Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (24 page)

When cats encounter the plant, their first reaction is to sniff. To humans, fresh catnip has the odour of mint mixed with fresh-cut grass or alfalfa. In the dried plant, or in commercial cat toys, the alfalfa odour predominates. Upon reaching the plant source, the cat commences to lick and sometimes chew the leaves, in the second stage of the response. The chewing is often interrupted when the cat momentarily stares into space with a blank expression, then quickly shakes its head from side to side. In the third stage the cat will usually rub against the plant with its chin and cheek. Last, there is a ‘head-over’ roll with rubbing of the entire body. Extremely sensitive cats may also flip from side to side by rolling over on their backs. The four-stage reaction runs its fixed course in approximately ten minutes.

Biologists have referred to this intoxication as an example of animal addiction to pleasure behaviour. The nature of the pleasurable intoxication becomes increasingly evident when high doses of catnip in the form of concentrated extracts are offered to the animals. The subsequent reactions are intense: cats head-twitch violently, salivate profusely, and show other signs of central nervous system excitation. One sign is sexual stimulation. Males have spontaneous erections while females adopt mating stances, complete with vocalisation and ‘love-biting’ of any available object.

The similarity of the catnip response to the normal sexual behaviour of cats is striking. The presentation of catnip results in a rolling pattern of behaviour that is exhibited by oestrous females during the course of normal sexual displays. These displays have prompted naturalists to speculate that catnip once served the evolutionary function in the wild of preparing cats for sex, a natural springtime aphrodisiac.

Matatabi
, which the Japanese call a pleasure plant, does the same trick for cats even better. This plant contains secondary compounds closely related in chemical structure and behavioural activity to nepetalactones. Concentrated
matatabi
chemicals, in doses unavailable to the cats in the natural plant, were placed on cotton balls and presented to the large cats at the Osaka Zoo. After an initial exposure, the cats became so eager for more that they would ignore whatever else they were doing – eating, drinking, or even having sexual intercourse – whenever the chemicals were made available. They displayed a very intense ‘catnip’ response, then rolled on their backs where they stayed for some time ‘in complete ecstasy’.

1989. From:
Artificial Paradises: A Drugs Reader
, ed. Mike Jay, 1999

Zoë loved her rats dearly. At first there were just two, in a twenty-gallon fishtank. They had offspring, and became a close family. Soon, Z started letting one or two at a time out to play for a while each day, just to allow them to enjoy the absence of those glass walls. Soon it became harder and harder to put them back inside at night. After some time, the tank was left uncovered, and they were permitted to come and go as they pleased.

And come and go they did – mostly come. Over a period of months, their numbers multiplied steadily, to the point where upon entering the apartment one would encounter a veritable ‘ratrug’, made up of over a hundred little black-and-white bodies, with a few whites and tan-and-whites mixed in, eagerly greeting you. Of course, they weren’t given free access to the entire seven-room apartment. Two of the three bedrooms were closed off to the little ones – leaving them more than enough space to roam.

Aside from our actual bedroom, the other ratless bedroom had been converted years earlier into something of an office. Atop a thick green wall-to-wall carpet sat a work table and an industrial equipment rack full of ancient minicomputers and peripherals. A bathroom was also accessed by going through this room, as well as a closet. Zoë and I used to throw all our empty dope bags into a thirty-gallon trash bag, kept in the office closet. We did this not only out of fear of someone coming across contraband trash in our garbage, but also because of the residue that came in handy on desperate days. You can scrape up quite a healthy dose out of nearly thirty gallons of ‘empty’ dope bags.

Some rats were more exploratory in nature than others. Eventually, one enterprising young rat apparently found (or made?) a hole in the wall behind the piano in the living room, leading him to a space behind the bathtub, from which he wandered around to some loose tile behind the toilet.
Voilà
, he found himself in the cut-off bathroom, then making his way into the off-limits ‘office.’ We had no knowledge of his journey until one needy day, looking for bag-residue in the trash bag, we found a hole torn in the bottom of the trash bag, and many dope bags chewed to bits. Clearly the work of one of our little friends. We soon detected the means by which he must have gotten into the closet, but couldn’t find him. On successive days, we found more and more bags chewed up, but never caught him in the act. But it was clear that we had a regular little user on our hands. Just like in the experiment they used to show us only the first half of on TV, where the rats placed in the cage with cocaine would gobble it up until they died, but the rats placed in the cage with heroin would take enough to feel straight, and level off their usage – so this little fella seemed to be using it regularly, but not gorging himself on the entire pile in any one day.

This went on for some time. We gave up on using our trash bag as an emergency supply, since Mikey seemed to be keeping well ahead of us, and evading detection. (He was called Mikey after the signal the lookouts at the 2nd Street dope spot used to shout when cops were approaching – ‘Mikey! Mikey!’ – scattering everyone on-line to the winds.) Finally, one day, I happened to open up one of the old PDP-11 computers mounted in the equipment rack. On the surface of an unused portion of the backplane, there was Mikey’s nest. This little guy wasn’t commuting from the living room anymore – having found happiness in the closet trash bag, he had settled in the office, alone. His little nest consisted of the basic rat essentials: a floor made up of chewed-up toilet paper; a pile of food pellets, collected from what we used to pour out onto the floor for the rat mob, who made a sound like that of hail on a tin roof while eating it up; a single bar of soap(?); assorted chewed-up bits of cardboard collected from around the house; and, most alarmingly, a neat stack of Monopoly money – totally untouched by rodential teeth, in pristine condition! He knew better than to chew up the cash.

I realized then that Mikey was indeed a self-sufficient fellow. Obviously, aware that the finite scrapings in the trash bag were diminishing faster than we were replenishing them, he gathered up a supply of cash for the day when he’d have to go out and cop on his own. Oh, the Great ‘G of J’ (God of Junk), as Zoë used to exclaim so often. He tends to all creatures great and small.

‘Mikey’s Tale’, 1997

I
COME FROM
a long line of pet deaths. Bunny and Clyde . . . Tiny and Twinkle. Sid and Nancy. Mungo . . .

But it’s Godfrey who haunts me.

At night, when the cistern gurgles, it’s like he’s back with a splash.

Majella hooped him at a fairground and brought him home, dangling from her thumb, gulping mist in a plastic bag. He wasn’t expected to live for long. She plopped him in the dead terrapin’s tank: watched him loop. Blessed his tank. Named him after her ex-fiancé, the paratrooper: the one who’d chucked her out on the street, howling. Godfrey.

Godfrey was like Godfrey: he was quick, ginger, flash, but he was never mean.

He was so
bright
in our dingy house. He blew air kisses all day, puffed out silvery smoke rings . . . link chains. A stray sunbeam hit his glossy water and he sparkled. Round and round, an endless U-ie . . . At first, Majella blew him kisses back, showered him with presents from the pet shop: bright coral-gravels, a pagoda, a stone-coloured hide’n’seek boot, as fluorescent pink plastic hanging garden . . . and sieved him out, with the tea strainer, for long transatlantic journeys in the bath – and then she
turned
. She turned to clubbing, drugging and a bloke called either Mr Ecstasy or Marv. Or both. Majella, my sister, went
rave
mad.

One day Majella was a laughter-line in a nightie, spitting on an iron, singeing a pleat down her navy work skirt, and next, she was this gum-snapping
stranger
pacing up our hall: wearing tight T-shirts with daisies on them, calling cabs at midnight; hipped out, with her belly button sticking out of flab. (Later, she had it pierced: it went septic. Septicaemia . . . She got gangrene. She had to go to hospital. It went the size of a yeasty currant bun. But that was
much
later.)

Majella really
loved
Godfrey but, after she hit the clubbing scene, got, as she called it, ‘loved up’, she hated him.

I didn’t think pretty Godfrey could live for long.

‘Mum?’ I said. ‘
Look
!’ I’d airlifted him out from the hellhole of Majella’s bedroom: blown away his sky of talcum powder, reeled out a foot of Majella’s tan-coloured, scummy tights, and set him down by the scummy cooker in the kitchen. Though he was thin, a red bone in a white sock – he was, I thought,
all the light in our house boiled down
.

In the hot kitchen Godfrey blinked his gold. ‘Look, Mum,’ I said, ‘isn’t he sweeeet?’

Mum looked down: her cheeks steamed, flushed like two rubbed spots. Her eyes, under her sweaty eyebrows, gleamed. I looked from her to the brown sudsy cooking pots, back to Godfrey, back to Mum.

I thought: Poor Godfrey, he won’t last for long. Out of the fire, into the pan.

Mum had gone . . . funny in the head. That’s what Majella yelled, tapping her temple: ‘You’re
funny-in-the-head
,’ as though Mum’s head had been stacked (when we weren’t looking) with comic books, sitcoms . . . I couldn’t think of a better explanation myself.

Outside, our other pets howled on the lawns, sang like exiles, made a heady high white noise, scribbled their nibbled light-pink legs in the sheds, kicked up for dinner time. The toy poodles shook their pale dreadlocks. Our albino rabbits stretched their dirty jaws. Across the neighbourhood, strays joined in: cats caterwauled. Mum stirred away in the kitchen. She boomed a silent radar: her animal attraction. The pets on the lawns crackled, eared up and somersaulted back. Or they’d bounce and pose above the grassy gore, suspended for a moment, hunched like fridge magnets.

In his tank Godfrey (plumped up), beaming bright, would pause. He’d leap above the pagoda, hang out in the hanging garden. Dirty strobe light smacked his back. His tail thumped. He swam on.

We had to ring for take a ways. At night, when the cat songs got too much, I’d lob our leftover cartons of chicken tikka, the chewy rinds from our takeaway pizzas, salty chip rejects, up out and into the long splattered grass. Shrieks! A scrummage. A feral pet race. The air filled with clods of earth: back-kicked peas. Tree-high stalks shook. As I noted in my red notepads, only the very fast survived.

Doctor Trang upped Mum’s medication. The side effects, he said (zombie-ism, intense communion with small dumb animals), were a small price to pay, believe him. I did. I’d already noted the symptoms: synchronicity: in the hot kitchen, when Mum paused, holding a ladle, Godfrey paused too; when one stirred, the other whizzed rapidly round.

In the kitchen Godfrey’s light drew me to him. He surfed the surface; flayed gold . . . green . . . red. His tank bubbled like a miniature jacuzzi: full of air and spinning fat globes. He’d flip on his side, fin a zippy sidestroke, blow a little link kiss at Mum as she sipped, with deep concentration, at her wooden spoon. Mum looked down at Godfrey and blew him a crumb, a grape, a rubber fish face. They were one.

At least, I knew, with Mum around, Godfrey was safe.

At night, our other pets sat in line on the black grass: ruby-red-eyed. They were the lifers: all born to us, given to us, at a time when we must have seemed, no, we were
exactly
like a photograph happily framed: there was Mum in rose-tinted C&A blouse; Dad, roastily tanned in his crisp blue cotton overalls; Majella and me in our steam-ironed bottle-green school uniforms (Majella’s big hands on my little shoulders), showing our heavy-metal orthodontistry. Behind us surged a thunderous studio sky. Around us hopped the albino rabbits, the tortoise. The mongrels. The cats. Poodles . . . they all began to die.

Majella started clubbing it once a week, then twice . . . thrice . . . Mr Marv was a light voice on the line (a ‘Yeah’, a ‘She in?’). He was a slice of shadow, a stripe of Adidas in the crack of a cab. Majella came home shiny, she sniffed, snapped her chewing gum at Godfrey. (Her luminous inks flowered first in the choke of the hall.) In the kitchen she drank tap water, spat green tubes of it through gaps in her teeth at me, at my homework; stared in at Godfrey as he flashed to and fro in his tank. Her face greyed, grew stone. She hovered over his tank, dribbled strands of her long beige hair in, eyes set wide apart: black-pooled, scary, like a shark’s. Godfrey cowered in his hide’n’seek boot. I cowered too. ‘Godfrey,’ Majella chanted, ‘I’m going to
get you
. What am I going to do Godfrey?
Get you
.’ I didn’t think Godfrey could survive for long.

Outside on the lawns, all the pets cried.

In my trainee notepads, I noted, sipping a Lemsip, ‘We’re all on medication now.’ Mum had little white pills. Majella had her little white pills. Even Dad, who I was in love with, took massive painkillers. He had migraine. He’d come home from the railways like a train. Light stabbed him. Coffee killed him. Pineapple juice made him cry. He had migraine so bad he had to inject himself in the bathroom, using his leather belt as a tourniquet. (His injection kit was a toy briefcase, deadly black; inside, chrome cylinders, needles so think they made your skin lock.) He had blinders. He’d charge home honking noise, smoking rust, with one eye spinning like a shot blue marble, the other scrunching up his forehead, his bobble hat thick with dust. I don’t think he noticed the litter under his boots, or chicken tikka again for tea. I stood in the kitchen sipping blackcurrant Lemsip, studying my books, peeping in at Godfrey as he swam round . . . round.