I went downtown and picked up a load of dex from a coffee bar there

epub or mobi
 

'The gang I went with - we were teddy boys in those days, you know, long velvet jackets and drain pipe trousers - decided that we would go out on pills every week-end instead of going out drinking. For a few week-ends life was great. Then the week-ends got longer. I couldn't get up for work on Mondays and lost my job. Then I got kicked out of my lodgings because I couldn't pay the rent. Pills were all I thought about. Preludin was my kick. You could buy tubes of them over any chemist counter in those days. I got into trouble with the law for the first time. For that I was sent for twelve months to a probation hostel in Leeds. I thought, that's it, you will have to settle down and lead a normal life. What a thought! One of the lads in the hostel told me about the sort of inhalers that if you dismantled it, you would find inside cardboard strips that contain amphetamine, the sort of drug that's found in your Purple Hearts, your benzedrine, dexadrine, Black Bombers or French Blues. The idea was that you would swallow the strip whole. I remember one night, it was three o'clock in the morning and I only had one strip left. I just prayed that the effects would last until the next morning when the chemists re-opened. The problem was that when you swallowed the strips they made you sick and this time was no exception. I just vomited up everything on to the floor. I just had to have that strip so I just picked it up from all the muck, shook it and re-swallowed it. Then the inhalers were taken off the market and I went back to pills. Anything in the amphetamine field. Once I had gone through three days and three nights without any food or sleep. I found somewhere to sleep which to me was like heaven! the local tip. In the morning I woke and I saw something licking at my face. It was a rat. All around me were hallucinatory rats. I tried knocking them off but they just flew away, thirty to forty feet in the air. I jumped out of that dust freighter and ran out into the street screaming, the rats following.