Diary of a Drug Fiend

Over the Top ! 29 can hardly even say that I felt. I was Feeling itself ! I was all the possibilities of Feeling fulfilled to the uttermost. Yet, coincident with this, my body went on automatically with its own private affairs. She was escaping me. Her face eluded mine. “O Thou storm-drunk breath of the winds, that pant in the bosom of the mountains! I adore Thee, Evoe! I adore Thee, I A O!” Her breast sobbed out its song with weird intensity. I understood in a flash that this was her way of resistance. She was trying to insist to herself that she was a cosmic force; that she was not a woman at all ; that a man meant nothing to her. She fought desper- ately against me, sliding so serpent-like about the bounds of space. Of course, it was really the taxi— but I didn’t know it then, and I’m not quite sure of it now. “T wish to God,” I said to myself in a fury, “ I had one more sniff of that Snow. I’d show her!” At that moment she threw me off as if I had been a feather. I felt myself all of a sudden no more good. Quite unaccountably I had collapsed, and I found myself, to my amazement, knocking out a little pile of cocaine from a ten-gramme bottle which had been in my trousers’ pocket, on to my “and, and sniffing it up into my nostrils with greedy relish. Don’t ask me how it got there. I suppose Gretel Webster must have done it somehow. My memory is an absolute blank. That’s one of the funny things about cocaine. You never know quite what trick it is going to play you. I was reminded of the American professor who boasted that he had a first-class memory whose only defect was that it wasn’t reliable. I am equally unable to tell you whether the fresh supply of the drug increased my powers, or whether Lou had simply tired of teasing me, but of her own