Empathy for the Devil: Make Your Demons Work for You. Without Selling Your Soul.

By Jerry Hyde

In this three part book Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll, Hyde yet again plunges into sex, psychedelics, hurricanes and heroes on a quest for the truth at all costs, exploring issues of paedophilia, plant medicine, and community through narrative.

• Language: English
• Publisher: O-Books
• Release date: Oct 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789047325

Jerry Hyde

Jerry Hyde has worked in film, theatre, TV, and the music business. After retraining as a psychotherapist he has had a fairly conventional career, until losing the plot and rebranding himself in the somewhat 'out-there' style for which he's become known. He lives in London, UK.

Book preview

Sex

There’s nothing quaint or romantic about paedophilia.

The Lonely Planet Guide to Morocco

Chapter 1

A dark cloud hangs over Tangier, heavy and dense it blots out the sun, crows funnelling upward make a dry husking sound as their wings cut the air blue black against the sallow sky doing nothing to enhance my grey canvas mind.

No one else can see this shapeless mass.

Not Truc-Mai, she darts and sings delighting in the colours and sounds, the ancient walled town, her laughter spares us my black mood, this force field of gloom that arrives like daydreams of the dead each midsummer.

Tangier, Tanger, Tangiers … most people don’t even know where it is, no direct flights from Britain which at least spares us the socks, sandals and lobster tans, the deep-fried bingo wings and salt patches beneath the distended man breasts of England that spread like a lager-fuelled contagion across the earth each August.

April may well be the cruellest month – but August is surely the ugliest.

That first night we dined at the El Minzah, all jaded finery and suicidal waiters, a below par tagine and a lukewarm gin and tonic, the ghost of Brian Jones hovering dispassionately overhead, falling into a wood-framed bed, exhaustion taking me as soon as my head hit the pillow, dogs howl like wolves and street sounds from the medina drift into a tormented slumber twisted and without relief.

The call to prayer roused me like a dirt-bike long before dawn, Truc-Mai murmuring incomprehensibly beside me, the words escaping momentarily, she slept on tangled in a broken dream naked in my arms, a fat lazy sun pulling itself above the faded apathetic mist that hangs heavy as kif over Tangier, arrête she mumbled without conviction as I kissed her softly on the neck.

Tu est un homme terrible.

Mid-morning, Cafe Baba, mint tea and hashish done pale green and sweet, light golden and fluffy, The Stones, Ginsberg and Kerouac on the walls, we drift through the umbilical passageways settling inevitably in the Petit Socco, more mint tea and juice d’orange in this living theatre with its cast of 1000s.

In the medina, I feel safe; its walls hold me, the ancient way of life, the absence of automobiles or mobile phones – everyone here on a level. Outside the old town energy changes dramatically, a few steps through an arched gateway the unreal world dominates once more, traffic competing with people, an unfair battle that people were always destined to lose, a hierarchy of power and automated supremacy as we vie for space in the jostling throng, back-footed, anxious and on guard.

All imbalances of power lead to abuse and destruction.

If London is aggressive, Paris aloof, and New York, for all its freedom of expression, is downright deranged, the medina in Tangier despite its sleazy reputation has a buzz rarely found in the big free metropolises of the decaying West, the ever-present hum of humanity interweaving, community pulsating as cells in a body, they pass, they smile, they glance, hooded characters unchanged in 2000 years.

As well as The Stones and the Beats, The Beatles were here once, so too Morrison and Hendrix – but they’re here no longer and as is so often the case, I have the feeling I’ve arrived too late.

The party’s over.

I look around vainly searching for a glimpse of Brion Gysin, Jack Kerouac, Paul Bowles or Allen Ginsberg but the only ghosts are those of myself, a lifetime ago darkly possessed and much younger too, my daughters – one in arms, the other running free on chubby legs, the image quickly lost as tears press to