Monkey House Blues

by Dominic Stevenson

  The parties usually took place near the sea, in small bays around Vagator and Anjuna, just far enough from the beach to provide cover when the sun came up in the morning. Local Indians provided huge sound systems that could be heard for miles around, so if you forgot to go to the party, you would likely hear it in the middle of the night and go along later. Sometimes we went around 3 a.m. after a few hours’ sleep and took a trip that would peak as the sun came up.

  The police often turned up at the parties, haranguing the organisers for baksheesh before disappearing into the night with a wad of rupees. Rumour had it that police officers in Delhi paid bribes to get posted to the area to make the most of this scam, and there were always plenty of tourists carrying drugs who could be threatened with arrest in return for money. Occasionally they would arrest someone and put them through the courts – usually ending with a ten-year prison term, which then involved a great deal of money to secure release. The most I paid was a thousand rupees (around twenty-five pounds), but a friend spent a couple of years in prison and it cost his family many thousands.

  Police weren’t the only hazard, and one of the biggest problems was people ‘flipping out’ on drugs. Within days of my arrival a friend of a friend, a young Australian called Baz, lost the plot and appeared to have ‘left his body’ permanently. He’d shaved his head, covered himself with red paint and was driving around naked on an Enfield. The Goans – who were used to dealing with these kinds of problems – had him sectioned, and his father had to fly out and collect him from a psychiatric hospital in Panjim. Theft was common and was invariably blamed on outsiders from neighbouring Indian states, and occasionally stories of rape would filter through the usually blissful community.

  But the darker side of Goa rarely infringed on the general atmosphere of the place, and it was bad form to dwell on such unfortunate events as being burgled by criminals or nicked by the police. Failure to walk around with an almost unreal sunny demeanour was a sign that it was time to go home or, better still, take more drugs.

  Ecstasy was all around: I was initiated by a guy called Fast Eddie and promptly threw it up on the side of the road on the way to a party. I was highly suspicious of the drug and have never really changed my mind on the subject. I decided early on that a drug that made you feel deliriously happy while doing nothing in particular was playing tricks on the mind. There seemed to be something fake about its high, though it was unlikely to bring on the kind of trauma that hallucinogenic drugs were capable of unleashing. Sannyasins, the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajhneesh (later known as Osho), were supposedly making the stuff in Pune, a dusty town between Bombay and Goa, and a kind of finishing school for lost rich kids. They certainly looked as if they were on it much of the time, and their hyper touchy-feely manner seemed to bear this out.

  The defining point of my first Goa visit was a Full Moon party that lasted three days. I was 24 years old, and it was the Chinese Year of the Snake: my birth year. Months earlier, in Japan, I’d had many strange premonitions involving snakes and had found myself stepping over imaginary ones in the streets of Kyoto. Hissing cobras became regular visitors to my dreams, where I was both terrified and transfixed. I recall leaping from my futon at the sight of a King Cobra that slithered across the tatami and wagged its V-shaped tongue at me. Shortly after arriving in India I’d visited a snake farm near Madras, and I never missed an opportunity to pay the snake charmers who played their flutes to entice their pets from wicker baskets. Snakes had become my friends.

  I climbed up the sandstone cliffs to my motorbike at the end of the marathon party, and there, lying on the ground beside my bike, was a snakeskin. Since drugs tend to heighten one’s receptivity to such ‘signs’, it was a uniquely auspicious sight that convinced me I’d turned a corner in my life. The past was dead and the future beckoned. For the first time in my life I was free, and for the first time in my life I considered making money out of drugs.

  It seemed that pretty much everyone I knew in Goa was at the very least a part-time drug dealer and/or smuggler. Scams of one kind or another were always being talked about, and people would disappear for a couple of weeks and fly off to some corner of the world to ply their trade. Since I was based in Japan I was in an excellent position to make the most of my new contacts, and people’s eyebrows rose at the mere mention of the place. The yen was still a phenomenal currency and the price of hashish the highest in the world by far. There was a lot of money to be made, but the risks were high and the penalties tough. Friends had been locked up in solitary confinement for long periods of time and had suffered from the psychological ordeal. I had no intention of putting myself through such a situation and abandoned the idea, for the time being, at least.

  In an attempt to make some extra cash, Jonathon, myself and another guy called Rich decided to buy a kilo of hash. I’d never seen such a large chunk of the stuff, and we hid it beneath a pot at the back of our house in Goa, in a hole in the ground about a foot deep. Later we went to a party and returned at around 9 a.m. to find the drugs had gone. My first foray into dope dealing had not been good. We’d lost a couple of hundred quid each and assumed that someone had seen us burying it and come back while we were at the party and taken it. I put it down to karma and decided that I wasn’t suited to the business, an assessment that I’d have done well to remember later on.

  I left Goa in the middle of a beach party, and took a bus up to Bombay. My brain had taken enough battering, and it was time to see more of India. Somewhere along the way I’d gone native and become the kind of spaced-out hippy I’d previously laughed at. I’d seen friends come back from India with beads round their necks, facial hair and a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead under their arm. I told myself that it would never happen to me, yet now I was eight and a half stone, with a ponytail and goatee, reading my third Carlos Castaneda book in a row. The first thing I did on arrival at a new hotel was makea shrine with crystals, incense and Hindu deities. I’d given up eating meat and believed myself to be on a new spiritual path: a hotchpotch of astrology, numerology, tarot cards and Eastern mysticism.

  It’s difficult to say how large a part drugs played in this new mental state. Many people go to India and take no drugs whatsoever and still find the country deeply affecting. I think if you spend more than three months in the place, it works its magic regardless. The pace is so different from in the West that it becomes necessary to shift gears to cope. The traveller who goes into a railway station hoping to leave with a ticket within ten minutes is likely to be frustrated. After you’ve been in the country a while, you realise that you need a whole morning to buy the ticket and that you should bring along a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi to pass the time.

  Once the recalibration is complete, many Westerners find the pace of life in India preferable to their home country’s. Of course, much of this is to do with economics. Travellers generally don’t work and are able to make believe they are sadhus, the ochre-clad holy men renouncing worldly pleasures, or any other fantasy. If they had to carry 25 breeze blocks on their heads in 40-degree heat for 50 cents a day, they probably wouldn’t feel they were on their way to achieving nirvana. Travelling in India is a wonderful thing, but keeping your feet on the ground can be tough.

  I ended up staying with a sadhu in the Himalayan mountain town of Manikaran. It was an important Sikh pilgrimage site, with a large temple at its centre built on a hot spring. The basement of the temple had a series of large rooms waist-deep in the hot, sulphurous water, which constantly flowed from the centre of the earth. The temple provided free food and shelter for pilgrims, but I stayed with a sadhu on the edge of the town. He called himself Hanuman Baba, and his was the warmest house in the area, having been built on rocks that were scorching from the springs. On my arrival in Manikaran I’d checked into a guesthouse, but it was freezing cold at night and I’d arrived in my Goa outfit of baggy drawstring trousers and T-shirts. I bought a nasty yak-wool jumper that felt like a hair shirt and spent as much of the day
as possible in the temple lounging around on the heated stone floors.

  Hanuman Baba was no ordinary sadhu and, by local standards, no sadhu at all. We’d met at a party in Goa, where he held court with his waist-length dreadlocks and maroon robes, swinging his head to the beat of the music. He enjoyed his drugs and seemed to have money, and spent time hanging out in Italy with friends from the Osho Ashram in Pune. When the heat got too much in the lowlands he moved to the mountains, where he smoked charas and played host to a succession of Western hippies.

  I had my first Indian dope bust in his little house on the hillside. We’d taken an acid trip and were sitting listening to music and smoking chillums, the clay hash pipes favoured by sadhus. The door to the house opened and in walked the chief of police for the town. He was a tall man with a Colonel Blimp moustache and an awkward Basil Fawlty walk. I’d seen him before, and he’d even greeted me in the street, waving his cane with a smile. Sometimes he wore civilian clothes, but today he was wearing his khaki uniform with his cane under his arm like a sergeant major. He was paying a social visit to Hanuman Baba, but the second he saw me with the dope pipe in my hands he went into a rage. Hanuman tried to defuse the situation and told him to calm down, but he insisted I accompany him to the police station. The acid was a fairly mild trip, and after Goa my tolerance to the drug was greater than ever, and I held my ground when he grabbed my arm and tried to drag me from the room. Realising his words were not going to sway the chief of police, Hanuman presented him with the chillum instead, and this seemed to do the trick, because the policeman promptly sat down and smoked it. Half an hour later we were still smoking together, and he forgot all about arresting me.

  Larry and I had been exchanging dope stories, of which he had many, and he was never happier than when he was recalling them. He still believed in the notion of dope smugglers as Robin Hoods sticking two fingers up at the ‘establishment’, though in reality it was nothing of the sort. If he could throw in a tale about the ‘psycho Scotsman’ so much the better, and he often talked about McLoughlin’s violent past. It occurred to me that I was the only person, apart from Mark, in the foreign group who hadn’t known anyone prior to being locked up together. Gareth’s and the Germans’ fortunes were inextricably linked, and so, in a way, were Larry’s and Tommy’s. Meanwhile I was the outsider, as Mark had been before me, and both of us had been given significantly shorter sentences than the others, partly because neither of us had been charged with intent to supply, but also because as individuals we were not viewed as a gang.

  None of the other foreigners were Indiaphiles, but for me it had been a second home, after Japan, while England was no home at all. China was a much tougher country to travel in, but it had its charms. Even in jail I held the country in high regard and never felt any bitterness towards the people or even the authorities. I blamed myself for my stupidity and thanked my lucky stars for the short sentence I’d been given. If India had brought on dreams of snakes, China was dragon country, and now they too came into my world. From flames in the fireplace, to mountains and rivers from aeroplane windows, to the outlines of clouds in the sky, they’ve been with me ever since. My love affair with India had slipped by the wayside, and China had taken its place. I’d lost my freedom, but I’d got lucky on the side. Even in a cage, I felt at home in the Dragon Land.

  [8]

  The Monkey House Rules

  You had to hand it to the Chinese: they knew how to run a jail. Ti Lan Qiao, Shanghai Municipal Prison, is situated on the north shore of the Huangpu River in the middle of the city and houses some 5,000 inmates, mainly men. Built by the British at the turn of the century, it was later used by both the Japanese invaders and the Nationalists. It was considered a model prison by the local authorities due to its emphasis on Reform Through Labour, a term that I would come to hear like some gloomy mantra.

  As well as labour, the jail was the administrative centre for Reform Through Education, which was translated for me by an officer –without the slightest hint of irony – as brainwashing. This was taken incredibly seriously, and the prison had its own TV station that beamedan endless stream of propaganda to the other jails and labour campsacross the region. Most officers approached their Reform Through Education duties with the tired resignation of a preacher who’s long since stopped believing, while a few came on like TV evangelists, haranguing the bored inmates with fire-and-brimstone speeches that could go on for hours.

  The top brass at the jail took great pride in the low recidivism of the criminals that passed through their system, seeing it as vindication for the vapid sloganeering that was their stock in trade. In truth, there was a far more ominous explanation for most prisoners’ reluctance to return to crime after their stay in Ti Lan Qiao, chiefly the length of the sentences handed down to first offenders. A burglar, for instance, could expect a sentence of around eight years or more for a first offence, and would serve at least seven of those. On his release, Reformed Through Institutionalisation, he would be sent to a prearranged work unit where he’d work for breadline wages in a government factory. If he had no family to vouch for him, he’d be required to live on the premises in a quasi-Dickensian-workhouse environment. His community leaders would be informed, as would the inhabitants of his neighbourhood, and he might be required to make a public apology for ‘letting down the People’. Stripped of the life he once knew, a broken man, chained to the state, he’d most likely have neither the time nor the inclination to reoffend. The system had a brilliantly grim logic to it, which reasoned that if the average criminal was most active between the ages of 16 and 30, such draconian sentences – not to mention the post-prison regimen – would keep them out of circulation for most of the duration of their criminal life. There were no ‘career’ burglars or ‘habitual’ thieves, as we say in Britain. In China, a one-time thief stands out in his community like a one-handed Saudi.

  As foreigners, we’d missed out on an important part of the Chineseprison experience and come straight to our final destination. All other prisoners were required to spend a month or so being inducted in 6th Brigade, where they had to learn the ‘Big Fifty-Eight’ off by heart. The prison rule book was the first, last and only book most Chinese prisoners read. The small book had taken on the same significance inprison that Mao’s Little Red Book had during the Cultural Revolution, and inmates were expected to be able to quote the rules verbatim. When they got to their final brigades they were expected to know everything in the book, but many couldn’t even read and needed help. New arrivals sat around in groups, cross-legged, nodding their heads and repeating the edicts over and over. After a while, they would be summoned to undergo testing by other prisoners and would be slapped every time they got something wrong. Foreigners were exempt from this task since much of the material contained Party jargon concerning ideological reform. However, we were expected to learn an English translation of the ‘Ten Don’ts’, which were written on the walls of every cell. They read:

  Don’t sit down in the cell when a captain tours.

  Don’t eat food in the cell.

  Don’t spit in the cell.

  Don’t piss or shit on the floor.

  Don’t sleep or lie down in the cell unless authorised.

  Don’t keep the cell untidy.

  Don’t leave the cell until told to do so.

  Don’t enter the cell until told to do so.

  Don’t keep dangerous implements in the cell.

  Don’t hide contraband in the cell.

  Prisoners were divided up and allocated their brigades depending on their skills on the outside. Mechanics fixed cars, chefs worked in the kitchen brigade and so on, while unskilled workers got the really dull jobs, like packaging. Many of the prisoners were serving long sentences, but few had life sentences. If you warranted a lifetime in prison, you would have been shot in the first place. Many prisoners had suspended death sentences, which meant you were on probation for two years and could be executed at any time in that period. Most (though not
all) prisoners survived this and were then given a life sentence, which was then changed into a 20-year term. Some were fast-tracked through this process, particularly those who’d been given exemplary sentences for political offences that had subsequently become less serious in the post-Mao era. I met a guy 12 years into a suspended death sentence for a political crime who was hoping to get out within a couple of years, but this was quite rare and most could expect to serve at least 20 years of such a sentence.

  The guards wanted nothing to do with the day-to-day running of the jail. This left the majority of the work to the prisoners, who managed to do a remarkable job of keeping the place clean and orderly, even to the extent of doing the guards’ paperwork for them. Meanwhile the guards sat around, hunched over Nescafé jars of green tea, stirring only to hawk another ball of phlegm into the spittoon beside their desk. When they spoke, it was usually a disdainful grunt accompanied by a look of absolute revulsion. Captain Xu was our commanding officer, and I was informed early on that he was an arsehole who disliked foreigners even more than he despised the Chinese inmates. He’d been a prison officer for more than 20 years, though he didn’t look a day over 30. His teeth were stained with green tea and nicotine, while his uniform was dishevelled and tatty. He had the look of a man whose life had passed him by, and the slim consolation that he was better off than the people in his care failed to elicit even the faintest smile.

  If Captain Xu looked young for his age, his deputy Captain Zhu looked about 14. He was small with a round face and wire glasses that reminded me of Joe 90. New to the job, he made a vague effort to look like he had some kind of role in the prison and spent his first few weeks standing around trying hard to look busy. His uniform fitted him and was better kept than his colleagues’, but after a few weeks he tired of pretending to have a proper job and settled into the idle routine of chain-smoking and eating sunflower seeds. Unlike Xu, he spoke a few words of English and occasionally managed a smile before checking himself and withdrawing back into his lost-adolescent persona.