From bohemian to bourgeoise

Recently, I got very stoned. I haven’t been that stoned since I was at Woodstock. Or was it the first Glastonbury festival? Or maybe Bob Dylan at the Isle of Wight? I can’t remember, but that’s dope for you. The curious thing is, I don’t take drugs any more. I hate getting high. It’s like your brain is seasick. But there I was at a party and the hostess offered me an apple-flavored, cannabis-infused gummie. Without thinking, I swallowed it — just as if I’d been offered a canapé.

Someone later told me I ran out of the party yelling: ‘Help! I’m going to die!’

As soon as I did so, however, I started to panic. What had I done? Why had I done it? Any minute I was going to start hallucinating and then take off all my clothes and do frenzied nude hippie dancing before falling to my knees and weeping and crying out: “Mother, where are you?” (Something like this once actually happened to me.) People at the party would be frightened. They would call an ambulance or maybe the police. Then the men in white coats would come and take me away — ha-haaa! I was freaking out even before the drugs took effect.

Then the voice of my young bohemian self said: “For heaven’s sake, relax! Can’t you just let your hair down and have a little fun for once, you old square? You’ve become so uptight and boring. Go wild! You’re such a puritanical wuss. Do you think Keith Richards goes, ‘Oh dear me I’ve done a gummie! Mick, help me please!’ Cosmo, what harm can one little gummie do?”

I found out about forty minutes later when a friend who had also eaten one passed out and fell to the floor, head first. She was unconscious for a few minutes. I discovered another gummie guy sitting on his own in a dark room staring intensely at his feet, quivering with paranoia. By now the stoned hostess had gone to bed, unable to string a coherent sentence together. And me? I felt as if I was about to pass out too. Someone later told me I ran out of the party yelling: “Help! I’m going to die!”

I had a very bohemian druggy adolescence. My parents were old bohemians. For Christmas they regularly gave my brother and me a lump of hashish, cigarette papers and a packet of cigarettes. As a family we’d get stoned and watch the Christmas edition of Top of the Pops.

And even though I quit taking drugs decades ago they’ve always been a part of the world I’ve moved in and identified with. Artists, writers, poets, musicians and crazies — these are my people. Or at least they used to be. Nowadays when I’m in some Soho dive or at a party of people dipping their fingers into little bags of this and that, I feel I don’t belong.

First of all, everyone is stoned on something: mushrooms, hashish, MDMA and coke — though the use of cocaine (the worst drug in the world) — is, I suspect, in decline. But psychedelics — LSD, psilocybin — are growing in popularity. I try to warn my young friends that taking LSD is like playing Russian roulette with your brain. They don’t listen. Everyone I know drinks, takes drugs and stays up to three or four in the morning — except me.

These are fun people. Bright. Creative. Talented. I love them. But after a certain point in a drug- or drink-fueled bohemian evening even the best and the brightest become unbearable. (As Sartre never said: hell is other people smashed out of their heads.) The drunk and the stoned blur into one and the same creature: the intoxicated bore. Both are unbearable in their own ways. The drunk batters you down with tedious repetition; the stoned with goofy whimsy presented as great wisdom.

I feel like one of those older gay men who comes out of the closet after a lifetime of pretending to be straight. After a lifetime of pretending to be a wild boho I want to come out of my closet and declare to the world: I’m actually a nice bourgeois boy at heart. There, I’ve said it!

Yes, I want to have a super-clean and tidy apartment that smells of furniture polish and possess a cupboard of beautifully ironed linen. I no longer want to discuss the dialectics of modern art or the poetics of transgression. I want to exchange tips on dealing with nasty stains, unpleasant odours, pension plans and playing bridge. In short, I want to discover — as Luis Buñuel ironically put it — the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie.

The thing is, the bourgeoisie aren’t what they used to be. Once they were sober and serious and sensible; now they’re just like the bohemian folks. For starters, they’re all stoned out of their heads — at least the ones I meet are. I recently sat in the mansion of a very hardworking and successful entrepreneur who once upon a time would, on my arrival, have offered me a glass of the finest and most expensive Champagne. Instead he offered me a hit on his bong. And I know a man who is very rich, very successful, and he not only has his own plane, his own cook and his own island but he now has his very own special joint-roller. That’s right, a man whose only job is to construct perfectly rolled spliffs.

Of course I plan to keep my crazy boho friends. Fortunately for me they’re usually too stoned or pissed to know how boring I am now I’ve gone straight. One thing I’m certain of — the days of being a gummy-dummy are definitely over.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.