Dark Specter

2

The time I remember best is the night we ended up down at the Commercial, and all that happened afterward. It would be nice and neat to be able to say that that’s where the whole thing started, but there must have been a lot more behind it, a slow shifting of psychological fault lines under the pressure of life events about which I know nothing, about which maybe no one ever knew anything, and never will now.

Minneapolis is not exactly notorious for its seedy lowlife, but there is-or was, back in the seventies-a part of downtown, a couple of blocks either side of the railroad tracks, which got reasonably lively after dark. The Commercial Hotel was right in the middle of it. They knocked it down later and built a mall with fountains and escalators and shops selling things which no reasonable person could need, but I don’t recall anyone circulating a petition to save the place. The Commercial was one of those oppressively huge hotels which went up all over the country around the turn of the century near major railroad depots.Its fortunes exactly mirrored those of the transportation system it was built to serve, and during its last decade the rooms were used only by prostitutes, winos and other down-and-outs. What kept the place in business was its liquor license. The bar was the biggest and rowdiest in town and they had pretty tight bands on the weekends, but for us the main attraction was the atmosphere of sleaze and failure. It appealed to our sense of living on the edge.

Maybe that was what held the group together. It’s hard, in retrospect, to see what else we had in common. Even calling it a group is misleading. We were just a bunch of guys who liked to hang out together. The membership was never clearly defined. The basic core-Greg, Sam, Larry, Vince and me-was more or less stable, but it also included a temporary assortment of girlfriends, buddies, hangers-on and anyone who happened to be crashing at our pad at the time.

We were all young, of course, but so was everyone else back then. Greg, Sam and I were all connected in one way or another with the university, but the links were so tenuous and diverse that this too is a false trail. Greg had been an athlete, a college football star, but had been dropped from the team in his second year following a much-publicized drug bust. Sam had studied English for two years-we’d taken some classes together, which is where we met-before dropping out to complete his studies at the University of Life, while I was in my third year of Comparative Literature.

As for Larry and Vince, they came from other worlds altogether. Larry worked for a painting contractor, and got home every night covered in specks and streaks of various hues, stoned out of his mind on paint thinner. Vince’s means of support remained a mystery. We suspected that he was subsidized by his parents, but that was not something you could either admit or inquire about in those days. He spent most of the day fiddling with a bank of stereo equipment he had put together from kits and spare parts, which provided a mind-numbing volume of sound that was the envy of our friends and the despair of our neighbors.

What brought us together originally was the house. It was a pleasantly decrepit wood-framed place with an overgrown yard and a huge maple out front, in a run-down blue-collar neighborhood south of the river. Many lots had been demolished and rebuilt as condos or walk-ups, and the surviving older houses had a provisional, doomed look accentuated by lack of care and upkeep. Respectable renters steered clear of such properties, but the combination of low rent and no hassle was just what we were looking for. The landlord, an old Swede, was waiting for some redevelopment company to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse, and he didn’t much care what we did with, to, or in the house just as long as the rent was there on time every month.

It’s all part of the general pattern that the guy who originally found the place didn’t go on to become a member of the group at all. He was a dour jock who’d been a wide receiver on the same team as Greg, but had now graduated and was working as a salesman at a Dodge dealership. He and a coworker took the house and invited Greg to share it with them. Greg brought in Sam, who in turn mentioned the place to me. I was living with a girlfriend that year, but I was looking for an excuse to break up so I said I’d give it a try.

The arrangement was doomed from the start, of course. The two car salesmen may have looked and sounded very much the same as us when we met them over a beer one Saturday night, wearing their weekend tie-dyes and faded Levis, but they had in fact crossed the shadow line which separated our floating world from the uncompromising grid of straight society, and were none too happy about this transition. Monday through Friday they had to be up at seven, showered and shaved, suited and wide-tied, and get out there and move stock. Their servitude was thrown into sharp relief by our anarchistic lifestyle, and they tended to react particularly badly when we staggered back in from an all-night party just as they were leaving for work, or decided to play The Who Live at Leeds at the appropriate volume around three in the morning.

But what brought things to a crisis was the question of drugs. We had a fairly large stash of these on hand at any given time, mostly pot and hash, but also more exotic treats. This gave the car salesmen the jitters. If the house got busted, their careers would be over before they’d started. At first they came on heavy and tried to enforce a ban, but there were three of us and only two of them, plus we had the advantage of being able to drop some uppers to improve our attitude, or toke up and mellow out if the vibes got too heavy. It must have been a bitch. They finally gave up and moved out to a squeaky-clean high-rise near the dealership, leaving us to find replacements quickly to make up the next month’s rent. Larry turned up on the first trawl-he’d been to school with Sam and they used to shoot pool together once in a while-along with another guy who didn’t last, and the following month Vince materialized from somewhere, I still don’t know how or why, and stuck.

Such a casual, disparate grouping seems pretty unlikely now, yet at the time none of us thought twice about it. Later, looking back nostalgically from the far side of my own shadow line at that lost world of ease and excitement, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out just what it was that made the whole thing work. I can’t speak for the others, but I think I know what drew me to them: a passion for the tawdry and the transient, a weakness for the power not just of cheap music but of cheap emotion, cheap ideas and cheap thrills of every kind.

To Greg and Larry, all this came naturally. It was where they had grown up, a language they had spoken all their lives. With Vince it was a little more forced. He never talked about his parents, but one or two comments he let drop in unguarded moments suggested that he’d been raised in the kind of small-town home where they subscribed to the New Yorker and listened to the live broadcast from the Met every Saturday morning. He had to work his catechism of popular culture, but did so with all the zeal of a recent convert. For Sam, the journey had been even longer. His parents had permitted only one book in the house, the family Bible, and regarded television and popular music as works of the Devil. Even the radio was only turned on for farm bulletins and religious broadcasts on Sunday.

But despite their differences, the other four were merely expressing or reappropriating a culture native to them. They were Americans. So was I, on paper. I had been born in Maine and carried an American passport, but none of this made me an American, in my own eyes at least. My father had been European marketing director for a Boston-based company, and from the age of six to eighteen I lived and went to school in Holland, Switzerland and France. Despite summer vacations back in the States, when I enrolled at the University of Minnesota, I felt a foreigner in my own country.

So my association with Sam, Vince, Greg and Larry meant more than just a good time. At the risk of sounding pompous, it was a rediscovery of my roots, an affirmation of my identity. I was discovering for the first time the unique experience of American low taste, the authentic, unexportable cultural product. I reveled in its shameless excess, its triumphant vulgarity, and looked to the others as my guides through a heritage I possessed in name only. They were naturally flattered by this, and the fact that I embodied various qualities which they aspired to-a classy veneer of sophistication and cosmopolitanism-helped soothe any tensions which might have arisen from our differences in other respects.

That Saturday night at the Commercial was a good example of the way the relationship functioned. As I said, the bar at that hotel was notoriously the roughest and scuzziest in town. The bouncers at the door checked the ID of anyone who looked remotely under age, but that and money were all you needed to get in. You ordered a tableful of beers from one of the hard-faced waitresses, and as long as you drank up and didn’t get too rowdy, no one would bother you. The noise level was pretty high, particularly when the band started up, but the bouncers ensured that there was very little real trouble. Occasionally a pack of frat boys running the trapline would start making assholes of themselves, but that was just local color, like the hookers who trolled the bar between glasses of Seven-and-Seven.

So there we were, that Saturday night, sitting around a table of half-drunk brewskis and discussing what theologians term the Problem of Evil. There was nothing unusual about this. When it came to conversation, we went straight from the trivial to the cosmic without batting an eyelid. We could spend hours discussing what kind of pizza to order, or rehashing the plot lines of old movies, and then move right on to such topics as the meaning of life or the theory of reincarnation. We were equally at home with the sublime or the ridiculous. It was the stuff in between we didn’t have any time for, the earnest middle ground of the straight world with its rules, regulations and responsibilities.

Drugs had a lot to do with this, of course. People who weren’t part of that scene often don’t realize that it was governed by a code of etiquette every bit as rigid as a Long Island dinner party. If a fellow-tripper decided that some object in the room-an ashtray, say-was of intense beauty and significance, it was simply not done to point out that it was just a fucking ashtray, for Christ’s sake. On the other hand, if someone brought up the fact that the toilet kept overflowing, or that the electricity would be turned off if we didn’t pay the bill, he would immediately be told to stop heavying everyone out. It was considered gauche in the extreme to mention practical problems or future arrangements, but absolutely OK to raise the question of the origins of the universe, or to argue for hours about whether the physical world has an existence independent of our perceptions of it.

So there was nothing out of the ordinary about our discussion that evening at the Commercial. It was a television news item which sparked the whole thing off. At home we almost never watched the news, considering it to be a propaganda tool of the military-industrial complex designed no less than its Soviet equivalent to manipulate and suppress the truth. But there was a TV set in the bar to entertain patrons while the band took a break, and this particular report had gotten to us. Sure, it was another repressive preemptive strike at the drug culture of which the power-trippers in Washington were rightly terrified, but it also related to issues which directly concerned us, and we had to talk it out.

Here’s what happened. A single mother living in some tenement in New York set out to bathe her baby. Since there was no running hot water, this involved heating a pan of water on the stove. The mother in question was a junkie, which gave us an out to some extent. We didn’t approve of hard drugs, although if anyone had managed to score some cocaine we would have given that a try because word was it wasn’t physically addictive. But heroin, no way. We were drug users-radical, innovative individuals for whom illegal substances were just one more tool in the unending search for personal growth and enlightenment. People who took heroin were mindless addicts. The distinction in our minds was absolute.

Anyway, while the mother is waiting for the water to heat, she decides to fix up. When the water is nice and warm she pops her six-month-old in the pan, only unfortunately she forgets to turn off the burner. I think it was this simple domestic detail which got to us. It was the kind of thing we were doing all the time. None of us would forget the night Larry set the kitchen on fire when he got the munchies and started to fry up some food, then switched trips and wandered off leaving the pan on the stove. But there were five of us, and at least one usually had his head straight enough to keep track of what was going on. The woman in New York wasn’t so lucky. She was alone, and she’d miscalculated the dose when she fixed up. Result, she passed out and the baby was boiled alive.

OK, it was a real bummer, whichever way you looked at it, but any other time we’d have had a moment of silence and moved on. These things happen, life’s a bitch, gotta keep on truckin’. But that evening, for some reason, we all got hung up on this thing. Maybe the grotesque nature of the tragedy had something to do with it. People getting boiled alive sounded like something from the Middle Ages, or some wacko late movie scenario. Plus the details were hard to work out. How big was the pan? Couldn’t the kid climb out? How much water was there? Why didn’t it drown? How long did it take to die?

The only way to exorcize all this was to find someone or something to blame. For the TV people there was no problem, of course. They blamed the mother, and the dealers who had supplied her habit. But even though we disapproved of heroin, and despised anyone who let themselves become enslaved to it, we couldn’t get off the hook that easily. We’d all been equally out of it at one time or another, and although dropping when alone was against our code, who was to say what we might have done if we’d had kids to raise and poverty to contend with and nothing else to ease the pain? There was no way we were buying into the newscasters’ smug, judgmental line.

But if the mother wasn’t to blame, who was? For a while it looked like society was going to take the rap. If the woman had been brought up in a caring, supportive, communal environment, like the indigenous peoples before the white man fucked everything up, this would never have happened. There would have been plenty of old people with time on their hands who were only too glad to look after chores like bathing babies, leaving the mother free to go out and get royally laid by a selection of superstuds like us. Plus she’d be living in harmony with nature, so she wouldn’t need drugs or other artificial stimuli to combat the colonialization of her mind by the propaganda machine of late-capitalist consumerism, right?

We had all more or less agreed on this solution when Sam put a new spin on the whole thing by bringing up the religious angle. This was a personal thing with him. He’d never talked much about his fundamentalist background until a couple of months earlier, when his mother was killed by an intruder at her home in Milwaukee. They caught the guy right away, a local loser who’d already done time for break-ins. Another conviction would send him to the pen for ten to fifteen, so he’d taken a gun along and, as guns will, it had gone off.

Sam had never given the impression of having much time for his parents. When he talked about them at all it was as a big joke, a couple of hicks given to quoting the “good book” and dwelling at great length on the moral failings of others, so we were surprised to see how hard he was hit by his mother’s death. His father had succumbed to cancer five years earlier, and his mother had begged Sam to attend the University of Wisconsin so as to be near her. He had been equally determined to keep his distance, but when the old woman died in such a shockingly gratuitous way he naturally felt guilty for having left her all alone in the house. Rather than admit this, however, he deflected his feelings into an all-out assault on God. His parents had given up everything for Him, laying waste to their lives, pursuing a scorched-earth policy lest Satan find a crumb of comfort, and what was their reward? His father was consumed by a slow and agonizing illness, his mother gunned down in a robbery gone wrong. Thanks a lot, God.

So Sam’s line on the boiled baby story was fairly predictable: it was just one more proof that the idea of a wise, loving, all-powerful God was a crock of the ripest bullshit, and that anyone who believed in Him was mentally deficient and in dire need of counseling. We’d heard all this before, and duly nodded, murmured “Right on!” and reached for another beer. Then Larry, who hadn’t said anything much up to then, suddenly broke out, “I believe in God anyway.”

For a moment no one said anything. We were too stunned. If Larry had remarked that personally he enjoyed eating boiled baby, maybe with a little relish on the side, that would have been fine. But this abrupt declaration of a faith whose existence none of us had imagined left us deeply shocked. It was uncool.

“Anyway, it’s all like a matter of faith,” Larry went on a little sheepishly. “I’m only saying there’s no way you can prove God doesn’t exist just ’cos bad stuff happens.”

We belatedly realized that Larry must have been suppressing this statement for a long time, not wanting to challenge Sam on the sore point of his mother’s death. But this was neutral ground, and the time had come to take a stand.

“Sure, you’re right,” Sam replied in a slightly patronizing tone, as though he was managing Larry the way you did someone who was having a bad trip. “All it proves is that if God does exist, then He’s an evil fucker.”

“God is love,” Larry retorted heatedly. “Evil is the work of Satan.”

Years of Bible study had left Sam well prepared for an argument such as this.

“That’s the Manichaean heresy, Larry,” he replied cheerfully. “Couple of hundred years ago you’d have got burned at the stake for dividing up good and evil like that. Listen, according to the Scriptures, God is all-powerful, right? ‘I am the Almighty God,’ Genesis seventeen, verse one. ‘The Lord God omnipotent reigneth,’ Revelation nineteen, verse six. But we are also expected to believe that ‘God is love,’ First Epistle of John, chapter four, while Psalm Thirty-four tells us that ‘the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in Him.’ All I’m saying is that you can’t have it both ways. If God is all-powerful, He could have saved that baby. If He is good and loving, He would have.”

This broadside understandably left Larry reeling. Apart from a theological expertise which none of us had suspected Sam possessed, we’d each had about fifteen beers by this time, to say nothing of the joint we’d passed around in the car on the way there.

“Religion isn’t about that, it’s about eternal salvation,” Larry protested. “It’s about the soul, not the body.”

Sam rolled his eyes and nodded earnestly. His lean, angular face and sharp, close-set eyes made him look like a ferret going in for the kill.

“I see! So our pain doesn’t matter to God, that’s what you’re saying. Have you ever stuck your hand in boiling water? Can you begin to imagine what that child must have suffered? But of course that’s as nothing in the eye of eternity. Probably the kid hadn’t been baptized. That would explain everything. Original sin. It’s going to burn in hell anyway, so why not boil it up a little first, get it used to the idea. Right?”

“It’s not for us to judge the Almighty!” Larry broke out.

“Why the fuck not?” Sam shouted. “What would you have thought of Phil here, or me, or Vince, or Greg, if we’d been in that apartment and just stood there and watched the kid stew? Would you have got down on your knees and worshiped us? No fucking way! You’d have called us sadistic perverts who should be locked up forever. So where does that leave your just and loving God?”

An embarrassed silence fell. We knew Sam as a good-time guy, laid-back, mellow and very funny, someone for whom nothing was worth hassling about. This was a Sam none of us had glimpsed before: engaged, angry, articulate, dominating. He seemed to pick up on the vibes himself.

“What do the rest of you think?” he asked with a visible effort to lighten up.

Greg scowled into his beer.

“I think this whole thing’s a downer,” he said.

“I think we should get stoned,” added Vince.

“We could go home and smoke some more,” I suggested.

Vince stood up.

“I mean really stoned. I’ll go see what I can score.”

Just then the band came back for another set, we all sank a few more beers and Greg launched into a story about a cheerleader who’d reportedly been slamdunked by the entire U of M basketball team after their recent triumph over a rival institution out in the sticks known around campus as Moo U. By the time Vince returned, the earlier incident seemed to have been forgotten. We had blowups like that all the time, and they didn’t faze us too much. Worse things happen when you’re stoned. Straight people might get hung up on disagreements and dissent, but we knew it was all in your head.

Vince had bought six tabs of what was billed as “organic mescaline.” This evoked a round of skeptical groans. Ever since Huxley and Castaneda, mescaline was the buzzword in drugs, but the chances of being sold the real stuff was just about zip. This almost certainly wasn’t mescaline at all, and sure as hell not organic. What we’d scored was most likely some cocktail such as acid cut with downers. Vince said he knew the dealer, though, and it was bound to be good shit whatever it was. That silenced any complaints. Another aspect of drug etiquette was that it was a point of honor never to refuse anything supplied by a friend of a friend. If Vince’s buddy said it was OK, that was good enough for us.

Riding home in the car, we passed another joint around and fiddled with the radio. Larry sat up front beside Greg, who was driving. Sam, Vince and I swayed from side to side in the back, singing along to the Allman Brothers’ “Whipping Post” with Vince playing a mean air guitar. Suddenly a flashing blue light flooded the car.

“Holy fuck!” said Greg, glancing in the mirror. “It’s the pigs.”

We totally lost it. Some friends of ours had got busted a couple of weeks earlier. They were only holding a couple of grams of hash, but they’d been charged with possession and were in jail awaiting trial. We had six tabs of some unknown psychedelic plus a whole bag of weed. To make matters worse, the thought flashing through each of our drug-and-booze-hazed brains was that Vince’s “friend” had done a deal with the nares. How else could they have got on to us? It all made sense. The dealer had copped a plea in return for fingering his clients so that the cops could bust them on the way home. Now they would strip-search us, do a rectal frisk and pack us off to the state pen where we’d be buggered and beaten up by redneck cons who thought hippies were faggot commie scum.

“Open the windows,” said Sam. “Vince, pass me the shit.”

Vince handed Sam the stapled plastic pouch containing the tablets. As the car slowed to a halt, we wound down the windows in an attempt to flush out the sweet, herby smell of marijuana. The police cruiser came to a stop right behind us, lights still flashing. Greg turned off the radio and took a deep breath.

“Jesus Christ,” said Larry quietly.

The patrolman sidled up to the driver’s door and asked for Greg’s license. We all sat very still while he scrutinized it.

“Get out of the car,” said the cop.

We obediently opened the doors and struggled out. The policeman stared at us irritably.

“Not all of you!” he snapped. “Just the driver.”

We climbed back into the car again. The patrolman led Greg away. I thought about another night, when I’d been driving from one party to another with some people I didn’t even know. We’d done some speed before leaving, so we drove very carefully, chanting “Take it easy!” like a mantra. We thought we were maintaining really well until the State Patrol pulled us over on the highway. “You know how fast you were going?” the cop asked. “Gee, officer,” said our driver, “I was just keeping up with traffic.” “You were doing ten miles an hour,” the guy replied. That time, fortunately, we were clean.

After a few minutes, Greg reappeared and the police cruiser pulled out and roared away. We all stared at him as though he’d come back from the dead.

“What happened?”

“What did he say to you, man?”

Greg got back behind the wheel.

“One of the taillights is out,” he announced laconically. “He gave me a ticket.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Far out!”

We laughed like maniacs all the way back to the house. We’d beaten the system yet again, put one over on the whole Establishment crock of shit. The episode just confirmed our conviction that we were cooler, smarter and better adapted for survival than our enemies. They got so obsessed with their uptight rules and regulations they didn’t even notice what was going on right under their very noses! There we were committing a major drug offense, and the dumb patrolman cites us for a traffic violation!

It wasn’t till we got inside the house that someone sobered up enough to ask, “So where’s the mescaline?”

“I ate it,” said Sam.

There was a stunned silence.

“I thought the guy was going to bust us,” Sam went on calmly. “A few ounces of weed we might talk our way out of, but not the tabs.”

“You ate them all?” asked Greg incredulously.

Sam nodded.

“What strength were they?” I asked Vince.

He shrugged.

“Who knows? Couple of hundred migs, the guy said.”

“We’ve got to get him to the hospital fast, get his stomach pumped.”

“No way!” said Sam forcefully.

“Sam, you’ve just dropped over a gram of whatever that shit is. You could die.”

He shrugged and smiled.

“We’re all going to die, man.”

“For Christ’s sake, Sam! This is serious. Even if it doesn’t kill you, it’s going to screw your head up completely!”

Sam stared at me.

“You figure I can’t handle it?”

There was nothing I could say to that. Our cardinal rule was that drugs don’t fuck you up, hang-ups do. An oft-repeated story described how when the Beatles made their first pilgrimage to India to see the Maharishi, he noticed that they were stoned and asked to see the stuff they’d been taking. They hand over their stash and the guy swallows it like candy right in front of their eyes. Fifty tabs of acid, man! Grade A, unadulterated, full-strength sunshine, nothing but the best for the Fab Four! And the Maharishi gobbles the lot and then sits there all night, calmly discoursing on the Path of True Knowledge until the sun comes up! Even a dose big enough to turn on a small town couldn’t disturb his Inner Peace and Purity, dig?

So while in a similar situation nowadays someone would have dragged Sam off to the hospital, by force if necessary, back then it was out of the question. If I’d attempted to press the issue any further I would have risked being branded a power-tripper, projecting my own insecurities and anxieties onto Sam. Certainly none of the others would have backed me up. Their attitude was pretty well summed up by Larry’s response when Sam assured us grandly that he would be all right.

“Sure you’ll be all right, man, but what about the rest of us? How are we supposed to get fucked up now you’ve cleaned out the stash?”

“Don’t heavy me out, man,” replied Sam, closing his eyes.

Vince suggested dosing him with orange juice to bring him down, but we didn’t have any in the house and Greg wasn’t too crazy about driving after what had just happened. Anyway, Sam said he didn’t want to come down.

“I’m kind of looking forward to it. I’m tired of low-level tripping. I’ve always wanted to go to the limit, and this is my chance.”

“Maybe you’ll have an out-of-body experience,” said Greg, a trifle enviously. Everyone had read about out-of-body experiences, but no one we knew had actually had one.

“Maybe you’ll see God,” added Vince.

“If I do, I’ll ask him why he let that kid boil.”

The fact that he could joke about it made us feel more relaxed about the whole thing. Sam was an experienced tripper, and the dealer had probably been lying about the strength of the tablets. We smoked another joint and listened to some music, and then one by one people drifted off to their rooms. Sam lay stretched out on the sofa, his foot tapping in time to the music. I was the last to leave. I asked Sam if he was OK. He didn’t reply.

“You want someone to stay up with you?” I asked.

His eyes opened, big and blank, but there was still no reply. I didn’t insist. I had an early class I couldn’t afford to cut, and I knew from experience that even good trips are bad trips when someone else is having them.

By the time I got up the next morning, Sam had crashed. He didn’t surface again until late that night. I was sitting in an attempted lotus position on a beanbag, making notes for a paper I had to write. The others were out somewhere.

“Hey, man!” I said. “How did it go?”

He looked at me in a strange, expressionless way.

“Phil,” he said flatly, as though recognizing someone from the distant past.

“What happened?”

He frowned.

“Nothing.”

“Last night, I mean. You dropped all that shit.”

A ghostly smile appeared and disappeared on his lips.

“Oh, that. The usual stuff, man.”

I shrugged and got back to my paper. Everyone’s trips were their own responsibility, but also their own business. If they wanted to share them with you, fine-unless of course they carried on about them at excessive length, as though they were somehow better and more interesting than yours. But if they chose not to talk about them, you had to respect that too. A fundamental tenet of our shared philosophy was that language was a highly suspect medium of communication, clumsy and imprecise, a tool used by the straight world to impose its rigid, normalizing concepts on the infinite, threatening freedom of the human spirit. We weren’t any more consistent about this than about anything else. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one frequently went on and on about at ball-breaking length. But Sam had chosen to exercise his right to remain silent, and anyone who questioned him further would stand revealed as an undercover agent for the thought police.

Within a few days, the whole episode had turned into the stuff of myth, one of the heroic exploits to be celebrated whenever members of the tribe gathered late at night and the communal joint passed from hand to hand. Its connection with real events became increasingly tenuous. Before long we were telling people how we would have been busted by a crack narcotics squad that night if it hadn’t been for the quick thinking of Greg, or maybe Larry, who’d dropped the whole stash of twelve-count ’em! — twelve tabs of high-grade acid, and how we’d worked all night to keep him together while he went on about the wall-to-wall shag being a heaving mass of maggots.

Sam never contested this version of events, or talked about what had really happened. In fact he rarely said anything much any more. He had changed, becoming quieter, more serious and withdrawn, less accessible to our noise and nonsense. The reason seemed obvious. A month or so earlier, Sam had received his “Greetings from the President” letter from the draft board. He had been shocked at the time, because he had drawn a pretty high number in the lottery and had thought he was safe.

Now that the date when he had to report for induction was looming closer, however, he seemed strangely resigned to his fate. Again, we thought we knew why. With his level of education, Sam would almost certainly be able to land a clerical job and put in his year’s tour of duty filing reports and typing letters. Nevertheless, the situation inevitably created tension in our midst. Larry’s turn was also coming up soon, and he had a number in the low teens, making it almost inevitable that he would be drafted. From time to time he talked of taking a bus up to Canada, or maybe applying to join the National Guard, but he never did anything about it, and we all knew he never would.

The rest of us were safe. Vince had already been turned down because of his bad eyes and generally poor health, while Greg and I were protected for the moment by the student deferment. We never openly discussed the matter, but this manifest inequality slowly drove a wedge into the heart of our intimacy, splintering it apart. One night just before he left, Sam freaked out for the first time in our company, raving on about the world being divided into two kinds of people, the ones with real souls and feelings, and a bunch of phonies who were just pretending to be alive.

Nothing came of it, however, and a couple of days later Sam packed up his belongings and set off to start his two months’ basic training at Fort Lewis, in Washington State. Our farewells were awkward and subdued. A month later a woman I’d been seeing on and off for the past year invited me to move in with her. I was glad to leave. Larry had also been drafted by then, and Vince and Greg were spending more and more time with people I didn’t know. That stage of my life was over. It was time to move on.

I never expected to see any of them again.