Some colourful characters I knew in my younger days
My shifting roots and diverse social background facilitated my getting along with unusual persons with whom I crossed paths, just as my mother always did on the principle of ‘being a good mixer’. Somehow I have always come across outsiders who needed contact or befriending, especially when I lived in England and was more easy going and less worldly-wise. I record some vignettes of a selection of unusual persons I came to associate with after I arrived in Norway.
Dag Halvorsen
Having introduced Dag elsewhere already, it remains to tell of his eccentricity and unusual pan-European lifestyle. He was already well travelled when first I met him in England, where he had come across as the only male among a batch of other Scandinavians trainee social therapists. A chief reason for Dr. Maxwell Jones to invite foreign youth to work at his ground-breaking social therapy hospital in Sutton, UK was that they were free of all English class preconceptions and were not only difficult for patients to place or pigeonhole, but were both different in behaviour and often attractive to the male patients so able to draw them out to an extent that English staff could not. Dag was obviously a phenomenon in the view of most of them, being fumblingly impractical, distrait, humorously unconventional and fascinating to listen to, his intellectual talk causing puzzlement and fun. For example, he would sing the most amusing ditty about the former British Communist leader Harry Potter: Oh! Harry was a Commie, one of Lenin’s lads, 'till he was foully murdered by reactionary cads for others to join in the response 'by reactionary cads…' and so on.
When I stayed with him in Oslo, Dag was always involved in student politics, which he took very seriously. He was in a great hurry for some important meeting one morning and rushed into the kitchen where I was chatting with the young Sami whose room was the former scullery. Dag grabbed a slice of bread and cursed that he had to open a new pack of butter, grabbing one end of the wrapping and shaking furiously until the half kilo fell out, hitting the table edge and ending on the floor. Waggling his knife, he bend down and took butter from the fallen mass then searched around for something more for his sandwich. In the process he trod firmly in the butter and shouted ’Scheise! scheise!’. Looking at us beseechingly and scraping his shoe repeatedly on the door lintel to remove the grease he said, “Look, I have not time, can you clear this up?”, before hastening off without awaiting an answer. The Sami and I were simply too taken aback to react. This was one gem among others I witnessed through the years. When he had become the national broadcasters news correspondent covering Poland, I saw him interviewed on TV in a second-hand bookshop in Warsaw, during which he tumbled two separate piles of books with sudden hand gestures.
Our interests and world views diverged more and more and I did not keep in touch with him in later years. However, one day I ran into one of the old gang, by then a very well-known journalist and broadcaster, Erling Lægreid, who had often challenged Dag in our mutual discussions. He regaled me with subsequent accounts of Dag’s awkward bumbling. Erling and friends had persuaded him to visit the mountains, which - being cosmopolitan and city-based, he had never done. While picnicking they noticed a fairly wide and man-deep channel full of mud and a sluggish stream. They took turns at jumping across it but Dag did not dare. They reasoned with him and bolstered his confidence until he at last began a long run up. Just as he was about to leap, someone let out a terrible scream and Dag faltered, but his momentum took him well into the mire.
His career in Norwegian National Broadcasting was illustrious for he had many connections with movers and shakers both in and behind the Polish regime, as well as circles of friends in both Western and Eastern European countries. With his many languages and wide political knowledge, he saw various Cold War issues differently to most Western experts. As I understood it, he also had sympathies with Polish officials juggling to stop the worst depredations of the USSR, not least by downplaying the Polish strikers’ demands thought too riskily far-reaching. So when Lech Walesa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Dag was caught off balance and offended the Norwegian powers-that-be and their popular award in refusing to report on the matter from Poland or interview Walesa. This led to a severe reprimand which most likely cramped his career thereafter.
Mike Bell
Some years older than I, Michael Bell from Tunbridge Wells came to Norway due to a girlfriend from Oslo. Having both been to sea in common and being tea-drinking countrymen, we hit it off fairly soon. He had been in the Royal Navy, starting as a young boy on a training establishment at Portsmouth (H.M.S. Worcester) and then signing on in all innocence when only 16 years old for all of nine years… one of the scandalous practices of British military institutions in those days. When I met him he was around 28 years old and, having no savings, he was hard put to it to subsist in Oslo, doing day work wherever he could get it, such as helping on the docks.
Gradually he found a better means of subsistence, the sale of illegally imported cigarette papers. In the 1960s, Norway levied a truly punishing tax on cigarette papers and the inferior local brand was made almost equally expensive. Mike used to go down to the docks of an evening and get chatting with seamen, especially British and Royal Naval people. They would often invite him aboard and sell him some duty free spirits, tobacco and quite a lot of cigarette papers. Soon he had a regular supply from ships which plied back and forth to UK. He was able to make at least 300% profit on them and then sell them well under the Norwegian price. His Norwegian was almost non-existent so all he could do when he entered, say, a building site during working hours was to bawl out ’Sigarettenpapiren’. Time and again, virtually the entire work force downed tools and queued up to buy as many packets as he could provide.
I enjoyed his company whenever he dropped in for a cuppa as he knew the Royal Navy from the bottom, though not far upwards. He was naturally very bitter over the treatment handed out in the RN to ratings who transgressed even in matters where civilians would only face a fine at worst. When his ship came in from duty free seas he had tried to smuggle an extra carton or two of cigarettes, as was not an uncommon infraction. He had been caught and court-martialled, awarded six weeks in a military prison. That was as close to regimented hell as the warders were able to make it. He lost most of what respect he had left for the Navy thereafter. However, his salad days then came about, in the 1950s, when he was drafted to some ship serving the large mothball fleet in coastal waters somewhere in Eastern England. The small working party he was assigned to went out in a launch daily to carry out watch and diverse maintenance duties on the large fleet of mothballed ships at anchor.
One morning they had to remove the steering gear from a destroyer and hoist it up with derricks to shift it onto a barge to be taken for repairs. While swinging this very large piece of machinery around, it got snagged and mercury began to pour out of a hole onto the deck. In the emergency, quick-witted ratings found buckets to collect the mercury, which continued to pour forth. When they returned to their mother ship, the buckets were battened down in the launch. The matter was no doubt reported, but Mike arranged with a pensioned rating who visited the ship for cigarettes and booze to check the price of mercury and where it could be sold.
The income was a welcome addition to the working party's private pockets, and before he was reassigned elsewhere they had purposely emptied the mercury from the steering gears of many of the mothballed ships and generated a regular income for months. Being wise to all the tricks of the lowest sailor class, Mike and his mates knew how to core up and confuse the paperwork and point any questioners in the wrong directions. Whether any of the mothball fleet was ever activated for service, he did not know, but it would have been a big surprise for any officers who would have been in command.
Mike landed a job as caretaker of an old and run down apartment block in Oslo's East End where one of his main cares was to keep the vermin down. He took me down into the cellar gangway and rats could be hard moving ahead of us behind the inner wooden walls. They seemed to avoid the poisons he laid out, so he devised a system whereby he fed the rats from a small bin in the middle of the courtyard, luring them out of their holes. He would lay fresh bait and wait beside the bin with a cricket bat and knock every rat that came for six, his game of rat cricket extermination.
Peter Monsen
I first came across Peter when I began as a student of sociology in Oslo. He was such an unassuming person that he somehow disappeared into the background everywhere. Son of a Norwegian, he had grown up with parents in New York and had come to Norway recently. The smallish group of new sociology students went to a sociological conference weekend in the hills above Oslo and, largely because he was also english-speaking, I came to know him a bit. After seeing him at various lectures and a few student get-togethers, I tried to draw him out of himself as I realised he was insecure and lost.
The first time he opened up somewhat was when I heard he spent a lot of time drawing, which I also liked doing, so I had pressed him to show me some of his efforts. I was very impressed by about 20 self portraits which showed talent. Because of big problems from his background and the poverty in which he now lived, he hid himself away - a virtual hermit, though it was months before I came to realise this. I found he had no other friends or befrienders than I, which made me feel some responsibility to keep in touch. He also had a wry sense of humour I recognised. Only once in the first two years since we met did he contact me. He rang me up one evening and eventually said he happened to be quite nearby, so I invited him to the room I occupied for a cup of tea.
When he knew me better, he confided in me about his childhood trauma. His father and mother were alcoholics and, as a teenager, he almost inevitably felt the need to try drinking himself. His mother was enraged and one day, when he had a bottle of whiskey and went into his room and locked the door, she battered on the door screaming and crying and then threatened him that she would kill herself if he did not come out and get rid of the bottle. Eventually she quietened down so he got drunk and slept the night. When he came out of the room in the morning, his mother was hanging by the neck outside and had been dead all night.
Peter had a fear of werewolves, literally. He knew it was irrational but he could not control it and he wanted to talk about it. He later admitted that he actually did rituals to protect himself like carrying garlic and he made a werewolf mask which he wore at night to exorcise them from him.
It took me some time to take this seriously but it became obvious that this was a major trauma. He investigated all he could find out about lycanthropy, which only made the problem worse as he found no solution but concentrated the more on the fixation. The idea that a werewolf could be his spiritual double, into which he might metamorphose was one great fear of his. I thought his very passive and unassuming personality and his mother's suicide was somehow connected to his fear of becoming a werewolf and he agreed it was likely. About three years after I first met him, he suddenly came over a deeply serious book which virtually set him free of the obsession overnight. It was called 'Man into Wolf' (An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism and Lycanthropy ' by Robert Eisler, published in 1948). I read the book too and found it extremely wide-ranging historically and virtually gave an explanation of the phenomenon. Peter had rid himself of the werewolf obsession and was able to joke about it thereafter. No doubt the basis of it all was his trauma, the unexpressed anger that had come to rise in him more and more against his mother. That was a big first step towards his overcoming some of his very reserved nature and reclusive cautions towards the world.
Not long afterwards, my ex-wife and I had to find a new place to live and obtained a large apartment which cost more than we could comfortably manage. So Peter took the spare room and contributed to the cost. He stayed with us for up to a year and during that time he blossomed as an aspiring artist. He drew one enormously involved picture on a huge wide roll of paper, impossible to describe as it contained dozens of extraordinary interconnected scenes like shifting dimensions. Unfortunately, he eventually junked it. He also made a papier-mâché replica of a very gory decapitated human head hanging upside-down from a hook on a chain. We had some occasionally complaining neighbours on the floor below us, and we found he had hung the head down the garbage shaft so it was at their level when they opened their waste aperture. I was trying to write a play and he made very intuitive illustrations for it with linoleum cuts. He later became a professional artist largely on the basis of linocuts.
Peter then spend a long period in Copenhagen where he lived in the deserted military barracks of Christiania, which was first occupied by flower power and provo activists and became a large and successful and independent hippie community for many years. Thereafter we soon lost touch and he moved to Sweden, married and brought up children. I never met him again until he died there.
In 1961 I attended a meeting of an esoteric Indonesian spiritual sect called Subud, which I also joined for a while to find out about it. There I met Dr, Jan Greve, who was on a similar mission. He was a neurologist who had taken up private practice as a therapist using the title psychiatrist. He was already in his 60s and was a rather agreeable person and proved to be a great help to my friend Noel who was suffering continual anxiety. He was amenable to students of psychology and the like, holding open house to groups of such visitors. He was far from being a standard white-coated and personally-disengaged kind of doctor and had a lively interest in discussion of all manner of human questions and was himself outspoken without any kind of what is now known as political correctness.
Being interested in psychic illness due to my association with Scandinavian social therapists where my mother worked in a psychiatric hospital, and because I knew Dr. Nic Waal for whom I had worked for 3 months at one of her treatment homes for very psychically disturbed boys, I was considering becoming a psychologist. Dr. Nic Waal was a well-known self-liberated female figure in Norway and had become a very innovative therapist - the only psychoanalyst trained by Wilhelm Reich - and not least because she tried on herself the treatments she was to give her patients, for example, herself having electro-shock. Incidentally, Jan was not self-important either, telling us that he had always been to too timorous and overwhelmed to meet Nic Waal or to go into psychoanalysis, which he regretted.
Due to my interest in psychology and my previous work in a social therapeutic institution, I considered trying psycho-active substances to investigate different states of mind, provided the effects were temporary. I first obtained cannabis during a visit to Paris in 1962 and found it changed sensation and perception considerably, both with very agreeable and occasional very disturbing effects. I introduced Dr. Greve to this and he was impressed by its mostly pleasant transformation of his mental processes. Some time thereafter he was sent LSD 25 by Dr. Karl Evang, the Director of Health in Norway, to try out on himself and patients (note: in 1962 many psychologists and their kind were investigating mescaline and LSD 25 since the witch-hunt against psychotropics had not begun). By way of returning a favour, Jan offered me a trial of LSD 25, which had a tremendous effect on me and my subsequent life (all described elsewhere). He began to use cannabis with his patients in therapy with some remarkable good effects, also because he was not offended by contrary opinions but responded to them properly.
Ironically, the fact that Dr. Greve was using cannabis in therapy was attacked by the very man who had sent him LSD 25, and attacked in very strong and threatening terms. He was commanded to desist, but he responded by saying he had a duty to protect the true interests of his patients. Cannabis had been damned utterly by the entire Norwegian establishment and media as worse than heroin and was of course illegal to possess or use. Dr. Greve challenged Dr. Karl Evang to a public debate which actually took place at Club 7, a music, theatre and club frequented by many 60s youth, not least many who were in favour of cannabis. That the Director of Health knew relatively little about cannabis soon became evident. That he had never experienced it was a point against him, but he countered by saying that he knew what TB was without having to be infected with it. That it was the effect on one's consciousness and mind that was the key issue evaded his grasp, as well as how it worked well in private therapy ,so he was badly worsted in the discussion and laughed out of the club. This made hitherto undiscovered Dr. Greve well-known and shifted the focus of the long-running debate in the media.
I knew people who had grown up with Evang and I learned that he most definitely would not take this lying down, so I tried to get Jan to see that he should rather take a low profile or Evang would prosecute him. Jan said that the truth had to be told and he would not keep silent. It was a mix of pride and bad judgement. Dr. Evang was in such a powerful position that he waited until evidence could be gathered against Greve for the police to charge him and arrest him while awaiting trial. They made him wait in solitary confinement for over a year before the trial. At the proceedings, very prominent celebrities testified to how Dr. Greve had given them LSD 25 treatment with beneficial results, including the author Jens Bjørneboe and the philosopher Arne Næss. A prominent psychiatric expert from UK rubbished the testimony of his Norwegian counterparts with sound documentation, but it did not change the view of the ultra conservative support judges and the presiding judge, all being prejudiced due to the ignorance prevailing in ruling circles. In 1972 he was convicted of possession and use of cannabis and LSD 25 (by then made illegal) and found not guilty of trumped-up charges such as sexual impropriety and possession of seized cannabis (some grams of material) which were proved to have no active ingredients. He had already served the prison sentence of 1 year awaiting trial! Despite this, he continued his practice as before, probably because the debate had been so damaging to the authorities and was making cannabis and its benefits too well-known and providing more oxygen to Dr. Greve himself.
I had helped out at the trial and continued to associate with Jan and his circle. As he wanted to visit UK and I was about to go there, he offered to drive me there in his 2CV. I was in a quandary because he had just read a book called 'Throw Away Your Glasses' and claimed he was seeing better and better without them. He was sometimes prone to follow such unwise advice and, at about 70, he had also eagerly embraced sexual liberation and sought to find young female companions, in which he succeeded. The long journey via Denmark was rather a trial, but he could not really handle driving on the left in England, so I took over to navigate through London to take him to visit my mother and stay overnight. My then-wife and I had visited his country cabin and walked the forests with him and we had also been there for a weekend when he and some friends had an LSD session. I would drop in to his house in town now and again or even to his informal meetings to meet his therapy clients. Having got to know him very well, I found more and more areas of life about which he was either naive or subjects on which knew almost nothing. As time went on he grew less flexible and a more one-sided wiseacre, eventually believing he knew God and suchlike excesses, and this actually impressed his mini-following as well as my former best friend Noel Cobb, to whom he had really been kind and for whom he was very much a substitute father.
John Leitch
In 1968 several of us - two families and one single man - formed a group to buy a large ancient wooden villa with extensive grounds beside the fjord near Oslo. During the first couple of years seven adults and two children lived there and this little progressive community of ours attracted many visitors. Of these an Englishman with his girlfriend, John Leitch, came to help clear out the house, which was stuffed to the rafters with a vast amount of junk and valuables hoarded through 70 years left by the former owner. After we had taken possession, an auctioneer was to come and value the goods, which he did at total profit to himself, offering nothing but to take away cost free the ancient furniture, armory of weapons, early sound, film and other turn of the century appliances. We all thought that we might be able to hold onto a few minor baubles and we told the bent auctioneer that we knew his game, so he'd better leave some things for us to share, which we modestly selected. In one trunk John found a large genuine bearskin overcoat which he commandeered, later telling the auctioneer that it was full of maggots (while it was perfect still). John's father had been an antique dealer (somewhat bent) and John knew the trade, having done some dealing at Portobello Road. He nearly shed tears when we eventually had to burn a large set of Edwardian type velvet chairs and many other old items that he held would have made a fortune in London, for no second-hand dealings were allowed without paying a considerable tax to the authorities, which were soon hot on the trail of any offender. John had no permanent place in Oslo and zero income, so he asked if he could stay in the boathouse, which was a small hut with a balcony, all half suspended over the water of the fjord.
John improved the hut with shelves, built a half-loft double bed, a mini-kitchen and lived there with his girlfriend Virginia for about five months until the intense cold drove them away. We had agreed and arranged for an electric cable for lighting, cooking and a small heater. It later proved extremely costly to us, but we found out too late that this meant our electricity bill was given a supercharge for 'excessive power use'.
A year or more later, three of the original group having surrendered their shares to us, John and his girlfriend Virginia rented a couple of rooms from us for about a year. John and I became good friends and shared many of our very varied experiences. We had both been to sea and had visited several of the same ports and shared other interests connected with being English. both having used cannabis and LSD 25, while John had experimented with quite a few other mind-changing substances. He had spent more than year in the mid-60s wandering through Afghanistan, Nepal and India. I already knew a lot about India, beginning with friends who grew up there at my preparatory school, and intensely during my 15 months with a mixed Indian crew aboard two ships, but I had never been closer than Colombo in Ceylon. John was a great raconteur and gave me a vivid store of descriptions of his wandering there, eventually living partly on alms, since Indians traditionally welcomed visitors charitably into their homes as divine guests. They regarded English hippie wanderers as spiritual seekers ('dharma bums'). In addition, John had many yet more remarkable experiences to convey that interested me particularly since I too had experience with mind-altering psychotropics - cannabis and LSD 25 - while John had experimented with quite a few other such substances. Both he and I had numerous amazing experiences and we could relate accounts of many we knew who had also ventured into the inner worlds that are open to trippers.
John had hiked through the Hindu Kush along with shifting small groups of Westerners, some of whom had an unusual stimulant which he thought was a drug for Parkinson's disease. He also said constant users of it had developed the shakes themselves. He took it on a few occasions, with dramatic results. He and a friend were wandering along on a plain of grassland when they noticed small figures among the grass, like tiny elves. Astonished they hard them chattering too. John's friend asked these being if they were real. The elves all laughed and said that of course they were real. Who else did they think swayed the grasses when the wind blowed. Soon John's attention was taken by a vast abyss beside which he was walking and they both began what seemed like a most perilous walk between constantly appearing deep gorges. When the effect of this drug wore off they realised that they had walked on nothing but flat land and there were no such cliffs or gorges anywhere in the region.
They met a group of other hippie travellers who had rented some rooms where they were able to stay. Their hosts wanted to go to a cinema not far away and see an Indian film showing there, but John and his companion wanted to try the drug again. They made tea and read books while waiting for it to take effect. All at once his friend gasped aloud and said that the book he had was utterly fantastic, it seemed to contain everything about everything he wanted to know… so John began reading it with him. They got so absorbed in its wonders that they read through the night and the next day, wondering why the others had not returned. So it went on for days and days, drinking tea and reading the book of all books. Eventually the door banged open and the cinema-goers returned at long last. Why had they been away for weeks, asked the readers. It took some convincing to get them to believe that it was still the same evening on which they began to read. This extreme case highlights how the sense of time is totally altered with many mind-altering substances.
John persisted with these trips into the unknown. He was walking in Nepal on a deserted stretch of road when he heard the same elfish voices chattering away. He spoke, asking where they were. Under a pile of stones! He crouched down to see a crowd of them busily working away and he talked with them. They told him many things and how the city he saw them building was theirs and how they were living in it. Some other time he was walking to visit an important Buddhist temple in central Kabul. As he neared the place, he noticed two bronze statues of two dogs there. A man approached him and did naamaskar (eastern greeting with hands steepled in front of one’s chest), and over his shoulder John saw the two dogs come to life and chase around the square and start mating. The man barred his way saying it was too sacred and he could go no further. John asked why not and was told that he would not wish for onlookers when he was doing such things. He never did get to the temple… probably he got distracted by something else as happens a lot with mind-altering drugs.
One afternoon when John took LSD down beside the boathouse where he was staying, I kept him company at his request, but took nothing. He was mostly very absorbed so we spoke little. Suddenly, not 5 feet away in the water, a huge salmon leapt up in a very high arc, spraying droplets around. Though I knew people sometimes caught the odd salmon along that stretch of fjord, this was so big that it seemed impossible. I said to John' Did you see that!' He said "Yeah.. that kind of thing happens when you're on acid."
After staying in Norway for over a year, and finding no suitable employment or any prospects, John returned to Brighton. He had been educationally disenfranchised by going to secondary school in England where he had never once been told or even heard that people could sit for the General Certificate of Education. He was certainly intelligent enough to have gone far, but such was England at that time, still very much affected by class distinctions. He returned to visit his friends in Oslo several years later and we had some enjoyable times together. Happily he settled in Cornwall and lived on a farm where he could live his alternative lifestyle and manage well. Last I heard of him he was writing stories for children, and I think they would have been a great success.
Bernie Young
In 1972 I met Bernie Young, a keen jazz drummer. A 30-year old Canadian, he was studying architecture in Oslo and for several years we saw a lot of one another, not least because his girlfriend at that time later became my second wife. Bernie split his time between making money to support himself and his mother and his studies , plus his music hobby. He had been a ship's cook and/or a fisherman on a West Canadian salmon fishing vessel, which was a seasonal job and allowed him to pursue other things in the off season, which he did in Norway.
Some years before I first met him he was in severe financial straits due to his mother, to whom he was devoted and who suffered badly from psychic problems. He came in contact with someone who told him that he could solve this radically. Bernie had never used any drugs, not even cigarettes then, but he learned that easy money could be had if he went to certain contacts in Lebanon who would set up a very secure route for him to export hashish for a remarkably low investment. So it was that, putting his trust in this friend, he travelled to Lebanon and, with a guarantee of his genuineness to the hash producers in an area of the country which was completely no go for all authorities, he was able to enter that lawless zone and was welcomed by the contacts who had been told in advance of his coming. He described the people and place as ordinary hard-working farmers and their families who were avoiding severe government oppression and trying to make enough to run their own community and all it required, which he thought they were doing excellently from all they showed him. The enclave had developed its own security against police or the military.
The people he met there were very pleasant and glad to sell him hashish on which he could make at least several hundred percent profit if he sold it in Western Europe. In addition, they undertook to advise him thoroughly and set him up with an identity and persona which would get him through the customs he would encounter. A complete outfit was soon tailored to fit him in the guise of a Catholic priest, under which they fitted secure body packs which held about 10 kilos of hashish. He was given two worn suitcases in which a further ten kilos were secreted in false compartments. He was naturally somewhat nervous on how to pull this off but told them he was ready to go. They said he was not ready. Firstly he must go out in this outfit and travel around for some time in Lebanon, but without any contraband, and get comfortable with the situation. So he set out, Bible and rosary in hand, and soon got lifts from local people who called him Father and treated him with much respect. Soon he was invited to a wedding, fortunately not being expected to officiate but as an honoured guest. By the time he returned to the enclave he felt much more confident about the journey. During all that time he never even tasted cannabis, though the circle of friends he had were occasional users and all assured him that it was far from being as dangerous a drug as alcohol or tobacco - let alone opium derivates - and convinced him with documentation that it was not physically habit-forming at all.
The journey back to Norway was all by rail and involved the crossing of numerous borders. Bernie said that this went swimmingly and he got rather used to being called 'father', though he avoided as much contact with people as he could. Not until he arrived in Copenhagen and was about to board the train to Oslo, the last leg, did a problem arise. Walking along the platform he noticed too late three Catholic priests, clad like himself. They advanced on him in apparent glee, "Hello, brother!" one exclaimed. "Let us spend the journey together discussing spiritual matters." Bernie had to think rapidly and, as I recall it, he looked pious and came up with, "That would have been fine indeed, but I am in a period of intense meditation and prayer, so I'd prefer to be alone with God". They were very understanding but insisted on helping him with his heavy luggage though and lifted his suitcases onto the luggage rack for him. He breathed deep sighs when they left him with mutual blessings for another compartment. At last he made it to startle his friends and bring forth 20 kilograms of top quality Lebanese hash.
This was not the end of the saga, for the problem of selling it soon arose. He lacked the apparatus and sufficient contacts, so only managed to sell a small fraction of the load. He had to keep the stash hidden and it was not until many months later that he took it with him on his regular return to Canada. Neither could he find any buyers there until he ran into an American from San Francisco who said he'd help him sell it there and it would not take even a day. So Bernie went with him. They went to this guy's flat and he said they should drop acid as that was the key to the enterprise. Bernie took a mind-altering substance for the very first time. To his stunned amazement, people started calling round, all willing to buy large amounts at fair prices and the whole lot was gone within 24 hours. The sum of money he ended up with was very considerable, I recall, over $10,000.- Unfortunately, however, a close friend of his was in financial difficulty with his small business and Bernie lent the entire sum to him on the prospect of a yet bigger return, with which he would set his mother up in a house and so on. It did not take that long before the friend went bankrupt and Bernie never recovered a single dollar from him.