148 The Diary of a Drug Fiend
I read in a paper the other day that a committee of
people in Philadelphia had decided that a skirt must
be not less than seven and a half inches from the
ground—or not more. I don’t know which and I
don’t know why. Anyhow, the net result is that the
price of cocaine has gone up from a pound an ounce to
anything you like to pay. So of course everybody
wants it whether they want it or not, and anybody but
a member of parliament would know that if you offer
a man twenty or thirty times what a thing is worth
in itself, he’ll go to a lot of trouble to make you want
to buy it.... :
Well, we found this man was a fraud. He tried to
sell us packets of snow in the dark. He tried to prevent
Cockie examining the stuff by pretending to be afraid
of the police. |
But as it happened, Cockie’s long suit was chemistry.
He was the wrong man to try to sell powdered borax
to at a guinea a sniff. He told the man he’d rather
have Beecham’s Pills.
What I love about Cockie is the witty way he talks.
But somehow or other, the flashes don’t come like
they did—not so often, I mean. Besides which, he
seems to be making his jokes to himself.
Most of the time, I don’t get what he means. He
talks to himself a great deal, for another thing. I get
a feeling of absolute repulsion.
I don’t know why it is. The least thing irritates me
absurdly. I think it’s because every incident, even
the things that are pleasant, distracts my mind from
the one thing that matters—how to get a supply and
go down to Kent and lay off for a bit and have a really
good time like we used to last month. I am sure love
would come back if we did, and love's the only thing
that counts in this world or the next.
I feel that it’s only round the corner; but a miss is
as good as a mile. It makes it somehow worse to be
so near and yet so far....
A very funny thing has just struck me. There's