Eddy Says

Eddy Says: Drukqs Part II – Pandablood

By | Published on Thursday 17 March 2011

Eddy Temple-Morris

Way back in July last year, I wrote about a fellow DJ who was considering quitting music to get away from the drugs, and discussed how I’d found it possible to keep the two separate. Here is the long promised follow-up. And once you’ve read this, you can look forward to ‘Drukqs 3: Terror At 30,000 Feet’ – coming to an Eddy Says column near you… some time.

I’ve found this Charlie Sheen saga immensely entertaining. Watching a man walk the razor’s edge between genius and insanity is riveting. While on the one hand he raves, deranged and deluded, on the other he says some genuinely inspiring things: “Can’t is the cancer of happen” – I love that. Or “Let’s face it folks, it feels better when you say it” is another admirable sentiment, almost something CALM could hijack as a new strapline. It would sit very comfortably next to ‘being silent isn’t being strong’.

Anyway, all the talk of his tooting seven gram rocks, and having ‘tigerblood’, has ignited Twitter to a point where he became the fastest-followed person ever. People are just talking about it, love him or hate him, people are communicating about him, and his behaviour is making us think about ourselves and ask questions. You know I’m always banging on about the fact we should communicate more, talk more, share more, so this can only be a good thing on that level.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I feel I’m the opposite of Charlie Sheen. I don’t have tigerblood. I wish I did. I have pandablood. I’ve never been good with stimulants. The last line of cocaine to pass these nostrils was years ago, at Manumission in Ibiza, the season before I started Ibiza Rocks in the back room, where one of the organisers casually gave me tiny amount. “This’ll keep you going”, he said, as he casually put the wrap in my record bag to last me until close at around 8am. When in Rome, and all that, so I had one line and it spun me out so badly I’ve not touched it since.

Lightweight? You ain’t heard nothing yet. Pandablood.

This is my favourite pandablood drug story. Eleven years ago and my (ex) wife was pregnant with Tone, we had a week away in Portugal. It was our last holiday alone, and our last chance to go away somewhere on a plane, as she was almost at the airline cut off point for those whose oven buns are getting uncomfortably large.

It was near the end of the holiday, and we were in a shopping mall, having a last splurge before we flew home. Neither of us were breakfasty people, and after a bit of perusal, we felt the need for a bracing coffee to fuel us through the myriad shops.

I ordered a double espresso. What came was more like a quadruple. It was delicious. It had that lovely layer of what Italians call ‘crema’ on the top, which sticks to your top lip. It was what I’d call a ‘holiday coffee’, unusually delicious and indulgent. I thanked the waitress and complimented her on the quality of it.

“Would you like another… on the house?” She offered.

“Thank you”, I replied. “I’d love one”.

What the hell, I thought, I’m on holiday. I didn’t give it another thought as I bolted back the second one, helped by one of those little cinnamon twisty pastry things they serve at coffee shops on the Iberian Peninsula.

We took to the shops to buy a few things and about 40 minutes later we sat down to lunch on one of the ‘outside’ tables of a mall restaurant. That is to say, under the roof, but in the large open area.

Almost immediately I felt a very strange feeling. It’s a specific feeling that smokers of the weed will know all too well. You know that feeling you get when you’ve had a skinful of alcohol, a proper piss up, then you get home and make the mistake of rolling a spliff? THAT feeling. Scientifically speaking, this is the feeling your brain experiences when these two alkaloids clash. It’s more commonly known by phrases like ‘whitey’, ‘purple-out’, ‘max out’, ‘helicopters’, or my favourite, ‘helicopter-beds’.

I knew the feeling well but I was instantly really worried, as I hadn’t drunk anything for about two years, and the last spliff I’d had was about a fortnight before.

Shit, I thought. How can it be that I’m feeling like this? I had the proper collywobbles. I looked down at my shirt and it was jumping in front of my eyes, rather my chest was making my shirt leap out at ridiculously fast tempo. I remember thinking, calm down… you’re a DJ… what’s the BPM… SHIT… 180… Roni Size!

I looked at my Mrs on the other side of the table, just within reaching distance and I remember the look of panic and of helplessness on her face. I looked down and then again at her, she was looking around desperately… and with that my heart continued its journey past hardcore Gabba and I passed out right there in the middle of this huge shopping mall.

I woke up some time later on my back, with something partially blocking my otherwise perfect view of the Mediterranean sky. It was a paper bag. It was inflating and deflating before my eyes. I had a classic ‘where am I?’ moment. As I came to, I realised I was on the cold marble floor, and someone had put a paper bag around my nose and mouth.

“You were hyperventilating – this helps”, the angelic stranger said. I was surprised to hear an English voice. She told me she was a British nurse who lived there, and had seen me keel over and come to help my distraught and heavily pregnant wife.

Then the paramedics arrived. They took one side of me each and carried me, like a side of beef, on what turned out to be a walk of shame through the shopping mall. I heard Portuguese people whispering, gossiping, as I was dragged past. I kept hearing the word ‘heroina’ being repeated, as they assumed I must be some kind of drug addict being forcibly ejected, a danger to all and sundry.

I spent the whole afternoon in hospital feeling very weird, nauseous, confused and in a state of shock, as every kind of test possible was administered. After my umpteenth test followed by the umpteenth ‘all clear’, a bald, youngish doctor approached me, looking at his clipboard like somebody looks at a particularly difficult set of Scrabble tiles. He rubbed the crown of his head with his palm again and again, looking at me, then back at his chart.

“I do not understand”, he confessed. “We have tested your heart, lungs, brain, we cannot find anything wrong with you. You have no drugs in your system, no alcohol…”

He scratched his head again. “Please, sir, can you tell me exactly what you have had in the last 24 hours, everything, food or drink”.

“OK, that’s easy”, I answered. “I had a seared tuna steak last night – actually it was cremated, you guys can’t cook fish properly – then this morning I had two delicious cups of coffee and a…”

“Stop!” He jumped. “You had what exactly?”

“Two big cups of espresso…”

“Aaaaaah”, he groaned as he slapped his hand on his forehead. “Caffeina!” Suddenly the last bit of this frustrating jigsaw puzzle slotted into place. I heard various Portuguese swearwords, woven around the word ‘caffeina’ as he walked away, shaking his head at the obvious, when he’d tested for everything more complicated.

I was discharged shortly afterwards.

I couldn’t believe such a strong reaction was purely down to caffeine, so, on my way back to the UK, 48 hours later, I tested myself at the airport. I’d had to get up at 5am to get an early flight, so a tiny single espresso seemed like a good idea after check-in. Within a few minutes of downing it, the panic hit me, I felt sick, a mild case of helicopters started to envelope me, along with a wave of nausea, and I ended up having to go and lie down in the toilet for an embarrassing half an hour or so. I felt in shock for several hours afterwards and called my doctor as soon as I got home.

At my GP appointment, I explained what happened and Annette, my awesome GP at the time, smiled and said: “You OD’d!” She explained that this happened to a great many of her patients and it was, in her words, “an unbuffered overdose of caffeine”. She reminded me that caffeine was the drug Coca Cola and Pepsi chose to replace cocaine, when that became illegal.

“Let me explain it to you as a musician would”, she continued. “You experienced feedback. Only three things make your heart beat faster, drugs, exercise and fear. If you introduce two of these at the same time then you can get something akin to a feedback loop. The drug (caffeine) made your heart race to Roni Size tempo, but it was your fear that made it beat faster still, and you got caught in this loop”.

I’ve drunk decaf ever since and been absolutely fine, but this does demonstrate, aside from the fact that I have the constitution of a giant panda, that caffeine isn’t as cuddly a drug as you might think, and that drinking it every day is like taking cocaine every day. Your body builds a resistance to it, and slowly but surely, you end up needing more and more to feel its effects. The proverbial slippery slope.

I look at people like Charlie Sheen – I’ve had, and still have, a few friends with similar constitutions, people able to abuse themselves with drugs and/or alcohol for days at a time – and I’m jealous of them on a purely physiological level. I do wish I had an iron constitution, I wish I was bigger, beefier, more able to withstand the slings and arrows the world throws at you, but alas, I’m resigned to a fate of being the one that always gets bitten by a diseased mosquito, gets tinnitus, pneumonia, breaks bones and can’t handle stimulants. You’ll probably see a news story soon enough, a small paragraph in a local paper, certainly not a headline in anything national, that reads ‘radio DJ dies after eating too many Maltesers’.

Then I see clips of Chaz Sheen saying he’s “a rockstar from Mars” and I think maybe having pandablood isn’t so bad after all, or as Bill Bailey just put it on Twitter – “Taking part (it’s not the winning)”.

Hahahaha.
X eddy



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