Dealing or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues Page 5

  Carol Moss appeared out of nowhere and sat down at the table. She didn’t say anything, just sat.

  “Want some smoke?” I said to her, holding out the joint. She shook her head and Musty laughed.

  “Forget about her,” he said. “She’ll snap out of it.”

  I took another long, luxurious hit and then held the joint away from me, observing the fine blue-gray smoke and the creeping advance of the burning tip across the yellow terrain. And realized that I was stoned. “Wow.”

  Musty said, “Fine smoke, what?”

  12

  IT WAS DEFINITELY EXTRAORDINARY SMOKE, and I couldn’t say a thing for a while. The events of the day got up and introduced themselves to me formally and asked me to sit and chat. Having no alternative, that is exactly what I did. It had been quite a day.

  I realized that I was very tired and that the business end of everything had been concluded. I could crash. The feeling came over me like a huge breath of hot air, not uncomfortable but impossible to escape, and I knew that I wanted to sleep.

  Musty was in front of me saying something. I think he was still talking about how good the dope was. My ears focused and zoomed in on his words. People talk too much, I was thinking. And they eat too much. So they fart a lot and have jizzy friends like Lou. They’re fat and they drive fast cars and listen to the news and beat off to Lawrence Welk. They’re lonely. They get cancer and diarrhea and heartburn and dysentery and malaria and syphilis and an education, all from talking too much. The hell with them. I wanted to go to sleep.

  “Where’s Lou?” I asked, and everyone in the kitchen stirred audibly.

  “He said something,” said Musty.

  “Jesus Christ, he’s alive.” A chick’s voice. Must be that Carol what’s-her-name.

  “And he wants to go to sleep!” said Musty, laughing.

  “Where’s Lou?” I said again. “Got to get some sleep. Completely whacked out. That dope is unbelievable.”

  “He’s functioning,” said Musty to the chick. “But just barely.” Then to me: “Tell you the truth, I don’t have the slightest idea where Lou is right now, and he probably doesn’t either. He may be back in an hour, which was an hour ago, but it’s more likely that he’ll be back sometime tomorrow. He’s got an old lady in North Berkeley and once he’s up there he doesn’t show for a while. So you might as well crash here.”

  “Fine,” I said, “anywhere. Sorry to be so lively, but this happens to me every so often, just comes over me. Nothing I can do about it. Uncontrollable desire to close my eyes. Strange but true.”

  “You can take Jack’s room,” said Musty. “Second door on the left, at the top of the stairs. There’s a sleeping bag in the closet if there aren’t enough blankets.”

  I thanked him and split.

  13

  SECOND DOOR ON THE LEFT, open, I stumbled in. Sat down and with a sigh of relief, took off my shoes and was just about to throw off the jacket when I heard someone say “Hello.” I whirled around, and there she was, or rather there it was, a shift of swirling colors so bright they hurt my eyes, glistening white teeth, beautiful tanned skin—a fine woman, the whole thing extremely fine, too fine, to be true, in fact too fine to be true anytime but now. All I could think was, Please would you … please just go away.

  “Hello,” I said. I put my shoes back on and stood up. “Sorry, but they told me downstairs this room was empty. Which room is Jack’s?”

  “Sit down,” she said, still smiling.

  “I’d like to very much,” I said, “in the morning. But right now I’m very sleepy and have to go to bed. So if you’d tell me where—”

  “This is Jack’s room,” she said. “My dog is having puppies in my room and the smell is too much, and I didn’t know anyone was staying here tonight, so …” She shrugged. “But if it really bothers you I’ll leave. The smell’s not that bad.” Another beautiful smile. I was being hustled; she knew damned well I wasn’t going to throw her out if her dog was having puppies. Well, hell, I figured I could probably get her to drop one of the Seconals I had with me, so the light wouldn’t be on all night. I wondered how long I was going to have to be sociable before I could shove one down her throat. There was nothing to do but sit down and find out.

  “Your dog’s having puppies?” I said.

  “Yeah,” she laughed. “Six the last time I looked, but probably more by now. I’d take you in to show you, but Dagoo is getting motherly already and she wouldn’t like having anybody around she didn’t already know.” I nodded, cursing myself for not having been born a dog, with the same prerogative. “Want to hear some sounds?” she said, and without waiting for an answer she went over to the stereo in the corner of the room. As she did she brushed her long blond hair back from her face and I saw it clearly for the first time in the candlelight. Then she came back over and sat down next to me.

  “Want to smoke some dope?” she said. “Out-of-sight stuff, Musty got it for a rich friend of his back East.” She produced a lid and began rolling some joints. She lit one, and placed the others in the marvelous cleft peeking over the top of her shift.

  “Great place to keep your stash,” I laughed. Maybe I would blow some dope. This was obviously going to take some time, this social bit.

  “Got into the habit this summer, during the riots,” she said. “They were hassling people just for being on the street, stopping you and frisking you for dope, anything. The cops love to give a chick a good going over, but they never check there.”

  I nodded and took a long hit, noticing as I did that the dope was different from the stuff I’d been tasting with Musty. And had a quick paranoid flash: was he pushing me one brick of good dope and giving me another nine keys of shit? But then I thought, No, not Musty. He was a businessman, and besides he was too close to John. No, that was the kind of stunt that smacked-out old Ernie Statler would’ve pulled. I laughed at the thought of Ernie, and just then a lightning bolt zinged between my ears and caressed the backs of my eyeballs. I was a new man.

  “Fine smoke,” I said, giving her the joint. “Very fine smoke.”

  “I should hope so, if you’re going to knock off that much of it in one drag. Man, the look in your eyes was golden. What’sa matter, you feeling bad when I came in?”

  “Just tired,” I said. “It’s been a long day.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” she said. “This stuff really gives you a run for your money.” Then she hopped up—“Wow, listen to that!”—and went over to turn up the stereo.

  She came back and sat down again and stared at me. Not really at me, but at what I was wearing. As if to say, I like you and all, but whoever told you to put those things on? I got a flash on Sproul Plaza that afternoon and suddenly realized what had been happening that day, all day, ever since I’d gotten into town. I’d been swimming upstream the whole time, because of the way I looked.

  I laughed and said, “I know. Who’s my tailor.”

  She shook her head. “No, no, I didn’t mean that. It’s just that, well, I just can’t get over those duds. You are the one from Cambridge, aren’t you?” I nodded, and she laughed. “God, do all the dope people in the East look like you?”

  The way she said it, I had to laugh with her. “No, just the ones who run bricks for paranoid friends. I look like this whenever I come out here. It’s a trip, huh?”

  She laughed again, then said in a surprised voice, “Hey, I know where I’ve seen you. You were over at Steven’s this afternoon.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good friends with Steven?”

  “You good friends with Ross?”

  She looked at me, then shrugged. “Ross’s okay. You’ve just got to get to know him. As a matter of fact, I remember him saying something about you. Sounded like you and him didn’t get to know each other the right way.”

  “What is the right way?”

  She laughed. “There isn’t. Want another smoke?” I nodded and she reached down into her shift to retrieve another joint. I
figured that at the rate we were going, neither of us would be needing a Seconal. We’d be out cold in an hour.

  “This dope almost never got here today,” she went on. “Musty’s place got busted about ten minutes after he got the word and he barely had time to move it all out.” Her eyes got big. “They wouldn’t have had to bust him, either. Just his bricks. He’s gotten cocky lately, and that house was rented in his own name.”

  “Yeah, I saw that.” She stopped fumbling with the matches and looked at me. “I flew in this afternoon, see, and I only had that one address. And nobody left a note on the door.”

  She laughed. “Wow, I heard they took the walls out.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, they did. But hell, it’s over, done. So why don’t you light that joint.”

  She did, and passed it over. Then she said, “You flew out just to pick up the bricks?”

  I held up my fingers. “Three days, and I’m off again.”

  She was incredulous. “Three days? That’s all the time you’re going to stay? Why not hang around, once you’re out here?”

  “Well, I’d like to, but I’ve got to get back. Exams.” I laughed. “Anyway, it’s not as ridiculous as it sounds, if you’ve ever spent a winter in Beantown.” I looked at her, and she shook her head. “Oh, well, you’ve missed something. Snow, sleet, wind, gunk—Boston’s got it all. It’s a winter wonderland.”

  “Far out,” she said. “I moved up here to get away from too much good weather. From L.A., just south of L.A., actually. Bright sun and eighty degrees all year round. It drove me nuts. So I split school and wound up here in Berkeley.” She leaned close to me and gave me what was by this time a darkly stained roach. “How’d you know Musty?” she said.

  “I didn’t,” I said. “He’s a friend of a friend—that rich guy you were talking about before—dude named John. Very nice cat who unfortunately was born with a trust fund in his mouth.” Then I shook my head. “That’s just a state of mind,” I said. “He’s actually a great guy.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “He sounds it.” And as soon as I heard her say that I knew that, somehow, she’d felt the same vibrations that I had. It was John, and the world he’d built up around him: distant, alien, and totally destructive to the atmosphere in the room.

  And then she was saying something about another joint and I was nodding, not thinking about that but rather about the way I was feeling, the way I was slipping and sliding head over heels into the old I-am-you-and-who-is-he? routine.

  Because suddenly the old Subterranean Laundry Man was there, pulling out the dirty linen for all to see and admire, watching everything that I did. Scrutinizing idiosyncrasies, scribbling notes, making points. She has her hand on your wrist, my boy, aren’t you going to respond? She trusts you and wants you, old chap, aren’t you going to help the lady out? It was weird, that feeling. And it made me very nervous. I was split in two, cut down the middle, the one half watching and the other half acting on dictation. I was suddenly being careful. Careful not to blow the scene, careful not to mess up all the good work done so far, careful to keep the emotional strain to a minimum until I could manage to plunk her firm little ass into bed. And with the caution, with the split, came the memories.

  I first met the Laundry Man in high school. He was just a casual acquaintance then—a friend of a friend, you might say. But I soon discovered that I was more ambitiously horny than I would have ever dreamed possible—and that my three daily hours of football with the high school meatballs didn’t alleviate the pain one bit. That knowledge was the birthright of the Laundry Man, and he thrived on it until one day he was bigger than me, and was calling the shots. It soon became my habit to flee the chloroformed vistas of pep rallies and cheerleaders and student body apathy, and to make my way to New York, where I haunted the bars of the Lower East Side, getting thrown out of most of them for being underage, and the rest for drooling. But I continued undaunted, hunting for that mythical older woman who would, in the privacy of her run-down apartment, teach me every exotic churn and buzzle known to man.

  I learned to drink Scotch on the rocks like apple cider, and to perform a number of other routines suggested by fellow travelers—socks in my undertrow, a wedding ring on my finger, a carefully cultivated five-o’clock shadow, and on and on. And I got all the ass I wanted, Grade B ass, to be sure, and not all of it inspected by the Department of Agriculture, but then that’s what I was looking for on the Lower East Side. I thought it was all very funky.

  But the whole time I was hustling, I was watching. I was comparing notes with the other guys (TWA stewies are best?) and then trying new little numbers out (my wife died of leukemia, she was only twenty) and then watching again. And one day I finally got sick of it, especially sick of the chicks who couldn’t play it any other way except as this kind of a game, and more especially sick of myself because I’d been doing it so long that it was part of me, it was there all the time, and I couldn’t turn it on and off at will any more. The Laundry Man wouldn’t knock off after working hours like the rest of the boys. By the time I stopped going down to New York, I hated the whole riff.

  Only to discover that my peers and classmates were now digging the joys of communion. The chicks in school were suddenly hankering for me, mostly because I was aloof. Sweet little homemade lemonade cunts sidling up to you in the corridor and launching into their version of “Getting To Know You.” I couldn’t stand it. I told them to be quiet, and then to go away, and finally in desperation to fuck off. I became a monk. I avoided them. Because the whole time the Laundry Man was back in my head, stiff with starch and saying, Come on now, son, oblige the lady. Be sociable. Be a man! But I knew better than anyone that the Laundry Man spoke with forked tongue, and I did not want to lie again.

  So I tried to keep him under lock and key, and just live my life. But here he was again, huffing and puffing and lusting for the battle—and here was this goddamned chick playing right up to him.

  14

  SHE WAS TAPPING MY SHOULDER. “Hey,” she said, “you planning to finish that all by yourself?”

  I looked down at the roach in my hand and laughed. I was about to suggest another, but she already had it out and was lighting it. Then she said, “What do you do in Cambridge?”

  “I’m on the dole,” I said. It was supposed to be funny, but as I watched her face I could see that she didn’t understand. And then, it wasn’t all that funny even if you did understand. In fact, it wasn’t funny at all. It was a way of life.

  “How’s that?” she said, head to one side.

  “Government,” I said. “I study government, political science, whatever they call it around here.”

  “Oh,” sort of drawing her breath in, trying to figure out if I was leading up to some kind of punch line. I wished there were some kind of punch line for school. “Is that interesting?”

  I laughed. “I don’t know. Ever read the papers?”

  “Only the comics,” she said, and I laughed again. That was good.

  “Well, there aren’t any comics in the government department at Harvard. At least, they don’t think of themselves that way. Nothing but serious, devoted scholars.”

  She said, “Why don’t you split? I mean, it doesn’t sound like you dig it much.”

  I shook my head. “Not for a while.” Chances were pretty good that if you split, especially if you were splitting to get out of the machine, you’d just wind up a different kind of machine.

  “Draft?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Can’t you get out?” she said.

  “Of the all-new, action Army?” I said. “I don’t know. What the hell, though, what a drag this is, talking about it like this. This is exactly what they want you to do—get good and freaked-out about something as half-assed as the Army so you can’t really concentrate on what’s going down. Divide and conquer,” I said, raising a mock finger, and she smiled. I finished the joint and put it in the bag with the other roaches. “What’re you up to in Berkeley, right now?”


  “Working in a studio,” she said.

  “Is that right?” I said. “Far out. What, modeling?”

  She laughed. “No, no. A recording studio.” She tossed her head in the direction of the stereo. “Like, we produced this album, for one, and we do a lot of re-mixing. But pretty soon we’re going to be doing the whole works, from beginning to end. They’ve almost finished the new studio.” She pulled out another joint. “Seventy-two tracks, man. Dig that.”

  “Far out,” I said again.

  She got up to change the record, and I didn’t see but rather felt her presence this time, as she moved about the room in the flickering light.

  “Sukie,” I said, half to myself, as she sat down again beside me. Rolling it over against the roof of my mouth and seeing it come out with the smoke of the joint, “Sukie.” I turned to her and asked, “Why do they call you Sukie?”

  She looked up at me and I was filled with her strange eyes, rich and thick, and I couldn’t hold the gaze. Suddenly I wanted to kiss her and I folded my hands and thought about Mt. Auburn Street. There, that was better. I could talk again.

  “You still haven’t told me,” looking at her again.

  She turned away. “Because I’m, ah, tawdry.” She seemed to savor the word as she said it, bitterly, and it dripped from her mouth.

  “Tawdry,” I said. “Good word. Fine word. Sukie Tawdry. Tawdry Sukie−−”

  “Don’t,” she said, and I could hear an edge in her voice, something hurting, and so I didn’t. I just sat. And wondered, What now? And wondered again about the Seconal. After a while she put her hand out to me and said, “You’re nice.”

  I was angry. “What?”

  “I said, you’re nice.”

  “What does that mean?”—thinking, Christ, Jesus Christ, not this bit, not just now when I was starting to dig you.