Free More Fool Me by Stephen Fry Page B

had hardened into uselessness, a vein in their eyeball or their penis, then plunge the plunger, they were surely the true addicts. I got the word ‘squeamish’ from an article I read by Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriting phenomenon who gave the world A Few Good Men , The West Wing , The Social Network and The Newsroom . He was taking a break in rehearsals with Philip Seymour Hoffman and, as an ex-coke fiend, was saying to him that he’d always been too squeamish to inject himself, otherwise he supposed he’d have been a junkie. ‘Stay squeamish,’ was Hoffman’s (typically) curt reply. It wasn’t too long after that that he himself was dead. Twenty-three years ‘clean’ and then one back-slide and it was all over. It’s rather like nuclear weaponry: you can never say it is safe because it has only been safe up until now ; it needs to be safe for all time: one moment of not being safe, and the whole game is up.
    So, back now in London in 1986 for my first experience of taking coke. I nervously watch my friend take out a folded wrap of paper, open it and shake out a heap of granular white powder on to a metal tray on the table beside him. He takes out a credit card and with its edge chops gently until the powder is as fine grained as he can make it. He uses the edge to sweep this pile into five equal lines, rolls up a ten-pound note, bends down, applies the end of the tube to one nostril and the other end to the first line and with a sharp snort sucks in half of it. He takes the remaining half of his line up the other nostril and then passes me the rolled-up tube.
    With as much nonchalance as I can muster I reproduce his actions. My hand is trembling a little, and I am more than a little anxious not to imitate Woody Allen’s notorious sneeze in Annie Hall . My bent nose has gifted me a deviated septum, which means that it is uncommon for both nostrils to be in full working order at the same time. I force as much suction as I can on my line with the weak left nostril and nothing moves. Embarrassed, I take the whole line up my clear right nostril with one huge snort. The powder hits the back of my throat and my eyes sting a little. The other three, also neophytes at this ceremony, take their turns.
    I sit back, expecting hallucinations, a trance, bliss, euphoria, ecstasy …  something.
    Our host, as is his right, licks his forefinger and sweeps up the residue of powder, pushing it round his gums.
    ‘Er …’ says one of our number braver than me, ‘what are we supposed to feel?’
    ‘You get a bit of a buzz’ – the expert claps his hands together and exhales loudly – ‘and you feel just … good. That’s what’s so great about coke. It’s kind of subtle?’
    Up until this time the only illegal drug I had ever tried had been dope, which I had been rather ashamed of strongly disliking. Cannabis, even the milder versions of grass and resin available back then before the age of skunk and buds, was certainly not subtle, neither in effect nor in after-effect. In 1982 I had once vomited all over, around, above and below the lavatory of a friend’s house only a few months after coming back from our Footlights tour of Australia. I can’t remember any discernible pleasure at any stage and had more or less foresworn the weed. Most people have a drug that suits them, whether it is nicotine (not much of a behavioural modifier), coffee, cannabis, alcohol, ketamine, crystal meth, crack, opium, heroin, speed, MDMA/Ecstasy. I had decided early on that cannabis was not for me, but I hadn’t for one second considered replacing it with another one.
    Sitting back now and inspecting the effect of the cocaine, I have to confess to noticing finally a benevolent stimulation. I observe too that we are all inclined to talk a little more. Mostly over each other, without listening, a feature I will soon come to recognize very clearly.
    A BRIEF HISTORY OF BLOW
     
    Cocaine (if you call it ‘blow’ you sound hipper and cooler),