperwork and court appearances so they could see us testify. In the beginning they were all shocked by what they saw.

“The first time we hit a shooting gallery it was on 110th Street and 5th Avenue, that’s Harlem. There were about 20 people shooting p. One was a massive woman, about 260 pounds, with a tube around her arm and the needle still jabbed in a vein.

“They came with us when we hit the bars and interrogated people. No one knew they were actors and we let them question the dealers and addicts so they got to feel comfortable dealing with them as though they were policemen. That’s why the movie stands up so well, they’d done it for real.”

In one of two Harlem bar scenes, the extras were all cops posing as drug addicts and pushers. In the other, they were all off the street. “They were people Eddie and I had busted at one time or another. We went to see them at some centre where they were trying to re-habilitate themselves and when we asked if they wanted to be in the movie, they all jumped at the chance. It was that which gave it a real wild smell.”

There were a couple of gun-running scenes, so Grosso and Egan taught them exactly how to hold and fire the weapons during sessions at the police firing range. “They both used our guns in the film, too. Scheider also wore my watch and ring so he felt really comfortable. He wanted my shorts, but I wouldn’t let him have those.”

Scheider was, of course, an excellent choice to play Grosso – same build and colouration; and he hit the right note as the careful detective known for seeing the dark side to situations, hence the nickname “Cloudy” (given to him by Egan). Grosso was the perfect antidote to the flamboyant, risk-taking Egan who mastered disguises such as a hot dog vendor, a deaf mute and a priest. He was nicknamed “Popeye” for his constant “popeying” around Manhattan’s drinking holes. As Grosso says: “He was a real character, way out there, and a great cop.”

Egan’s idiosyncrasies are marked out early in the film. His bizarre method of confusing suspects during interrogation by asking them whether they “picked their feet in Poughkeepsie” is used in the scene when Hackman, dressed as Father Christmas, questions a young guy he and Scheider had chased through the streets. Grosso, having witnessed this so often during the ten years they worked together, hoped Friedkin wouldn’t use it. But he did. “Friedkin loved it. So did Hollywood. They lapped it up, so did the public,” he groans.

Hackman didn’t lap it up, however. Grosso: “Hackman got all disturbed the first time he saw us arrest and lock up a guy. He kept saying, ‘I’m not a copy, I shouldn’t be involved in this.’ Then, when we took the guy to court, he couldn’t wait to get him a hot dog when he was hungry, but Eddie was having none of it. I tried to explain that we had to arrest and bring to court 30 people a month, and bring in another 130 for questioning. If we bought everyone a hot dog, we’d be broke. About three weeks later, he saw the same guy in another shooting gallery. Then he started to get the idea.”

Hackman was far from ecstatic about portraying such an unconventional and sometimes prejudiced cop, and became increasingly irritated by Egan’s Irish “charm”, recalls Grosso: “Eddie was always teasing and chastising Gene. I think Gene had a bit of a problem with the character at the beginning. But as time went on I think he found that there were many similarities between them. When I saw the final cut I was amazed how much Hackman had become Eddie. It gives you the respect you have to have for actors who, with the proper research and direction, actually become the people they play, such as De Niro in Raging Bull.”

It was a great true-life story for the big screen, but the mechanics of filmmaking meant artistic licence was employed to ensure optimum visual effect. The famous scene where Hackman chases an L train was based on an actual chase in which Egan and Grosso tried ot keep ahead of a subway train between Penn Station and Grand Central so they could catch the drug-dealing Frenchman as he got off. To make it more visual, D’Antoni and Friedkin got Hackman to chase an L train which ran above ground along an elevated railway line. A kamikaze stuntman drove the car, driving flat out whilst weaving through the traffic to keep up with the train. The inspired filmic version of this event makes a great action sequence and culminates with Hackman shooting the unarmed Frenchman in the back. Then there’s the ominous and frenzied climactic shoot-out, giving a suitably ambiguous ending to the complicated tale.

Grosso’s new vocation as technical advisor didn’t end here. While Friedkin was completing the final shoot of The French Connection on Wards Island, Francis Ford Coppola was preparing to shoot the interior scenes for The Godfather nearby. Friedkin took Grosso over to meet Coppola. “Friedkin told Coppola that he couldn’t make a movie in New York without ‘Grosso and his gorillas’, so I was hired on the spot. I found locations, showed them how to search, hammered the crowds, drove cars and provided 75 cops as extras as well as members of my family for the wedding scene.”

Grosso made two small appearances in The Godfather as Phil, one of Captain McClusky’s (Sterling Hayden) cops. The first was outside the hospital when McCluskey orders him to lock up Michael (Pacino) and he says: “Give him a break Captain, he’s a war hero. He’s not mixed up with the mob.” They had to do about 18 takes. “I wanted to kill myself,” laughs Grosso. “Because I was acting with Pacino and Hayden, my voice went up in the air like a woman being chased in a dark alley. I learned how difficult it is to be an actor.”

“Phil” was also one of the four guys who shot Sonny Corleone (James Caan) in his car by the tollbooth out on Long Island. “I said to Coppola, ‘If four buys are shooting at him with machine guns each holding 45 slugs, not only would you not find Jimmy Caan, you wouldn’t find the car. They’d all be completely blown away.’

“The next day Coppola called me over, he was such a gentleman, and said: ‘I thought about what you said Sonny, but Jimmy Caan is bigger than life in this movie and we’ve got to kill him bigger than life.’ I still thought he was making a tremendous mistake, but I was dealing with reality and he was dealing with movies. Not only did I learn that he was right, but I also learned that that scene ended up being one of the most memorable in movie history.”

It was on Cruising (1980) that Grosso really came into his own as a technical expert. Reunited with Friedkin, he worked with Al Pacino tracing an undercover cop’s troubled journey into Manhattan’s S&M gay underworld to fish out a crazed killer. Grosso had spent over five years working undercover on all kinds of cases, including a community of deaf mutes (for which he had to learn sign language) and homosexual rings. “We took Pacino out to the gay clubs in Greenwich Village to show him how to operate in that world, so he could observe and get a feeling for how people act.”

But just as Hackman and Scheider would never know what it was really like to work as a narcotics agent, to live immersed in the overlapping worlds of the cop and the mobster, Pacino would never experience the reality of undercover work. He would never know what it took to actually get results, nor would he ever have to master the psychological tactics, or experience the fear.

“Apart from mastering your cover story, the biggest thing is to know how to get information without anyone realising; also, to know how to remember faces, times, locations so you can go back and complete a report. You’ve got to remember to adopt all the characteristics, too. It’s stupid, but I was once trying to buy marijuana in East Harlem. I wasn’t smoking because I don’t smoke, and a guy came over and asked if I wanted a cigarette… I almost said ‘no’.”

Then there’s the decision on whether to take protection. “You’re often afraid to wear a wire or carry a gun into the bars because women will pat you down or touch you in all different places when they hug you – they’re told to do that to check if you’re carrying. So you need to be really creative about where you’re gonna carry a pistol.

“I was once searched when I was carrying a gun in my crotch, they never pulled my pants down, but it got pretty hairy. I don’t konw what they would have done if they’d found it. Same goes with a wire. I’d wear it in a real strategic spot running down the lining in the back of my jacket. They won’t always pursue a search if you have a good line of crap, but you’ve got to have the bravado to call their bluff. I don’t want to make out this is 007, but it’s a dangerous job.”

Grosso went on to advise on many other movies as well as being story consultant on numerous television projects, including Kojak, The Rockford Files and Baretta. He formed his own production company, Grosso-Jacobson Communications Corp, in 1980. They’ve produced some of the most successful TV movies and action series sold worldwide, starring big names such as Martin Sheen and Paul Sorvino.

Still, doesn’t he miss the danger of being a cop and the thrill of the chase? At least that dry sense of humour is still evident in his reply: “What I do is I go once a month to a precinct and the cops let me slam the cell door a few times. Every cop says you get an orgasm when you hear it close.”

This article originally appeared in Hotdog magazine. Many thanks to Tina Bexson for permission to republish.

Like many of his generation Peter Weissman recalls the ‘60s as a halcyon period of his life and, like his peers, came of age during this revolutionary era marked by social, cultural and political change, relayed in the memoir, I Think, Therefore Who Am I? Dolly Delightly investigates

Peter Weissman was involved in both the political scene and the hippie drug subculture, was arrested demonstrating against the Vietnam war and lived in New York’s East Village, trying to find himself whilst experimenting with drugs. During the 30-odd years it took him to complete I Think, Therefore Who Am I? he lived close to the people and locales of that past, documenting the odyssey of discovery and confusion, catalysed by psychedelic drugs.

Weissman went to Boston University for a graduate degree in journalism but left as soon as he could. He later completed his thesis, entitled ‘Trends Toward A New Age’, in 1971. He lived for a time in Berkeley, with its transplanted hippies and former political activists, and for the past 20 years in Woodstock, New York, the town associated with the festival. He has earned a living as an educational researcher, teacher, marketing clerk, postman, reporter, press secretary for a politician, gardener and as a freelance copyeditor for major publishers, which he now does from his country home.

I Think, Therefore Who Am I? (published in 2006) is the first book in a triumvirate, and has recently been translated and published in Italy under the title Penso, dunque chi sono? The second, Digging Deeper, was published 2010 and begins where the author’s psychedelic memoir ends, as he re-enters a world he once took for granted. From there, Weissman takes the reader on a coast-to-coast trip, sardonically observing himself as he presents a slice of the ‘60s generation negotiating the ‘70s in discrete, short stories. Weissman is currently working on the third and last book in the series.

You document your interest in writing in I Think, Therefore Who Am I? but what do you think was the first impulse that set you on the course to being a writer?

I wrote a poem in fifth grade which was published in a mimeographed school magazine. I remember feeling quite proud, but I didn’t think of myself as a writer then. I didn’t keep a diary or a journal at home, I didn’t read books (nor was I read to). In fact, I was always behind in English at school. Not surprisingly, in retrospect. A more formative writing experience occurred a few years later when I was in the seventh grade. A teacher by the name of Mr Lipmann showed an interest in my writing bringing to light the possibility that maybe it was something I could be good at.

Why did you feel compelled to record your experiences by writing a memoir?

I’ve been writing so long you’d think I’d know the answer to that. But I don’t, other than to say that I’m an expressive type, primarily a verbal person, as oppose to, say, a visual or an auditory one. As for recording my own experiences, it seems I have a need to explain myself. Also after giving up writing for a while I came to the conclusion that I needed to write because if I didn’t I went a little bit crazy.

Interestingly enough, some psychologists have claimed that the creative urge is a kind of neurosis. Would you agree?

I’ve heard that, usually in connection to a psychological exercise to determine whether or not the alleviation of neurosis interferes with the tension necessary to create. I myself conducted an experiment of sorts one winter, about 10 years ago, to test the claim that writers are compelled to write and found it to be true as without it I felt I lacked self-actualisation.

Your memoir records a time when you were heavily into drugs. How did you get into them and do you recall the first time?

A friend who read it told me that although I was in that world, I was never actually of it. I’m still thinking about that. I began, I guess, like many others of the ‘60s generation, smoking pot on weekends while in college. At the time, it was a daring thing to do and those who did it considered themselves as outsiders… It loosened me up. In fact, a few years later I was eager to try psychedelics, to see what all the fuss was about. And it was great, for a while. You’ll never hear me apologise for it.

When’s the last time you smoked a really good joint?

A long time ago. I don’t do it anymore. Among other reasons, it left me fatigued and sluggish, and as a result I couldn’t accomplish much. And when you get older – or at least as I’ve gotten older – accomplishing things becomes more important than getting high.

So what do you do for kicks nowadays?

Kicks? Too exciting a term for what turns me on nowadays. Between professional freelance book editing, which I enjoy immensely, and my writing schedule, I spend most of my time on the seat of my pants. Other than splitting wood, I’m still trying to come up with something challenging to do over the winter, which lasts about five months here in upstate New York. In the other seven months – spring, summer and fall – I like to bicycle. Now that I think on it, it was something Henry Miller also enjoyed in his later years. He once said his best friend was his bicycle, a bohemian-made track bike he bought from a six-day racer at Madison Square Garden.

Going back to your experience of drugs, do you think the artistic vision is enhanced or distorted by hallucinogens?

I don’t think it helps you be a better writer. For one thing, you have to know your craft, or vocation, to do it well. For another, whatever “creativity” consists of, it is, you might say, a drug in its own right, and mixing drugs is never a good idea. But it can be helpful in terms of perspective, and in moving from one place, or angle, to another, since that itself can catalyse new perceptions, ideas and thoughts. But so can travel or any number of things such as abruptly waking up at three in the morning and finding yourself in a sudden crisis.

What other things have then catalysed new way of seeing and thereby influenced your writing?

Good question. It makes me go back and catalogue what would be the most important influences in my life. Certainly, the psychedelic drug experience, and the bleak aftermath, which compelled me to begin anew, in many ways, some documented in the follow-up to I Think, Therefore Who Am I? called Digging Deeper. What I considered my “spiritual studies” had an effect, but also getting married which led to all sorts of realities, good and bad. The overall conclusion I arrived at can be boiled down to a quote by Michel de Montaigne who said: “Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself”.

Are all the characters in I Think, Therefore Who Am I? based on real people? Have you had any feedback from any of them?

Yes, they’re all real people: in both I Think, Therefore Who Am I? and Digging Deeper. I did meet some people from I Think, Therefore Who Am I? years later, but no, I haven’t had any feedback, except from one character who was of the opinion that everything we experienced back then was make-believe, worthless, and there was no reason to dwell on it. The epigraph to my memoir is a quote by Jiddu Krishnamurti who said: “The one true vocation for many is to find out what is real”. So you can imagine my incompatibility with my former acquaintance. In fact, I’m short on patience with people who insist on leading the unexamined life. So I didn’t try to reconnect with him again.

You recorded the time and milieu of late 60s New York with acute perception. I know you grew up in Queens, could you tell me a little bit about that, and how/if the city inspired you at all?

Where I grew up – one of the “outer boroughs” as they’re called – I could have been a hundred miles from what people think of as New York City, which is Manhattan Island. So I can’t say I was inspired by the city; I only knew it as my own uninspiring middle class neighbourhood. I was not entirely foreign to Manhattan, because I commuted to high school there from Queens for three years – an hour and a half each way – which made me familiar with the details and indignities of a more congested urban environment. And, like a tourist, I’d visited a few landmarks and gone to a few off-Broadway shows.

But finding myself on that Island after college, for the first time in my own apartment – in the East Village, a wonderful, motley neighbourhood of small bookstores and coffeehouses – was a wonder. I loved walking the streets, coming upon hidden nooks, the sense of a more adventurous life, even when I wasn’t participating in it except as an observer. But that alone, in contrast to my previous life, was a windfall to creativity, and in that sense the city did indeed inspire me.

Your memoir is set entirely in the realms of the city and among real people, yet the line between fiction and reality sometimes seems blurred. Is it something you set out to achieve?

No. In fact, my initial conception of the book was to tell my story as directly as possible, including the drug scenes, though the line between reality and fiction was difficult to discern at times. This was a challenge I attempted to meet with realistic description, dialogue, and a somewhat removed narrator who was, among other things, more ironic than his younger self. I wanted to capture a particular state of mind through my characterisations of others, as well as places and scenes. As George Orwell pointed out, truth is not absolute but a writer should strive to report what he thinks it is. In trying to capture the hyperawareness brought on by psychedelic drugs, however, I did couch my perceptions in mythic interpretation, which is not exactly real. My characters are themselves, but their qualities are redolent of gods and goddesses. As I noted at the end of one chapter: “The gods on Olympus had not been perfect. They were human, after all”.

You have clearly been influenced by various things, but do you credit any one writer with an influence on your literary tastes?

I guess I’d have to say Miller, for his anecdotal style. Louis-Ferdinand Céline for his stream of consciousness prose. I also like Orwell. Raymond Chandler and Ring Lardner taught me it was okay to be funny. For a while, I was taken with Albert Camus and to a somewhat lesser degree by Sartre, which encouraged me to be the existential writer I am, but with a dollop of irony that is entirely my own.

I did write to Miller once, when I was trying to get someone to take me seriously. I did that with several writers I admired, but he was the only one to respond. He did it in longhand on his own stationery, which had an inscription about the eels in the Sargasso Sea. I have it somewhere in my filing cabinet, and one of these days I’ll probably find it.

Miller always wrote about what he knew, do you think an artist’s “experience” has any weight on the quality of his work? Can one write good books about a subject he has no feeling for?

I suppose what you learn influences what you write, and I think you have to get “into” it to convey what you believe. But I don’t think our actual experiences have anything to do with whether we write well. Anyone can see more or less deeply into their own lives, whatever the content of those lives may be.

What is your concept of the creative process per se? Would you agree with Leo Tolstoy’s suggestion that writing is “the transmission of a feeling which the artist has experienced”?

I agree with that, but then I don’t write what would be considered fantasy. Although I do enter a trance of sorts while writing or at least the preliminary stage of it feels like that. The second stage, in my own process, consists of editing – finding more satisfying words or phrases to what was written in the trancelike, cathartic stage. Adding and / or subtracting sentences, paragraphs and ideas is all part of the writing process but I guess you probably know that.

Further Resources:
Dolly Delightly’s review of I Think, Therefore Who Am I?

I have a penchant for esoteric Russian literature of the kind that’s mostly found in frowsy second-hand bookshops which, I am unashamed to say, I frequent with steadfast regularity. About a week ago, during one such visit, I picked up a 1985 Picador edition of a book called Novel With Cocaine by M. Ageyev. The name denoted an author of Slavic extraction, which the précis confirmed he was. My curiosity was further piqued by the fact that very little is known about Ageyev or his work; except that it was first published in the 1930s by a Russian émigré journal in Paris, after journeying there from Istanbul. To this day Novel With Cocaine remains an unclaimed roman à clef, narrated by a 17-year-old schoolboy against the milieu of a crumbling Russian empire as the aftershocks of the February Revolution solidify into a new Soviet regime. The novel centres on the binary concept of war both as a social phenomenon and an inward battle between “the spirit and the flesh”. 

From the outset Vadim Maslennikov’s intense, monadic, time-warped narration fluctuates between extreme emotion, giving a clue to his mercurial disposition, his two-faceted nature and his moral adynamia. He leads us down a vertiginous path, navigating between the vitreous ethos and wreckage of a country in turmoil, and his hedonistic quest for shamelessness (“the most passionate trait of human depravity”), amidst the dirty boulevards with foul smelling stairways leading to whores and lechery. The son of a soldier killed in battle, a moral relativist and a closet nihilist, enlightened to a fault and louche to drugged-out distraction, the self-excoriating and self-aggrandising Vadim is bored of war and the echoing of nugatory anti-German sentiments. As he confesses, “I did not vilify the Germans because I hated them; I vilified them because the harder I pounded away with my abuse and invective, the more deeply I experienced the exceedingly pleasant feeling of oneness with the crowd”. This sentiment is later mirrored in his feeling of “sharp, sweet pride in the knowledge” he is Russian. Vadim emerges as both a listless defector and a patriotic zealot, but his opinion of the gruesome events unfolding in front of him is summarised best when he says, “Words like war, victory, defeat, the dead, the captured, the wounded – all those ghastly words which in the early days of the war felt as vibrant and alive as live carp in one’s hand – they were all, for me at least, suddenly drained of the blood they had been written in, and deprived of that blood, they turned into mere printer’s ink”. Not so for his classmate, the budding revolutionary communist Vasily Burkowiz, who confronts a scholarly priest by asking him how “conquest, defeat, murder and annihilation of one man by another” squares with his preaching and his “Christian values” before concluding bitterly that “war is no use to anyone except generals and quarter-masters”.

Vadim’s own bravado of perfunctory detachment wanes as he records his reaction to the squalor, poverty and depravation caused by the nation’s patriarchal collapse into chaos, through his profound embarrassment of his mother. Assailed by her penurious appearance on the school steps he says, “She stood alone, of to the side, in her fur coat full of bald patches and her ludicrous bonnet fringed with strands of grey hair peering into the streaming throng with obvious trepidation which only heightened her pitiful appearance”. Ashamed of her “tattered, patched, evil smelling rag of a dress” and her “crooked run down heels”, he tells his schoolmates she’s merely an “impoverished governess” but instantly feels “his heart going out to her”. This pang of remorse is quickly supplanted by a “rush of vicious thoughts” as he inwardly imprecates his ageing mother for embarrassing him in front of his peers. Sensing his hatred, her “thin lips, stretching cheek-wards, twist her face out of shape, and from the brown sockets of her closed eyes through the fans of her wrinkles the tears begin to flow”. His maternal disdain resurfaces sporadically throughout the book and, like a great contagion, afflicts his attitude toward all women, those “pitiable sluts agreeable to anything”, whom he surveys with a “terrifying wide-eyed look” of provocation and hate. While undergoing treatment for syphilis, this “erotic Wunderkind” pursues a prospective receptacle and takes her to a maison de rendezvous – but her naïveté and “infantile tenderness” disturbs him when she bestows on him “a small mound of tiny silver five-kopeck pieces” as a good-luck keepsake. Incensed, he qualifies “the entire incident as a waste”. Eager to dispense with her, he says goodbye and watches her “unjustly hurt moving off into the distance” then absentmindedly slips his hand into his pocket to the clink of the kopeks which hits him “like a whip lashing at his ignominious heart”. Vadim has only one persistent character trait, vacillation. Thus the novel revolves around the conflict between “a sound heart and a deformed conscience”. This pendulous state from good to evil, from hate to remorse, from “cruel lack of scruples” to “rushes of love for the universe” is the dominant and prevailing rhetoric in Novel With Cocaine and its endeavour to illuminate the murky nature of the human soul.

Speaking about rejection, Vadim perorates about revenging himself “on the insults of previous women by insulting their successors” and compares its “bitter perversity” to being rebuffed by a boy at school. This is one of several allusions to Vadim’s latent homosexual yearnings, as is his epicene desire to get close to Burkowitz which never goes beyond “normal scholastic intercourse”. The violence of feeling toward women is controlled by Vadim’s bracing narcissism innate in his explanation for shunning prostitutes because he has “no interest in intercourse legitimised by verbal agreement” and is only after the “cruel and covert battle, the gains and final victory,” of appropriation of that which cannot be procured “for a handful of roubles”. Vadim’s internal monologues align themselves with 20th century philosophical tradition when he says, “It was an odd thing about my life: Whenever I was happy, I would think my happiness could not last; as soon as I thought that, it would indeed go up in smoke. Not because the external conditions creating it had ceased to exist, but because I was conscious that in due course those external conditions would inevitably cease to exist”, a rumination in line with Arthur Schopenhauer’s pronouncement that “In a world like this, where there is no kind of stability, no possibility of anything lasting, but where everything is thrown into a restless whirlpool of change, where everything hurries on, flies, and is maintained in the balance by a continual advancing and moving, it is impossible to imagine happiness. It cannot dwell where, as Plato says, continual Becoming and never Being is all that takes place… no man is happy… it is all the same whether he has been happy or unhappy in a life which was made up of a merely ever-changing present”.

This philosophical practice extends to Vadim’s meditations about love when he meets the “fox faced” Sonya, noting that “To a man in-love, all women are merely women except the woman he loves, who thereby becomes a person; to a woman in love, all men are merely men except the man she loves, who thereby becomes a man” – and yet Vadim is unable to express his feelings, which he justifies by saying: “My experience in matters of love seemed to have convinced me that no one could talk eloquently of love unless his love was only a memory, that no one could talk persuasively of love unless his sensuality was aroused, and no one whose heart was actually in the throes of love could say a word.” It extends also to the question of sensuality versus spirituality which he qualifies to be different in both sexes, namely that in women the two are merged and in men completely separate and if “womankind bandied together and took the male path, the world would turn into one huge brothel”. The relationship between this “callow youth” and his beloved comes to an end when Vadim’s sensuality evolves into depravity, prompting Sonya to retreat from the “foul and loathsome mire” of defilement. This denouement veers the course of events off-track and sees Vadim in a dingy baroque den snorting the “devilishly light white powder” and pontificating about the “emotion of motion and the motion of emotion” as his limbs tremble with a new dexterity and a “quietly pulsating core of exaltation”.

The ensuing chapters document both Vadim’s kaleidoscopic confusion and edification while under the influence of cocaine, as he takes preponderate detours into cyclical contemplations of death and life, and adrenaline-fuelled phantasmagorical excursions against the glaucous backdrop of the “naphthalene shimmer” of Moscow. And while the drug fuels his predisposition to pontificate, it also highlights the bleak reality; impassioned self-abhorrence and the “ever growing burden of despair” which hastens the thought of death and lack of desire to go on. Ageyev’s prose is enriched with an inextricable tangle of the sordid and the beautiful of the singularly complex and the bountifully ideological. His extrapolations about the diabolically lunatic effect of cocaine and its imposing immanence brings to the fore the inner conflicts that form the core of the novel, with a tantalising resonance stripped of all ornament and imbued with a bestial force. Novel With Cocaine contains all the components of a utopian idyll of artistic merit epitomised by social realism in Russian literature of the 1920s and 30s. Ageyev’s high melange of style combines both the materialist and idealist aesthetics, with eschatological undertones, giving this book much of its originality. The theme of control and escape becomes more overtly apparent with Vadim’s decent into addiction, propelled by his desire to find happiness, that “intense awareness of joy” that he may have felt with Sonya. But instead what he finds is a heightened inner discord, a resignation to torpor and dearth of action in the world beyond his own autological confines. Meditating on the psychology of inertia and the phenomenology of drugs in a bid to explain to the reader the strength of cocaine juxtaposed with his own weakness Vadim says, “The reason behind human activity, as diverse as that activity may be, is always one: man’s need to bring about events in the external world which, when reflected in his consciousness, will make him feel happiness” and the power of cocaine lays in “its ability to produce a feeling of physical happiness physically independent of all the external events”. In his pursuit for that elusive feeling of joy – by way of mitigating the pain and “immortal misery of the empty pocket”, the absence of love and lack of self-actualisation – through drugged-out stupefaction, Vadim overlooks the most important truth of all, namely that “Real happiness depends upon ourselves” and everything else is merely a palliative, a fallacy which sooner or later dissipates into nothing, like the drug itself.

“I felt savaged a bit by the whole thing… Hunter was in the middle of institutionalising his mother at the time, for her drinking. Great lady, by the way. Met her once, she had this kind of drinks zimmer frame with all her requirements in it. Very useful.”

Ralph Steadman is recounting his first meeting with Hunter S. Thompson. That assignment, later recounted as The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved, was the first foray into Gonzo journalism. This broke enough moulds to pave the way for Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, which followed a year later.

The Kentucky stint was a trial-by-fire nightmare. A life threatening liberty risking menace that only a sick fool would want to repeat. Thompson really did empty a restaurant by firing mace about.

“Only a few squirts,” Steadman blithely recounts. “You don’t need very much of that stuff.”

On the subject of the Kentucky project, no, he isn’t sorry he never got to write ‘Fuck The Pope’ on the side of a huge yacht in spray paint. I felt I had to ask, as it seemed such a great idea.

“I’d have been jailed if I’d done that, and never got back into the country. And then I wouldn’t have worked with him all those other times.”

There in a nutshell is the flipside of Hunter S. Thompson’s other ego, Ralph Steadman, the artist responsible for illustrating much of HST’s prose. A more rational, less chemically enhanced soul, to be sure. Ink drop for ink drop, one of the few people to be Thompson’s match. In his field he is the equivalent of HST.

He was also someone who could be put through many trying, sordid ordeals, produce wonderful work and then come up smiling with the words, “Great, when can we do this again?”

This probably why Ralph insists on stating, very clearly, that Thompson was a son of a bitch. He was a mean bastard, and he always was.

That much is made clear early in the conversation. It is also apparent in Steadman’s book, The Joke’s Over, a behind-the-scenes look at life with one of American letters’ most dissolute, honest and crazy souls. This had to be worth recording for posterity, and it’s delightful that the Steadman brand of (written) invective is lucid, evocative and even generous. He recounts the details behind some of the finest American writing of the last century.

Assignments would typically start along the lines of: “Ralph, you filthy perverted pig. I want you to draw something for me, Ralph. Only you would know how to do this. I need you to draw absolute evil”.

That’s an odd way of talking to friends but it creates an allure, a solid bond of piss-taking, menace and curiosity. I try and dig for a little background on the Thompson bloodline. Steadman is effusive in tracing Thompson’s lineage back to Scotland (via Manchester, by the way).

“Incidentally,” he asks, “have you heard his voice?”

At this point, a tape is played down the phone. A bizarre rumbling patois barks out, roughly a third of which is coherent. I catch the words “Time magazine” and “masturbating.” The rest is seething angry gibberish and static. It doesn’t sound Scots, though. More like how Badger in Toad Hall might’ve sounded if he’d been cornered by weasels while drunk.

Trying to define something like Gonzo is difficult. For the uninitiated, it means basically getting horribly shit-faced, mingling with the subject of a journalistic assignment, provoking them to bile and incest, disappearing from town looking half dead, and then recounting the matter with a twisted, mocking style.

One point Ralph emphasises is how funny a writer Thompson was, and this cannot be overstated. Certain types of people miss the astoundingly keen, precise reportage because the drugs and rage act as a screen. This is a damn shame. The drugs and rage are the extra spicing. Also the social justice. HST cared for an America that is now in retreat, the flag he proudly draped round his shoulders degraded in his eyes by Bush’s time in the White House. It’s a shame the mean bastard’s dead.

Talking to his artistic enabler underlines all the more how much of an absence that proud raving figure has left. The two fused magically. Without Steadman, there would still have been Thompson, but it wouldn’t have been as brilliant. Equally as sure is that Steadman hasn’t had his share of the credit. Many American readers believe that HST did the pictures himself, despite the signature.

Satire is a sore point to Ralph. He feels ripped off by Spitting Image. Apparently Roger Law swiped the, well, spitting. Terry Gilliam also took certain cues from Steadman’s biliously nibbed arsenal. Apparently Michael Palin’s been… well you know… the whole ‘which circles do you move in?’ type of situation. Those doors never opened for him.

At this point I feel a little sorry for Ralph. When I told him how I first read Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, after seeing its elegantly warped, intriguing cover, he recounts how this threatened Thompson. The drawings pull at the reader, providing some hilariously twisted insight in the depravity being spewed out onto the pages. It seems this cut a sight too near sharing credit for Thompson, who made Ralph suffer for this apparent slight.

At a push, and finely recounted in The Joke’s Over, we can see real affection between the two men. Also, a rare instance of the author being shamed. Thompson apologised with sincere humility for the time he almost killed Steadman with an accidental shotgun discharge. That may sound only sensible, but do bear in mind the vast weight of things he didn’t apologise for. Only rare types can get away with that.

“He created for himself a mountaintop and never really lived up to it. He gave himself a peak. He was the same way with drugs, always wanting to get back to that high spot. His approach was, ‘I’ve got to write it as I’m going – each step is another sentence’. But after all that, when it came to putting these things together, it seemed right and natural that I should do the work”.

At this point, without any eliciting, Steadman gives his theory on why the good doctor, as Thompson liked to be known, committed suicide.

“He shot himself because he was afraid of an old people’s home, just being strapped in. He had a crazy dream where he couldn’t do anything, and this old woman was crawling slowly closer to fondle his balls”.

So now you know: it was them mad old sack strokers in the old folks’ home that finally did for Thompson.

There is a parallel between that and the acid vision of his grandmother crawling up his leg with a knife between her teeth circa Las Vegas. Maybe such demented notions run in circles. Possibly the downside to having the insight of a demented loon is being a demented loon with insight into too many things.

On a personal level, Steadman is clearly tired but still running full tilt. He is engaged upon a variety of business ideas. Check out ralphfancygoods.com for all your elegant needs. He works exceptionally hard. The drive comes from wanting to establish his children in the whole art market thing. There is also the constant need to create. It would be easy to admire Steadman as a working definition of the term ‘artist,’ but graft often detracts from the end product in people’s minds. We’re a funny bunch, us artistic consumers.

–––––

Chris Wood is the author of Sherlock Holmes and the Flying Zombie Death Monkeys, available from Amazon.

Kenn Taylor

Wreckage – Niall Griffiths

See all books by Niall Griffiths at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com




Liverpool, often noted as a city of poets, songwriters and playwrights, has produced surprisingly few novelists. One man too go against the grain of this is Niall Griffiths. His intense and often brutally dark novels, punctuated with an absurdist sense of humour, tell the story of those existing, often forgotten, on the edge of society. They’re written mostly in dialect, and are set against the mixed background of the Welsh landscape and Liverpool cityscape – in all their glory and all their horror. Despite having written five novels, selling thousands of books and having had his work translated into five languages, he has received little recognition in the city he was born – perhaps because of a mixture of the controversial subject matter of his books and the fact that he now calls Aberystwyth his main home. He returns to the city often, however, and imminently is back in Liverpool for a significant period, having been commissioned to write a non-fiction book about the ‘real Liverpool’.

I visited Niall in Aberystwth for a chat and a few drinks in the pubs of the seaside town.

Griffiths was born in Wendle Street Toxteth, later living in Netherly. He began writing “basically since I had the motor function to pick up a pen”. He says he was influenced early on by the oral tradition passed down from his Welsh speaking grandparents: “There were not many books in the house but it was full of stories.” In a household lacking literature his early creations were often of a strange fantasy nature involving, amongst other things, giant crabs. “Where it came from I have no idea, it’s just always been there and it needs to come out, if I don’t write for a day I feel like an absolute wretch, it’s almost like kind of having to justify my existence.” An early, and profound, influence was Welsh writer Ron Berry: “I think when I started to read books they gave me a way of dealing with a terribly confusing world. When you read, say, for an hour, you’re away from the world -but you’re also very much here, especially when you are reading very worthwhile literature because it should be telling you about the world outside your window.”

At the age of twelve his family emigrated to Australia, one of the ‘£10 Poms’ that left the UK in their thousands; but due to the homesickness of his mum they returned 3 years later. With little money – having had to pay a full return fare – they were helped to find a house to rent by a relative in West Kirkby, Wirral, where Niall attended the local Grammar School. Often singled out and treated differently by some teachers because of his Liverpool background. He left school at 15 and went through a series of menial jobs including cleaning muck spreaders. Recalling: “I did a bit of work in any kind of job and all that taught me was I didn’t't want to do any kind of proper job, that’s one of the reasons I returned to study” He studied for A-Levels in Birkenhead, Later moving back to Liverpool, living in Hope Street in the city centre and various other spots. “I was just bumming around the city till I was twenty-two and left to study, I’ve traveled around Britain ever since, I’ve always come back though and it always feels like home like.”

He finally settled in Aberystwyth, returning to his Welsh roots. He first fell in love with the Wales when as a teenager he was sent Snowdonia on an outward bound course by a judge after a series of petty crimes. This much maligned policy actually seems to have had the desired effect on Niall: “It showed me how silly I had been and it gave me a creative outlet for my energies.” And it instilled a love in him which remains to this day: “I love climbing – well, walking up. On top of a mountain is such an amazing place to be; it’s almost like being close to God in a way, especially if you are on your own. Incredible. That said it’s fucking brutal as well, nature, birds of prey, full of death. Living in the country isn’t very nice. You leave your house and walk down to the shops and it’s all very pretty looking around but you look down and there is an animal torn apart, I wanted to capture that side of nature in my books too.”

He originally moved to Aberystwyth to study for a Phd. Having to work as a building labourer to support himself, he became annoyed at wealthier students entirely supported by their families – yet less interested than he was – and Griffiths drifted away from his course into a world of week-long parties and binges on drink and drugs. It was then he began to write what would become his first novel, Grits. Published in 2000, it was a book about the flotsam and jetsam of the UK washing up at the end of the railway line in Aberystwyth, trying to escape their problems but only taking them with them. It was well received both critically and commercially: “I got all kinds of people at my readings from people in cravats to people with facial tattoos”.

His next book, the provocatively-titled Sheepshagger, dealt with its disturbed Welsh anti-hero Ianto’s struggle to deal with his identity after his family home is bought by incomers-with murderous consequences. Perhaps his most ‘Welsh’ book, this one was ironically written – for the most part – whilst he stayed in his girlfriend’s flat on the edge of Toxteth. His last three books have either been set in Liverpool or covered characters that, like Niall and many others, have made the journey between the city and Wales. Kelly + Victor is an intense tale of the extremes of love and life in Liverpool at the turn of the millennium, whilst Stump and his latest Wreckage dealt with a wide cast of characters living and dying at the lower end of society’s ladder in both the city and the countryside. .. Griffiths is currently working on two non-fiction books. One of these deals with the ‘£10 Poms’ system of Aussie immigration that he and his family went through, and the other – about ‘the real Liverpool’ – is published by an independent Welsh press for whom he wrote of ‘the real Aberystwyth’. Because of this he is planning to move back to the city for a period of time this year to get to know the city once more and look at the massive changes that are currently taking place. He says: “Writing a book about the real Aberystwyth was one thing – it’s a town of 20,000 people – but with Liverpool where the fuck do you start?”

There are many links between Liverpool and Wales, an issue examined extensively in his novel, Wreckage. “I’ve started to explore those connections. Liverpool has always been called ‘the capital of North Wales’. For a lot of people there Cardiff is a foreign city, it was Liverpool that was their city”. In the light of the Capital Of Culture win, Liverpool bid to host some of the events of the national Eisteddfod, being one of the few places the festival has taken place in outside of Wales in the past. But this was met with fierce opposition by some. “I think that is ignoring the Welsh heritage in the city and also the Welsh influence on the way the city is today. You did have one of what they call the arch druids coming on the local news going ‘No it’s a Saesneg city’ which to me is just fucking bigoted.”

And the Capital of Culture win? “Well, it’s a double-edged sword isn’t it? It will bring money into the city but only if it will make money back for those who invest.” He recalls a conversation with the Glaswegian writer James Kelman about that city’s win of 1990: “He said it brought in a load of money but since then the social problems in the city have only got worse because the so-called scummy people got pushed out to the estates which never got cleaned up.” “Culture of course is not just art galleries and restaurants, it’s also graffiti and terrace chants and a lot of people forget the grassroots bands, independent publishing presses and everything. They want to focus on culture that is acceptable and saleable, the kind of stuff they talk about on the fucking Late Review”. But it’s not all bad: “I don’t think it will make this kind of hidden culture die down though. It should become stronger to react against it. You just want this sort of stuff to be recognised sometimes you know, but we would be foolish to expect anything more from this sort of scheme.”

Niall has been noted and praised for writing against the perceived wisdom that a pared down, economical writing style is best. He instead mixes the dialogue of different dialects with classical techniques and often highly-charged, poetic prose. “In terms of dialect, and this is something that I have got from the Welsh, is that their politics and identity is all bound up in their voice, in the Welsh language and accent. So I have kinda taken that and looked at all the politics bound up in language and how you speak. In terms of using classical devices I want to cite the stories of local, often poor people, voices that are often not heard. I wanted to give it an epic quality, and one way of doing that is to look back at epic writing.”

I ask if by portraying in his novels life at the lower end of society, he is trying to highlight social problems. “Yeah definitely – both in Liverpool and here as well. For a small town it has a big drink problem, drug problem, homeless problem. It’s often forgotten that these kind of problems don’t just exist in cities. Aberystwyth has all the problems of a city, but also the different the different areas and cultures that make cities interesting places to live.”

His characters often seem to be searching, desiring and fighting for something that they can never quite grasp. Why is that? “I think we live in extreme times, certainly extreme psychological times. People are absolutely aching for things which are not there, for some kind of spiritual fulfilment.If society does not offer any outlet for that, then it will come out in violence, it will come out in any form of extreme experience. So that’s partly it, but I suppose in another more powerful way people are just yearning for some sort of recognition.” I ask him if this is why he, like his characters, has spent so much time travelling: “If you have kind of artistic ideas that is often linked with dissatisfaction and you can think that it is because of where you are that you are dissatisfied and want to move out though that is often misguided. When you reach it it’s never there of course but it’s the journey that counts, that’s how you find yourself.”

In addition to the ‘real Liverpool’ and ‘£10 Poms’ books Niall is working on a series of short stories, a novella and is planning his next novel. A busy man, he must have favorite moments in his work he’s proud of regardless? “Grits is very personal so in some way that’s my favourite; it terms of pure structure, Kelly + Victor. I like Stump too, and Wreckage – that its so barley controlled” He laughs. “That’s all my fuckin’ books isn’t it?” “In terms of favourites I suppose I hope I’m never happy, never write a master piece and keep writing. If I did I think I would probably wither away and die.”

Wreckage by Niall Griffiths is available in Jonathan Cape paperback for £6.99

Lunar Park – Bret Easton Ellis

See all books by Bret Easton Ellis at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Lunar Park presents itself as the straightforward first-person narrative of “Bret Easton Ellis”, spoiled, self-obsessed, solipsistic rich boy etc. etc. etc. author in a state of debauched twilight. We join up with Bret as he half-heartedly attempts to start a new married life with the long abandoned film- star mother of his similarly long neglected teenage son, as they lead their sterilised, gated lives in the rich outer Holywood suburbs. Simultaneously sharing with and jarring against his neighbours’ ubiquitous obsessions with Stepfordite hygiene and diet, Bret has singularly failed to dull his own diet of booze and drugs.

As this “Bret” self-regardingly presents himself a style emerges every bit as subtly self-mocking as that of Patrick Bateman in Psycho, a prose deliberately glib, blank and seemingly artless. This is where the detractors claim to strike home. “Bret is a smug, flat, amoral prick! Advertising the fact doesn’t alter it!” That Bret can have even his supporters worrying at the back of their minds this might be the case is testimony to razor-sharpness of the satire, the audacity on display. In the end, you believe or you don’t, it’s a leap of faith. Believing is a lot more enjoyable.

Self-congratulating frat-boy authors of the 21st century are not quite so vital a target of satire as the odious New York corporate boys of the 80s however, and while the razor runs sharp, the book would wear thin pretty quickly if this was all it aspired to.

Instead, it delves, dives and swoops into very varied territory. Strange things happen. Children are going missing around the gated community. Ellis’ house begins to take on the hues of his childhood home in sinister fashion. While louche, aging swinger Ellis hangs around the college where he teaches “creative writing”, hitting on teenagers, one fling in particular gets strangely out of hand. His estranged son retreats into a disturbing misanthropy which may or may not be simply a sullen justified sulk at abandonment. And at a fancy dress party organised at Bret’s behest, someone turns up dressed as a certain P. Bateman. A very exactingly realised Hell breaks loose.

It’s hard to imagine a book more self-referential, “knowing”, post-modern. Too clever by half, it’s asking for its glasses to be pulled off and its head thrust down the toilet. One way it redeems itself from smugness and ultimate irrelevance is the immense subtlety in which it conveys the dizzying myriad twists of the author’s gaze. The changes in tone are nothing short of masterful. It shifts from a playful if vinegary satire of twattish authors, to murder mystery, to shlock ghost story, to an unexpectedly adroit study of failed parenthood. Once again, this should be a real mess, but its real achievement is that there is no sense of jolt as it veers from one to another, the joins don’t show.

Each style is handled expertly within itself. The creepy potential of e-mails as a previously untapped source of modern horror is particularly innovative. But the most welcome surprise is the lyrical, lengthy final passage. It could not be further removed from the fatuous drollery of the novel’s opening, and yet is somehow totally in keeping.

Ambiguity can be the most vibrant life-blood of art, and Ellis keeps us guessing from here to infernal eternity. There is no resolution here, no redemption. For all the archness, this seems a real cry from the depths of a flinching soul.
The book is dedicated to Bret’s father Robert Ellis, presented in the book as a calculating monster and the blueprint for Patrick Bateman. It is also dedicated to Michael Kaplan. Kaplan is apparently Ellis’s real-life partner who died of a heart attack in 2004. That the Ellis of the book appears to see his occasional same-sex liaisons as mere overspills of a jaded Id is perhaps the only real proof that the man who wrote this book has some degree of genuine detachment to the horrors that unfold within. I hope for his sake that’s true. That I end up doubting even this is perhaps the final tribute to the truly entrancing hall of jagged mirrors he has constructed, and the intriguing, beguiling and moving tale produced in consequence.

One night, twenty-four-year old recent Minnesota transplant Diablo Cody was walking home from her dull ad agency job when the words “Amateur Night” on a topless bar’s marquee beckoned irresistibly. Even though Cody had only once been inside a strip club – and, with her idyllic middle-class upbringing, devoted boyfriend and conspicuous lack of emotional scars, hardly fit the stereotype of a sex industry worker – one try-out as an amateur led to a year of professional hard graft as a stripper, lap dancer and peep-show performer. The equally hilarious, titillating and gruesome account of her exhausting adventure, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, is far more than just another stripper memoir or dispatch from the dark side: Cody’s analysis of what she found within the walls of upscale men’s clubs and sleazy sex palaces, and within herself, is shot through with a laser-like wit and punk rock sensibility likely to influence all political shades of opinion on sex jobs and raunch culture. Cody – who’s now hung up her white platforms to work as a successful screenwriter and arts editor – talked to me on the phone from Minneapolis.

– Even jaded readers will be fascinated by some of the real-life characters in your book. Like the jizz-licking guy at the peep show.

He’s the celebrity of the book! He would come crawling in and lick up as much as he could. The thing that was really fascinating about him was that he was so clean cut. He was the last guy you would ever think had a habit like that. I shudder to think about it.

– What else did you come across that fazed you?

You know, people who just had really strange fetishes. Incest would come up a lot: People who would want you to masturbate as their sister, or their mother. That was something I was not comfortable with. I tried to be pretty game, but that really freaked me out. And, you know, a lot of cross dressers. There seemed to be a lot of men who wanted to come in and talk about gay sex. To me that was really surprising, that they though of the booth as a safe haven for their fantasies, even though it was obviously straight-oriented entertainment. That was weird.

– So you became a stripper as an experiment – were you surprised to find you became addicted? And was it the money or the attention?

Honestly, I never made that much money compared with the people I worked with. So for me I think it was about the attention, but also sort of an external thing. I found it to be cathartic, a very weird, twisted form of self-expression. I think I got addicted to just how subversive and how fun it was compared to my every day life.

– And you didn’t derive any particular satisfaction from, say, when you got a promotion at the advertising agency where you worked.

Right, I didn’t at all, and it surprised me, because if I got twenty toy shows at Sex World [the porn emporium where Cody worked as one of the "dolls" who are displayed and selected for peep show performances] in a night I would feel proud.

– Is this something mainstream feminism has still failed to sufficiently acknowledge, how satisfying it can be to wield one’s sexual power in this way?

It can. I think it’s something that third-wave feminism has recognized. On the other hand the one thing people have failed to recognize is just how unsatisfying and unfulfilling the corporate world can still be for women. Because no matter how much we’ve progressed, the glass ceiling is still so much in place. And I honestly felt kind of degraded in my day-to-day life, at the white-collar jobs, because I was always being undersold. Whereas in the sex industry it was so straightforward.

– But which would you say is the more exploited group in a strip club: The girls who work, or the men who hand over the money?

Some of the needier customers, the men who were looking for an emotionally connection, were really preyed upon. They were definitely manipulated and victims in that way. But most of the time, the women were disenfranchised. It’s the societal model for a woman to be revered and worshipped as a thing of beauty, and in a strip club, it’s actually the complete opposite. You have a roomful of beautiful women, trying desperately to woo these men.

– Competing with each other.

Exactly. And it really turns the men into little emperors and the women into these sad, groveling creatures. So that was the one aspect that disturbed the heck out of me. You know, I always thought that strip clubs would be the kind of places that celebrated beauty and femininity and it’s really not the case.

– How much do the men kid themselves that it’s anything other than a financial transaction?

Funnily enough, a lot of them sexualize the financial aspect of it and find it a turn-on to be paying for a lap dance or for female companionship. There were others who were obviously in massive denial and seriously wanted to believe, “oh, this girl really cares about me, she told me her real name,” not knowing that the same girl was mocking them in the dressing room and had given them a fake real name. Every dancer I knew had an onstage name and a fake real name for when she really wanted to sucker a guy. But he would actually believe that you shared that information with him because he was so chivalrous and truly respected women. You know, “I can earn her trust.” A lot of guys just want to be the white knight, that’s the persona they assume when they walk into the club. Like they’re going to find some poor little lost girl and save her.

– What do you think about what Ariel Levy has called “the rise of raunch culture”, and the argument that the phenomenon of women visiting strip clubs is regressive rather than empowering?

I guess I’m emblematic of this raunch culture she talks about. I’m the foul-mouthed, trash-talking, salty sex worker who has a lot of fun with that stuff. And I guess I don’t read that deeply into it. I think that any time people get to reverse roles it’s empowering, and for women who get to objectify other women it’s a role reversal, it’s empowering and it feels good. There’s just no way around it. For me, from a purely hedonistic standpoint, I find women attractive, so it’s fun to go to strip clubs and it’s fun to watch porn.

– In the book you describe meeting a high school girl who’s working in a strip club, and for her it was a regular part-time job, no big deal. What does that say about American culture?

I mean, just equating material things with sexuality has become a totally mainstream concept. You hear it in the music… stripper culture is totally mainstream now, obviously. Now there’s stripper aerobics, t-shirts for girls that say “Porn Star”, all that kind of thing. And it’s not the world I come from. I came of age in the nineties, when we had Riot Grrl music and it was just a more feminist time. I know I’m being a hypocrite by saying that I don’t think a high school girl should be involved in the sex industry, but at least by the age of twenty-four or twenty-five I had lived enough to be able to make that decision for myself.

– What would you say to a woman who’s read your book, thinks it sounds like an interesting job and is going to try it?

I would say try it, slowly. And make sure that you maintain control of yourself in the situation at all times. That includes maintaining some level of sobriety. Because honestly, the people who fall down the rabbit hole are the ones who get involved with drugs.

– And the ones who cross the line into prostitution?

Exactly, yeah. You really have to know your boundaries. In a lot of cases I think that escort work and prostitution, to me that’s just another more extreme form of sex work. I don’t beat around the bush. I knew a lot of strippers who were really quick to point out the difference between them and prostitutes, but honestly I don’t see that big of a difference. It’s a controversial viewpoint, but I know that I was selling my body and selling my sexuality and I’m not really sure how much bigger a step it would have been toward becoming an escort. It’s all so closely related that it struck me as funny when girls would get extremely offended by that comparison. I would think, you’re in a peep show with a dildo up your twat and you’re asking me to show you more respect!

– So do you have any regrets?

There are times when I wish I had attempted to take it even a little more seriously than I did. Because it would have been interesting to see what it was like to get really entrenched in the lifestyle and be one of the upper echelon performers. Obviously I have a physical limitation in that regard because I don’t look like a ten.

– And you don’t want to get big fake boobs?

Exactly, I didn’t want to go that far. But at the same time part of me wondered what it would have been like if I had gotten big fake boobs and gone the whole nine yards, had that ambition that some of those girls have. Because then I really could have gained insight into what that life is like, from a purely anthropological standpoint.

– But you would never go back and do it now?

Right – I think it was pretty obvious when I was doing it that I was kind of a dilettante. I probably wouldn’t go back and do it now, but I miss it. I still feel a little twinge when I pass a strip club, and sometimes consider going in.

4 Play – Irvine Welsh
[collected scripts of plays based on Welsh's work]

See all books by Irvine Welsh at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com



[Note: this is the complete text of a syndicated interview with Harry Gibson provided to the press to promote the 10th anniversary production of Trainspotting, the play based on Irvine Welsh's novel of the same name.

Gibson wrote the script for the stage adaptation of Trainspotting and directed both the original production and the new production which begins in 2006. See the Trainspotting - The Play site for full details.

Spike also interviewed Gibson at the time of the original production in 1996: Harry Gibson: Trainspotting: Expletives Repeated]

So 10 years on, why the revival?

HG: Love, I think. I mean, audiences love seeing it, actors love performing it, and I love directing it. I’ve done Glasgow, Toronto, New York, the Australia tour and I reworked it for the Edinburgh Festival, so it felt like stand up comedy in a tent, and for the West End so it could fill a big old fashioned theatre; so this is my seventh time. And I know it’s a special show for the producers because it was ten years ago when they fell in love with it except that Mark Goucher had to look away when the needles came out. Well, they picked it up and put it on the road and got a smash hit and a shelf full of awards, so for them it’s pure nostalgia. So here we go trainspotting again.

How did it go down in New York did they get it?

HG: It upset them. Sympathy for junkies isn’t big on Broadway. And the language is way too bad for uptown folks. But for eight weeks it was a must see for Soho artists and Greenwich Village actors. The movie actor Brian Denehey said to me, “That is the darkest show I have ever seen.” And he’s been to some very dark places. Australia though was the opposite. One guy said to me, “That’s the funniest first ten minutes of a show I ever saw”. They just sat there eating popcorn and laughing like mad. The thing is, the play has a personality like all good plays which changes from cast to cast. Sometimes it’s a black comedy, like the movie, sometimes it goes deeper, really tragic.

Yes, what about the film? I mean, this isn’t the play of the film is it?

HG: This is the play of Irvine Welsh’s original book. I read a first edition and we had it onstage (at The Glasgow Citz’s) nine months later. We thought it would be good for four weeks in the small studio, but on the first night we had queues wrapped around the building and by noon the next day the whole run was sold out. We revived it six months later in a bigger studio and it sold out again. That was the one which Danny Boyle (the movie’s director) and his team came to see, but naturally a play and a film are two different animals. I love the movie. It’s a brilliant caper-film. It reminded me of those Beatles & Monkees films with lads leaping around to music like ‘Hey, hey we’re the Junkees, and we just junky around’. One big difference between the play and the film apart from the fact that the play just uses one set and four actors and you can smell it happening in front of you is that the movie ends up being the hero’s getaway, while the play stays with the trainspotters, left standing in the ruined old Leith railway station waiting for trains that will never come to get them a away from it all. Irvine liked that ending. Truer to life.

So Trainspotting entered the language?

HG: Spotting is everywhere now. In fact language is a big part of Trainspotting’s appeal. People write dissertations about it. The play has 147 cunts. In Edinburgh housing schemes, I explain to people, cunt is a laddish term of endearment. You can say “Y’cunt-ye” to a mate and it’s quite cuddly. You would not call a vagina a cunt; a vagina is (excuse my language) a f*n*y. Translators have some difficulties; I think the play’s been translated into 17 languages now, and I am waiting for the Japanese version because I’m told the Japanese don’t have dirty swearwords; mind you it might be the maddest version ever.

The culture of the production transforms the show; the Icelandic version which I saw in Reykjavik looked like a saga; our hero’s mother appeared out of a mist like a troll, with a giant wooden spoon. In Paris, it was “La Haine” type streetkids, playing around mostly on scaffolding. The Dresden director must have done a lot of very special workshops games on because I don’t remember writing parts for four blue eyed blonde boys or asking them to do a buggery dance; this went on for three hours – but still, it got 17 curtain calls. Trainspotting gets done all over the world: Canada down to Mexico across to New Zealand and up to Hong Kong – every country has its trainspotters. At the moment the National Theatre of Romania is doing it in Cluj.

So you’re not short of a bob or two?

HG: Well, let me put it this way. I wish I’d made is a full-scale musical. I might be rich. As it is, it’s just a small show for studios, so cheques do drop on the doormat from time to time but only small ones. We’re talking the price of dinner. So I have not given up my day job. Which is theatre anyway. People ask me, “What made you do this?”, and the boring answer is that it’s my job.

I do plays and I turn Irvine’s books into plays because he is a writer of foul genius. I’ve done the play versions of five of his novels. The latest one is Porno, the sequel to Trainspotting about Sick Boy’s attempt to become a porn baron, but for the first time, I’ve got a play which no one will touch. I think they think it might be pornographic, and it isn’t….very. I think it’s beautiful. But then I think every show I do is beautiful, however wild and in your face it is. It’s got to be beautiful theatre. Otherwise it’s a mess. I saw some Oxford students do it last year, and they fucked it up so bad I wanted to walk out and weep. I needed much vodka comfort.

Isn’t “in-yer-face” a whole style of theatre now?

HG: So they say. Actually, theatre’s been doing in-yer-face for years. It isn’t about outrageous acts, it really means your actors address the audience directly, they don’t pretend they are being spied on through a glass wall. Audiences really like that. It makes a play more like rock’n'roll. Well, like The Fall’s idea of rock’n'roll – they’re Irv’s favourite band. So it feels rough, but actually its cunning and beautiful, it draws you into a dream just like Shakespeare where a Prologue tells the punters what’s going to happen and the hero opens his heart in soliloquies, and you’re drawn into a Midsummer Night’s Dream, or King Lear’s nightmare; now that’s pretty “in yer-face” – “Out Vile Jelly!”

Defining the arts into movements and schools is an intellectual’s pastime. Like Irvine’s use of language it’s interesting to philologists but to many ordinary punters Trainspotting is just a great dirty book like Lady Chatterley’s Lover or The Naked Lunch. And language makes a great paint stripper. Used like a tool and my actors know exactly when to say “fuck” – it can cut through walls of pretension and prejudice. Scholars have called Irvine’s style “dirty realism” and my style “in-yer- face” but we’re just following our literary and theatrical ancestors to reach people’s hearts and minds, And people keep coming back for more.

On tour, Trainspotting keeps bringing new people into theatres; theatre managers cry out happily, “We’ve never sold so much lager”. Of course, theatres have to make a special arrangements; at the end of the interval at the Citzs we used to send a usher out to ring a bell in the car park, where customers had popped out for a spliff. And staff do find customers in odd places, let’s just say couples have been known to get carried away, round the back of the stalls. Occasionally someone gets carried out by the paramedics or policemen, but this is rare, There have been no riots yet!

How does all this affect the actors?

HG: One or two of the actors did take their research a bit too far. There was some scraping -up off the ground. But we’ve never lost anyone. The competition to act in Trainspotting is fierce, so we can cast people who are not only fine actors but know the lifestyle, We don’t cast innocents.

Have you ever cast anyone famous?

HG: We’ve cast actors who became famous afterwards. Our first Mark Renton was Ewen Bremner who went on to play Spud in the film an is now a wealthy movie star. In the West End our Alison was played by the amazing Michelle Gomez, who you now see on TV a lot she’s the HEAT magazine girl. And when I saw Lord of The Rings, there was one of my Tommies – Billy Boyd! This kind of starspotting makes watching films and TV a bit weird for me me- well everyone in The Business, you want to get into the drama, but then an old friend pops up and punctures the illusion. I mean, Gollum you look into his eyes and you know it’s Andy Serkis! And you go “he was in a show of mine!” Which no one wants to know and you get shushed.

The Sexual Life Of The Camel?

HG: Ah. Yes

Didn’t you bet someone that you could write a play about masturbation?

HG: It was the first night party of Trainspotting and I did get into a conversation about writing a play about anything, and wanking did come up, and I did write and won a bet, which I think was a bottle of malt whisky, or maybe a case, but I can’t remember who I made it with, so I never collected! And the play was given a reading at The Royal Court which Andy “Gollum” Serkis was in, but it’s never been professionally staged, which may be because people think it pornographic, which it sort of is…

In a beautiful way?

HG: Exactly! Next question.

How have things changed since 1995, in terms of the drugs scene. Will this new production still strike a chord?

HG: It was 1995, but Irvine was going back to the 80s, when heroin-use surged in Edinburgh and it was Thatcher’s Britain and getting messed up and wasted was like defiant and political. And then getting on an E was the way to love. For a century every different drug-craze was hailed as the way to paradise, or the doors of paradise or the road of excess leading to the palace of wisdom, or just a great way to celebrate being rich or escape being poor hashish, acid, speed, coke, E, and you can go back to champagne cocktails for toffs, absinthe for poets, opium for factory workers, laudanum for stressed gentle folk, mother’s ruin gin for ruined mothers and urchins.

In Trainspotting, the book and play, we’re clear about the thrills and the buzz of defiance, but it’s like William Burroughs, the American junky novelist who tried everything and especially enjoyed morphine, he realised something was wrong; he said, “I spent two years gazing at my foot”. He got tunnel vision, and was disappearing, but then he started to see the light, the bigger picture what he saw as a great conspiracy. Well, in Trainspotting, you see that the light at the end of the tunnel is the light of an oncoming train. You can’t leave the theatre unshocked. Now I think that the whole Trainspotting phenomenon has been part of a gradual turnaround of opinion, at least ( and maybe most important because we write the copy for society) among intellectuals and the mediafolk

We are more grown up about drugs. We’re less inclined to idealise or demonise drugs. Society as a whole is not less inclined to TAKE them because humans have always taken drugs, we might even have become human by doing so but we hear less bullshit about drugs being either instant death or the road to excess leading to the palace of wisdom. In truth, the road of witless excess normally leads to the A & E room and the grave. Our realism is good.

Drugs are something you probably should try so long as you don’t have to. If you have to take drugs, it’s time for a reality check. As a drug worker in The Gorbals in Glasgow told me “If you have a life, you can do some drugs; if you don’t have a life, drugs will fill the vacuum”. As the careers of Irvine Welsh and Harry Gibson show, the palace is reached by getting education. My experience says, “Don’t do drugs till you’ve learned the Latin”.

Much more about Irvine Welsh is at irvinewelsh.com