A long afternoon turned into a long night and a long day after. It had all started on a sunny day in the park. J had met P and her crew for a couple of pints in the afternoon on Clapham Common. Naturally, they smoked a few joints with their beers as they discussed the last party they’d been to, the next party they were going to, and their favourite subject, girls. J was a straight guy and P was a gay girl and they had a mutual admiration for exactly the same kind of chicks.
J had the hots for a girl called Marie-Anne, a livewire with a fiery temper and an edge of danger. P warned him off, whilst at the same time conceding her attractiveness. “She’s trouble mate. Be warned. No one would ever be enough to keep her happy”.
The afternoon waned, P pulled a wrap of speed from her pocket. They had a dab, bought another round and chatted with increasing rapidity and intensity.
“What you doing later?” P asked.
“Well, I was going to go home, I haven’t got bags of cash at the minute” J replied. “Why what about you?”
“I’ve had an idea. We could got to the Brazilian’s house, they’re having a party. See what bits and bobs are knocking around there. If there’s nothing knocking around, we could go over to Trippy Finn’s across the road.”
“The Brazilian’s? Will there be any straight girls”
“Probably not, but there’ll be pills, so don’t be greedy”.
“Fair enough! Let’s go.”
An hour later they found themselves in a house in Brixton. A group of Brazilian lesbians were tripping on acid. Two of them had walkie talkie head sets on and were talking to each other across the kitchen. The others were swirling around each other, alternating between paranoia and euphoria. A couple of queens were talking in the other room. One had a bag of pills; P, in her usual way, took him off an engaged in heavy negotiation, returning minutes later with “enough to be getting on with”.
A few hours later and the night had taken a new slant. Acid had been imbibed by all; visiting the toilet, J felt an intense shimmering that enveloped his entire perception. Returning downstairs, and sat in the room with the lesbians, he felt like a puppy in a bag of edgy kittens. P had been working on one of the Brazilians, and outside, allegedly, one of the queens had wanked off the other to get hold of his pills. A change of scene was in order.
“Let’s go to see Finn. He’ll have some pills and he’s mental, you’ve got to see his flat”
“Why is he called Trippy Finn?”
“You’ll see”.
They crossed the road and entered the estate. The sun rose, it’s angle rendering the buildings in sharp 2-D, like skyscrapers in a pop-up book. Glancing up at the tower block toward which they were headed, J felt like a supplicant at an Aztec ceremony, about to ascend the ziggurat, ,unknowing of his fate. “Looks like the lift is working, thank god. He’s on the 25th floor.”
Up they went, their strychnine-knotted stomachs dropping as the lift climbed. They entered the flat, and Finn emerged from the gloom. Effectively a heavily tattoed ginger poof, he looked like a camp Celtic goblin. We popped in to the kitchen and layed out a load of pills on the counter. P paid 10 each for 30, she would sell them at 15’s so they could afford to neck a couple straight away, which they did. They smoked a joint with Finn, who giggled and erupted occasionally in to bouts of gobbledigook.
“So Finn”, J asked. “Tell me, why are you called Trippy Finn?”
“Ooooh, ha ha, come and see”, he hissed, reminding J of a gay Gollum, and beckoning him through the hallway to a room in the rear of the flat.
He edged his head gingerly into the room. It was a room with a low futon on the floor. The walls were completely covered in tin foil; fairy lets studded the walls and the ceiling, which was covered in fluorescent stellar stickers. a strobe light flickered on a very slow frequency. J noticed a battered helmet covered in foil stickers resting on a chair.
“Do you want to come in and check it out? ” hissed Finn.
Robert Armani – Circus Bells (Hardfloor Remix)
