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back Driving Uphill: Selected Experiences of New Zealand Youth by Paul Garner, Peter Wilson Number of episodes: 7 Words of previous episode revealed to each author: 13 Written between 26 Apr 2002 and 23 May 2002 A couple of weekends before, I'd got drunk for the first time and discovered a couple of things; "Hey no inhibitions!" ...and that I couldn't play guitar for shit when pissed. By the time of the next party I was figuring if alcohol was that much fun I may as well try pot. It was out at a friend's farm, not far from where I lived. He had a big garage and various sheds out back where we could all be out of the way of his parents. I was trying to be sensible and responsible about the way I got into drugs, so I had refused to smoke the marijuana (smoking is bad for you!)... I insisted on eating it. I think perhaps I had a couple of other friends in the same situation; first-time stoners who were also strict non-smokers, so the mate whose place it was, and would be supplying the weed, capitulated and promised to do some baking. I have since learned the usual thing to do with weed if you want to eat it is to make it into cookies, but for some reason my mates decided to make pizza. Unfortunately they were lousy cooks, or there was some problem with the oven, or some ridiculous reason that meant the pizza was cold... raw in fact. Just, like, a cold doughy pizza base with bits of leafy green and some cold canned spaghetti on top. It was kinda unpleasant to eat. I managed to force down most of a slice, washed down with sips of 'Purple Death', the drink-du-jour for alcoholics and students... I gave up at that point though and went out back to the shed where there was a joint going round and had a couple of puffs. I don't think I got any buzz off the raw pizza, but I came back in after the joint and managed to prop myself up against the wall before breaking out in uncontrollable fits of hysterical laughter. Awesome. The wall undulated... it was a groovy wall. (please note that the author wrote this while drunk) Leaving the party they all piled into his car... Me, my sister and her friend, perhaps two friends, yeah, that sounds right, there seemed to be more than one voice emanating from the back seat. It was 1996, Ashburton or somewhere a click or two south from Christchurch. My sister's twenty-first. I was studying at Lincoln University and had driven down for the occasion. It was about 30 mins to one hour's drive, depending on your lunacy. I had a cold, or a flu, or something that meant I was on antibiotics and felt slightly out of it. I weighed around 73 Kgs, which is really light for me, I mean I was dead skinny. The party got underway, six kegs or maybe eight. Enough beer for a front-row. As I said I was sick, but hey, free beer, what warm blooded Kiwi male is going to turn that up? I had a jug, perhaps two. Stood shy in the corner, this was back when I didn't dance. My sister's boyfriend at the time had invited quite a few of his mates, as he was paying for it this was not surprising or indecent. They lit up the spliffs in the small rural hall. Soon Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix and Pete Tosh were all having a party in my head. I have never had much tolerance for Marijuana. But perhaps the beer and antibiotic mix was just as to blame for what happened next... ...Nothing too dramatic... ...Not exactly 'Reefer Madness'... ...But quite interesting... ...The party over driving back to Christchurch, uphill. The whole way, I mean this was at least four or five hours after I had had any beer, I felt unintoxicated by alcohol, but the road was strange. All the way home was a continuous hill, I even questioned my passengers on it but luckily they were too drunk to notice my psychosis. It was gradual, but always there, forever climbing, where there was no hill. I waved my arms around in front of me, experimentally. It seemed as if they had the opposite magnetic polarity to the Earth's local field; the closer I brought them to the ground the more they were repelled. Then, a couple of feet up from the ground, the field tapered away and my arms could drop back down, until they were repelled again. I have felt like this before, in 'flying' dreams. Everyone has their own buzz. There would often be a certain point in the night when I just had to hear some Hendrix. One time in my friend's basement I managed to commandeer the stereo, turn all the lights off, and put Electric Ladyland on. The first track is almost like 'musique concrete' with slowed-down and speeded-up tape sounds... it only lasts about a minute and a half but I was so stoned it seemed like half an hour, and as the hissing noises slowed down and down I could feel my heart beat slowing down with them until I was in a state of suspended animation, and wonder. Then came the sweet, sexy, psychedelic-gospel bliss of the title track to break the spell. They fed me lies, they fed me truths. It was all mixed up, inseparable from the hypnotic self-delusionary fever of their speaking. The words lost form, identifying characteristics, a blur of common place, cajolery it didn't matter what they said, I think they knew it too, it was behind the words, in the room When I finally made it out of there, I felt wasted, wasted on evil drugs. The babble hadn't lifted, stimulated, suppressed, depressed me in a discernable organic way, a biochemical way like good drugs, but they had tried to rape me, run me down, turn me into one of them, they had good-cop bad-copped me, mind-fucked me, left me feeling a dry used up prostituted wafer of soul. They were talking about me now, I knew it, they were planning their next move. They wouldn't succeed, even if I had to hide at home all day, if I had to get new hang-outs, new friends, I was determined never to see those bastards again. One time I was round my friend's house holed up in his bedroom, getting high, listening to Led Zepellin, when his folks called us up for dinner! It was a bit of a shock as I'd always taken care to avoid his family while obviously wasted. We opened the windows and sprayed deodorant around the room (Lynx and pot-smoke, the scent of innocence!) then went upstairs. Just like statistics have shown paranoid and over-cautious pot smokers to be safer drivers in certain circumstances, than drunks at least, I was extra careful not fall into a catatonic reverie. Or burst into a fit of hysterics. This latter point was made harder by the fact that his younger sister (not that much younger) was acting silly, attention-seeking, which I wistfully imagined was on my account. Fish fingers and mashed potato never tasted so good. The T.V. had become a portal of evil. All of the once inert harmless appliances now malignant presences, opening up, everything was coated with a sick yellow lacquer of fear, pure fear. Never again, I promised myself, would I touch any sort of drugs. If only I could find my way back, a way out of this nightmare world. We drank and toked, and worried that spotting cannabis resin off aluminium foil would give us Alzheimer's like Ronald Reagan. School was a real drag but easy to keep on top of with minimal work, all except Calculus which I came to despise for its uninspiring abstract meaninglessness, and I'd long since discovered that the tartrazine in my soft drink at lunch time had a far more detrimental effect on my studies than any pot I smoked in the weekends. I had become blas?about the work, having got good marks the previous year, even in subjects where teachers had moaned I was slacking, and ended up coasting to an A bursary. And so... some of my friends got laid from time to time, and at least one of them got a girl pregnant, and at least one of the girls got pregnant eventually, and some of them left home and went flatting. And I sat in the corner withdrawn, or let out bursts of repressed extroversion from time to time, or just went with the flow. And after a while it all seemed to get a bit boring, the same people all the time, wondering how to be someone else, or perhaps myself. But then things changed, we finished school and dispersed somewhat. I wasn't especially keen to go to University but none of the other options seemed particularly realistic or worthwhile. Heck I was depressed, nothing seemed particularly realistic or worthwhile. I actually got accepted for a musicians course at Polytech but decided against it, seeing only the negative aspects, real and imagined... as a qualification it wouldn't directly open up specific job prospects, I didn't need help with my guitar playing, they would suggest working on advertising jingles was a good way to support oneself professionally as a musician... etc etc. So I went to Uni, which sucked even worse than the last year of school... I was still living at home while half my friends were elsewhere. No one noticed if you didn't turn up to classes. The course advisor had tricked me into taking Calculus again, which I found even more uninspiring, abstract, meaningless and despicable than at high school, so I quickly eliminated it from my personal schedule. The science courses held some interest for me as they always had but we were still just learning the ground rules, like we'd been doing for the past few years, and the prospect of ever having enough knowledge and the opportunity to do anything creative in this field seemed interminably distant. The best thing about Uni was that my timetable usually left me a two to three hour lunch break. I originally thought this would just be a pain in the ass, extra time to kill in the middle of the day between classes, but in the end it was a kind of blessing. I'd head home and grill myself a frozen burger or cook some fried eggs on toast, teenage soul-food with no tartrazine in sight, just grease and preservative, and after a while I began to explore my Dad's LP collection. Thinking back, I hardly had any music of my own at that time, maybe a couple of CDs and some cassettes, but through his gig doing the blues show on 93FM my Dad had a large and growing collection of blues CDs. I soon found though that among the LPs were quite a few that he never really played. One in particular caught my eye... it had an exotic-looking double-fold cover with a reptilian eye staring out, and the tracks had spacey names: "The Others In Their World", "Lights Of a Satellite". It was Sun Ra's "Fate In A Pleasant Mood". I put it on and listened and it didn't sound like anything else I'd ever heard... like a Star Trek soundtrack, but serious instead of kitschy. I could hear jazz-like elements but I'd never really listened to jazz, I had a blues-centric view of jazz, and this didn't sound like what I thought of as jazz. It was obviously composed, and even theatrical in places, but also swinging and improvised... then there was that ancient egyptian sci-fi vibe, all acheived simply via acoustic jazz instrumentation. It was all in the notes in other words. I searched for more stuff like it, but found no Sun Ra. I do remember finding John Coltrane's "Blue Train", a classic from 1957, at around the same time and I didn't really like it. To my ear then it just sounded like 'Jazz', a lumpen generic mass of music I was unfamiliar with. I found a later Coltrane album though that I really dug, which had "Afro Blue" on it... Elvin Jones' propulsive, wild, heavy, swinging drumming and McCoy Tyner's claustrophobic, driving, full piano chords... energy! ...Coltrane's blowing over the top, a person in pure music just like Hendrix. It also had some other tracks in a free-jazz vein with Pharoah Sanders on second sax and possibly Alice Coltrane on piano or harp, a live "Kulu Se Mama" with African drums which I also loved. I soon found Ornette Coleman's "Shape Of Jazz To Come", with it's opening track "Lonely Woman" one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever recorded. I kept searching for this music with the spark of difference and strangeness and life and purity, and I found Ornette's "Live In Stockholm"... which was frankly rather heavy going, but by this stage I was really trying hard. And gradually I became a regular jazz fan... but I got there via Sun Ra and the outcats of free jazz. But anyway... the drugs! the drugs! Basically I wasn't really doing any, or anything, much at that stage as our group of friends had dissipated. I couldn't face another year at Uni so I spent most of the next year in boring aimless freedom, still living at home, getting up in the afternoon, forgetting to feed the chickens despite having nothing better to do, and playing guitar. In order to appease my worried parents and make a token gesture towards 'doing something more creative' than a science degree I took a correspondence school course in Graphic Design, a subject I'd given up at fourteen after realising my chances of ever working at designing new Ferraris in Italy were vanishingly slim, with a view to perhaps taking Art & Design at Polytech the following year. I soon realised the correspondence course was hopelessly shit and gave it up. In the meantime however I was experimenting with Photoshop and digital graphics on my brother's computer, and making a web page for my Dad's department at work. Towards the end of the year my folks were determined that I'd either get a job or go back to Uni, though I was against both ideas. They pushed and I wound up applying for a couple of shitty jobs like typing in tax returns for the IRD and stacking books at the library, neither of which I even got interviews for, seeming to confirm my conviction that working life wasn't for me (and I had a point). Then they pushed me into applying for a website design job I didn't seem to have a hope of getting... but my self-taught web skills were better than the non-existent web skills of trained designers, so I scored the job. The job turned out to be surprisingly stimulating and rewarding, and I was good at it, and it helped my confidence and self-esteem, and after a while I wasn't particularly depressed any more. And they were fond of big boozy parties and they were all stoners too, and I made new friends, got back with old ones and left home. And I made my way in the world and started to think about ways I could realistically give up the job which was starting to bore me, without just becoming an aimless loser again. And I tried coke in Memphis and in a pub in Acton, and E a couple of times, but when you spend your serotonin all at once and get no sleep dancing like a preening insect you get sick which ain't much fun and besides, why waste the money. And I lived happily ever after until eventually I woke up and it was all a dream. The End. back © All work herein copyright the stated authors.

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