Vulgar Tongues Read online

  Up tight? Cool it man

  NIXON LAUNCHED HIS ANTI-DRUG CRUSADE shortly after the close of a decade in which – if you believed the media – recreational narcotic use was, shall we say, mushrooming to unprecedented levels. Indeed, even if you were a teetotal octogenarian living in the Louisiana swamps or the Outer Hebrides, newspapers, television programmes and popular music could easily have kept you aware of a bewildering range of current and past drug slang. The same goes for the young and impressionable: if you were somehow unaware of then current terms such as leapers (amphetamines), miss emma (morphine), giggle weed (marijuana), red devils (the barbiturate seconal) or chunks (hashish), there was often a handy journalist or media-savvy swinger to spell things out for you. ‘Twenty years ago few young people had even heard of marijuana and other such drugs, much less experienced them,’ claimed the Spokane Daily Chronicle in 1969, ‘Today, “pot,” “grass” and “Acid” are part of most teenagers’ vocabulary.’ Indeed they were, and it was articles like this which helped them learn.

  Of course, the youngsters themselves might not be reading the local newspapers delivered to their parents’ homes, perhaps favouring instead the underground press, such as Oz and International Times in London, the Berkeley Barb in San Francisco or the East Village Other in New York, which covered the subject from – as they would have seen it – the freak’s point of view. A 1970 copy of the East Village Other ran an article for users simply entitled ‘Cocaine’, while in among the small ads for wifes-wapping clubs and ‘assisted’ relaxation services (‘Up tight? Cool it man. Climax your day with a mind-blowing massage’) could also be found the following:

  TAKE A TRIP. Turn on with the ‘FAMOUS TRIP-OUT BOOK.’ Sure fire chemicals. Make peyote, DMT, cannabis, LSD, etc. Do it NOW! Send $2.00 to: TRIPS UNLIMITED Box 36347-EV Hollywood 90036.

  This was an era in which some were advocating putting LSD into the water supply, to turn on the whole population, whether they liked it or not. Jerry Rubin, co-founder with Abbie Hoffman and others of the Youth International Party (Yippies), said in his book Do It! – Scenarios of the Revolution (1970), ‘Get high and you want to turn on the world.’ In this work he set out his incoherent plan for a brave new era of blitzed-out grooviness:

  Millions of young people will surge into the streets of every city, dancing, singing, smoking pot, fucking in the streets, tripping, burning draft cards, stopping traffic. . . Clerical workers will axe their computers and put chewing gum into the machines. . . Yippie helicopter pilots will bomb police stations with LSD-gas. . . Kids will lock their parents out of their suburban homes and turn them into guerrilla bases, storing arms. We’ll break into banks and join the bank tellers in taking all the money and burning it in giant bonfires in the middle of the city.

  Ten years later, Rubin was a millionaire stockbroker working on Wall Street, having made a killing investing in a fledgling company named Apple Computers, presumably having first run out of chewing gum.

  Papers for your head

  OF COURSE, RUBIN’S LANGUAGE has to be measured against the backdrop of the times. These were days when a large company such as mail-order giant the Record Club of America would send out flyers to its 3.5 million members advertising not only LPs and cassettes, but also a range of drug-related products they named pyschedelicacies, as Florida journalist Jack Anderson pointed out in 1972:

  The handsome circular also advertises a ‘candlestick stash’ for hiding ‘goodies from unannounced intruders.’ ‘Stash’ in drug slang is a narcotics supply. Also available from the club are ‘mind-blowing’ lights, ‘papers for your head,’ a ‘stash bag’ and a ‘toker’ pipe for smokers who want to ‘take off.’ All are marijuana terms. The ‘toker’ pipe, for instance, refers to a ‘toke’ which is a drag from a marijuana pipe. The ad says the ‘toker’ cools the smoke so a smoker can ‘hold it longer.’

  How much of this language was a surprise to the target audience is debatable, but any readers of an older generation who then heard the following year’s American hit single, ‘The Joker’ by the Steve Miller Band, would at least have known what the singer meant when he called himself a toker.

  Of course, since the mid-1960s rock music had been awash with more or less overt drug references. To take one well-known example, on their 1967 debut LP The Velvet Underground used junkie slang such as spike (needle) in the song ‘Heroin’, while on their follow-up album, White Light/White Heat (1968), the title song was all about amphetamines, and ‘Sister Ray’ was an eighteen-minute ode to the joys of looking for a mainline (vein). Similarly, the single by British mod band John’s Children ‘Smashed! Blocked!’ (1966) was named after two slang terms common in the London club scene at the time for being under the influence of drugs.

  While those releases of the Velvets and John’s Children were hardly million-sellers at the time, you did not have to look far among the chart-topping singles to find drug slang, whether it was the Small Faces using the word speed on the amphetamine song ‘Here Come the Nice’ (1967), and getting high in ‘Itchycoo Park’ (1967), The Beatles wanting to turn you on in the song ‘A Day in the Life’ (1967), or Jefferson Airplane taking pills – and an unspecified type of mushroom – in ‘White Rabbit’ (1967). Clearly, by the time the summer of love rolled around, the implication seemed to be that the whole world had tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. Except, of course, many people hadn’t. For some, the idea of trying to keep up with the mythical ideal of the newly liberated cosmopolitan drug aficionados was later exemplified by Woody Allen’s character Alvy Singer in the film Annie Hall (1977). At one point, he inadvertently sneezes a fortune in someone else’s chopped-out cocaine all over the coffee table, while elsewhere he explains to Diane Keaton as Annie his troubled relationship with drugs, turning down the joint she has just offered him:

  No, no, I, uh, I don’t use any major hallucinogenics, because I took a puff five years ago at a party and tried to take my pants off over my head. . .

  Coke Ennyday

  NOT EVERYONE TURNED ON, lit up or had their hair cut by Vidal Sassoon – indeed, on the average 1960s UK high street, many hairstyles owed more to Ena Sharples than Edie Sedgwick – while in local libraries, filed under ‘Burroughs’, you were more likely to encounter Edgar Rice than William. Still, in the same way that many television drama series from our own time which are set in 1960s Britain have a tendency to pretend that everyone was driving a brand-new Mini or E-Type Jag – despite the fact that numerous cars on the roads in those days were clapped-out old bangers fully twenty or thirty years older than that – the rewriting of history from a modern perspective would sometimes have you believe that until the psychedelic hippie free-love explosion came along circa 1967, few people had ever experimented with anything stronger than a pint of beer or a cup of tea.

  Consider this: a Hollywood film in which the famous star plays a drug-fuelled detective named Coke Ennyday, who wears a belt full of hypodermic syringes, shoots up every two or three minutes, and has a huge container on his desk simply marked ‘Cocaine’, from which he gleefully snorts an entire handful, blowing a cloud of it all over the room. A clock on the wall divides the day into four sections, dope, drinks, sleep, eats. On the trail of a gang of opium smugglers, he follows them to the knowingly titled Sum Hop laundry in Chinatown. Finding a sample, he takes an exploratory taste, then another, and another. Suitably hopped up, our hero defeats the criminals by either injecting them with drugs or blowing a blizzard of coke up their noses.

  The Swinging Sixties? The decadent seventies? No, Hollywood made this during the First World War. The film was The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916), starring Douglas Fairbanks as the coke addict in question. This was intended as a broad comedy, partly satirising Sherlock Holmes. The previous year, Hollywood had made a slightly more serious attempt at portraying drug use in John W. Noble’s film Black Fear (1915). Upon its London release the Daily Express noted that ‘the terrible effects of the cocaine habit play an important part in the thrilling new Metro fi
lm drama’.

  Sackloads of beak

  THE WORD COKE HAS BEEN SENDING out mixed messages for years, some of them knowingly under the radar. For instance, when the Beatles made their debut feature film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964), as noted earlier, many of their audience were screaming schoolchildren, of the kind seen chasing them through Marylebone Station during the credit sequence. However, a few minutes later, while on the train, John Lennon pretends to snort from a Pepsi bottle, one nostril after another, presumably as a veiled joke about coke sniffing, which would very likely have been lost on most of their younger fans.

  The adult world, however straight, had long been informed about cocaine through a variety of mediums. In 1921, the Observer treated its readers to an examination of the supposed popularity of the drug in Rome, employing a fine collective noun for addicts into the bargain, speaking of cocaine ‘or “lift” as it is called in the slang of the sunken fraternity’.

  Simply referring to the drug as coke dates back to the start of the 20th century, with the first written record appearing in Ray Stannard Baker’s Following the Color Line – An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy, published in New York in 1908. Under the heading ‘Negro Cocaine Victims’, the author described the scene as various poor people from both sides of the colour line appeared in front of a judge at a court in Atlanta:

  Not a few of the cases both black and white showed evidences of cocaine or morphine poisoning – the blear eyes, the unsteady nerves. . . . They buy the ‘coke’ in the form of a powder and snuff it up the nose; a certain patent catarrh medicine which is nearly all cocaine is sometimes used; ten cents will purchase enough to make a man wholly irresponsible for his acts, and capable of any crime.

  Over a century later, the slang word is still common currency, and was plastered all over the front pages of British tabloids once again in July 2015 when the Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords was photographed allegedly taking the drug. The Sun on Sunday broke the story under the headline ‘LORD COKE – Top peer’s drug binges with £200 prostitutes’, while a leader in its weekday counterpart the Sun, entitled ‘Lord A-Leaping’, referred to him as a ‘low-life coke-head’, and the Daily Star called him Lord Snorty. The satirists at the Daily Mash then offered the following friendly advice in their ‘Psychic Bob’ horoscope section:

  Aries (21 MAR–19 APRIL)

  Sometimes, treating yourself might be something as simple as a nice bath or a takeaway. Other times it’s sackloads of beak and a room full of saucy doxies.

  The assumed blithe familiarity of the general public these days with drug terminology is now such that Netflix announced their 2015 series about notorious Colombian drug overlord Pablo Escobar with the slogan ‘There’s No Business Like Blow Business’, Similarly, in 2001, Hollywood released a Johnny Depp film about the cocaine trade simply entitled Blow, safe in the knowledge that its target audience would conclude that the subject matter would be cocaine, rather than what the OED defines as a firm stroke; a violent application of the fist’.

  The bread to score weight

  ‘COCAINE,’ SAID A 1983 ARTICLE in the Montreal Gazette. ‘It goes by many names: Snow, blow, toot, nose candy, ego food. . .’ The term nose candy fits perfectly with the atmosphere laid down a decade earlier in the first great Blaxploitation film, Super Fly (1972), in which the lead character Priest is the man with the best supply, as described in the novel of the script:

  Priest was no pimp. He was a dealer, a high-class dealer of the best cocaine in the city, a pusher-man of the nose candy. Not a street dealer; he had lieutenants for that action. Priest himself handled only the richest clientele, those who had the bread to score weight. And in Harlem, that’s high society, all the way.

  Yet just as the word fly, describing someone who is knowing or aware, dates back to 18th-century England, nose candy originally appeared long before the days of purple felt fedoras and stack-heeled boots, being first recorded in a crime story by Dashiell Hammett entitled ‘Dead Yellow Women’, in the magazine Black Mask (November 1925). Similarly, referring to cocaine as snow has a relatively venerable history, and since the 1940s the slang words snowbird or snowman have generally denoted someone who sells, or is addicted to, cocaine. In Francis Grierson’s entertaining novel of West End low life The Buddha of Fleet Street (1950), he included a translation in brackets for the benefit of his less-worldly readers:

  Did you know that Prudence was a snow [cocaine] taker?. . . There was a snow bird who used to supply the stuff to members of a small gambling club.

  The term has endured, and in 1980 the manager of customer services for the Oregon State Motor Vehicles Division told the press about certain number plates which were not permitted because of their drug associations: ‘One man wanted SNOMAN on his plates. We turned him down. Snowman is drug slang for cocaine dealer.’ However, as far back as 1926, a play opened in London’s West End entitled The Snow Man, in which the title character sells drugs, although in this case the word referred to morphine. All of which highlights the fact that slang terms in the drug world, as elsewhere, can often be applied to several different things at the same time. In the early 20th century, various drugs capable of being inhaled were originally called nose candy, while virtually any drug you can name was at one time or another referred to by perhaps the most flexible term of all: dope.

  Ixnay on the opeday

  IN 1906 THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN helpfully informed its readers about the meaning and etymology of a new American term for a drug addict:

  Mr Thaw, the American millionaire murderer, is reported to have been described by one of his friends as a ’dope fiend’. The expression does not quite speak for itself to English readers. It means the slave of a drug habit, and might be translated as ‘drug-maniac”. ‘Dope’ is purely American English. . . . The New English Dictionary recognises it in two senses, both American. The first is ‘any thick liquid or semi-fluid used as an article of food or as a lubricant’. . . The second sense is ‘an absorbent material used to hold a liquid’.

  The phrase dope fiend certainly had staying power. In the William Burroughs novel Dead Fingers Talk (1963) – handily illustrated by one London paperback publisher at the end of the sixties with a fisheye-lens cover photo of someone leaning into the camera and fixing up with a hypodermic – it was clearly still in fashion more than half a century after being explained to Edwardian newspaper readers:

  I tied up for a shot, my hand trembling with eagerness, an archetype dope fiend. ‘Just an old junky, boys, a harmless old shaking wreck of a junky.’

  In the US in the 1870s, the slang word dope originally signified opium. Across in England, twenty years later, Farmer and Henley offered the following definition in their dictionary Slang and Its Analogues (1890):

  DOPE, verb (American) – To drug with tobacco. Also

  DOPING = the practice.

  For many years after this, the word dope became simply a shorthand way of describing a variety of drugs. For instance, in Herbert Asbury’s 1928 The Gangs of New York, he described how underworld leader Monk Eastman, shot dead in 1920, ‘had been bootlegging and selling dope’. A decade later, in Los Angeles, when Groucho Marx appeared as the somewhat unconventional doctor Hugo Z. Hackenbush – a qualified vet, but treating humans – in A Day at the Races (1937), he also used the word, but this time in back-slang:

  MRS UPJOHN : Oh, doctor, I think it’s time for my pill

  GROUCHO: Ixnay on the opeday [nix on the dope]

  Back-slang – the reversing of a word so that it is pronounced backwards – was listed by John Camden Hotten in his 1860 work A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words, Used at the Present Day in the Streets of London as ‘the secret language of costermongers’, in which ‘sometimes, for the sake of harmony, an extra syllable is prefixed, or annexed’. He gave examples such as elrig (a girl), mottab (bottom) and erif (fire). In recent years, a similar kind of back-slang has developed among young people in France, in which the word for eatin
g, manger, becomes géman.

  By the late 20th century, dope had mostly settled down to its narrower use as a term for marijuana. However, as late as the seventies, the word could still be applied to cocaine, such as in the novel Super Fly (1972), in which the main Harlem dealer’s partner asks him:

  You gonna give all this up? We got eight-track stereo, a colour TV in every room. We can snort up half a piece of dope every day. Now, nigger, that’s the American Dream, ain’t it? Ain’t it?

  Even so, dope sometimes has a different meaning. For instance, when a couple of teenage American girls are ordering soft drinks in Ward Greene’s novel Death in the Deep South – published in 1936 but set during the First World War – the exchange goes like this:

  ‘What’ll it be ladies?’

  ‘Dope and cherry, Fred,’ said the taller girl.

  This conversation was, of course, taking place in a drugstore, but dope for them was a word meaning a Coke, not cocaine.

  Feeling a little horse this morning

  TO MANY, ESPECIALLY THOSE in the armed forces, dope was simply slang for information. For instance, in Agatha Christie’s second novel, The Murder on the Links (1923), when Hercule Poirot asks an old-school London theatrical agent for some details about a music hall performer’s schedule, the man replies, ‘You go home, and I’ll send you round the dope in the morning.’

  However, American radio listeners were left in no doubt about the narcotic implications of the word one night in 1951, with the national broadcast of a pioneering documentary show, The Nation’s Nightmare, exploring the drug underworld, as Billboard magazine reported: