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gether as expatriates from their various countries or simply as British artists who felt outcast in their own land. It was a spectacular place full of singular originals--the men and women artists and their work. There was also plenty of dope, but unfortunately only two varieties of it, Lebanese hashish and pure London, drugstore heroin which was, of course, legal there for any registered addict.

The group sat in a quick cluster on the thick, Persian-rugged floor of what appeared to be the living room,--all the rooms looked so much alike it was hard to tell any difference between them with the exception of the kitchen and W.C. There was a tray on the floor, and Emmett helped himself to the papers, cigarette tobacco and hash, using about six or seven papers and mixing the loose tobacco with lots of hash to roll a "splif" which is a joint about as fat as a cigar and just as long. It took him nearly half an hour to smoke it with no help from anyone, because they all had their own or were not interested in anything else but the high-grade pharmacy scag. So was Emmett, and by the time he was loaded on smoke, he started getting a real yen to get off behind some of that fine A-l stuff, and he did, doing himself up as if he had his last fix the day before, instead of a decade ago.

The moment the rush hit and the dope ran through his veins, every cell in Emmett's body snapped with remembrance of the sensation they had never really forgotten during the ten, long, clean, past years. He nodded out right after what was only a cellular memory became again a real feeling enveloping his body in its own erotic warmth. He didn't even have time for any regrets--if he had any--just enough time to nod his head plop! down on his chest which wasn't heaving with its asthmatic wheeze any longer.

Emmett's nod became a deep sleep with him propped up in the corner of the room, leaning against the interesting walls undisturbed by anything or body. One of the poet elders in the house woke him up after three or four hours, because night was rapidly falling, and Emmett had to get to the "Dialectics of Liberation" conference being held in a gigantic, fantastic, huge dome of a building appropriately called the Roundhouse. It had once been the warehouse, storage depot and garage for the numerous vehicles of London's Metropolitan Transport system.

When Emmett arrived there a little before eight o'clock that Saturday night, he liked the industrial, working-class smell and leftover accoutrements of the brilliantly designed, hollow-mammoth Roundhouse, but he didn't particularly like the look of the weekend crowd [end page 427]