THE CUT-PRICE DUDE OF LIVERPOOL 8

After I’d known Linda for a while I felt I had to tell her about my career as a drug dealer. At the age of sixteen, still at school and obsessed with the idea of forging myself some kind of hipster identity, I’d noticed in the pubs, coffee bars and drinking clubs where I spent my evenings that the person with the coolest aura seemed to be the guy selling the dope. He would suddenly appear, then glide about as if on wheels, speaking to his clients in intimate whispers, all the time hanging over him this romantic, lawless, outsider mystique, and everybody always seemed really pleased to see him.

I was not alone in thinking that drug dealers were the epitome of all that was trendy and hip in the late 1960s. In the film Easy Rider the two heroes, role models for a generation, make the money for their doomed motorcycle trip to New Orleans, in time for Mardi Gras, from a massive cocaine score. The drugs are hidden in the Stars and Stripes petrol tank of Fonda’s bike. This was not seen as a bad thing. Indeed the influence of this outlaw drug movie was so far-reaching that the children’s bicycle the Raleigh Chopper with its enormous chromed handlebars, tiny front wheel and two kilograms of white powder hidden in the frame was clearly based on the Harley-Davidson hard-tail Hydra-Glide motorcycles ridden by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in the film.

Also and conclusively, everybody, except maybe the police and the government, knew for certain that the effects of drugs, especially marijuana, acid and cocaine, were entirely beneficial with no downside whatsoever.

I really wanted to gain some of the allure of the drug dealer for myself. My feeling was that I had the clothes and the long hair but the only things I didn’t have were the cheap drugs. From watching movies such as Easy Rider, The French Connection and The Man with the Golden Arm I understood that one important, indeed crucial, aspect of being a proper drug peddler was that you had to have access to reasonably priced narcotics. You got these narcotics from a connection further up the chain who sold you your product at wholesale prices, and you made a profit from the difference between the price you paid and what you charged your clients. It was simple Marxist economics really. My only problem was that I didn’t have this connection with a wholesaler, didn’t know how to go about getting one and in fact didn’t want to since I suspected that the people further up the chain might be very frightening indeed.

Then it struck me that if I didn’t care about making a profit or indeed if I didn’t mind sustaining a small loss then I would be able to sell marijuana or acid at the same price, or maybe even cheaper, than anybody else on the scene. So what I did was, I would buy drugs at the ordinary street price, usually from some guy in Southport that my friends back in Liverpool knew nothing about, then I’d sell these drugs to people in Liverpool, in the Maoist group I was a member of or friends from school, at a price about fifteen per cent less than I had paid. I didn’t think Karl Marx in any of his works, not even his Grundrisse, whose subject matter included production, distribution, exchange, alienation, surplus value, labour, capitalism, the rise of technology and automation, pre-capitalist forms of social organisation, and the preconditions for a Communist revolution, covered my particular form of capitalist exploitation, which contradicted every known form of Marxist thought since the retailer – me – was in effect extracting surplus value from himself. Nevertheless when customers asked me how I got my drugs so cheap I’d just look all mysterious and say, ‘Hey, I’m like connected with The Man. Know what I mean, dude?’

And they’d nod and say, ‘Yeah, I understand, man . . . cool.’

When I told Linda about my cut-price drug dealing, expecting her to be impressed and maybe even a bit horrified at my lawlessness, she said it was the saddest thing she’d ever heard. I replied, ‘Yeah, sad if you like having lots of great friends who cost you less than £3 a week.’ But over time I began to suspect that she might be right.