Marks - Mr Smiley: my last pill and testament

MACMILLAN

The names of some individuals in this book have been changed.

I was looking for something hidden, for someone who didnt want to be found, it was that oldest sort of trouble.

Falling Angel, William Hjortsberg

(adapted into the film Angel Heart)

We had a dream,
and the gangsters made a killing.

Tony Wilson,

in conversation with Howard Marks

This book is dedicated to my daughter
Myfanwy Marks

CONTENTS

On the last day of 1996, less than two years after I had been released early for good behaviour from a twenty-five-year sentence in United States Penitentiary, Terre Haute, for drug smuggling, I found myself carrying a packet of extremely pure MDMA through an airport. Of course they had a sniffer dog on me as soon as I got to Customs at Palma de Mallorca. The decision as to who to search is usually made in advance on the basis of the passenger list and, as I was travelling from London under my own name, I had expected trouble. I had also watched the chaos that had unfolded that year as the airport was renovated and so, after I was waved through passport control I had snuck into a storage area I knew was accessible to the public. As I was ushered into a cubicle by a two-man search team, the packet of MDMA was in another part of the airport, stuck in beeswax on the inside of a cupboard door.

After theyd searched me and found nothing, somewhat grudgingly they let me go. Some ground staff and cleaners were smoking in the doorways; they glanced at me as I made my way back between the sheds to where the buses were parked, but said nothing. I looked back at the main building, as if that was where I was going, and pulling on some overalls from my bag, doubled back, out of sight of the terminal windows.

The packet was where I had left it, stuck on the inside of the cupboard door, in a building used by the Spanish charter line Aviaco. Putting it in my trouser pocket, I felt the sticky weight of it rubbing against my leg, and now the crowds through the windows in the transit lounge no longer troubled me. The open spaces seemed small and unintimidating. For the first time since leaving prison, I felt whole and in control again.

It was futile to deny my true nature: as a true runner is born to run, and a writer to write, the smugglers buzz would always be there, deep in my being, like a retrovirus ready to be awoken, and any other life would probably never satisfy, and now it seemed important though I cannot say exactly why to mark this apparent moment of revelation in some indelible way and, as I drove out, passing a roadside Madonna, I pulled over.

This was on one of the shortcuts through the outer suburbs of Palma. It was almost night now, and I could barely see her features. Getting out, crouching in the roadside, already feeling a little apprehensive as I did so, I made a solemn oath that I would return to being true to myself before the year was out; but hardly had I finished than the air around me seemed to be filled with coarse, cackling laughter, and strangely, looking around, I could not see its source, as though it emanated from the image itself. Probably it came from a neighbouring building, or a nearby car, but it felt as if it were directed at me alone.

In town my daughters, Amber and Francesca, were waiting for me at a bar. The girls seemed as beautiful and assured as ever, no less so than in those first weeks after my return: both had come through my prison-years stronger and more knowing than I could ever have hoped, and sitting there, the weight of the oath hung over me, feeling, by the minute, more like a curse than something I really wanted.

After eighteen months of trying to work out what sort of life, if any, was left for me after seven years in prison, I was returning from a series of events in Britain to publicize my memoir Mr Nice, and though it seemed in some ways as if my prospects were brightening, I couldnt escape the sense that something important was missing.

I must have been unusually quiet because the girls kept giving me concerned looks and were trying to break the ice with chat about music, the only topic which always got me talking. In prison, the music on the radio had been country, and in the black-dominated dayroom there had only been hip-hop, but now Francesca was trying to turn me onto trance and acid house. The point she kept returning to was that this music made no sense unless one was on ecstasy when one listened, and it was apparent from the way she talked that she was already familiar with the drug, and she told me that there was a rave something Id had no experience of in the cave at Gal Dent, a forty-minute drive away from Palma, in the mountains near Llucmajor, and that was where we were heading.

As the midnight hour was striking, with a glass of cava in one hand and a joint in the other, I kissed my children and, as is the Spanish custom, spat out a grape pip for each year of my life I had spent behind bars. As the moment came to make resolutions, my mind was still suffused with the Madonna, whose face I had not seen clearly. The words of my oath, and the cackling laughter that had followed, still echoed around my head.

I knew my wish should be to undo the oath I had made. But the moment passed before I had wished, and it was too late. As we reached the mountains, the beauty of the place began to make me forget what had happened; the first hints of dawn-light filling the air; the winter sky seeming to burn with ethereal pinks and yellows gradually turning to the faintest of blues. Halfway up a muddy track sunglass-wearing people were just visible ahead, most of them seeming to glow with that same mysterious half-light. The car was stuck in the mud, as were most vehicles there, so we had to walk on to the cave enclosed by the mountains as the light slowly gave form to our surroundings. As we passed the last of the cars I swallowed a pill from my stash, and waited to see what would happen.

There were probably a couple of hundred partygoers present, some wearing Smiley acid-face T-shirts, and the music was loud, but I had expected more people. I had been told that ecstasy made one want to dance and I danced to bring it on, and as I took another pill around a thousand people began emerging from a dark tunnel lined with local gypsies. As the crowd surged around me I was pulled down into a catacombed passageway where strangers began hugging me, relighting my joint and guiding me forward towards a faint light, which grew stronger as the space opened out.

Around me people were weaving and dancing between arches that soared above us; as the strobes spun over the caves walls and the beats boomed them on, my body seemed almost weightless and it was as if I was merging with them, one cell of a giant being into which I was subsumed. I had read somewhere that the frequency of ecstasy-music was 140 beats per minute the same as that of an embryonic heart rate and in those moments it was as if I was suspended in a safe and deep womb-like space from which I never wanted to emerge again, so complete and perfect that when finally I did emerge, I was sure that it could only be as something different from what I had been before, something cleansed and reborn. Then Amber and Francesca were next to me again, laughing and dancing, and all too soon the experience began to ebb away, like the memory of a dream, as they guided me back through what now seemed a cold and blinding darkness to the car.

Id never had much to do with ecstasy. Like quite a few people, I first heard of the drug at the end of the seventies, when there was talk about a new love pill being used by Californian therapists to bring couples together. At around this time there was an article about it in