I have a confession to make: I’ve never taken cocaine. I know, can you imagine? All these opinions, all that talking, all the cycling around and telling people what I think, all those plans, all those parties and yet the most vivacious thing I’ve ever stuck up my nose is my fingers or a vick’s inhaler.
I’d like to tell you this was a hard-fought moral battle. I’d like to tell you that, like Woody Allen in Play It Again Sam, I spent my twenties surrounded by beautiful people all-but-ladling cocaine into my nostrils and urging me to breathe. I’d love to pretend that my friends and acquaintances were so fantastically monied, manipulative and inveigling that my entire third decade was spent holding back the tide of other people’s narcotics. But, the truth is, nobody ever seemed all that keen to give away their drugs. Not to me, at least. Not to someone who didn’t really want them.
My friends and I went to the kind of comprehensive school where you had to pay for drugs on a lipstick-marked B&H Silver while sitting on a window ledge in the girls’ toilets. With money, of course - I didn’t actually go to school in prison. But, as a result, nobody was in the least interested in blowing their very expensive powder, Stevie Nicks-style, up my ass. At university, as I shouted ill-formed arguments about sexual equality and my exciting new plan to start a magazine, new friends simply assumed I was already taking cocaine. Which, I realise, does not paint me in a particularly good light. The only thing more tiresome than a jabbering, orb-eyed coke bore drilling into your skull on a social occasion, is being stuck next to the sort of person who can get that twitchy and self-conscious all of her own accord.
My friends do, of course. They can - they’re not plagued by an intrinsic predisposition for meglomania, verbosity and crippling self-doubt. They can walk a white line after dinner simply to stay awake. But not me. 'The last thing you need,' one friend told me, sotto voce, aged about 19, 'is a drug that makes you talk even more.' So what are you meant to do when all of your mates are snaking off to the toilets, two by two, and you're left, awkwardly gazing into the middle distance until someone comes back to you talk to you. Because they will definitely want to talk.
The problem with not taking cocaine, however, like not drinking, not smoking and not taking MDMA, is that you can make friends who are taking cocaine feel uncomfortable. Judged. Which is one of those knotty little social problems that crop up in your twenties that you just have to learn to navigate. In my case, I discovered that what young cocaine-huffing bush babies really like - apart from the ability to stay up for seven hours talking absolute bullshit at turbo speed - is the sense of doing something clandestine. As soon as cocaine enters stage left, your friends become suddenly overwhelmed with the exclusivity and privilege of being in The Gang. They love having A Secret. They love picking out a cast of favourites to invite upstairs, or into the bathroom with them. Just Them.
I remember a huge, blonde, horse-like woman trotting into the bedroom of a houseparty when I was about 22 and neighing as indiscreetly as she could, 'Does anyone have any naughty-naughties?' into the ear of her neighbour. Naughty-naughties. What a twat. But, of course, you can only feel like you’re doing something exciting and elicit if you suspect that someone, somewhere disapproves. That someone in that room thinks it’s naughty. So if those owl-like, jabbering monomaniacs want to believe that I am shocked and appalled by their ability to ingest nasally, then I am very happy for them to do so. It’s no skin off my nose.
The truth is, good friends don’t mind if you don’t join in a post-dinner trip to the bathroom to huddle around a mirror. And shit friends simply won’t notice. I’m not Robbie Williams and I’m not going to drink 36 double espressos to give myself all the glorious palpitations of cocaine without any of that tricky illegality. I’m not Thomas Edison and not even a sandpit of cocaine is going to help me invent the 21st Century equivalent of the lightbulb. And, if I ever do choose to play in the snow, I’m fairly certain that I won’t immediately embark on an invasion of Soviet Russia after my morning bowl of oatmeal and linseed like that old cocaine fan Adolf Hitler.
Cocaine may draw a white line between my friends and me. But it’s one that genuine affection, attention and a shared history can scuff away better than a steel-capped boot. I may not love what cocaine does to women and the world, but I still love the women in my world.
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Picture: Rory DCS
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.