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| Best watch the above before reading below |
I’m a uni student. Sharing a three bed house in Elder Street Braddon. Opposite the Ainslie Primary School, that I’d been to in 1958, a “new Australian”, put in the migrants’ class cause I couldn’t speak English, and now we live opposite it, we three friends, we old school friends, no harm having been done by being labelled “immigrant” at Ainslie Primary or even at being called “a wop” or a “dago” because I spoke Italian and was dark and chubby and Italian-looking. No harm done. And anyway I got back at them, as we went over every evening to pinch the unopened bottles of milk that kids had left, not wanting it. The left-over bottles were going to go to pigs anyway, so why not to us?
We’re sitting there in 1969, in the autumn coolth, in Elder St, our house a mecca for mates, it’s our place, we live here, we pay rent and all that adult stuff, which was kinda new for us in our late teenage hood. But we’d run out of dope! I get the short straw. I was sent out to replenish our stash.
Rustle around for the cash for the stash. Thirty Oz dollars for an ounce in those days. I haven’t don’t the maths, but it’s not all that much and just the other day in Hong Kong, I was offered some at multiples of that price, even allowing for inflation. So we rustled together $30. It was around ten at night. They expected me back in an hour or less.
Into my VW beetle, and off to see Brenda, living in the Civic Apartments. Canberra is such a land-prolific city that something like “apartments” is unusual. These were just three floors high, but remarkable for Canberra.
I knocked on the door. Come in. Opened into a smoky room with bodies. On the floor and beaning in bags. Brenda was somewhere in that smoke and she lazily bid me in. Something on the stereo. Leonard Cohen, I found out. My first taste. (by far not my last).
I couldn’t just come straight out and ask for the dope. Courtesy. Brenda was no dealer. Just a friend. “Just” a friend? A friend then, and courtesies had to be gone though.
I draped myself on a bean bag.
I noticed that Brenda was busy. Sitting on the floor, with a saucer between her legs, working away at something.
She kept at it as we chatted.
She reached into the saucer, took something and put it to her mouth, sucked smoothly. Passed the saucer to the next bean bagger. Then offered it me.
“What is it?” I ask.
“California Gold."
Acid, huh? I’d never had it, but had read about it and heard about it. So...
“Sure, why not”, I say. “But how much?”. “Oh, it’s free”, she says. How much to take? She looks at me, big bloke, does her mental calculations, like a doctor. Two half tablets, she thought.
They alway say “the rest is history". Except it wasn’t. Except it was. My own history, that night, which I’ve never forgotten. That night.
The rest was a night of delightful hallucinations. Leonard Cohen's Suzanne took me by the hand and led me down to her boats by the river, and I heard the boats go by and I spent the night beside her. I knew she was half-crazy, but that’s why I wanted to be there; I was more than half crazy.
She fed me tea and oranges that came all the way from China. I had no love to give her, but she got me on her wavelength, she let the river answer for her: “you’ve always been my lover".
I wanted to travel with her, down the Swiss mountain side, cows smiling, cows talking, cows mooing, cows moaning, mooning and moaning about their tough lives, their sensitive udders, their signifiant udders, and I wanted to travel blind, but Suzanne tells me she will trust me. That I'd touched her perfect body with my mind.
