Life and Soul

Well, here it goes

Well here goes, for quite some time I have been pondering the idea of writing down some of the funny, more outrageous stories experienced over the last couple of decades. Enlightening you to some of the lighter/darker experiences that have been shared with various souls along the way.

I shall start with right here, right now… The place, Bangkok, the year, 2007…The new year was gaining its momentum, work was being offered for various times throughout the year, the emails were picking up in frequency.
People were genuinely getting back to the flow of working every day of their lives..
I seem to recollect it was a Monday night, possibly Sunday…? Who knows, who cares? My partner and I were talking; I do believe we were talking about drugs, a fine topic. We got on to the subject of Ice, particularly the differences between Ice & another pipe smoked substance rife in Thailand, especially popular in the bar girl scene; Yaba, I have no idea what’s in this, all I know is it looks pinkish and comes in the form of a small slit pill; but this is another story for later.
At this the time I had only heard about Ice, my partner had said she had smoked some whilst staying in Malaysia. Kinda a drug for the Hi-So crowd, where as Yaba is much cheaper and considered a drug for the Lo-So peeps.
Well the conversation eventually boiled down to “Do you want to try it?”, well I have never really been one to turn down an opportunity of a new experience, at my time in life you begin to understand that as you grow older the new experiences are far fewer and much farther between.
The call was make and an order laid, it must have been within the hour the bell went at the door, a small posse of three enter the flat, two girls and a guy, the dealer girls boyfriend, the driver; the energy was different already, higher frequency, more charged a certain buzz to the vibe. Feeling the whole trill of doing something wrong, against the rules, dangerous, the added energy swirling around increasing the excitement & fuelling the fun. I had met the two girls before but under different circumstances, just chilled, playing cards back at my girls old flat.

So I was quite intrigued, what did it look like? Smell like? How was it smoked? What was the effect?
The pleasantries completed, our guests now each with a refreshing G&T at hand, it was time to get it on. The girls gathered in the kitchen, an open plan lounge kitchen area, they set to work reconstructing the pipe, which had been dismantled for easy concealment whilst travelling. A petite glass bottle around a third the size of a small water bottle was two thirds filled with water, the screw cap was replaced, two straw holes had been made in the top of the cap & two straws were placed in the holes held in place with a few wraps of electrical tape. The first immersed below the water with the other end fixed to a small glass tube about three inches long and slightly larger than the straw, it was set at a horizontal angle ready for the burning of the Ice.
The other straw entered the top of the bottle but didn’t reach down to the water; this was the straw you placed into your mouth to draw up the smoke through the water, cooling the smoke, making it more pleasurable to inhale.
The method of working basically the same as a hash bong. The apparatus was reconstructed and ready for use.
The older of the two girls, the dealer, lets call her ‘D’, reached deep within her bra, her hand emerged with a small clear jiffy bag which looked like it contained nothing, on a closer inspection I could see a small amount of what looked like crystals, around two or three millimetres long and roughly one or two mill in depth and width, basically clear with no color. There were around ten or fifteen crystals in the bag.
D pulled a plastic toothpick from her bag, the ones that are like a cut straw, similar to a small cocaine spoon. This gave a perfect way of picking up one of the crystals from the bag & placing it halfway inside the glass tube. A lighter that had been specially prepared was used to produce a very small flame, almost as small as possible, the gas outlet of the lighter had been elongated with a small tube made from a stripped toothpick which had been whittled down to its thinnest possible dimension. The silver foil from a cigarette packet had been soaked in water so that the backing paper could be peeled off easily leaving the super thin strip of foil. This was then rolled around the prepared toothpick, and then the toothpick was removed making an extension tube to the gas jet of the lighter. The end of the toothpick was stuck into the hole of the lighters gas jet to stem the flow of the gas giving a much smaller, slower gas flow, the rest of the toothpick was cut off using nail clippers and the extension tube was fitted to the gas jet. The result was a tiny flame at the top of the extension tube, perfect heat for burning the Ice.
A little heat was applied first to the crystal inside the tube, it melted with ease, giving a clear liquid that rested in the bottom of the tube, the heat was removed and the liquid dried quickly. “OK” D said… “Who is first?” I think I must have been rolling a joint at the time, one of the girls moved into position to have a pull on the pipe. The advice was just inhale slowly, when you hear the bubbles the smoke is being pulled through the water and being inhaled. The lighter heats and the girl inhales, the only noise the slow bubbling from the pipe. After maybe 20 seconds of slow inhaling the girl stops pulling and the lighter is removed from the tube. D is mining, showing the girl that she should not hold it down, just exhale the smoke out slowly when until the lungs are empty. I was quite surprised at the amount of smoke that she exhaled; there was a slight menthol odour to the smoke. The pipe was passed to Pa, my girlfriend and the same procedure followed, then on to me, no need to add more of the Ice it seemed to last for a good few smokes before the need to replenish. I started to pull slowly on the straw, the bubbles followed, whilst inhaling I could taste nothing and could not feel any smoke entering my lungs, as I came to the end of my breath I pulled away from the pipe, D once again mimicked that I should release the smoke straight away and not hols it down, this I found a little alien as I had been used to smoking weed through a bong and holding the breath for as long as possible before exhaling. As I exhaled I tasted the menthol that I had smelt when the girls were having their turn. The taste was pleasant, quite mild and the smoke was cool from the drawing through water.
It suddenly came to me… Ice, small crystals that produced menthol tasting high… Crystal Meth!
The high was smooth, no big rush or climb just a light kind of amphetamine buzz, a pleasant experience. The pipe went round and round, the buzz wore off reasonably quickly maybe after fifteen minuets or so, it was easy to keep the feeling going with almost constant rounds of the pipe.

A few hours had gone by, D got a phone call from a friend asking if she knew anyone who wound want to go short time with one of her customers, she was already busy, the younger of the two girls about 28, her name Bee, was asked if she wanted to go, the pay was 3000 baht and she would be finished in a couple of hours. Well that sort money is not easy to come by in Thailand so the answer was yes, for the next twenty minuets she showered, made up and went through Pa’s clothes looking for something to fit, she was a few sizes larger than Pa. She looked good all done up, not tarty, just looking good, fresh and clean. She left with D and the boyfriend leaving Pa and me alone in the apartment, with a few crystals to burn between us. The time must have been around 9pm, Pa seemed quite fascinated by the pipe, cleaning it over and over again before getting it ready for another hit. It was good cause it spaced out the hits; making the Ice last longer and time to ride the warm, gentle rush. Being an amphetamine you felt like you needed to be doing something, my way of keeping busy whilst on amphetamines dated back to the old days of Rave, circa 1989, was to skin up… which I did again and again throughout the evening.
A couple of hours later the doorbell went again and the trio were back, not much was said regarding the customer but Bee proceeded to pull two small jiffy bags from different hiding placed on her body, the first contained about three time the Ice the original jiffy bag had held and the second had two blue/turquoise pills, with glee Bee informed me that they were E’s. Now I have always been partial to an E or two, almost immediately she had opened the bag and popped one of the E’s into her mouth, she picked up the near exhausted glass of G&T and washed the pill down, “The other is for you” she exclaimed, Pa didn’t want any, I tried to break it into two but it broke into 3 so I necked two of the pieces and left the last on the table, it was swallowed quickly by D.
Now how much MDMA was in this pill was debatable, if there was any at all, but the buzz of E’s is usually quite full on, a real rush, especially if you start to move and dance, the blood gets going and the rushes get stronger. These were OK, as I say not a real E (pure MDMA) but the ingredients, whatever they were, were doing the job. Rush, Rush, and Rush we went…
The pipe kept on doing the rounds with either D or Pa making sure someone was always cleaning and stoking the tube. The mix of the two highs from the Ice and the E went together well, I continued to skin up, being DJ as I went from i-tunes on the laptop, most probably a little to loud for the neighbours.
We partied on, and on, we were still going without any want to stop at 8am, dawn had come and gone, now the day was hotting up, creeping up to around 33 degrees. Most of the day was spent doing much of the same, there was still a fair amount of Ice left from the extra Bee had brought back, the amphetamine buzz of the Ice was keeping us all wide eyed and energetic, I was by this time extremely stoned but with none of the feeling of sleepiness. The girls had been playing cards for around 8 hours, Pa was a bit of a cool cat at cards, she would nearly always come home from her sessions with her friends with a pocket full of dosh, tonight/today was no exception.
Sometime late in the day the happy trio left and Pa and I were again alone buzzing in the apartment, we were left with the pipe and a few crystals which we slowly worked our way through. There was no sleep to be had this night either, absolutely no feeling or want to sleep, I might have laid on the bed a few times to see if sleep was possible but each time found it impossible, I ended up wandering around, playing tunes and smoking spliff all night through to the next morning.

Time for the come down, for every high there is an equal and opposite low.

I find myself in Singapore, I’m here for eight days.. I don’t know how to explain my life, its kinda weird. Last week I was in Macau for 2 nights, Hong Kong for two night, then off to shanghai for one mad taxi infested trip… we finished a meeting about video for a gig around 2.30 am, we got a taxi back to the hotel and continued on the G&T. soon come 3.00 am, best try get some shut eye, we gotta early flight back home, alarm at 5 am, up and out by 5.30, jump in a cab… off to the airport…