back in the days of old analogue reel-to-reels. Whenever I passed a McDonald’s I popped in to make another haul. Ronald McDonald’s red, white and yellow drinking straws, stored in glass carousel jars by the napkin and ketchup sachets, were the coke sniffer’s ideal. Hygienically protected in paper with a wider bore than the average straw, fistfuls could easily be taken home, and each straw neatly snipped in half with scissors to make the best possible sniffing tube. Washable too. I mean, for heaven’s sake, when one is generous with one’s supply, as I always prided myself on being, who knew what germs lurked within the snotty nostrils of the user to one’s left as one passed on the straw?
Storage? I won’t believe a single coke user who tells me they haven’t at least once opened their wallet only to watch, with a shudder of horror, their precious packet or baggy fall out and splash into the lavatory bowl below. * So, aside from the obvious advice to make sure you always close the seat before opening your pockets and getting down to business, consider the container. For a short time I favoured the highly fashionable, for sadly obvious reasons, condom holder. You could slip three well-packed wraps and a blade in this two-piece plastic container and then slide the two halves together. It was compact and safe. I would keep two straws in the other pocket. In later years I discovered Californian head shops, where simple grinders were on display in the window. Even smarter ones allowed you to grind out a dose and then quickly sniff it up, concealing the action behind a handkerchief. No visit to the loo, no waiting for said loo to empty so that the sounds of one’s chopping and snorting went unnoticed, just a simple indiscernible action. Of course, buying such a thing and several spares too is an unspoken – even to oneself – concession of one’s addiction.
Incidentally, using the phrase ‘getting down to business’ when describing a men’s lavatory may seem a little ‘ho ho’, but during the 1980s the epidemic of cocaine fever sweeping through the mewses, squares and side-streets of Mayfair had reached such a pitch that I remember sitting one evening in the bar of the wildly successful nightclub Annabel’s when a friend, a great wit, known by just about everyone in the world of London fashion and parties, a man one could genuinely call a playboy, came up from the men’s room with a look of outrage on his face.
‘Do you know what just happened?’ he asked, a frown of indignant disgust clouding his otherwise fair features.
‘No.’
‘Some arsehole just came into the coke-room while I was chopping out a line and, without so much as a by-your-leave, he took his cock out and had a piss in one of those porcelain bowl things … I mean, should we get Mark to fling the man out and have him thrashed on the steps of the club?’
That really is how prevalent the white stuff was then and how utterly unremarkable the taking of it in public was. Inasmuch as the gentlemen’s lavatories of Annabel’s can ever be called public.
Incidentally, some of the paragraphs above look like I am writing out a template of instructions and encouraging advice for the coke novice. It should go without saying and must be apparent if you read on and find out what damage I believe this noxious yet maddeningly beguiling substance did to me that I wouldn’t recommend cocaine to my worst enemy . Which won’t, of course, stop someone taking it out of context and damning me. Goes with the turf. Chap gets used to it. Barely a day goes by without someone on Twitter favouring me with the information that ‘I thought better of you than that’ – the ‘that’ being anything from passing on the blandest of off-colour jokes, to employing a swear word that ‘offends’ them (don’t get me started), to using a epithet that apparently slights a minority of some kind. Which I don’t really get. ‘God, there have been a lot of clever
Storage? I won’t believe a single coke user who tells me they haven’t at least once opened their wallet only to watch, with a shudder of horror, their precious packet or baggy fall out and splash into the lavatory bowl below. * So, aside from the obvious advice to make sure you always close the seat before opening your pockets and getting down to business, consider the container. For a short time I favoured the highly fashionable, for sadly obvious reasons, condom holder. You could slip three well-packed wraps and a blade in this two-piece plastic container and then slide the two halves together. It was compact and safe. I would keep two straws in the other pocket. In later years I discovered Californian head shops, where simple grinders were on display in the window. Even smarter ones allowed you to grind out a dose and then quickly sniff it up, concealing the action behind a handkerchief. No visit to the loo, no waiting for said loo to empty so that the sounds of one’s chopping and snorting went unnoticed, just a simple indiscernible action. Of course, buying such a thing and several spares too is an unspoken – even to oneself – concession of one’s addiction.
Incidentally, using the phrase ‘getting down to business’ when describing a men’s lavatory may seem a little ‘ho ho’, but during the 1980s the epidemic of cocaine fever sweeping through the mewses, squares and side-streets of Mayfair had reached such a pitch that I remember sitting one evening in the bar of the wildly successful nightclub Annabel’s when a friend, a great wit, known by just about everyone in the world of London fashion and parties, a man one could genuinely call a playboy, came up from the men’s room with a look of outrage on his face.
‘Do you know what just happened?’ he asked, a frown of indignant disgust clouding his otherwise fair features.
‘No.’
‘Some arsehole just came into the coke-room while I was chopping out a line and, without so much as a by-your-leave, he took his cock out and had a piss in one of those porcelain bowl things … I mean, should we get Mark to fling the man out and have him thrashed on the steps of the club?’
That really is how prevalent the white stuff was then and how utterly unremarkable the taking of it in public was. Inasmuch as the gentlemen’s lavatories of Annabel’s can ever be called public.
Incidentally, some of the paragraphs above look like I am writing out a template of instructions and encouraging advice for the coke novice. It should go without saying and must be apparent if you read on and find out what damage I believe this noxious yet maddeningly beguiling substance did to me that I wouldn’t recommend cocaine to my worst enemy . Which won’t, of course, stop someone taking it out of context and damning me. Goes with the turf. Chap gets used to it. Barely a day goes by without someone on Twitter favouring me with the information that ‘I thought better of you than that’ – the ‘that’ being anything from passing on the blandest of off-colour jokes, to employing a swear word that ‘offends’ them (don’t get me started), to using a epithet that apparently slights a minority of some kind. Which I don’t really get. ‘God, there have been a lot of clever
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