Dealing or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues Page 10

  “Yes,” I said.

  “We only want what’s best for you,” my mother said. When she dies, I’m going to have that one engraved on her headstone. The Final Solution to the upper-middle-class children problem.

  “Your mother is exactly right,” my father said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to say.”

  I looked down at the coffee table. There was an old issue of Life, about the Grandeur That Was Egypt. There was an issue of the Ladies’ Home Terror on top of it, about Drugs in Our High Schools: A Growing Menace.

  “Let’s be practical,” my father said, shifting around in his chair. “Now I know a little something about marijuana, and I’ve heard enough to convince me that it isn’t the dangerous and addicting drug that everybody says it is. So let’s accept that, and go on from there. The fact is, it’s still illegal. And it’s not a little illegal, it’s very illegal. Anyone who sells it runs a grave risk—a risk more serious than any potential benefits that might be gained from the drug itself. Do you follow me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Yes, what?”

  That really ripped me. If I hadn’t been stoned, I probably would have slugged him in the mouth.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Up until then, up until that fucking sir, I had been planning to have a talk with him. I had planned to try, at least to try, to reason with them.

  But that sir was the end, because it just made me remember what I had known all along in the back of my mind, that all this bullshit about parents and kids reasoning together and overcoming the generation gap is just that—bullshit. My parents wanted to make sure that I understood that their trip was the one that mattered. And at that point I just quit.

  All I said was “Yeah, well, look, I don’t know who told you all that, but I quit dealing six months ago. I haven’t had anything to do with it for six months.” This was true.

  “Is that true?” my father said. He seemed newly worried about something.

  “Yes,” I said.

  My mother said, “Are you hungry? Did you have lunch yet?” And she wiped victorious eyes.

  27

  SANDRA, SITTING NEXT TO JOHN on the couch, was wiping the smoke out of her eyes when she noticed her watch. “Oh,” she said, jumping up. “It’s time. We’re gonna miss it.” She went over to the television set and turned it on. I was so stoned that I sat there passively and watched her and then the screen, as it glowed to life with the visage of Sally Scott, Eyewitness News, with the Eyewitness News Team investigating a paramount concern to the parents of Boston: teen-age drug abuse.

  “Lieutenant Murphy,” Sally Scott asked, as she walked along a table laid out, like a feast, with exhibits. “What is this here?”

  “This here is a kilogram of marijuana, which is two point two pounds of the drug. It is dried and pressed into a block for purposes of transportation, as you can see.”

  “I see,” Sally Scott said.

  “If you bring the camera closer, you might get a better shot,” Lieutenant Murphy said helpfully. The camera came closer. “As you can see, this block of the drug is commonly referred to by traffickers and illicit users as a key or a brick.”

  “And this?” Sally Scott asked, moving on.

  “Now, this is what the kids buy from the dope peddlers. This is how the drug is sold, in a one-ounce Baggie. An ounce may cost as much as fifty dollars.”

  “Fifty dollars!” John said. “Jesus, maybe in Wellesley or someplace.”

  “I see,” Sally Scott said. “And how much of this, uh, drug is necessary to make a person, uh …”

  “High?” Lieutenant Murphy asked. “Not very much. The drug is smoked in cigarettes, called reefers or joints. Just one of these small cigarettes is enough to make a person suffer all the effects of the marijuana plant.”

  “Suffer?” Sandra asked, genuinely puzzled.

  John grinned.

  Sally Scott said, “And what exactly are these effects?”

  “Mostly unpleasant,” Lieutenant Murphy said. “The mouth feels dry and the voice may be painful. The eyes hurt and one may suffer hallucinations. All inhibitions are released and the person under the drug may act in peculiar and bizarre ways.”

  “In what ways?” Sally Scott had unusually large eyes.

  “Someone on this drug, under its effects, stoned, as the psychologically addicted users say, such a person is capable of almost anything.”

  “I certainly am,” Sandra said, and got up and switched the television off.

  “Hey,” John said, turning it back on. “Roll a joint, Sandy.” The sound returned just in time to hear Sally Scott ask “… the magnitude of the drug problem in Boston?”

  “Very serious,” Murphy said seriously. “There’s no question of that. All reports indicate that the center of drug abuse in the country is shifting from San Francisco to New York and Boston. Boston is now the center.”

  “Why is that?” Sally Scott asked.

  “The climate,” said John.

  “Primarily because of the influx of college students to the Greater Boston area. We have two hundred thousand college students, most of them from out of state. Unfortunately, some of these students deal in drugs.” Murphy paused to get his breath, then went on. “You see, the atmosphere on the college campuses today tends to encourage bizarre behavior, and often the responsible adult on the scene, the administrator, and so forth, will pooh-pooh even illicit activities if they happen to be fashionable. The campuses also provide a gathering place for all types of weirdos, outcasts, and hangers-on who wouldn’t be able to exist in a normal American environment. These types are often among the offenders. Simply by their presence, they assist the growing drug traffic.”

  “Oh, Christ,” John said, “are you listening to this bullshit?”

  Murphy was gone, and Sally Scott was saying: “… University’s psychopharmacology unit for answers to these and other questions. Doctor, what is the medical evidence on marijuana?”

  The doctor was pale and thin and thoughtful-looking. He wore glasses and blinked his eyes a lot, and spoke in little shotgun-bursts. “Well the first thing to say—is that there is very little in the way of—hard medical data on the drug. On the contrary we know remarkably little—about the effects—or the hazards—of this particular compound; however—we can say—that earlier ideas were wrong—and the drug is not addicting—by this we mean—there is no tolerance—phenomenon—and no psychological dependence or physical—uh, dependence—craving—no craving—and we can say the drug does not lead—to heroin or other narcotics.”

  “You say heroin or other narcotics. Isn’t marijuana a narcotic?”

  “Well, that depends—on your definition—but strictly speaking, a narcotic means—something that produces sleep—from narcos in Greek, ‘to sleep’—but in the usual sense it means pain-killing and sensory-dulling medications—sleeping pills—and these drugs, as you know, are nearly all addicting—the term narcotic—to most people—means addicting drug—though not, of course—to doctors.” Blink, blink.

  Sally Scott looked him right in the eye. “How dangerous is marijuana?”

  “Well, that depends again—on your definition—an automobile—is pretty dangerous—and so is aspirin, liquor, and cigarettes—the same thing—all medications—all drugs, broadly speaking—are dangerous and you are better off without them. In terms—of purely pleasure-producing drugs—like cigarettes and coffee—and alcohol—we can say that marijuana—so far as we know—may be a better drug to take—for pleasure—that is, safer and less addicting—but then—we know little about it.”

  “When you say a better drug …”

  “In terms of side effects—long-term damage—something like alcohol, as you know—is a terrible drug—physically addicting—psychologically disrupting—literally a poison to brain cells, a neurotoxin—and yet it is perfectly acceptable—to society.”

  “Alcohol is a poison to brain cells?” Sally Scott asked, astonished. “But alcohol is used in all civiliza
tions around the world.”

  “Yes,” the doctor said. “That is true.”

  After half an hour of this, I got up off the couch and said to John: “Got a lid?”

  John raised an eyebrow. “Studying?”

  “The exam’s tomorrow,” I said, “and I don’t know a fucking thing about the course.”

  John shrugged.

  “Well, it’s not Spots and Dots, you know,” I said. Spots and Dots was the toughest course offered by the Fine Arts Department. Modern Western Art 1880–1960. Blind men had been known to pass.

  “Top drawer of my dresser,” John said. “But only take one.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. I opened the drawer and took a Baggie, one of the fuller-looking ones. Herbie was particular about his payoffs. When I came back, John said, “By the way, check your desk?”

  I shook my head, and went into the other room to check my desk. There was a stack of mail on it; on top, in a cream-colored envelope, some sort of invitation. The handwriting on the front was Annie’s. I tore it open. It was an invitation to attend the Piggy Club Garden Party the next Saturday. I looked at the postmark on the envelope; it had been mailed a week before. Too late to give a negative reply. I went out and threw it in John’s lap. “Did you rig this?”

  John looked shocked. “You mean, arrange it?”

  “No, dammit, I mean call her up and tell her I was out of town.”

  John said, “I knew you’d be back in time.” He smiled. “To accept,” he added.

  “Get bent,” I said.

  “It’s a peace offering, you know,” John went on. “It means she still likes you.”

  “Get bent,” I said again. John was a member of the Piggy Club, and he was having a moment of fun at my expense. We both knew that Annie was now making it with a club member, and we both knew that club members were not permitted themselves to invite women to the parties.

  “You don’t want to go?” John said, now acting surprised.

  “Me? Not want to go to the Piggy Club Picnic? You’ve got to be kidding. I can hardly wait.”

  “Garden Party,” John amended. He sighed. “Little late to call her up and refuse, isn’t it?”

  That was unnecessary, and as I left the room I slammed the door behind me. Typical John interaction. I was furious and, in a sense, grateful for the pressures of the coming exam. No chance to brood on it. It feels so good when I stop.

  Down the hall was Herbie’s room. Herbie was a weird little cat, sort of a cross between Mr. Natural and Dr. Zharkov. He was a senior, and seventeen years old. He’d come from somewhere in West Virginia, where his father worked in the mines and his mother worked in the mine offices; one of those trips. Mother had noticed very early that Herbie was not like the other children and had taken him to a testing center that the government ran for mentally retarded children. The testing people had found that Herbie’s I.Q. could not be accurately measured—and not because he was retarded. They’d sent him to a special high school in New York, and then they’d gotten Harvard interested in him. Herbie hadn’t taken a math course that was listed in the catalog since his first year at Harvard, nor, for that matter, an economics course or a physics course. He was now working up at the Observatory, taking a side degree in astrophysics.

  I came in and found him sitting in his bentwood rocker, rocking back and forth. He wore dungarees and a garish print shirt, and he was smoking a joint the size of an expensive cigar.

  “Peter,” he said, when he saw me.

  “Herbie,” I said, and sat down across from him.

  Herbie scratched his head. “Let’s see, now.” He looked across the room at a wall calendar. “Economics, is it?”

  I nodded.

  “All right,” he said. “We can take an hour.” He held out his hand. I dropped the Baggie into it. He squeezed it, feeling the texture, then held it up to the light; finally tossed it onto his desk. “Sold,” he said. “There’s paper and pencil on the desk. Let’s get started. It’s all very simple,” he said. “The internal dynamics of the European nation-state in the early part of the seventeenth century eventually necessitated the manipulation of the economy to serve the political interests of the state. That concept in turn led—am I going too fast?”

  “Just fine,” I said, scribbling as fast as I could. “Just fine.”

  28

  I HATE THE MORNINGS BEFORE exams. I always go to breakfast, because I’ve been up all night, and I feel really ragged, and I have coffee and that makes me feel even more ragged. And I read the paper and shoot the shit and try to forget that I have an exam at 9:07 and that I haven’t studied for it.

  If you can get with some good breakfast discussion, then you can forget the exam coming. A discussion like whether women with small boobs have better orgasms than women with big boobs.

  But there wasn’t any such discussion the morning after I got back from San Francisco. I just sat there with my coffee and notes, and I felt ragged. It was so absurd, the school riff: all that time spent in school, which in the end amounts to the morning of an exam and the hour or two of the exam itself.

  Across the dining hall, a few industrious wimps were still studying: jamming down those last few pages of notes, knowing full well that it might make the difference between an A-minus and a B-plus. I thought of the Romans stuffing themselves with food, then sticking their fingers down their throats, vomiting it up and starting to eat again. Of course, if you eat that way, you must be much more interested in the process of eating than you are in the nutritional value of the food you take in. You must also have the stomach for it.

  Pretty soon the wimps were dumping their trays, and hustling feverishly out the door, talking to themselves. The time had come. I got up and left with them.

  The exam was held in Memorial Hall, a cavernous medieval sort of building, with desks in long rows. The proctors wandered from desk to desk with their hands clasped behind their backs. The best proctors—the most professional ones—remained entirely and haughtily aloof. But the graduate students and section men who were there to answer questions about the exam questions, as well as to be proctors, were pretty bad. A lot of them liked to walk from student to student and check out what was being written.

  About halfway through the hour one of them stopped to look over my shoulder. He looked, and he stayed. I kept writing, getting suddenly nervous. He had a nose cold, this proctor, and he sounded like a horse with pneumonia on a cold winter morning. Finally I turned back to look at him.

  He was shaking his head as he read the page.

  I shrugged.

  He shrugged back, but at least he walked on. The bastard had shaken me up; I began having trouble concentrating on the question. Particularly since I hadn’t done any of the reading that was necessary to answer it. I was just sort of going along, putting down words. The answer didn’t mean anything, but then neither did the question.

  I began to think of Sukie, and how she had looked when I left her at the airport. I wondered if she made it back all right. It was a drag for a single chick to hitch out to Berkeley at night. And then I wondered if she was meeting somebody afterward. I wondered if she had just wanted a ride to S.F., and that was why she had come in.

  Then I started to think about how she had been in bed. It was obvious that she wasn’t learning anything from me, which was completely to be expected, but just then it seemed outrageous, absurd, that she should have been with anyone but me. Or that she ever would be with anyone but me in the future. I could feel irritation building, and I realized that I was jealous. Not even jealous, more …

  “Five minutes,” the king proctor said, stepping to the microphone.

  I looked back down at my bluebook. I still had another essay to go. I stared at the question, praying for inspiration, and I got it at the last minute.

  29

  I HAVE NEVER BEEN JEALOUS. At least, not about women. I have been jealous of objects, of things, and sometimes of traits; I remember especially a friend of mine when I was a
kid. He held my unbroken admiration for years, because of his imagination. He effortlessly devised such wonders as the Burning-Bag-of-Shit Trick, conveniently placed on a neighbor’s doorstep—when the neighbor tried to stamp it out, well, that was his problem.

  Also the Good Humor Man Stunt, in which one kid would sprawl out on the road, deathly ill, and enlist the Good Humor Man’s help, while another kid went to the back of the truck and climbed into the refrigerated compartment. There he would stay, eating himself sick, for a full block, at which time a similar catastrophic mid-road illness would again cause the truck to stop, and allow the half-frozen and satiated ice-cream fiend to escape giggling and shivering into the sunlight.

  And I remember I was jealous of a guy who lived down the street from me one summer who had a cycle before I even had a driver’s license.

  But as far as chicks went, I had never really felt anything. Certainly not jealousy. Chicks had been a necessary evil, giggling half-wits who played games until your balls were purple and then forgot their purses in the theater, or had to be in by midnight, or Weren’t That Kind of Girl, or some other crap.

  And yet there I was, finished with the exam and by all reasonable expectations hot on the trail home, to blow some dope and collapse into bed, after being up almost forty-eight hours. But that wasn’t happening. Instead I went right back to my room and called her.

  The phone rang a long time. Finally a dull voice said, “Hello?”

  “Hello, is Sukie there?”

  “Who?” A very dull voice, and then I remembered the time change.

  “Sukie Blake, Susan, is she there?”

  “What number are you calling?” the guy said. He was being very, very careful about waking up and I couldn’t stand it.

  “Sukie, man, Sukie, the blond chick who lives upstairs, the one with the weird eye?”