Freight
Valium, Van
Morrison, meat pies for breakfast.
There were fireworks,
amphetamines, Pat Hanly posters. There were barbecues on beaches, parties in flats and taupata backyards, humid nights in gardens with lions and hyenas.
Listen. I once pissed in a jukebox.
On and into a jukebox. Fusing the machine but escaping electrocution and death.
Listen. I swallowed LSD a time, or two.
Swallowed LSD and utterly hated the whole fucked-up nowhere mess of an experience.
My first job
was in a freight yard. I stood in a railway wagon and wrangled crates cartons new-minted tyres, swishing off the backs of trucks they came, it was like a sweaty shift at some mechanical beach. As I walked to the pub after work, I’d feel a pleasant muscular fatigue, the hairs on my forearms would seem more numerous. And then there’d be the faces in the bar, the denimed shoulders downy Tudor beards, we were gardeners postmen dusties window cleaners, we were urban hippies cool the best of us, over-educated and sexually generous. Not that I was all that keen on dope, I never much cared for the weed, it didn’t do for me what I wanted done. My fondness was for alcohol, I went to alcohol as to a bride, oh ours was a white a mystical communion. If I relished the cordialities of the watering-hole, the binding sacraments of the communal well, it was ethanol itself that infatuated me.
It completed and
perfected me yes sir. It drugged me with its druggiest of sweets.
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