White Line Fever: The Autobiography

by Janiss Garza

Schoolkids get up to all kinds of shit, and after all, why not? That’s their job, isn’t it – to piss off their elders and give them a cross to bear; otherwise, what use are they?

One was as a house painter with this gay guy, Mr Brownsword (what a name for a queer, absolutely perfect!).

We began to hang out in coffee bars and dancehalls and pull other blokes’ birds and generally appal everybody!

After a bit of this it seemed to us that we should take drugs

Or you would wind up getting a lift with some huge, homosexual trucker. ‘Hello, son. How far are you going?’ ‘Manchester.’ ‘Manchester, right. I’d like to suck your dick.’ ‘I’ll get out here, then.’

Shel was blind as a bat. He did have some sight but it was pretty thin. He used to come into the studio saying ‘Hi guys!’ and immediately blunder into the drum kit. He was always walking into walls and doors and shit. He had minders lifting him up out of the debris everywhere, but he’d never admit that he couldn’t see – he just had friends who ‘happened to be there’ picking him up like it was an accident. His face was a constant mass of scar tissue about the eyebrows. But he was all right. He got the job done.

We used to get high and go down to the park and talk to the trees – sometimes the trees would win the argument.

But it wasn’t amphetamine, it was atropine sulphate – belladonna. Poison. We’d all done about a teaspoonful of it, which is like 200 times the overdose, and we went berserk, the whole lot of us. I was walking around with a TV under my arm, talking to it. Somebody else was trying to feed the trees outside his window. It was really interesting for a while, actually. Then we all passed out and somebody called Release, the firm with the free drug rescue van, and they loaded us all in the back like bundles of wood and took us to the hospital.

It was called a ring modulator, but it was actually an audio generator that went out of human hearing at both high and low end. If it went up, you would lose your balance and fall down and vomit; if it went down, you shit your pants.

But of course, we could never tell for sure if it was the audio generator or if it was because we’d spiked all the food with acid before the gig.

Dikmik and I had been up for about three days prior, whacking down Dexedrine. Then we got a bit paranoid and took some downers – Mandrax – but we thought it wasn’t very interesting because it calmed us down too much, so we took some acid, and then we took some mescaline to make it more colourful. It started getting a bit freaky, so we took a couple more Mandrax . . . and then we took some more speed because we got too slowed down again. Then we went to the Roundhouse. Dikmik was driving and he was really interested in the side of the road, so he kept steering over to look at it.

Larry thought it would be good to have Phil sing on one track, so we tried him out on ‘City Kids’. It didn’t work – he sounded like two cats being stapled together.

Then we got on the second plane and before we took off, the captain came storming down the aisle. ‘I have heard about you and your being deported from Finland,’ he glowered. ‘If you try anything on this plane, I will have you arrested in London.’ So we didn’t do anything the whole way back to London, but when we landed, there were all these cops on the tarmac. ‘Oh fuck!’ we thought. And then they arrested the captain! It turned out he was flying the plane drunk, which only goes to show.

Apparently people don’t like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because it upsets a lot of people. If you show them enough times that their arguments are bullshit, then maybe just once, one of them will say, ‘Oh! Wait a minute – I was wrong.’ I live for that happening. Rare, I assure you.