Druggie daze

By Laurie Taylor

Disruption of consciousness ahead

Be careful what you wish for, because you may get it - and your expectations may be dashed.

There was a lot of saloon bar talk about drugs among the boys I used to hang around with during my teenage years in Liverpool.

We'd talk knowingly about the differences between dope and chang and smack. We'd talk about how this or that jazz musician or beat poet was well known for his private addiction to one or other of these substances.

We'd also talk about the possibility of taking some drugs ourselves so that we too could experience the heightened sensibility that they promised to afford.

Even at the time, our intense and repetitive conversation summoned up that popular song pastiche:

Oh how we dancedOn the night we were wedWe danced and we danced'Cos the room had no bed.

You could similarly say that we talked and talked 'cos the bar had no drugs.

What we did have, though, was a wonderful cautionary drug story about Big Dave and Vinnie, two Liverpool boys of our own age, who, fired up by the knowledge that their jazz heroes in the United States regularly used marihuana, had set out with the resolution of polar explorers to acquire some of their very own.

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For months they hung around the pubs on the dock road, trying to buy a supply from one of the visiting seamen. Eventually, they struck lucky. A black American sailor sold them a small paper bag of grass for a fiver.

It seems that they took the bag home, emptied the meagre shredded contents onto a table and contemplated the disruption of consciousness and the hedonistic highs that lay before them. They knew that it would take rather more than a couple of puffs on a joint to make them play an alto saxophone like Charlie Parker, but even that modest ingestion might at least allow them some access to Charlie's bohemian style of life and thought.

But where could the experiment take place? They could hardly risk smoking at home or in the street. Someone might smell them out and confiscate their valuable stash.

So they hit upon the idea of going to north Wales. They would catch a bus over and then find a small local pub where they could mix their marihuana with some tobacco and roll it up into a normal looking cigarette.

It might give off a distinctive aroma but the possibility of a local Welsh farmhand recognising such a smell back in the late 1950s was absurdly remote. They could always claim it was a special herbal mixture.

Roll up, roll up

The great day came. They climbed onto their Crossville bus with their precious stash and set off for a little village just outside Mold. All went well at first. The local pub was warm and empty except for three old codgers sitting at an adjoining table.

In awe of Charlie "Bird" Parker

Gingerly, Vinnie took out the little packet of grass and sprinkled it onto the table. Then Big Dave licked the side of a cigarette and let the tobacco tumble out into a separate pile. Vinnie then took out a packet of cigarette papers and prepared to mix the marihuana and tobacco together into a real reefer.

But even as he addressed the ingredients, he was interrupted by a loud Welsh voice from the table on his left.

"What you doing there, boyo?""Oh, just rolling up," said Big Dave innocuously. "You don't roll up like that," said the voice. "Here let me show you."

And without further ado he moved his chair alongside Big Dave, picked up the packet of cigarette papers, vigorously extracted a new paper, licked its edge, and then turned to the ingredients on the pub table: the small pile of grass and the larger pile of tobacco.

Without pausing in his endeavours he swept his broad hand across the table sending the precious grains of grass flying across the damp floor of the bar.

"Now, that's better. This is how you do it," he said, as though in clearing the grass from the table he'd been performing a minor public service.

Big Dave and Vinnie returned miserably to Liverpool on the last bus. Big Dave married June, an attendant at a Birkenhead petrol station and Vinnie became a local geography teacher.

It was rumoured that they still got together for a few pints of bitter on the annual anniversary of Charlie Parker's death on 12 March. But they never ever tried to get on the drug scene again. And apparently, neither of them, for the rest of their lives, went anywhere near north Wales.

Someone told me recently that they'd read the Vinnie and Big Dave story in Rolling Stone about 10 years ago but the names and locations were different. Some people will steal anything.