Thank God I never got along with marijuana

I think I was saved from any remote danger of ever becoming a hippy by the simple fact that I don’t respond well to marijuana. The first time I tried it was at home with a friend sometime in our teens, and it had literally no effect on either of us whatsoever.

We puffed and puffed like billy-oh, listening to hippy music all the while, taking the experiment very seriously. My friend eventually grew so bored he popped what was left of the little green cube in his mouth and swallowed it. Not a sausage. Interestingly, another friend, a regular partaker who had “scored” the relevant “shit” for us, had been wrecked after the first few puffs and had wandered off home in a mental fog.

The next time I tried it was on a school trip in Boston a year later, and I will admit to laughing hysterically and falling off my seat at one point – but that might have been due to the quality of the performers. Third time, in the company of two fairly well-known members of a newly-formed British rock band at the home of a classical music critic in Wimbledon, I got very snippy with their irritatingly soft-spoken American manager (he made the mistake of using the phrase “all that old rock ‘n’ roll shit” to describe the music I loved) and threw up afterwards -  unfortunately, not over him. 

A long hiatus followed and a middle class couple rolled a joint at a small dinner party and I had a few puffs, and promptly turned very aggressive (an effect alcohol only had on me a handful of times – invariably when I was already in a bad mood). 

I’m told today’s versions of the drug are much stronger than they were back then – but I suspect they’d only make me sicker and angrier than the original.

Even if marijuana had provided me with a Nirvanic high, I’m not sure I’d have donned a kaftan and beads and started calling everyone “man” and exclaiming “far out!” and going “phew!” to denote that something was, like, “heavy”. For a start, most of the bad boys I knew who experimented with drugs were basically testosterone-fuelled, beer-drinking rugby players who were unlikely to adopt peace and love as their credo. My other friends were, like me,  cynical, small “c” conservative types who didn’t see much point in ending up wrecked in a gutter with a syringe sticking out their arm. While we enjoyed a lot of the music, we found the whole hippyshtick – the language, the clothes, the political posturing – quite ludicrous.

I only ever once toyed with the notion of identifying myself with the counter-culture. It was in 1971 on the day the defendants in the Oz trial were found guilty. I was in Soho, visiting One-Stop Records to buy an expensive imported copy of the J. Geils Band‘s first LP (a glorious hunk of hard-as-nails, no-nonsense, white-boy Chicago Blues). As I exited the shop, I saw a billboard announcing the verdict. For a few minutes I indulged in a fantasy of feeling aggrieved – maybe the pigs really were out to get us; this was an establishment vendetta against our generation; The Man was determined to crush all opposition to The Machine. Man the barricades!

It felt good, all that self-righteous anger at being a member of an oppressed minority who wanted nothing more than to tell the truth and have fun and…

Then I saw a group of hippies shuffling along the Dean Street pavement towards me, shoulders hunched, pigeon-toed, electric hair hanging down, talking in that, like, really quiet, monotonous way that was supposed to indicate that (a) you were high on substances and (b) like, really at peace with yourself, yeah? And I thought – I am not one of you! The OzSchoolkids Issue was a vile piece of conscienceless pornography produced by silly, sniggering sixth-formers, their defence lawyer  John Mortimer was a smug liberal git, and, for God’s sake, I was a Conservative! And then I remembered a friend who’d been lost to the dark side, and it was all I could do not to duff them all up, the ridiculous twats.

I won’t give my friend’s name, just in case he’s now the Chairman of a Fortune 500 company – but he was the only chum who I remember totally succumbing to the lure of hippydom. He was a martyr to acne, socially awkward, extremely aggressive, and very clever – he was Oxford-bound to read Classics. The school’s admittedly small skinhead contingent (Direct Grant entrants) had it in for him, and he had taken up body-building to turn himself from a bespectacled swot into a physical force to be reckoned with. He was a staunch Chelsea supporter, travelling to away matches as a member of the hooligan tendency. And he was an even stauncher supporter of Enoch Powell, and very keen on the National Front (he may have joined – can’t remember). For some inexplicable reason, we became friends: maybe because he was just so bloody odd. 

Sadly, my chum couldn’t get on with his ex-docker father, now living in a large modern house in Leatherhead (red brick with a classical portico). Fisticuffs ensued, plus a really cack-handed suicide attempt involving aspirin (!). My friend spent the summer holidays living on his own in a flat in Surbiton before returning to school as a boarder. He was eventually expelled for attending a Chelsea match which he had been expressly forbidden to go to: one assumes it was a deliberate act of self-destruction.

A few months later, he turned up at our house. His hair was long and greasy and he was wearing a filth-caked kaftan. He was living in a squat, and had, in effect, become a card-carrying hippy. The chap who would have knocked one’s block off a few months earlier in support of his dementedly racist views was now hunched and mumbling and talking about scoring acid and having sex with “chicks” and about needing “some bread, man”. When I mentioned Chelsea, he just shrugged.

My mum fed him and gave him some money, he had an extremely necessary bath, and then wandered off into the night, having turned down the offer of a bed. He couldn’t remember the address of his squat. He’d be in touch.

I never saw him again, but, years after the event, my mother told he’d once phoned her at her flat in Paddington while I was at university, trying to track me down. She invited him over and the food-bath-cash-refusing-a-bed routine was repeated. He was evidently in a shocking state - dirty, dishevelled,  confused, incoherent - and wouldn’t take any sensible advice or let her call anyone. My mother said it was obvious he’d be dead within weeks, if not days.

I hope he survived and sorted himself out. But I know damn well he didn’t.

If anyone tells you there’s a lot to be said for the hippy ethos, punch them.