I doubted whether any of my new acquaintances went a day without a smoke or some other stimulant. As my friends knew, the E hit me as a revelation and I wanted it served to the prime minister and pumped into the water supply. I popped handfuls of it every day for a fortnight. It led me into my own body and out into others’, insofar as there was anyone real there at all. I couldn’t tell. (I liked to call us E-trippers “a loose association of solipsists.”) My ardor made my new pals laugh. They had learned that E wasn’t the cure, and the last thing the world needed was another drug philosopher.

But after the purifications and substitutions of culture, I believed I was returning to something neglected: fundamental physical pleasure, the ecstasy of the body, of my skin, of movement, and of accelerated, spontaneous affection for others in the same state. I had been of puny build, not someone aware of his strength, and had always found it easier to speak of the most intimate things than to dance. As a Newbody, however, I began to like the pornographic circus of rough sex; the stuff that resembled some of the modern dance I had seen, animalistic, without talk. I begged to be turned into meat, held down, tied, blindfolded, slapped, pulled, and strangled, entirely merged in the physical, all my swirling selves sucked into orgasm. “Insights from the edge of consciousness,” I’d have called it, had words come easily to me at that time. But they were the last thing on my mind.

By using others, I could get myself on a sexual high for two or three days. It was indeed druglike: a lucent, shivering pleasure not only in my own body but, I believed, in all existence at its most elemental. Narcissus singing into his own arse! Hello! I was also aware, as I danced naked on the balcony of a house overlooking Lake Como at daybreak after spending the night with a young couple who didn’t interest me, of how many addicts I’d known and how tedious any form of addiction could be. The one thing I didn’t want was to get stuck within.

For the group, there was sex of every variety, and the others’ drug-taking had moved to heroin. At least two of the boys were HIV positive. Several of the others believed that that was their destiny. Because my contact with reality was, at the most, glancing, it took me a while to see how desperate the pleasures were, and how ridiculously romantic their sense of shared tragedy and doom was. My generation had been through it, with James Dean, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, and others. If I’d been a kid now, I’d have found poetic misery hard to resist. As it was, I knew I was not of them, because I couldn’t help wondering what their parents would have thought.