The Life and Times of a 20th Century Smuggler

By Ruff Twinsteer

A memoir of the adventures of 25 years in the life of a small time European drug smuggler. A fascinating insight into the psychology and mind set required to slip quietly between the cracks of society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781300871446

Book preview

The Life and Times of a 20th Century Smuggler

The Life and Times of a 20th Century Smuggler

Second Edition [eBook version]

Copyright © 2014 Ruff Twinsteer, Ruca Publications

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-1-300-87144-6

The right of Ruff Twinsteer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988

The Cover Design Photograph and all images included within are used courtesy of Janet Henbane or are the sole property of Ruff Twinsteer and Ruca Publications.

[eBook version by Fee Plumley, technoevangelist.net]

Conditions of Sale

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar conditioning being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

This book is dedicated to all those who travel with something (good) to hide.

A special thanks to Lins, without whom this book would never have seen the light of day.

And to Carolina, for her selfless support and love.

I was young, once...

Chapter One

Under the miserable grey canopy that the British call 'sky', squelching through the sodden marsh that used to be a field, a riot of colourful weirdness composed of hippies and travellers spread love and peace in an otherwise joyless countryside.

Stonehenge Free Festival 1981 was a salvation. A brilliant rainbow light explosion of awakening. Alright it was uncomfortable camping in a stolen Mk IV Cortina estate, cold and wet as English summers are wont to be, but the discomfort was far outweighed by the revelation that there just might be ANOTHER WAY.

The myriad types of hashish, weed, mushrooms and acid that were available of course heightened the perceptions of this wonderland, full of the colours that should abound in daily life. The general bonhomie of the masses, unimaginable in the towns and cities, had a dreamlike quality that for the first time since my early childhood bathed me in its bliss.

It was amazing how, despite the general anarchy and chaos that prevailed throughout all the individuals and groups present, streets had been formed. Strategic placement of brightly coloured covered stalls purveyed candles and incense, tea and herbal infusions, alternative therapies and every kind of smoking accessory. Stages had been set up by various together groups of long haired bearded types and swirly-whirly dirges echoed out across the melee of chaos that had somehow, as if by force of nature, formed some discernible kind of order.

There were three types of people there, if I may be permitted a rash generalisation. The urban hippies (people who had normal day jobs, wore bike jackets and had long hair) the 60s crew (now getting on a bit, in their teepees and benders) and the proper hippies of the time.

The life that had led to my arrival at Stonehenge had been a troubled one. I was not much good on the job front, generally unhappy with everything that life seemed to offer, often depressed and sometimes suicidal. I could see no way forward in life knowing that I would never be able to hold down a job so would never qualify for a mortgage or even be able to consistently pay rent. I couldn’t identify readily with anyone in the real world; I couldn’t bring myself to read The Sun, had no interest in football and hated pubs and discos (as they were then called) because alcohol tasted like piss at best or poison at worst and everyone wanted to fight. Friday and Saturday nights were just a feast of drunken brawls and being a loner invited a beating from groups of tough pissheads. It's amazing how tough three guys feel when they're confronting one lonely guy in a dead end alley.

Sadly, they were always tougher than me.

The depression came from the realisation that everybody seemed to be like this; everyone went to work, read the Sun, raved about football and then went to the pub and hopefully got to beat up some poor sap. They got married, bought a house, had kids, went to the pub, got drunk and the cycle continued. It was very clear to me that this was wrong, but how could it be that I was right and millions of people were wrong? It didn’t make sense, so therefore I must be wrong. Hence the spiralling depression, self loathing and suicidal thoughts and indeed actions.

The first form of respite, release, such as it was, came when I was seventeen with the purchase of my first motorbike. The ability to wander free and alone with my thoughts and at the same time being able to form a bond with another being, albeit mechanical, was a revelation. Walking through a park in the 70s in North London was not the idyll that one might suppose it to be. Groups of youths would seek out the lone-walker and do their level best to beat him up, just practicing for Friday and Saturday I suppose. The joy of isolation from the world provided by the bike was indeed life-enhancing. To begin with one could run away pretty damn quick, and then there was the protection; helmet, gloves jacket and boots. The helmet could be wielded as a weapon too; the odds were evening up. The amount of times when sat at traffic lights that a couple of hideous British bikes would pull up next to me and the riders would get off and, shouting abuse, would rush over to beat me up purely because I was on a Japanese bike. Normally such odds would be insurmountable, but my trusty Yamaha 250 could, and always did, easily blow any British piece of junk back into the prehistory from whence it was spawned. This occurred dozens of times; never once did they catch me.

Hah! One up for me then.

Naturally my attitude didn't go down well with the parents; at the earliest opportunity they kicked me out onto the street. And so began a miserable period of living rough when I couldn't be bothered to work, or bed and breakfast hovels when I could. It was in one of these that I met an Irish drunkard, a workaholic to pay for the alcoholic within. We were three guys in one bedroom; myself, an Australian and the Irishman. We got on OK, played cards and talked of our rubbish lives.

One night returning from a pub together the Irishman asked me why I didn't drink. I told him that I couldn't stand the taste of the stuff, hated being drunk, didn't like violence and even more hated hangovers. I said I couldn't understand how anyone could call that fun. He agreed on the hangover front, but said that it was the price you had to pay for fun. The next day he returned from an evening down the pub and said Here; try this. offering me a piece of newspaper folded like an envelope. I opened it to discover some plant material with seeds in it.

That's top quality grass my man he said, you can only get it from the Jamaican guys. So naïve was I that I wasn't impressed,  and responded with, And?

You gotta roll it up and smoke it. he said, and then proceeded to do just that. So I smoked some. We had a great evening, gales of laughter and fun; everything was funny or deep. Finally we went to sleep.

I awoke the next morning, clear-headed and feeling good. There was no headache, nausea, or indeed any negative side effects from an evening of outrageous off-our-heads fun. I couldn't believe it; fun with no payback. I had found my muse.

Soon I discovered hash and pollen and preferred these even more. The happy soft-focus on life that hash induced made all my problems seem less important. The problems were still there but they didn't upset me so much. Depression slowly slipped away and a general feeling of well-being came to take the place of my usual state of despair.

I soon managed to find out how and where to buy something to smoke.

As a result of my homeless days, I had suffered a mild kidney failure and ended up in Charing Cross hospital, a ten or twelve-storey tower block. I was on the third floor. My girlfriend's mother was also hospitalised and she was on the eighth floor. We got on very well together and she loved a smoke. We would often sit together on the eighth floor smoking room balcony, looking out across the Fulham skyline in a happy, stoned daze. Her fingers were curled inwards like claws which made it impossible for her to roll joints so I kept a load of pre-rolled ones in a glasses case. Having noticed the frequency of our little get-togethers the nurses thought that we were having an affair.

One afternoon I was reading a book in my bed on the third floor when a nurse came rushing in. She was flustered and asked me to get up to the eighth floor as quickly as possible and to bring my glasses case with me.

Hurry, she urged.

Intriguing.

I rushed over to the lift and shot up to the eighth floor. As soon as the doors opened another nurse quickly grabbed my arm and escorted me into the Ladies' Ward and led me to a curtained-off bed. She pushed me through the opening. Lying on the bed was a woman trembling and sobbing uncontrollably. My girlfriend's mother and a few other ladies were around the bed trying to comfort her. The nurse said to me Don’t just stand there, give her one of your joints for goodness sake.

The ladies looked at me imploringly. So I opened my case, took out the biggest spliff in there and lit it, passing it quickly to the distressed lady.

Apparently she was in hospital to have a cyst removed from her stomach. They had taken her down to surgery and begun the simple and quick operation. The surgeon sliced into her belly. It was then that they realised that they hadn't given her any anaesthetic. She was fully conscious and felt, with excruciating clarity, the sharpness of the surgeon's blade. For some reason they felt that they couldn't stop the procedure once they had started it; she had to endure the entire operation awake.

This is the time, apparently, when hospital staff go running off in search of a drug dealer.

She pulled desperately on the spliff. It only took a minute or so and the poor lady had stopped sobbing and had pulled herself together. She relaxed and smiled wanly at me. She reached out with her hand and squeezed mine in gratitude. I left her with a few joints and a lighter and then went off with my girlfriend's mother for a much needed smoke out in the smoking room.

Frankly, the mind boggles sometimes.

I found a squat in Kingston in South London and was getting on OK. I had a bit of bike-courier work every now and then when I could be bothered and started selling small amounts of hash to finance my own intake. Buy an ounce and I had an eighth for me, free; excellent. I even managed to acquire some friends and, through one of them, I came across LSD.

Ah the bliss, the power. It was like (I imagine) sitting in the space shuttle; take the acid, wait a while and LIFT OFF. A sudden surge of power and energy coursing throughout the body and the mind; a feeling of massive acceleration. When will it stop for goodness sake? Body trembling, mind wanting get out and hide under the bed, and then you'd level-out and float in the nothing that is the universe of the consciousness, the Id, and would see clearly the shit that society has forced you to believe and to be. The demons, my demons, showing themselves clearly for the first time to me; no trickery here, just bare faced snarling demons who love to screw me up and make me into the sad tosser that I am.

Seeing ones demons clearly means that they can at last be recognised and defeated; just make them smile and they look confused and vanish. Hah! Another one up to me. Then the come-down; just gently being pulled back by the gravity of un-enhanced perception, gliding down serenely to planet normal and falling exhausted into psychedelic dreams. Waking up you feel a little fazed but no ill-effects; feel great, have learned shit, saw my demons, shafted some of them, hah, this shit is therapy man. Roll a joint and put the kettle on!

One night my friends and I decided to spend the night tripping; we had a luminous Frisbee. I left my girlfriend in charge of the couple of ounces of hash that I had for sale should customers appear, reminding her of the importance of stashing both it and the scales before she went to bed. We had a great night out tripping and playing and when I returned to the squat at 7am the next morning I walked into a house full of the local police. There, lying next to my bed, were the hash and the scales and my dumb-ass girlfriend looking up at me, still in bed.

With the uniformed lot was a long-haired suited type who clearly thought he was somebody special; top Drug Squad dude, he said. He asked me (in the same smug manner that the lead thug surrounded by his mates would ask you if you thought you were a hard man) what was in the silver foil wrap that they'd found next to the hash.

Don't lie to me sonny he smirked, there ain't nothing I don't know about the shit you people take. So what's in this?

He was holding between his finger and thumb a small piece of tinfoil, folded into a perfect square. 6 mm by 6 mm, 1/4" in old money, waving it in my face while his other arm was positioned teapot-spout style on his hip. His natty suit was pushed aside to show his piggy badge of power clipped to his belt, just like the American cops do on TV. His colleagues clearly thought, if the looks on their faces were anything to go by, that Mr Drug Squad dude was an arsehole. But still, he was the man in charge.

They were serious types, saving the world from drug-dealing scum, while the suited teapot with long flowing locks was a clown revelling in his moment of glory. I had never been surrounded by the filth before and knew I was caught red-handed. I couldn't put the blame on the dozy girlfriend so I thought it was best to come clean.

It's acid, man. I said as nonchalantly as I could.

Well, you've never seen such a look of panic and horror suddenly appear on someone's face. It was as if he'd just seen a giant poisonous man-eating spider crawling up his arm. He violently threw the tab away from him as fast as he could and even let out a little girlie scream. Mr Know-it-all didn't know shit!

The uniformed filth had to help me up off the floor, tears of helpless laughter running down my face, and carted me off to the Police Station. They weren't rough or abusive; we'd shared a moment. They had appreciated seeing the super-cool Drug Squad dude freak out.

My first bust.

Naturally I didn't go to my court hearing.

On another night-time tripping fest three of us were sitting in the front room of the squat. It was unfurnished save for two semi-destroyed sofas separated by an upturned tea chest that served as a table. The ancient wallpaper was peeling off the walls, the bare floorboards missing in places, adding to the general despair and abandonment of the building.

It was bloody cold so we had a fire going in the grubby fireplace.

We were burning a pile of old pallet wood that I had just finished chopping outside in the back garden.

On top of the tea chest stood an empty but well-used bong.

I was sat on one sofa and my mates, Gary and Gary, were sat opposite me on the other. The only sound that could be heard was the crackling and spitting of the pallet wood burning away. We were seriously tripping and each of us were lost in our own little worlds.

A movement vaguely attracted my attention. I raised my eyes to look in its direction. It wasn't that I didn't want to move my head or change my posture to investigate, it was more that I had forgotten quite how it was that one achieved those bodily movements.

The eyes would have to do.

I thought I saw something that looked remarkably like a policeman staring inquisitively in my direction. Ho hum, my imagination has gone mad, I thought. I moved my eyes back to the far more interesting patchwork of decayed wallpaper and the fascinating swirling patterns within. Some indeterminable time later another movement from the same direction demanded attention.

This time my eyes thought that they saw two things that bore an uncanny resemblance to the shape of policemen.

I dunno, get a grip man, I thought to myself and returned my gaze once more to the interesting wallpaper show.

Well bugger me if it didn't happen again. This time there appeared to be three policeman-like objects standing silently in the corner by the kitchen door.

Gary and Gary couldn't see this burdensome hallucination because they were sat with their backs to the kitchen door. I had had enough of these distracting apparitions and so felt the need to solicit some support from my friends.

Gary, I said to the Garys, Every bloody time I look over to the kitchen door a policeman appears. At first there was only one, but the buggers seem to be cloning and multiplying or something.

Do me a favour will you, have a look and see if you can see any. Or is it just me?

Gary and Gary, in slow motion unison, craned their necks around until they could see the kitchen door. They looked, they contemplated and then pronounced their verdict.

Nah they said, you're imagining things.

Thank fuck for that, I thanked them. I thought I must be losing it for a moment there.

One policeman turned to his two colleagues and said I don't fucking believe these clowns.

Apparently the noise I had made chopping up the pallets earlier had prompted a concerned citizen to call the police and they had come to investigate.

One of them crossed the room and peered into the empty and long ago smoked bong, and then they left.

We returned to our wallpaper gazing until the fire went out and then went to bed.

So, here I was; an urban hippy. The world of hash and magic mushrooms and LSD had led me, inevitably, to Stonehenge, a huge police-free happy drug-induced week-long party. The party was actually a month long, but I didn’t know that then.

We, as well as the rest of urban hippy-dom, had turned up for the Solstice party.

A whole week of whatever you could afford and endure.

People were outrageously dressed, or not. Naked was no problem if you were immune to the climate,

Do what you wanna, do what you will, just don't upset your neighbour's thrill, as Zappa said. The true definition of civilised anarchy as far as I’m concerned.

Music to blow your mind was wafting across the field, smoke was rising from cooking fires everywhere, kids were running about and screaming happily, adults were running about and screaming happily.

Bliss ruled, bliss drooled.

But, and I know one shouldn’t start a sentence with the word but, but (again) there was something life-changingly, mind-bogglingly, perspective-alteringly, else.

Other.

Forget the drugs, forget the fun, forget the anarchy, forget the beautiful and the unwashed people.

All faded into the background; the birds stopped singing, the fake druids who had arrived in suits stopped chanting, the very earth stopped spinning around the sun that had stopped burning, for there, and there and over there was The Answer.

The solution to my anguish of inevitable life long homelessness was there in abundance.

Buses.

Colourful old buses and coaches, being lived in! I couldn't buy a house, ever, but I could probably buy a bus, a home, a real home.

As Mr Z said (and I may quote him often), Home is where the heart is, on the bus.

Naturally I was far too shy to boldly go and talk to any of these bus hippies, but went back to my squat in Kingston full of ideas and hope and the absolute certainty that I was going to buy a bus and all my problems would be solved.

My girlfriend was vaguely supportive and my friends politely humoured me, but I was a man possessed with a brilliant concept.

Two weeks went by; life carried on. I was still selling dope to the needy when one glorious evening the