Goodbye Alan and Maggi

Extracts from my Diary of 1971

Saturday 23 January 1971 [after learning of Alan’s death]

Under the sway of a cup of coffee, the Tournai Mass, memories filter through into my awareness. Memories of the romance of amphetamine — that delicate, sensitive feeling with a pale wash of sadness that comes before the rough jolt galvanises one into subhuman activity or inactivity. Memories of Alan, who after years of trying managed to escape into the blissful, or relaxing, non-awareness of death.

Alan, whose life in the dream — the sensitive prefix, nostalgia — was more real than mine. Alan, who surrendered the conflicts of life for the deeper, more troubled conflicts of a dream in life, and was led gradually and inescapably to the door at the end of his path: death.

Every heroin flash is a small foretaste of death — that delicious numbness, constriction of the area of awareness, surrender of the body and mind to the all-invading, perfumed, heavy embrace of Morpheus; a gradual sinking in the warm, gentle, caressing waves of the river Lethe.

Alan, who, needing love more than most, cried for it passively by allowing himself to drift further out from our shores, beyond the reach of help, until he surrendered himself to the deeps.

That he died in the convulsions of blood poisoning, shuddering weakly under the impact of a pounding brain-hammer; or that he died unconsciously, gasping for breath and sucking his own vomit down into his lungs and thus sealing his fate, like Rab; or that he died after melting down from a chair or lavatory seat, mind burned to nothing by an unconsciously calculated lethal flash of heroin, Nembutal or crude opium in his blood and his brain, like Tom Shonk — does not matter. It was merely that peak in an ascending range of icy-topped mountains that thrust through the plane of clouds above.

I cannot help but be sadly glad that Alan escaped from the hurt of self-violation.

Friday 9 April 1971, 1 a.m.  [after learning of Maggi’s death]

A beautiful, real girl

 fearful but with enthusiasm, joy.

“She had so much love to give”

was a fitting epitaph.

She followed close the thread of oblivion and was ensnared by its convolutions.

Easily desperate, she jumped thirty feet from a hospital window,

was fucked for heroin,

surrendered her senses in delirium and derangement,

started slowly the long climb back to herself,

gave birth to a son she loved

accidentally overdosed and died one morning, lying suffocated, on her face, one eye open, one eye closed

the unflattering mask of death.

Sadly ceased to strive

lost the subtle awareness of here and now.

Just never woke that day,

went back to the earth too soon.