Whose line is it, anyway?

STYLE, SEPTEMBER 2001

I AM NOT A fuddy-duddy. (Although, I suppose, anyone who would voluntarily use the word “fuddy-duddy” in public is demonstrating some marked signs of fuddiness, not to mention more than a whiff of duddidom.) I am, in the main, an open-minded sort of fellow. The darkling byways of human behaviour may sometimes sadden me, but they no longer have the power to shock.

Indeed, I have myself known a wild night or two. Why, there was the time when I was hitch-hiking to Grahamstown and I was picked up by two Rhodes students of indeterminate gender carrying a five-litre vat of Kool-aid … but you don’t want to hear about that. Suffice it to say that I still wake of a morning, screaming “The sheep is on fire! The sheep is on fire!”

So understand that I am not being more than necessarily curmudgeonly when I say: Haven’t we gotten over this whole drug thing yet? Seriously, it was fun when we were kids – okay, it’s still fun – but we’re adults now. Aren’t we meant to have some, some … oh, what’s the word? … reminds me of a song by Aretha Franklin … dignity, that’s it. I’m not even talking about the sad cases of a certain age who pull their stretchy T-shirts over their rounded bellies and go paddling out into the world of children with a couple of Ecstasy pills in the coin compartment of their wallets. Their idea of dignity is to make a point of never being the first person to pull off their stretchy T-shirt and wave it around above their heads.

Not much better, though, are the processions of grown-ups who come trotting back to the dinner table from the bathroom, sniffing generously and suddenly eager to discuss the last three episodes of Survivor, or Kant’s idea of the sublime, or the great idea they’ve had for opening a new store that is a clothing boutique but also a place where you can buy organic vegetables and sushi. “Everyone likes sushi,” said my neighbour at the dinner table recently, her eyes rotating in opposite directions.

“I don’t,” I said. We looked at each other blankly, which is as it should be. I considered adding my feelings on the subject of organic vegetables and indeed clothing boutiques, but the moment had passed.

It’s not that I don’t understand the special pleasures of slipping off with an illegal substance and a credit card and the same rolled up hundred-dollar note you have been carrying around ever since you went on holiday to New York in 1993. It’s fun and naughty and all those things to which we as adults cling, in the forlorn hope of ensuring that there is some small corner of us that will be forever young. But it soon becomes a little tatty, frankly. It’s possible to overrate the feel-good factor of crouching in a damp cubicle, bringing your face closer to the porcelain of a public toilet than your mother ever imagined in her fond dreams of your future, for no better purpose than to ingest a questionable powder only recently excavated from the small intestine of a large Nigerian.

There is nothing really glamorous about it, is there? Tiptoeing off to the men’s room with an entourage of adoring cadgers and slow-eyed party veterans isn’t exactly going to whisk you away to the Oscars or to the whitewashed hotel balcony in the south of France. Especially not with the quality of drugs available locally. Learn from the discomfort of my old pal Donald, who as a youth on holiday in Cape Town tried a short snifter of a Schedule A narcotic that had been liberally, not to say vindictively, and we would add amusingly, mixed with an industrial strength laxative. He spent the next three days in a variety of public bathrooms around the Cape, though not with five of his closest friends. From this he learned to avoid drugs, and Cape Town.

There are many good reasons to frown upon drugs. They encourage drug dealers, for one. They cause you to forget where you left your car keys, for another. For a third thing, they make sure you only realise that you’ve misplaced your car keys after you’ve somehow managed to drive home.

Most compelling argument for me, though, is that drugs diminish dinnerparty conversation. There is more of it, but that more adds up to so much less. Haven’t we all had that uncomfortable experience of arriving at a dinner where a thoughtful host has filled the salt cellar with cocaine, but forgotten to tell you because he’s still looking for his car keys, and the next thing you know, you’re chattering away about, um, well, I can’t remember what it was we were talking about, and anyway my tongue’s a little numb, but while we’re on the subject, I’ve though about something even more interesting – let’s talk about me!