Free Dead Babies by Martin Amis

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    : "You shun your spirit," he murmured, "every time you agree to sell your days to the city, to measure out your life at the city's pace."
"Right," said Marvell. "You feel like a cog, a sort of robot that's got to—"
"Hey, you lot," called Diana, "stop talking piss and come and help me with this fucking hamper."
    Andy was urinating noisily against a nearby tree and Giles had curled up with the gin bottle. The fact was that little Keith had been lending catering assistance to Diana, who happened to object both to his revoltingly pudgy fingers occasionally skimming her own and also to being bracketed implicitly with the least attractive person present.
"For Christ's sake, let's break out some of that Irish," said Andy.
"Yes," said Quentin, "and let's take in some of this sun."
Marvell and Roxeanne arranged themselves on and around Skip's outstretched form—an arm here, a leg there. It didn't look self-conscious, somehow or other.
"Now," said Marvell. "I want you all to give this drug thing some genuine thought. I don't want to get too mechanistic about it but I've done this sort of project before, in controlled conditions, and I have some sort of article or possibly a pamphlet in view. Names changed; conjectural in idiom." Marvell yawned, and nestled further into the nook composed by Skip's chest and Roxeanne's shoulder. He looked like an unwholesome potentate, propped up against his friends' long bodies, his face shadowed and beady under its trellis of hair. "I don't know about you guys," he went on, "but I'm pretty fucked and I don't want to be flashing all night on this thing. We take off around seven, should be right. Think it over and give me your specifications when we get back. I'll be interested to see what you people choose."
It had taken Giles the last two-thirds of this peroration to crawl the five feet to where Andy lay spreadeagled on a blanket. On arrival, Giles poked Andy's shoulder.
"What?" said Andy.
"Hey, Andy," Giles whispered loudly. "What's that chap saying?"
Andy stretched. "Says he's got drugs'll do anything. Anything you like. You tell him what you want to happen to you and he'll make it happen.”
"What, anything? He—he could even make you stop worrying about your . . ."
"Anything, man," said Andy, searching for a more delicious posture in which to drowse. "Anything."
When Giles had removed the swimming green of the gin bottle from his lips and settled himself also on the ground, there lingered in his mind the afterimage of what had snapped into focus from the smoke between everything and his eyes, the three smiling faces of the Americans.
    15: meandered up america
The Americans constituted a "triad," a "troy," which meant, more or less, that they got to fuck and bugger one another indiscriminately. It was their habit, too, to rope in another personage to form a "rectangle," or another couple to make up the full "star." And are we to believe that sexual excursions outside the group were censured? On the contrary, they were encouraged, applauded as adding further imaginative declensions to normal activity. The threesome had flourished for two years and showed lively signs of continuing to do so.
Their story went something like this.
Skip's father, Philboyd B. Marshall, Jr., a horrible human being, used to run a hot, dirty garage on the outskirts of Tara, Tennessee. Philboyd had done so many appalling and traumatic things to his son that anyone who heard about them spontaneously congratulated Skip on his apparent sanity. Philboyd had once raped him, for instance—not (we hasten to add) in a libidinous spirit, but because he had caught Skip emptying the latrine with a shovel rather than with his bare hands, as Philboyd had requested, this being itself a punishment for an earlier mischief. "Kitch you at that kind of non-sense again, boy, and you're in real trouble."
Father and son relations worsened. What with the gas station not doing so good these days, the way all the guys were moving out of