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Unsafe At Any Speed
An excerpt from Julian Cope's autobiography, 'Head-On/Repossessed'
In San Francisco, we were a psychedelic group. All the older journalists came out to meet us. They said I wrote like Arthur Lee, and championed us loudly. I staggered around the streets, confused and happy and guilty at everything I did. I hung out on my own on Haight Street and bought loads of second hand biographies.
My phone-calls with Dorian were so inconsistent. Sometimes I was charming. Other times, if Dorian said anything that rubbed me wrong, I would become silent and motionless and would look straight ahead at the floor of my hotel room. I'd stare and stare until my eyes saw only directly in front of me, and darkness would cloud the edges, and a tunnel would form and I'd slip into a mood of total and inert psychosis.
I had all this blotter acid from Los Angeles and, during an interview, a middle-aged woman called Sheila gave me a clear plastic-bag, full of "sherbet".
"It's pure California Crystal," she said. "A thousand trip bag. I live out on the rock, and the Dead sent it for you."
We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, out of San Francisco and on our way to Boulder, Colorado. It's a 1200 mile journey. We had to do it in 2 days in our crappest of crap Dodge Ram van.
We resumed our positions and I cradled my 1000 trip bag in my hands. It was the size of an ounce of rolling tobacco and clear. Bob Proctor said we had to break the speed limit all the time, just to get to the show on time. Fuck it, I though, let's make this an epic of epic journeys.
I evaluated my situation. I had seven trips in either blotter or tablet form. It was around noon. I had two days of intense hell ahead of me. Better take them all. I scooped up the blotters. They were between one-eighth and a quarter of an inch in size. They had colour cartoons of Disney characters printed on them, and I took all seven of them with a swig of beer. Gary looked at me, his air of resignation to the fore. If I was going to be in a state, he figured he should fuck up too. I took his forefinger in my hand and dipped it lightly into the bag of crystal.
"Lick your finger, Gary. Right, that's one trip. Okay?"
Gary stuck his finger in the packet five more times. Right, it's like that is it? Over the next half hour, I added eight more fingerfuls of crystal acid to my dose of seven blotters.
Nothing happened quickly. Alfie and Jeff looked apprehensive but I settled down to read at the front of the van. I had bought the autobiography of Blaze Starr for 25 cents on Geary St. in San Francisco. She was a stripper, but I mainly loved her name. The coastal breezes were soon far behind. The hills gave way until, through the intense heat and the haze, we were over the state line and into Nevada.
"Ay, fuckin' shuddup, will yer?" Bob Proctor asked for the tenth time.
"Sorry, Robert." I had started to make truck noises as the trip came on. Errrrrr Urrrrrr...
It was hard to stop, especially when someone kept asking me. I looked up. A V.W. Beetle was travelling towards us down the highway, about 2 feet above the ground.
"Alfie, look. Look, Alfie. Look, look, look! Looook."
He looked. The Beetle passed. "So what?" So what?!? I couldn't believe it. The single most amazing thing in my life, thus far, and Alfie doesn't care. Suck thine shit and then suck mine, Alfredo.
And then it happened. My 15 trips came on. I looked at Gary.
"Faaaaaaar Ouuuuuut! Garfield, you're the bloody family dog."
I sat bolt upright. Sitting between Bob Proctor and myself, Gary Dwyer sat, paws 'n' all, as canine now as he had been feline in Rockfield. He stuck out his long wet tongue at me and panted. I brushed my filthy matted hair luxuriously by the open passenger window. It streamed out behind me, the wind from the enormous open gash buffeting and massaging me. I was huge. I was totally huge. My breathing was strong and virile. I looked around at everyone, my nostrils flared and equine. I felt Godlike and beautiful. Huh, I'm Mercury and you can all fuck off.
With the temperature around 100 degrees, we were not yet fully into the desert. The towns became fewer and fewer and soon we alone raced across the vast and giant white sand, like a tiny slot-car across Nevada. Occasionally, a convoy of chromed and shining Peterbuilt and Kenworth trucks would appear, endless miles in front of us. We would catch them up in minutes, sometimes trapped behind their vapour trails, then dip and sway before vrooming past them. I stared transfixed at their tiny roller-skate wheels fighting to support the enormous weight thundering through the dazzle and the heat...
Troy Tate stood, sagging and with great effort, at the edge of a Nevada truck park, a beer in one hand and a brace of iced imported lagers in the other. We were filling up with petrol at one of the zillion 76 truck stops on these highways. We had eaten our fill at a roadside diner called Middle of Nowhere outside Cold Springs, Nevada, then danced with a couple of old guys. Before we left, I'd helped the waitress's son with his homework and she had given us all sun-hats with the place name on it. Now it was midnight and the frying pan that was the van roof had begun to cool slightly. Gary and I stood, vacantly and immobile, at the gleaming and spotless all-night coke-machine, looking out into the mountains. We ambled slowly over to Troy at the far edge of the truck park, my hearing too acute in the sibilance and the treble of the jet-black and insect-laden night.
This place. This place and this frame of mind. I was solid and separate from everything. The road went on forever. And these roads. They weren't even real roads. Nature threatened to reclaim them at any minute. Like an elastic-band stretched round a tennis ball, it felt as though I could cut through them with a gigantic razor-blade and send them spinning off into space.
Bob Proctor rounded us up and packed us back into the van. I had bought a family pack of marshmallows. A huge $3 bag and nothing else. The others had bought quite sensibly and I looked longingly, trying pathetic attempts to do swaps. A marshmallow for a Hershey bar? No way. A marshmallow for a can of coke? Fuck right off.
As we pulled in to the hotel for the night, the acid was hotter and clearer than ever. It was 3.30 a.m. We had been travelling for hours. And I had spent the last hour pressing white and pink marshmallows, alternately, into the ceiling of the van. They stood out like huge candy rivets in patterns along the roof panels. Bob Proctor told us to stay in the van whilst he checked in. Eh, we thought. It's cool to leave the van. We staggered crazed and slobbering into reception.
It was a cowboy town, wow. Behind the reception was a casino and the carpets were deep pile red. Like raging bulls, we were sucked towards the dynamite red. Around us, a western movie was unfolding. I could not believe it was real. I could not believe that the town sheriff was gambling only about 5 feet from me. And he wore the most enormous hat. A gigantic Stetson. It was white, a creamy white which reminded me of coagulating milk. As I was drawn into the thick of the casino, Bob Proctor jerked me back hard.
"You bloody dickhead. Are you off yer bloody head? We're not in Liverpool now, yer clown. They'll kill us if yer pull any shit."
"B-but this is for us, Bob. The sheriff's wearing his best hat for God's sake."
I just couldn't believe that this was normal. My brain seethed with ideas, but Bob Proctor had made me paranoid. I grabbed the key and fled upstairs with Gary.
That night, sleep would be impossible. What are we stopping for, anyway? We could drive forever. Huh, bloody Alfie and Jeff need to sleep. I consoled myself in endless baths, but Gary was restless. Finally, he hauled me out of the bathroom. It was 5.30 a.m. and we had been awake for over 20 hours. We couldn't tell. We were fuelled and ready to go.
There was no room service and nothing to do. We watched some repeats on T.V. but Gary had to go out. As the sun came up, we both took just a couple more hits of the crystal, and set off to walk around the town...
It was six hours later when we pulled up at a desert store, full of cowboy boots, moccasins and far-out regalia. We had seen large signs announcing the place alongside the highway for about 50 miles. I drooled over a pair of tan suede Indian boots. I paid $15 for them, then spent the next hour cutting all the fringes off.
We crossed into Utah and soon Nevada was left way behind. Gary and I lolled comatose and vacant in the two front passenger seats. I was nowhere. I'd been strung out right across the journey, a part of me still in San Francisco, the rest littered at regular intervals across the desert. The accumulation of the trips, the weeks of little sleep, and the situation with my marriage and Dorian. All this and travelling across America in a shitty van: it was all beginning to take its toll. Eh, I thought. People maintain this shit for years. Don't wimp out now, you plank. You've got a show tomorrow night.
Bob Proctor still had a lot of cocaine left over from San Francisco. Normally, he and Troy were the only takers but today we stopped at a roadside diner and had a few lines each. Cocaine isn't a nice drug. It's a bullshitter and that's a fact. But I needed to straighten up. The LSD was so much a part of me that I could only just hear my natural mind, raging away down some lost tunnel screaming, "Remember me, remember me."
The highway through Utah was like some sunbaked open coalfield in South Wales. The sand was grey by the sides of the road, and we travelled for mile upon mile alongside dusty freight trains and open-haulers. The railway lines were parallel with the highway for ages at a time, then they would suddenly shoot off.
My pal, the freight train, would then ride about a mile away before snaking back to the road and we would remain, side by side, cutting through the desert together.
We had maintained an impressive average speed on the journey. Bob Proctor had figured that we had to break the speed limit by 20-25 mph for most of the time, just to give us space to eat. But every day we fell a little behind.
We caught up with a convoy of trucks belching smoke, crawling along and in no hurry to let us past. Gary and I screamed out, "Overtake, Overtake, Overtake." Bob checked his CB radio but there was nothing happening. He tried to pass a couple of times but the oncoming traffic was just frequent enough to make it difficult. Then, he suddenly pulled out. To the right!
We raced down the hard shoulder on the inside of the convoy, the sand and the dust pouring into the open windows. We choked and cackled as we bounced around inside the van. Yeah, Yeah. Past the first container wagon, awlright. Past the second container, awlright, on and on and on, past the seventh container wagon and...right past the patrol car which had obviously been the reason for the convoy's delicate speed.
As the patrolman strode towards us, Bob Proctor fumbled his briefcase out of sight. It contained my 1000 trip bag, a large bag of grass, the San Francisco cocaine and all the tour receipts.
Be normal, I thought. Concentrate.
"This is fuckin' Utah, right?" snarled Bob Proctor. "They lock you up, you pull any shit."
Normal, normal, normal. I sat looking gleefully and psychotically normal, trying to understand the seriousness of the situation.
"You realise you were doing 83 miles per hour, sir?" The patrolman looked stupendous. So law-enforcing that I had a problem not complimenting him. I beamed at him. Hope I look okay, yeah, I'm cool.
"Yeah, sorry about that. We've gorra get to Boulder dead soon."
Bob's Liverpudlian twang interested the guy, but we weren't getting off completely. He told us that overtaking on the inside on dirt at 83 mph was dangerous to other people and us as well. Yeah, we know, dead sorry, etc., etc., etc. He fined us on the spot, then we had to follow him to the nearest post office. He couldn't take our money. He had to watch us post it to the king of fines.
And we were off. No arrests, nothing. I got severely booed for being over-friendly, but what's new?
The Salt Lake City signs became more frequent. One said 225 miles, then 130 miles, then out of nowhere I caught the glint of something golden on the horizon. In just a couple of miles, the dust grey earth became green and lush like the English countryside. The glint came from the dome of the capital building. Each U.S. state capital has a dome. The Mormon state capital in Salt Lake City has a golden dome. It figures.
The unreal and spiritual building reached out to me but in an instant we were gone. I had only seconds to think of Brigham Young, Joseph Smith, Donny and the guys, and we were leaving this green and idyllic oasis far behind.
Bone-weary, brain-weary and utterly fucked, we entered the state of Colorado. Are we there yet? Are we near? No, we're not even close. The day was coming to an end. No way would we get to sleep in Boulder tonight. Shit, another half-day of travelling tomorrow. Troy had collapsed in the very back seat, his system totally caned by the weight of beer and the intensity of spirits. Jeff and Alfie were hunched up together, their hell journey still in full flight.
In the front seat, Gary and I kept Bob Proctor alert. He'd driven thousands of miles since our arrival in Dallas, and was more psychotic than anyone. I was starving, let's stop, man. We waited for a diner, a truck stop or some such to appear but nothing did. There was no food in the van, not anything. Sweet wrappers and tobacco and trails of two weeks driving littered the floor. In my haze, it looked wonderful. I searched on my hands and knees for a morsel but to no avail.
The night wore on and the temperature plummeted. I put my feet up on the dashboard and lay back. My eyes caught a feast, a complete feast. On the ceiling, petrified from the heat and filthy from the dust, were the pink and white marshmallows that I'd so carefully stored, two days before. I pulled them off the ceiling one at a time, like a farmer picking fruit, and hungrily chewed them up. Gary was revolted but soon he was eating, too. Around 3.30 a.m. we pulled into a tiny town called Dinosaur, checked in, and fell into oblivion. For Gary and me, even the acid could not halt our crushing and inevitable slumber.
"Now look, Pam. Yer've gotta find him now !"
Bob Proctor and I stood at the only pay phone in Dinosaur, Colorado. We were broke again, to-tally skint. We had 17 dollars between us after we had paid the $55 for the rooms. Bill Drummond was not in Liverpool, and Pam Young couldn't seem to clear any money for us. I wasn't concerned, though. The trip was still in full swing and I was only interested in one thing, a huge church-sized fibre-glass Brontosaurus that stood in the middle of this dust-bowl of shacks and roadside diners. How had we missed this thing last night?
I wandered back to the motel, still transfixed by the fake dinosaur, and topped up the trip with a couple more fingerfuls of the crystal. The motel was three long domestic trailer caravans and a reception hut. We had booked the entire place for $55!
An hour or so later, we were back on the highway with the promise of money soon. The shape of the Colorado countryside had changed entirely. We climbed high up into the Rocky mountains, on and on around winding treacherous passes. The hours passed and I fell into my first real sleep for days. I slept fitfully and hunched in the front of the van up to the very top and, after hours and hours, I felt us begin to make the descent into Boulder.
That night, the Teardrop Explodes played a very unartistic and average show. I wore my new suede Indian boots to make me feel good, but I was truly gone. All spent.
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