Diary of a Drug Fiend

CHAPTER I KING LAMUS INTERVENES It is only three months ago; but it seems a lifetime. My memory is now very good, and I remember more details of the past every day. I am writing this account of the past three months, partly because my best friend tells me that it will strengthen it if I exercise it by putting down what has occurred in sequence. And you know, even a month ago, I couldn’t have recalled anything at all with regard to certain periods. My friend tells me that memory fails me in part because nature mercifully wishes to hide from us things which are painful. The spider-web of protective forget- fulness is woven over the mouth of the cave which conceals the raw head and bloody bones of our mis- fortunes. “ But the greatest men,” says King Lamus, “ are those that refuse to be treated like squalling children, who insist on facing reality in every form, and tear off ruthlessly the bandages from their own wounds.” But I have to think very hard to write down the incidents of the dinner at the Wisteria when Lou and I had made up our minds to end our lives. I had got some prussic acid from the chemist’s more than a week before. It took us that time to make up our minds to get up and to acquire Dutch courage enough to take the plunge. Some instinct prevented us dropping out of existence in a place like those lodgings in Greek Street. When all one’s moral sense is gone, there remains a racial instinct in men and women of good blood which tells them, like Macbeth and Brutus, to die positively and not negatively. D.D.F. 247 R