Free I'm Your Man by Sylvie Simmons

we would go down to the beach and swim, then come back, have lunch at the port, and then we would go up to the house, have a siesta for a couple of hours and then start happy hour. It was very good—a lot of fun and very productive. Leonard worked his ass off. But I couldn’t—I’m sure neither of us could—maintain that schedule.”
    Leonard had the assistance, or at least the companionship, of a variety of drugs. He had a particular liking for Maxiton, generically dexamphetamine, a stimulant known outside of pharmaceutical circles as speed. He also had a fondness for its sweet counterpoint Mandrax, a hypnotic sedative, part happy pill, part aphrodisiac, very popular in the UK. They were as handsome a pair of pharmaceuticals as a hardworking writer could wish to meet; better yet, in Europe they could still be bought over the counter. Providing backup was a three-part harmony of hashish, opium and acid (the last of these three still legal at that time in Europe and most of North America).
    Mandrax I get, but speed? Your songs don’t sound like they come from a man on amphetamines.
    â€œWell, my processes, mental and physical, are so slow that speed brought me up to the normal tempo.”
    And acid and the psychedelics?
    â€œOh, I looked into it quite thoroughly.”
    As in studied or dropped a few?
    â€œOf course. A lot more than a few. Fortunately it upset my system, acid—I credit my poor stomach for preventing me from entering into any serious addiction, although I kept on taking it because the PR for it was so prevalent. I took trip after trip, sitting on my terrace in Greece, waiting to see God, but generally I ended up with a very bad hangover. I have a lot of acid stories, as everyone does. At the side of my house there was a kind of garbage heap that during the spring would sprout thousands of daisies, and I was convinced that I had a special communion with the daisies. It seems they would turn their little yellow faces to me whenever I started singing or addressing them in a tender way. They would all turn toward me and smile.”
    Is there a Leonard Cohen acid song or poem?
    â€œMy novel Beautiful Loser had a bit of acid in it, and a lot of speed.”
    â€œDid he tell you about the writing on the wall?” asks Marianne. “It was in gold paint and it said, ‘I change, I am the same, I change, I am the same, I change, I am the same, I change, I am the same.’ I think it was beautiful.” Steve Sanfield remembers that they “smoked a lot of hashish and began to use LSD and psychotropic drugs more as a spiritual path than recreational.” There was a variety of paths to follow. Hydra, says Richard Vick, a British poet and musician who lived on the island, “always had the odd shaman who came and went and would be the feature of the winter, who would be into the tarot or sandbox play or something.” The I Ching and The Tibetan Book of the Dead were popular. George Lialios was also investigating Buddhism and Jung.
    Leonard continued to fast, as he had in Montreal. The discipline of a week of fasting appealed to him, as did the spiritual element of purging and purification and the altered mental state that it produced. Fasting focused his mind for writing, but there was vanity in it also; it kept his body thin and his face gaunt and serious (although the amphetamines helped with that too). There seemed to be a deep need in Leonard for self-abnegation, self-control and hunger. In Beautiful Losers he would write, “Please make me empty, if I’m empty then I can receive, if I can receive it means it comes from somewhere outside of me, if it comes from outside of me I’m not alone. I cannot bear this loneliness. . . . Please let me be hungry. . . . Tomorrow I begin my fast.” The hunger he wrote of appeared to be all-encompassing. In the Spice-Box of Earth poem “It Swings Jocko,” a bebop song to his prick, he