Diary of a Drug Fiend

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