an extract from Ch. Ch. Ch. -------------------------------------------------------------------- When he at last managed to pull his eyes painfully into focus he realised that he was looking at the halo of light which appears to surround a rain drop when the warm amber glow of a street light reflects off of it. He was aware of only three things. One; a feeling - he was
hurting, but he didn't know exactly where. His entire
body seemed to be weighed down by an oppressive nausea. As his brain slowly regained some sort of twisted version of normal perception, he remembered that they’d crashed and he was immediately sick. A steaming foul tasting bitter sweet explosion of partly digested matter came flying out from his mouth and splashed over the road. He focused on that. It wasn't as pretty as the rain drop but it was unusually bright and seemed to shimmer, almost as if it was a living entity in it`s own right. A thing from another world which had rudely used his own body to propel itself through a vortex between dimensions, and as a consequence had suffered a complete rearrangement of it`s molecular structure. He watched the pool from another planet as, being mostly liquid, it succumbed to the forces of Earthly gravity and spread out looking for sea level. He felt better having exorcised the alien from within to without and he tried to sit up. "OUCH!......FUCK!" He'd broken an arm and it wouldn't behave as it was supposed to. Instead of supporting his weight it bent the wrong way and pushed a sharp and jagged piece of bone through torn tissue and out through his shirt sleeve, which, he noticed for the first time, was drenched in blood. The sticking out bone looked strange, as though it didn't belong to him. It was as if some unseen primitive assailant had been waiting in ambush and thrown a bone tipped spear at him. The pain this strange archaeological object was causing him served to sharpen his instincts and caused a subconscious motor reaction, which he was only vaguely aware of, to generate deep down in the primordial part of his brain. It told another part of his brain, a part he was a bit more aware of, to pay attention, snap out of it, look out, danger. Grabbing this ex arm with the one which still operated as instructed he rolled over to inspect the source of the noise he’d heard some moments ago. Andy was dead. There was no aura. The life force gone. Pop. What seconds ago was a living breathing dynamic interesting funny dangerous human being was now a piece of dead meat lying at an unfeasible angle a few feet away on the same wet tarmac. "You stupid cunt" he heard himself say to the dead meat, "I knew you couldn't do it" He looked at what was once his good friend and comrade in mischief hoping for a sign that he was only taking a brief trip to the heavens before beaming back down to share in the inevitable post accident laughter, but there was none. He rolled over on his back, clutching his throbbing blood soaked dysfunctional arm and looked at the stars, wondering which one the vomited alien had come from, which one Andy wasn't coming back from. Then he lost it. When he awoke a strange face was floating about above him. The face was moving and he remembered that when faces do that there ought to be an accompanying sound. Speech. But he couldn't hear anything. He could feel what must have been an arm supporting his head up off the ground and he was aware that someone had placed a blanket over him, it smelled of medical things. Unlike the black, out of focus thing which was put over his face, this smelled of vomit and rubber. He tried to get them to take it away. But he felt heavy, very heavy. Fade to black......................... It would have been OK if Andy hadn't taken that last bend so fast. They’d nearly come off at the one before but only skidded. It was an exhilarating sensation which frightened the life out of him, being that close to the godhead. Andy was on his own trip. They were only sharing the physical, the three dimensional events. The mental and the spiritual were something, somewhere, else. Each was in his own space. Somewhere off tangentially weird. His own weird took the shape of a dragon. They were riding a cosmic bumper car along the twists and turns of the great green serpents diamond studded spine, undulating and coiling back on itself, the eternal circle. Except that it wasn't circular, it was constantly changing direction. A bumpy up and down ride through the space dust. A curving, twisting, screeching, sliding, skidding dice roll with destiny on God’s own roller coaster. Nothing was certain as they flashed past constellations and bushes, nebulae and trees, galaxies and sign posts, black holes and gate posts, stretching out from one end of the universe to the other, bending back on themselves as time does. Where they were headed didn't matter. They were matter themselves, they were a part of everything. Everything and nothing. Nothing was certain. Nothing is. Except change. In reality, or at least in what we take by common consensus to be reality, they were riding a Triumph 250 down a narrow twisty lane on the outskirts of Bognor Regis. And they crashed. This would probably have happened anyway, even without the drugs. The drugs took the harshness out of it. The drugs took the normality out of it. The drugs made it magical. It was a stupid thing to do, to take a fast ride on a borrowed motorbike with a cocktail of LSD, amphetamine, cider and pot in their brains. But what the hell, they were just seventeen. They'd stopped a way back down the road and changed seats, Andy urging to be allowed to take the controls and our friend hanging on to the pillion for dear life, lost in a wild hallucination. Two stupid seventeen year olds looking for something. Anything, it didn't matter what. Fun probably. The sort of fun they could have on a bike they borrowed from a guy at the beach party. "Hey man, giz a go on your bike" "OK.....Yeah.........Cool" It was like that in then, in 1970. The summers of peace and love in the late nineteen sixties brought a massive influx of new and amazing drugs which became the focal point of a generation. Everybody took drugs, any drugs on offer. You dropped pills, chewed bits of strange dried up cacti, put blotting paper on your tongue, smoked a vast range of the underground exports of half the third world, snorted powders, drank potions, swallowed concoctions, and injected stuff directly into your bloodstream. It was a time of experimentation. You experimented until you found out what you got off on and what was best to avoid. Most people seemed to come through this mess of dangerous opportunity unscathed, going on to become productive members of society - teachers, bus drivers, entrepreneurs, mechanics, musicians, carpenters, lawyers, parents - survivors. Some were less fortunate. But who's to say. They say the sixties never happened till the seventies don't they? Well, the sixties is a name given to a period of our common history which had less to do with Chronos and more to do with Eros. The sixties isn't about a date and time it`s about a state of mind. When you got into that state you turned on and dropped out, and as far as you were concerned anybody who didn't could fuck off and drop dead. The party was happening on a little beach near a place called Pagham which is near Bognor on the Sussex coast. A very pretty little place it was too. He'd gone down there, with the small group of friends who had given themselves the collective title of The Team. There was a rumour that someone had picked up from the friend of a friend of a face someone met at a free festival called Harmony Farm a few weeks before. "There's gonna be some good trips, orange sunshine" was the rumour. You'd travel some distance for some good trips. By 1970 there were a lot of not very good trips in circulation and those in the know did their best to avoid them. The rumour turned out to be true and a jolly weird time was had by all. He was sitting on the sand waiting for Andy to come back with the trips remembering the last really good trip he'd had. It was at the Stones concert in Hyde Park the year before, 5th July 1969. Only two days before the concert, and a mere three weeks after being sacked from the band, Brian Jones had been murdered in his swimming pool. Accidentally or not, it was a much debated point, but murdered he was. Apparently by a couple of rip off builders "`avin` a larf". Mick Jagger stood on the front of the stage dressed, aptly some said, in what looked like a clowns outfit and read the eulogy for the dead Stones founder, a Shelly poem; Peace, peace, he is not dead.... Thousands of butterflies which had been delivered to the stage in several cardboard boxes were finally set free. The butterflies dispersed in higgledy-piggledy zig zag directions, no doubt confused and terrified by their incarceration and transportation. Some flew out over the crowd, some settled around the scaffolding of the stage. Others were swatted by Hells Angels who had been engaged as front of stage security. Who would break a butterfly on a rolled up copy of I.T? (to paraphrase the famous Times headline) A Hells Angel obviously - Swat, swat, it definitely is dead. It wasn't until later when he saw the film of the event that he realised how good a trip it actually was. At the time, out in the sunny happy park, surrounded by people he loved, the Stones sounded amazing. It was all too beautiful there in Itchycoo Park. But if the memory is a willing deceiver, the camera doesn't lie. It captured a very untogether and out of tune performance. Mick Taylor, Jones` replacement, obviously hadn't a clue what was going on but did his professional best to "wing it". Keef was out of his gourd and wobbled around behind Mick looking like he'd just been dragged reluctantly out of some bar. Watching the gig second time round there in the cinema with chemicals in him no more dangerous than the preservative they put in Kia-Ora orange juice, he was able to compare the memory with the reality. Sometimes it`s best not to. --------------------------------------------------------- |
