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

1

AS A STANDBY YOU GET the seat right behind the jets. Sit down, tuck the special suitcase under the seat in front of you, buckle up, and look out the window at the Boston rain. Then look over and smile at the two Marines sitting next to you, and wait for the goddamned thing to take off.

Once in the air, you get your choice of chicken, sword-fish, or roast beef; Life, Vogue, or Sports Afield. Life features an article on the growing menace to our children, the Marijuana Habit. A follow-up on how one Illinois town rallied to the challenge and pulled itself out of the dope gutter. A quote from a kid at the University of Illinois who says reality is the best trip of all.

When you can’t stand any more, you up and amble back to the can and flip on the OCCUPIED sign. Once safely locked in, you fumble around with the air whooshing up out of the john; you try not to spill your whole stash on the floor as you roll a neat little joint in your clammy dope-fiend hands. And then you blow it.

After that, things slow down a bit and you amble back and stumble across the two Marines and get your earphones on just in time to catch the flick. Last time it wasn’t too bad, some Nazis torturing a prostitute, but no such luck on these daytime ventures—it’s Andy Griffith as an iconoclastic but truly lovable parish priest. For the next two hours you are part of Andy’s G-for-General-Audiences struggle to refurnish the church, and it’s all pretty wonderful. But toward the end of the movie, high-altitude dehydration sets in, and you find yourself feeling pretty miserable. So you amble back toward the can again, with numerous eyes flicking up at you suspiciously as you walk down the aisle—since everybody smelled dope the last time—but you fool them all and get a cup of water.

While you’re in the galley you pocket a few of those absurd little booze bottles that they hustle for a buck apiece before the meal, have a few more cups of water, turning occasionally to face the cabin, and smile innocently at anyone who is looking. Then return to your seat, with some ice in the cup, to get thoroughly and quietly juiced.

This doesn’t help the dehydration any but it makes the time go a lot faster. Toward the end of the trip you even join the Marines in molesting the stewardesses. The stewardesses are very good-natured about them, because they’re in uniform, poor fellows, and so young, too. The stewardesses are less good-natured about you.

Finally the captain comes on to announce that San Francisco airport is still there, and that we may be landing soon. The seat belt sign comes on, the Muzak returns, and everyone frantically puffs away, trying to get that last little hit of nicotine before the NO SMOKING sign flashes on. Behind you in the next seat the middle-aged lady searches her purse for the tranquilizer she always drops before the landing.

And then the plane comes down. It’s 3:55 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, seventy-two degrees, the sun is shining on both sides of the street, and it’s all before you.

2

I WAS EXPECTING TO BE met at the airport, but nobody showed. I couldn’t believe John hadn’t called my friends to let them know I was coming, so I shuffled up and down the arrivals platform waiting for a familiar face. Everyone was waiting. There were servicemen waiting for the bus, businessmen waiting for the fat wife and the dog, porters waiting for tips; all of us waiting to see what would happen and waiting then to see what would come next.

After an hour I knew John hadn’t called. It pissed me off that he could be so casual. He could afford to be, that was the heart of the matter. John had enough bread to buy himself out of anything that he got into—and into anything he felt out of. He simply assumed things were the same for other people—and if they didn’t measure up to the assumption, then what the hell were they doing hanging around with him? But I was still angry, because I couldn’t take a bus across the Bay, not with twenty-five hundred in twenties bulging in my coat pocket. The only alternative was a rented car, and he knew that I didn’t have the bread to waste on a rented car. But then, he did…

So I went over to the Hertz counter, where a sleazy blonde in a zebra suit was smiling into space. She could be easily replaced by a machine that smiled, I thought as I stepped into view. But then a machine would have known that my license was a phony. And anyway it was all part of the game: I gave her the license and she smiled. I pretended the smile was real, and she pretended the license was real. A reasonable bargain, all things considered.

The car was a green ’69 Mustang. First thing I did when I got in was to check the ashtray. A ridiculous gesture, but the kind of thing I always find myself doing, just to make sure that the ads are really up front. Yeah. Well, the ashtray was clean but the ignition was burned out and the car wouldn’t start, so I exchanged it for an identical green Mustang and rolled out to Berkeley.

Back on the Bay Shore Freeway. It felt good to be ripping along at sixty-five miles an hour, a cool salty breeze blowing in off the water and the blue-green hills of the city up ahead. It was almost five, and the outbound lanes were mobbed, sweaty tangles of bumper-to-bumper frustration. But there was barely another car on my side of the road. I suddenly thought of Boston, and I laughed. It would be raining there, still, and the streets would be filled with the long, dour faces of people trying to convince themselves that spring really was on its way—or at least would be once exams were over.

Boston seemed so far away, and so ridiculous. Just then I rounded a corner and the whole side of a hill bade me WELCOME TO SAN FRANCISCO.

I realized that I shouldn’t let myself get too carried away, that I should stay cool for the work ahead. But I felt so good about being back in California that I just couldn’t feel anything else. I couldn’t get uptight about meeting Musty, and I couldn’t feel all the small, sobering, paranoiac things that I should’ve been feeling, that I was supposed to be feeling. Just before I’d left Boston, John had given me the rundown on Musty, so that I could get good and paranoid about doing business with him. Being paranoid was supposed to make me cautious, discreet, cool about the whole riff. But what John told me just made me more confident than ever.

Because Musty was big. At twenty-three he was one of the biggest and most successful dealers in the country.

Which meant that his scene was a lot different from most other dealers’. Most of them, when they’re doing lots of ten or fifteen or twenty bricks at a time, think they’re moving a lot of dope. They figure they’ve got a good hustle going, and for the most part, they do. But they’ve got one hang-up, and that is their dependence on a supplier. In that respect they’re as helpless as the little guy who picks up a street lid now and then on his way home from work. And they can get burned and ripped off and hustled in a thousand different ways, just like that little guy.

Because they’re not in control of what’s going down. They’re just taking part.

Musty was in control. He did only one kind of job, and he did it extraordinarily well. Musty ran lots of two thousand kilos—no more, no less on any given run—across the border from Mexico. He dumped them in San Diego, in his own warehouses, and there they sat until they were shipped out in broken-down lots to New York. Musty kept his hand in the operation up to the point when the bricks were shipped, his own art-supplies front doing the job. But after that he was through with it; he took his cut and split. That way anything that was busted, either in New York, or on the way back to California, was almost impossible to pin on him. For all the narcs ever knew, the stuff was coming in through the New York Port Authority, right under their noses.

Musty ran a tight operation, with everyone from the Federales to the Customs people to the Mexicans who drove the trucks and airplanes being liberally paid off. He wasn’t just careful, though; he had class. When it came time for a shipment, he went down to the Mexican plantations himself. He was friends with the plantation owners he bought from and he spoke fluent Spanish. His concern did not go unnoticed by the sellers, and as a result his marijuana was only the purest, his bricks the heaviest. They were almost always at least thirty-two ounces—dry—with very few sticks and no stones or clay. On a market that’s usually full of oregano and gasoline-cured or otherwise hopelessly souped-up garbage, his dope was highly regarded. And it always brought a good price.

The most impressive thing about his operation was that he’d been running it for almost four years without a hint of trouble or a cramp in his style. A record like that demands respect, whether you’re behind the law or trying to keep ahead of it. The IRS people in San Diego had finally gotten on his back a few months before, but it’d been nothing serious, just a lot of irritating questions, and he’d simply stepped out of town for a while. To San Francisco, which was now his company headquarters.

3

JOHN HAD MET MUSTY EARLIER in the spring, on the Massachusetts Turnpike. John was test-driving the Ferrari he’d gotten the week before, seeing how it performed on the road. And Musty was bumming around the East, California style, with a pack on his back and his thumb out dangling. So John had picked him up and they were rolling along at maybe eighty, nobody saying anything and Musty no doubt sitting there thinking, What a bummer this is, to ride in this car with a straight creep—thinking this because in California anybody who smokes dope looks like he smokes dope, and Musty wasn’t used to the Eastern style yet. So when John, with his maroon Ferrari and his J. Press suit and his Newport accent, opened the glove compartment to reveal a pound bag of clean Michoácan, Musty blew his mind. The dope had come from one of Musty’s kilos that was nothing but buds and flowers to begin with; he just started laughing, while he rolled a few joints. John rolled up the windows so the smoke wouldn’t get out, and they both managed to get high as the sky before they hit the Newton tolls.

Which is a sad pun, for hit the Newton toll booth they did, going about twenty-five. Drove right up the cement fender and piled into the little box the toll guy stands in. Seemed that John, who was never a good driver, had a little trouble maneuvering his machine after a few joints. The toll guy was terrified, expecting to find some epileptic old lady who’d had a coronary. Instead, he was greeted by two very stoned young men, laughing hysterically and wiping the tears from their eyes. Completely unscathed, both of them, but not looking particularly grateful for it.

When the cop came, he told John that he was a very lucky guy. The cop also said some other things about Rich Motherfuckers and Kids Today. Everybody is interested in Kids Today, even the cops. He asked John how he happened to total his brand new Ferrari and John explained about the faulty disc brakes—these crummy little Italian imports, you know, they’re all the same—and the cop farted.

Then he drove John and Musty back to a gas station where they could call for someone to pick them up. John sat in the front seat, because he had a suit on and looked respectable. Musty sat in the back. The cop talked to John first, giving him some more about Rich Motherfuckers and Damage to Public Property and asking how his old man liked picking up the tab. Then the cop looked in the rear-view mirror and asked Musty how long it had been since he had taken a bath and whether he thought he was Jesus Christ, with hair like that. The cop also said he had fought in the war, he wanted them both to know, in the goddamn war.

To change the subject, John suggested that it must be tough work to be a state trooper. The cop mellowed at this and admitted that it was tough work. Everybody thought it was a great job to be a state trooper, he said. Everybody thought it was all glory and gravy. Everybody wanted to be a trooper, but they didn’t have no fucking idea, it was hard work and no joke.

John got off with a State Warning. Musty was told to be out of the state within forty-eight hours.

That was the way John worked. He needed to be with a person only about fifteen minutes before he knew what his weak spot was, and how to go to work on him. It didn’t matter if that person was a cop, or a professor, or a freak. Fifteen minutes. Anyway, John’d put his finger on Musty’s weak spot as efficiently as he’d managed the trooper. And before Musty said goodbye to Massachusetts, he’d agreed to sell dope to John in small lots, so long as the pickup was made on the West Coast. Musty, who never did anything less than two thousand kilos, and never touched his dope after it was in San Diego.

So I was on my way to meet Musty.

4

TRAFFIC WAS HEAVIER GOING OVER the Bay Bridge, but I made the corner of Ashby and Telegraph by five-thirty. From there it was just a few blocks to Musty’s address, 339 Holly Street, in the middle of a quiet neighborhood of clean, pink-and-white stuccos with palm trees and clipped lawns. There was nobody on the street to stare at the straight honky who jumped out of a green Mustang with a suitcase in his hand and went up to ring 339.

The suitcase was a little thing John had rigged up, small enough to fit under an airplane seat, and lined with aluminum to keep the dope smell in. It also had internal and external locks to disappoint inquisitive cops. A sealed package of any sort requires a specific search warrant before it can be legally opened. Altogether a neat and reassuring way to travel.

I rang the buzzer beneath the name on the mailbox: Padraic O’Shaugnessy. No wonder they called him Musty. Then I waited, and when nothing happened I pushed the buzzer again. The apartment was on the second floor, and I could faintly hear it ringing up there. But nothing else, no footsteps or talking or other noise.

I began to get irritated, because I was right on time and they should have been there to open the door for me when I came up the steps. I couldn’t figure out where they could be, but then I didn’t really give a damn. I just didn’t dig standing around like the Fuller Brush man, waiting for somebody to come to the door.

Finally I went back to the car and started reading the Tribe I’d picked up on Telegraph. What a drag it was, this waiting. I pulled out my own little traveling stash, rolled a joint, and blew it, trying to relax.

I’d been sitting there half an hour when I decided to get something to eat. I could never eat on planes, and after the six-hour flight I was hungry as hell. The stoned hungries, I might add, which is what the Now Generation is all about. A normal case of the hungries anyone with a will can sit out, but the stoned hungries are merciless. When dope eventually gets legalized, it’ll be the A & P lobby that’s responsible. How can you argue against a drug that keeps you eating regularly, sleeping regularly, and buying a six-pack of Pepsi every day? No way, in America.

I’d just started the car when I heard sirens. I was wondering how close the fire was, when the patrol cars came screeching around the corner, going the wrong way on a one-way street, and pulled up in front of 339. Behind the patrol cars were two Ford sedans, loaded with narcs. They had a cop driving, so it looked like they weren’t just dropping in to pass the time of day. I sank down in my seat, and waited.

The bust moved very quickly, and very efficiently. The cops jumped out of the patrol cars and staked the house out, three in the rear and three up front. Two others headed for the front door; one had an ax and one had a portable vacuum cleaner.

The narcs spread out behind the cops, five of them going into the house. They were fingering their lapels and hitching up their pants nervously, like they expected some trouble. Which was absurd, because anyone as big as Musty wouldn’t hassle cops. But it appeared from my bucket-seat foxhole as though they might be planning to shoot first and ask questions later. Oakland heat, it will be remembered, have that habit.

I was afraid to leave. I suddenly realized why John had been so insistent on my looking straight, and so insistent on my schedule. It looked like the man had finally come down on Musty. If I took off, one of the plainclothesmen standing near me might notice the car and take down the plate numbers. And then, if he decided to check and found out that the car had been rented that afternoon at the airport by a kid from Cambridge, Massachusetts, well, that’d be Fat City for the narcs.

So I stayed. And I sweated it, because the bust was shooting one of our little rules to hell. The Three Day Rule. It was nothing more than a rule of thumb that we always worked by: the heat were usually at least three days behind anything that was happening. More likely five days, to be sure, but for safety we usually kept our schedule down to three. So the courier always flew in within three days of Musty’s run from S.D., and got out of town within three days of the pickup. It was cool to work that way, because the heat simply couldn’t move any faster than that. I mean, the heat are only people. They’ve got a job, and for eight hours a day they do it. But after that they go home and watch the box with the wife and kids, like everybody else. And so if you worked full time, the way we did, it was easy to stay ahead of them.

But here they were, and here I was, curled up in fetal position on the seat, peeping over the dashboard at the plainclothes narc nearest me. He was watching the house. He didn’t look too interested. In fact, he looked bored shitless. The cops-and-robbers glow began to fade close up, and as the bust progressed I got more and more into this dude. He had his hands in his pockets now, and was staring at the street. God, what a drag, I suddenly thought. What an unbelievable bitch of a drag it must be to work as a narc, and spend your whole life rushing around town trying to bust a few druggies. It was a unique train of thought for me to take, because narcs have achieved a certain hard-earned prominence in the mythology of dope smoking. They’re cast as relentless, evil, and thoroughly mindless cogs in the great machine of repression. Wowie zowie. This guy didn’t look evil, he didn’t look like much of anything. Just a tired, dull, underpaid stool for the law.

But then I thought, What the hell. I wasn’t going to get suckered into that routine again, into thinking of that pig as just another person. Because he wasn’t, and it was dangerous to think of him as if he were. The danger was a personal one. I’d just be setting myself up for a rip-off if I ever got into any kind of hassle with the dude.

Because if I got into a hassle, I’d still be a person, but he’d have to be a pig. It’d happened to me so many times, that whole riff. Like you talk to any cop who’s hassling, and after a while—if you come on like a regular chum—after a while, he’ll swear up and down that he’s Real Sorry To Have To Do This To You. He’ll tell you that if it weren’t for the blue he’s wearing, he’d take you home to have a beer and meet the wife. But then he’ll lay it on you: he’s real sorry, and you’re supposed to understand because you’re a regular chum, but he’s got no choice but to run you in. His job is to enforce the law. And then it’ll all come tumbling out, all the excuses, all the lies, all the jive about how he doesn’t have anything to do with anything. He’s just doing his job, and he’s not really running you in. It’s the law, and he can’t change the law, he just has to do his job, so… so? On go the cuffs, and on go the masks—and off you go.

A couple of minutes went by, and I could hear walls coming down inside the house. If they hadn’t found any people, they probably wouldn’t find any dope. But they were giving it the old pig try. When the worst suddenly seemed to be over, I lit a cigarette and sat up. And then:

“Hey you, what’re you lookin’ at?”

It was one of the cops from behind the car. The narc I had been watching was startled into action by his voice and flashed me his best piercing narc stare. They both came over to the window. “You hear what I said, boy? What’re you lookin’ at?”

“Oh, nothing, Officer, I was just—”

“You were just what? You want to get run in, huh, for obstructing the law?”

“No, sir, you see I was just driving through when—”

“I didn’t ask you what you were doing, wise guy, I asked you what you were lookin’ at, huh? Now you gonna answer me, or you want to double-talk the Captain down at the station?”

“No, sir.”

“No sir what? What d’you mean, no sir. I asked you a question. You gonna cooperate or not?”

“Yes, sir, I certainly will.”

“Then what were you lookin’ at, just then?”

“Nothing, sir, I was just on the street when I heard the sirens, and I thought it was a fire so I pulled over—”

“That was a long time ago, boy, a long time ago you thought it was some fire, and I’m asking you now! What’ve you been lookin’ at just now!”

“Well, sir.” I was scared shitless again. The suitcase was in the car and if they picked me up it wouldn’t take long for them to pick up on what was happening.

“Whatsamatter, boy, you tongue-tied? Huh? I asked you a question. You gonna answer me or not, ’cause if you’re not I got other places I can ask you, understand?” Suddenly he stepped back and took a fresh look at me. “You a college boy? Is that what’s wrong, huh? College boy, don’t like to talk to no police, think your girl won’t like you anymore, is that it? Huh?”

I decided the only way out was to kiss ass. “Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir, what?”

“Yes, sir, I am a student.”

“A student. A student, huh? Oh, I beg your pardon, student. I thought you were a college boy. Well, tell me something, student, where’d you get this car, huh? Did your student studies get it for you, or what? Huh? Tell me about this car you got here.”

“Well, sir, ah, my, ah… my father bought it for me.”

“Oh, I see, your father bought it for his student.”

“Yes, sir.”

“When your father bought this car for his student, did he by any chance make sure that his student was a student of driving, or did he just give it to the college boy?”

“Ah, well sir, I ah—” I ah was ah scared shitless that he ah was going to ah ask me for my license. Ahhhhhhh.

“What I’m asking you, boy, in plain language that even I can understand, see, even me who never was no college graduate, what I’m asking you is if you know how to operate this vehicle.”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Well then why don’t you do yourself a favor, and operate it right out of here right now!” He was almost yelling.

“Well, sir, I was going to do just that, but…” I pointed feebly at the massed cop-cars, which blocked the road.

“Well, then put the car in reverse, goddamn you, and git out of here!”

“Yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir,” as I started the car up again and backed out of there as fast as I could, and at the end of the street, moving off at good speed, I leaned out and shouted “Fuck you!” as loud as I could. It didn’t make much difference.

5

I WAS BACK OUT ON the Avenue again and hot-assing it up toward the campus before I realized I was still hungry. So I pulled into the first place I saw, which was a Peter Piper. Like everything else in California, Peter Piper is designed strictly for cars. You drive up in your car, order from your car, pick up the food in the car, and then park and eat in the car.

While you wait in line—in your car—you read the large sign that tells you what Peter offers in the way of nutrition. Finally, as the line progresses, you arrive alongside a large, maniacally smiling being, who is Peter. BE READY says the sign above his head in bright neon colors, PETER WILL SPEAK TO YOU. About the time you think you’re ready to punch Peter in his gleaming polished plastic snout, a thick intercom voice barks “Yeah, what’ll it be?” And you tell Peter, and he repeats it back to you, grinning his fixed, idiot smile. And then you nose to the front and wait for the food.

If you can drive a car, you can go see Peter as often as you like.

6

I FELT BETTER AFTER eating, all primed and ready to go. Where I was going to go was another question entirely. I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was going to do next—all I really knew was what I couldn’t do. I couldn’t find Musty. I didn’t know how even to begin to look for him. He was John’s connection, not mine.

And I couldn’t call John in Cambridge, because he had become convinced his line was tapped and had his phone taken out. I could try to reach him at Sandra’s place, on the phone we always did business on, but John wouldn’t be with her at this hour.

And I couldn’t go back to Cambridge without scoring something, because that would be a hundred and sixty bucks in plane fare down the drain and, more important, all our timing thrown off.

Which left me with no leads, no place to crash, twenty-five hundred bucks in my sportcoat, and a connection who was probably busting ass for Mexico, unless they’d already caught up with him. Not a particularly cheerful prospect. So I just drove around Berkeley, looking for somebody I knew and trying desperately to remember a single street address out of the dozens I knew in that town. I’d spent time in Berkeley before—mostly on three-day dope trips like this one—but one trip last spring had lasted a month. It hadn’t started as a month trip, but that’s the way it had worked out. And I’d met a lot of good people—I’d been things and seen places, as the saying goes.

But now, just when I needed them, the addresses and names wouldn’t come back, and I wound up parking the car in the municipal lot off Channing, so I could walk up to campus and look around. It was late in the day and the Avenue was jumping. The freaks were out in their usual positions: stoned hostile funky greaser freaks on the west side of Telegraph and stoned outasight panhandling peace freaks on the east side. The bikies were lined up in full formation in front of Pepe’s and I could hear some pickets up on Sproul Plaza. I hurried on to see what they were putting down, forgetting that I still had on my Weejuns and jacket. That was a mistake, because I looked like I should’ve been up on the hill drinking keg beer with the jolly mindless frat brothers, and since I wasn’t… The street punks jumped into action, edged toward me; all around me their soft liturgical drone filled the air: “lids, speed, acid; righteous lids” as the street people decided they had me figured. What a drag.

Up on campus a heavy scene was under way. The Berkeley police were huddled like sullen refugees under Sather Gate, looking as if they were just waiting for the word to come down swinging. And on Sproul Plaza there was a slowly circling ring of picketers, chanting and stomping. Most of them had helmets on; anyone who exercised the right to assemble and petition in this town knew what to expect.

In the center of the ring a heavy-set, shaded and leathered black man, beret tilted to one side and covered with buttons like a war hero with medals: “Brothers and Sisters, the time has come for us to act. There is no longer a defensible middle of the road. And by that I mean the middle of the road, man, that sit-on-the-fence shit. ’Cause when the long knives come”—it was not a threat, but logic—“when the long knives come, they aren’t gonna ask where you stand, and where you been standin’. They’re gonna know!” He was rapping and flapping his arms, talking to the picketers, turning away to speak to the crowd. Trying to get that old group-solidarity number down before the heat did. There was no middle ground, he said again, no fence left to sit on.

“You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution!” He shouted at passersby, fringe observers like me. “Part of the problem or part of the solution. The time has come to act,” he went on. “Join the Third World Brothers and Sisters, in support of their legitimate demands for Third World Faculty and Curriculum. And join them now.”

There was a lot of energy running through the crowd, and I was suddenly uncomfortable, standing there in my Hahvud Yahd monkey suit. The lines were sharply drawn in Berkeley, and everyone understood what they meant: the fight had already begun. Nobody said you had to get on the battlefield, but then… it wasn’t hard to put yourself in No Man’s Land. I looked back at the cops, who were starting to move toward the picketers.

…or Donald Duck Reagan or Mickey Mouse Rafferty. And we can’t relate to seeing our black brothers dying to support this pig fascist system in the rice paddies of Vietnam. We can’t relate to that and we can’t stand by and watch it happen no more neither. The time has come to act. Join the pickets now.”

The pigs were bearing down, and I beat a hasty retreat back across the street. The pickets had picked up on the energy now, and were stamping their feet as they marched, chanting Who are the people, We are the people, Power to the people. Yeah. Get that ball. Fight, team, fight. Push ’em back, push ’em back, waaaaaaaay back. I began to think about how nobody had ever really figured out what four years of high school did to a reasonably healthy mind. Then I saw somebody I knew: Steven.

7

STEVIE’S PLACE WAS PEACEFUL AND quiet, in the back of a house on Dwight Way. It looked onto a lot that had once been used for parking but which had, miraculously, fallen into disuse. Someone had planted a small garden and there were people all around, sitting out on their back steps, smoking dope in the sunset and laughing quietly. I remembered my dorm room in Cambridge, which had a generous view of all four lanes of Memorial Drive, complete with traffic jams twice a day, and wondered again why I hadn’t transferred to Berkeley when Stevie did.

You never realize what you’re missing until you come to Berkeley—and when you leave, it’s easy to forget. The air is light, the sun bright, and you feel tremendously energetic and strong. You also experience a sudden resistance to credibility gaps, realities of life, overdue bills, and other pitfalls of the American way. That’s why the “campus revolt” began in Berkeley, and that’s why it has never made more sense than it did, and still does, in Berkeley: because the people who are striking and picketing are picking up their energy from the land. When the sun shines in that town, life is so outrageously beautiful that a black man shot in Oakland the night before, or a zillion tons of bombs dropped on Quongquong in the last week, doesn’t seem wrong—it doesn’t seem like anything. It is inconceivable, and totally ludicrous. Which is what it would seem like to intelligent people anywhere. The difference is that in Berkeley, at least, the need to rectify the ludicrous offense is as obvious and natural as the presence of the sun in the sky.

Even the little details show. Like in Boston, if you want to call for the exact time, you dial 637-8687, which in letters spells “nervous.” In Berkeley, the equivalent number spells “popcorn.”

Stevie brought out a couple of joints and a gallon of Red Mountain. He gave me a joint and then a glass, and said again that it was great to see me. Then he said, “How’s Annie doing?”

“Okay,” I said. The hooch was good. “Well, not okay. I don’t know. Shitty, in fact. I haven’t seen her for about a month now.”

“Jeez, I thought you two were really…”

“Yeah, well…” I shrugged. “I still dig her.” I lit the joint. It was even better. “She’s bumming around with some dipshit from the Piggy Club now. I see her every once in a while on Mt. Auburn Street, smashed out of her mind. We exchange pleasantries and that’s about it. You know. How’s Barbara?”

“Cool,” Stevie said. “Great chick. Everything’s cool.” He lit his joint and said, “Came out here to get away from Annie, huh?”

I shook my head. “Not really.” Stevie had introduced me to Annie about a year before, and ever since he’d taken a kind of paternal interest in how we were doing. But hell, I thought, people changed. I’d changed, she’d changed. It had been a good thing but it wasn’t any more, and I didn’t feel like talking about it. “Not really,” I said again.

“You and your parents seeing eye-to-eye these days?” he asked.

I laughed and shook my head. I knew what he was asking. He was asking how I could afford the trip out. “Not exactly,” I said.

“You dealing again?” Stevie asked, pulling a long face. “I thought you quit that.”

“I did,” I said, “but John’s been getting into it lately. Pretty heavily, in fact. He’s turning over about twenty bricks a week.”

“Far out,” Stevie said. “Twenty bricks a week, around Cambridge?”

“Yeah, everyone’s turning on these days. But you know John. He’s not particularly interested in the details, just the wheeling-dealing. So here I am.”

“Just doing bricks this time?”

“Yeah. Just bricks. Ten in the little bag under my seat and away I go. With a free vacation in California in the process.”

“You ought to knock that shit off,” Stevie said. “You’re going to get busted sometime.”

I shrugged. “You drive a car long enough, you’ll have an accident.” I took a long hit off my joint. “Anyway, there wasn’t anything else to do. I mean, this is spring break, right? So I can come out here and dig what’s happening, or I can go back to fucking Westhrop to spend a restful week listening to the old man telling me what I ought to do with my life, while the old lady asks me where they’ve gone wrong.” I laughed. “You know, man, you got a moustache and they want to know where they’ve gone wrong. Fuck that. If I started pushing beds across the country and organizing panty raids they’d be unhappy because I was apathetic and uninvolved. You can’t win. Shit, I don’t even want to win any more. I just want to do the things I want to do.”

“Yeah,” Stevie said, “I’m hip.” He lay back on the couch and stared up at the tinted sky. We were silent for a while, and then he said, “You still buying from Ernie out here?”

I shook my head. “Ernie’s not too cool these days. He got busted with thirty bricks last month and didn’t have the bread to buy himself off.”

“Is that right?” Stevie said, sitting up, suddenly interested. “But I just saw him last week…” He stopped. He thought it over. “Maybe he found somebody to post bail.”

“Maybe.”

He looked vaguely apprehensive. “Well, if he made a deal, he’ll just turn in a couple of smack freaks.” He thought that over, and then added, “He wouldn’t turn in any of his friends. Ernie’s all right.”

“I’ll let somebody else find that out,” I said.

“Ernie’s all right.”

“Yeah, probably he is. But we’ve got another connection now, and there’s no question about whether he’s cool or not. Which reminds me, can I use your phone?”

“Yeah, sure,” Stevie said. He got up, and followed me back into the kitchen. I was asking how to dial information when there was a noise at the back door and a huge freak walked in, holding his head and bleeding.

It was Ross.

8

THERE WAS BLOOD ALL OVER everything, including the little blond chick who was holding him up. As usual, Ross had his sheepskin vest on, and as usual, he was mad. Ross was always mad about something; a good bust in the head just gave him a chance to focus his energy. He slumped down on the couch with the chick, beneath the poster that said SEE AMERICA FIRST. Stevie ran for a rag.

“What happened?” I asked the chick, who was crying and wiping her face and Ross’s with the same bloody handkerchief. There was a hell of a lot of blood, but then Ross was a hell of a big boy. He was big enough to be playing football for Ohio State, except that this was Berkeley, and Ross had hair down to his shoulders and was wearing a huge pair of yellow shades. One frame was shattered and they were lopsided on his nose now as he looked up at me.

“Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”

“What happened?” I said again.

“Up on campus,” the chick said, “the Governor gave the order to the pigs to break up the picket lines.” I tilted my head. “We were keeping people from classes,” she added.

“At seven o’clock at night,” Ross said. “The motherfuckers, keeping people from classes at seven at night.”

“So the pigs broke it up,” the chick said. She had stopped crying and was staring at my clothes. Stevie came back with a rag and started wiping more blood off Ross’s face. “Motherfuckers,” Ross kept saying.

“Quit moving your head,” said Stevie.

“See it now,” Ross said, to no one in particular. Suddenly he tilted his nose in the air and started sniffing. Sniff, sniff. “Goddamn,” he suddenly said. “Goddamn morons. You been smoking again.”

“Relax,” Stevie said.

“Goddamn,” Ross said, “now of all times.”

Stevie and the chick were working on him. Stevie said to her, “Sukie, this is Peter. Peter, Sukie.”

“Hello,” Sukie said. Her back was to me. She was bent over Ross, putting merthiolate on his head. Her long legs were stretched taut, and they were very brown. Hello, hello.

“You guys are going to screw everything,” Ross said. “You’re going to get us all busted for sure. Jesus, I think if you have too much of this, it begins to affect your brains. I think—”

“Quit moving your head,” Stevie said again. He glanced over at me and we exchanged looks. Old Ross. He’d never change.

He sat patiently until they had patched up his head, then stumbled off to the bathroom, with the chick still supporting him. When they’d gone, Stevie said, “He bought another one.”

“Oh?” Nothing had changed since the year before.

“Yeah. Last week.”

“What was it?”

“Shotgun,” Stevie said.

“Out of sight. What’s he got lying around by now?”

“I don’t know. At least six. Two shotguns for sure.”

“Two?”

“Yeah, one to replace the automatic. He jammed it last week and he’s having a hard time getting it fixed.”

I nodded. Seeing as how automatics were illegal, you’d have a very hard time getting one fixed. Besides the fact that none of Ross’s guns was registered. But that was the way his head worked. He figured that if he registered his guns, he’d just be tipping them off—the big “them”—so that when the day of liberation came they would know about him, would know to come and get him. He figured that they probably already knew enough about him to come and get him anyway, but just let them try. He was ready. Muthafuggin’ pigs.

It probably would have been a cool idea for Ross to keep his guns out of sight if he’d been doing anything, if he’d been a Panther or a Weatherman—even if he’d been a member of the Sierra Club. Anything. But Ross wasn’t doing anything, short of letting everyone know what a heavy he was, and knocking out a few token Bank of America windows with the butt of his gun when the inevitable spring riot came to Berkeley. That was why he always cut such a ludicrous figure to me.

Ross was a fervent Marxist-Leninist. At least, that’s how he thought of himself. He was one of the first people I’d ever met in Berkeley. I’d just been walking down Telegraph, digging the street scene, and he’d looked like he knew his way around, so I’d asked him if he knew where such-and-such Dwight Way was. He lived there too.

We’d been great good friends for an hour or so, which was, I later discovered, about as long as Rossie could function before finding it necessary to pause and consider the state of the coming revolution. So we’d started talking about the revolution, and after a bit of it I’d just laughed—and that had offended him deeply. You could do anything, say anything, be anything, to Ross—but you couldn’t laugh at the revolution.

Later, when Stevie mentioned that I was in Berkeley to score some dope, the dislike had turned to contempt. Ross had no place in his life for drugs. He was serious enough about his trip to live in constant preparedness for the big day. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, and you could hear him panting every night as he did his calisthenics. He stayed in shape for it, and he expected others to do the same. And so he especially detested dope people, whose presence meant a possible bust, and with it the confiscation of his well-maintained arsenal. We really didn’t get along.

But what bothered me about Ross, in the end, was that he couldn’t dig what anybody else was up to. I mean, I didn’t want the dude to knock off what he was doing just because I couldn’t dig it, but that was exactly what he seemed to want me to do. And as far as I was concerned, that was half-assed, because it all came down to personal excuses, which were purely a matter of choice. His excuse for not paying any attention to us was that we blew dope, which was not only illegal but was quite literally an opiate of the people, an anti-revolutionary device that we were politically ignorant enough to indulge in.

And our excuse for not digging Ross’s trip was that we figured that any changes that were really going to happen were going to happen in people’s heads. We figured that once you started killing, you admitted that you were at a loss for other solutions, and that your own way was so poverty-stricken in the knowledge department that all you could do with people who didn’t see the light was liquidate them. And we figured that was nowhere. So we blew our dope and stayed in our heads; maybe that was nowhere, but that was our problem.

The only hitch in all this was that, from the point of view of Ross’s repressionary society, he was a lot cooler than we were. I mean some places the written penalties for selling marijuana are greater than the written penalties for killing somebody. In that sense, Ross was a lot more hip than we were.

9

STEVIE AND I SAT IN the living room, waiting for something to happen. Pretty soon the chick came back out. I was fumbling around for a cigarette, but I didn’t have a match. “Do you have a match?” I asked her. She stared at me blandly for a moment, then said, “If you made a salad out of tobacco leaves and ate it, you would be very sick.” It was said without judgment or heat, simply a stated fact. But all I could think was, Christ, not again. Another California health-food freak.

“Stevie, got a match?”

He shook his head. “I’m all out, man. Ask Ross, why don’t you.”

Just then Ross came out of the bathroom, still holding a towel to his head. He was mumbling to himself, so I left the honors to Stevie.

“Ross, you got a match?” he asked.

“So you can smoke some more dope and stink the place up? Hell, no.”

“It’s not for a joint,” said Stevie. “Just a plain, ordinary butt that won’t stink anything up any more than it already is. For Peter,” he added.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. In my room, near the phone.” As I got up he said, “Hey, and there’s a number by the phone that you were supposed to call if you showed up here. Some guy from Boston called this morning and left it.”

I nodded and said, “Thanks.”

“If you call Boston, call collect,” Ross yelled after me as I went into his room.

There was a number with a Boston exchange written on a newspaper. There was blood all over the paper and I wasn’t sure of the last digit, but what the hell. I dialed and a far-off voice answered.

“Hello?”

“This is Peter,” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” said John. He sounded like I had just wakened him, which was the way he always sounded on the telephone. “What’s happening?”

“Not much. I got invited to a bust but I didn’t attend.”

“Good man. Musty gave me a ring about five hours ago. He said he’d had to split his place fast.”

“No kidding,” I said.

John ignored me. “Yeah. We were really worried about you for a while there, Peter.” I’ll bet he was. It would’ve cost him a lot of bread. As if he knew what I was thinking, John went on. “We were afraid the heat might hassle you when they found the house clean.”

I said, “They did. Big deal.”

“Ummm.” I had half expected congratulations on my narrow escape, but of course there weren’t any. John said, “Big bust?”

“Eight narcs. Couple of patrol cars.”

“Shit, that’s the trouble with Musty. When they come down on him, they come down hard.”

“I thought he was so cool,” I said.

“For Chrissake,” said John, “he is. He knew this was coming. He called me, didn’t he? Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay,” I said, “okay. You know where he is now?”

“Just a minute.” John left the phone. I could hear music in the background and, faintly, a chick giggling. Then John came back. “Peter?” he said. “Take this number down.” He gave me an Oakland number, told me to be careful, and hung up. I sighed a deep sigh of relief, knowing at last that everything was still cool. I felt like I could relax a bit, maybe even dig the Sukie chick for a while before I dived back into the business routine. I picked up Ross’s matches and went back into the living room.

Ross was sitting alone on the couch, smiling and drinking a medicinal glass of wine. He was telling Stevie with great glee how he’d managed to kick a cop in the ’nads before they’d gotten to him. “Took that fucking pig right out with me,” he said.

Stevie looked up at me. “Everything okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, fine,” I said. “Thanks.” Then to Ross: “Where’s your old lady?”

“Who, you mean Sukie?” I nodded, and he laughed. “She’s not my old lady, man. Just a good head. She hangs around to take care of friends on days like this, when she knows there’s going to be trouble.”

“Where’d she go?” I asked.

“She went back up to campus to see what’s happening.” He looked at me hard, and then laughed again. “You can forget about her, Harkness, if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking. She’s got a good head. She doesn’t go for druggies like you.”

“Oh, I see,” I said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, but I just shook my head and sat down. I wasn’t going to argue with the dude, I was just going to relax for a change and enjoy myself. In my hand I had the number John had given me, Musty’s number. I should’ve been on the phone trying to get hold of him, to set up a time. But I didn’t feel like I had to be in any rush. I could wait. Musty had almost put me on the shithook, and it was my turn to reciprocate. He could sweat it for a while, not knowing whether I’d been picked up. It was all part of the game.

10

DEALING IS FUNNY, AS A game. It is very external and controlled and it follows patterns of protocol and consequences as rigid as any ever encountered by Nine-to-Five Man. More rigid, perhaps, since not everyone is playing the dealing game on the same scale, or with the same intensity, or with the same degree of knowledge.

But everyone in the park is playing, whether he’s on the grass or in the bleachers drinking beer, because everyone figures he’s got something to lose. Essentially, that is what makes dealing so dangerous and so thrilling—the simple fact that everyone is convinced he’s got something to lose. Because not everyone is going to admit it.

That’s the difference between the dealer and Nine-to-Five Man, who is forced to admit it, whether he likes it or not. He has to wear a suit to work, and he has to keep his shoes shined, and he has to get haircuts and watch out for tell-tale underarm stains. These rules are accepted by J. P. Nine-to-Five, by Mrs. Ruth Wanamaker Nine-to-Five, and by all the little Nine-to-Fives. It’s accepted by them and before they know it, it is them, for which they receive the Consolation Prize of Knowing Who They Are. And everybody’s happy so long as the supply of glycerin suppositories holds out.

But that’s not what’s happening on the street, because all the people who are playing there aren’t sure they’re playing, and sometimes they’re most definitely not playing but only trying to play, or thinking they want to play, or some variation thereof. That’s what makes dealing so interesting.

It doesn’t start that way, of course, with the fully developed patterns and responses and the paranoia and the inimitable thrills and chills. It usually starts as an act of love and only later turns into a game.

You start with John Joseph Straight, single, on his way through life with one finger cocked piously up his ass and another thumbing through the Yellow Pages. To this sturdy fellow add two Pernicious Influences, one Psychedelic Experience, a taste of rock ’n’ roll music, and some form or another of Idle Mind (which is widely accepted as the Devil’s Playground). Beat Pernicious Influences and Psychedelic Experience until fluffy, add rock ’n’ roll, season with Idle Mind, and lick the gummed side. Hold a match to one end, insert in mouth. You are now smoking a joint and wondering why you never thought to do this before, while the little man in the back of your head who holds the keys to your future is rolling around on the medulla in a fit of epilepsy. He is shouting that you will never be the same again, that you have permanently damaged your chromosomes and your taste buds, and that you have generally corrupted your body and fulfilled your parents’ Worst Expectations. That is, that’s what he would be saying if you could hear him. But right now you are thinking you have never in your whole life ever noticed how perfidiously intricate the sun looks coming through a half-filled cut-glass decanter of wine, or how amusing it is that your belly button should be stopped shut, while your nose has two holes instead of one.

After a few experiences of this sort, the dastardly weed becomes a fond and coveted friend, and it attracts others. That is to say, in the spirit of brotherhood and togetherness which is the mark of the Aquarian Age, you and your friends blow grass together; and those of your friends who don’t aren’t around much any more. This isn’t any fault of yours—you’re still digging them as much as you did before—but you just can’t stand those soon-to-be-behind-bars looks they give you when you get your shit out and ask them if they want a smoke; or the way they ask you if you’re high on “that stuff” before they’ll tell you how ugly their date was last night.

So you and your dope friends blow dope together, and have a lot of good times together, and watch the sun go down every night together, and go to Baskin-Robbins to taste ice cream together. And after a while it gets so that you’re blowing a lot of dope together.

And that’s cool, contrary to the local witch doctor’s medicinal meditations or the Surgeon General’s latest case of the blahs. Because you know—having violated the number-one principle of Western science and entered into self-experimentation—you know that dope doesn’t make your eyes bug out, or make your head split open and grow asparagus. And you know that you don’t wake up the morning after with the cold-turkey, liver-lidded, hungry, frenzied, glassy-eyed, pure need look of dope in your eyes, because you’re eating better and sleeping more than you ever have before. And you know that grass doesn’t zap your brain into the fourth dimension only to drop it off in the second, leaving you with three eyes and a dork the size of a pineapple and the insistent, insane, uncontrollable need to kill, rape, pillage, and plunder (which a stint in the army would at least teach you how to do)—because in that sense grass is very uneducational.

On the contrary, you find that it is vocational. You change your name to Phineas Phreak or Seymour Stone, and wear bellbottoms and dirty BVDs and grow your hair down to your ass and try to keep from passing Go while still collecting your two hundred bucks for tuition every month. You cancel your subscription to The New York Times and read the L.A. Free Press and don’t brush your teeth and look sullen as much as possible. You hang up when old girl friends call and lead a mysteriously quiet life, enjoying the knowledge that your straight friends are worrying about your health and the “deterioration of his nervous system.”

But most of all you become conscious of the extent to which you were hoaxed by people you once believed in: dope doesn’t drive you to needles or crime, and you still laugh at your father’s dull jokes.

So you try to create your own mechanism, and struggle to survive within it. You do what you think is right, and you say not what you’re supposed to say, usually not even what you want to say, but what you have to say. And then one morning you wake up and it’s you they’re describing in the editorials, and they’re talking about you like you’re a piece of shit that won’t flush. You’ve dropped out, it seems. You’re alienated and God knows what else.

By this time, however, your evil habit is consuming a bit more of your lunch money than it properly should, and you and your friends decide to start buying in quantity. This makes for cheaper dope and, quite often, for better dope, because you’re getting a solid chunk of a brick, and not a lid bag half full of oregano. So you find a big dealer and buy stuff for your friends, and they love you for being so wise in the ways of the street and so kind to their pockets and throats.

Which continues until you finally realize, one day, that you don’t have to pay for any of your smoking dope if you buy in quantity with your friends and then sell a few ounces at street prices to anybody who’s interested. And probably by this time your parents have seen a picture of you in the papers with long hair, hanging out of the occupied administration building, and they have told you to come home to Flat Top Community College or be damned—which is to say, you have been cut off.

So that’s the way it begins, with a few lids to friends to keep the bookstore off your back, or the landlord or the used-car salesman or whoever else has it in for you at the time, and from there it grows like a weed. And soon enough you’re dealing quite a bit of dope and you aren’t seeing many friends, since you’re either buying or selling or smoking with buyers or sellers, and you spend a lot of time hustling and being far out and saying, “Oh, wow! Hey man, did you dig that?” And it goes on that way for as long as you can stand it—forever, if you can stand it that long. But the chances are good that the game will grow either too bold or too old, and the routines too sadly and forlornly familiar, and you will retire from street life and go back to where you came from. Which is where you are.

11

I CALLED MUSTY’S NUMBER IN Oakland and some guy who seemed to know said I should come over, that everything was cool. I was supposed to ring the buzzer under Carol Moss. I said fine and went over.

Driving over in the car, I felt better and better. It was a beautiful spring night and the windows were down; I could hear the sounds of the street and the people. The driving was mechanical and I began to drift into the fantasy, the current fantasy you might call it, but strong just the same. At first it was just faces: faces in my mind, faces of the people blurring as I drove past them, and then I saw the crowd fanned out before me like a huge faceless corpse, dead but alive, jumping and jiving as I tuned up for the next number, and I was telling the engineers to make sure all the recording equipment was in order, because I didn’t want to have to do it more than once. If I had things my way I was going to do the damn thing once and then get out from under the glaring heat of those spots, out into the night and away. They yelled back that everything was cool and I nodded to Willie. He thumped up the bass and started it rolling, drifting and flowing, echoing hollow from the P.A. speakers in the back of the stadium. And then the drums chopped in, stomping and humping, with the light clang of the cymbals on top of it, and then we were into it, the crowd knew that it was what they’d been waiting for all night and they moaned, an insane screaming moan of pleasure, screaming, We love it, it’s yours, it’s yours, we love it, we love it. And then the harp flew in and we were going, man, we were going and this was all they were going to get, but before we went they were going to get it. Just then the cords broke in front of the stage and there were cops all over the place, tripping and falling over the equipment and themselves and the chicks clawing and grasping and then it was gone, done and gone, and the MC was yelling “The New Administration,” and the crowd was chanting for more, more, but we were down and under and out of the lights… The lights, Jesus, I’d just run a red light and some poor bastard back there was screaming at me. I checked the rear-view mirror nervously, but there was no heat. Pure luck. I took a deep breath and there were no more faces. I finished the drive and parked across from the address I had been given.

It was an old, two-story house with big bay windows. There was a chopped Harley leaning against the side of the house, back behind the cars so you couldn’t see it easily from the road; it must be Musty’s. I smiled in the darkness. Connection at last.

I pressed the buzzer and a funky little blonde showed up, wearing a bathrobe that was much too big for her and an irritated expression. She sized me up with a cold eye, like one of those people at fairs who guess how much you weigh. “You’re the guy from the Coast,” she said. “In the back.”

I stepped into the hallway, which smelled old and dark. “Are you Carol Moss?” I said. “I’m—”

“In the back,” she said, walking away.

The hall led me back toward the only light in the place, past the stairs leading up to the second floor, past an empty living room and a foul-smelling can. I came out into the light and saw three dudes sitting around a small kitchen table. There was a nappy-looking spade in a white linen suit, a guy with long curly hair and a droopy moustache, and a little guy with glasses and a nervous look. They all glanced up when I came in, but went right on talking.

“Last night,” said the little guy with tiny pupils and glasses, “last night was heaven. It was just heaven! I didn’t think twice about it all day, just went in when I felt it coming and bingo! dropped it clean as a whistle.”

“Was it tapered at the end, like a fine cigar?” the spade asked.

“No,” the little guy said. He got a suspicious look. “Why do you ask?”

“You should make sure it’s tapered,” he said. “So your ass won’t slam shut.” He laughed at that, and the dude with the moustache laughed too. The little guy looked annoyed.

“No,” he said, “it wasn’t tapered. No, it wasn’t.” He began to smile at the recollection. “As a matter of fact, perfectly round and hard, and what a relief! What pleasure! I mean it was just−−”

“Heaven,” Moustache said. “You told us once before.” Moustache seemed a little bored with the conversation. He looked up at me. “You Harkness?”

“Yeah.”

“Have a seat,” he said. “You’re just in time to hear Lou tell us all about his intestines. This is Lou,” he said, pointing to the little guy, “and Clarence. I’m Musty.”

I nodded, they nodded, and I sat down. Lou looked spiteful. There was only a bare bulb overhead, and the walls were painted black, giving the place a séance atmosphere. The walls were covered with posters: Peter Fonda on a hog, with a sign saying OURS IS THE ADDICTED SOCIETY; Jimi Hendrix scratching his belly; Bill Miller for Berkeley City Council. They didn’t have the one of Frank Zappa on the can, I thought. But then, they did have Lou.

Lou sensed a lull in the conversation and was off again, full speed ahead. “You know,” he said, “today’s been just awful. I mean, really awful. That bust on Holly Street’s left me tighter than a miser. I’ve tried three times since dinner…” he held his hands out wide, as if to show they were clean “… and nothing. Nothing!”

“You need a systems analysis,” Clarence said, and laughed.

Lou was wide-eyed serious. “You think so? Does that help?”

“Cut the shit, Lou,” said Musty. He turned to me. “Good trip?”

“Little dull so far,” I said, lighting a cigarette. Nobody laughed.

“You miss the bust?” I shrugged. Obviously, I had missed the goddamn bust. “Sorry that happened,” Musty said. But, like John, he didn’t seem very concerned. “How’s John?”

“Fine, he’s fine.”

“Well,” Musty said, “we got your stuff here. It’s not quite Michoacán, but it’s nice. Very smooth.” He pointed over beside the stove, where there were a lot of bricks wrapped in foil. “Very nice gold,” he said. “John’ll really dig it.”

Then we talked about the bust for a while. Clarence asked me how the heat was in Boston.

“About usual,” I said. “They don’t hassle the colleges much. Mostly they try to hit you when you’re away from the nest. Airports, stuff like that.”

“I think…” Lou began.

“That sucks,” Musty said, “that airport thing. You want these bricks now?”

“I think…” Lou said, a grin beginning.

“No,” I said. “Cat I’m staying with doesn’t want any dope at his place. He’s got a paranoid friend.”

“I think it’s coming!” Lou yelled, jumping up from the table and running down the hall to the can.

“You got a place to stay?” Musty asked.

“Yeah, for tonight at least. I might be around later in the week, though. Could you put me up here?”

“No problem. There’s a room upstairs that’s empty, Jack’s room. You can use that. And the place’ll be cool because I’m going to get these bricks out of here for a while. When are you leaving?”

“Goddammit, where’s the toilet paper?” came a muffled voice from the can.

“Monday,” I said.

“Okay. We’ll have the dope for you before you go.”

Carol Moss walked into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of milk, and walked out without saying a word.

“What’s hassling her?”

“Me,” Musty said, laughing. “She’s ripped at me because I spend more time with my machine than I do with her. You see my hog out there when you came up to the house?” I nodded. “Fine machine. That’s a fine fucking machine. I keep telling her that if she had seventy-four cubic inches I’d spend more time riding her, but she doesn’t think that’s so funny.”

“No sense of humor, huh?” I said. They didn’t think that was so funny either.

“You could say that,” Musty said.

“I gotta split,” Clarence said, standing up, “before Lou comes back to tell us how it was.” He nodded to Musty and said to me, “Catch you later, man,” and was gone.

Lou returned, looking ecstatic. “Boy you shoulda seen—”

“You want to taste it?” asked Musty, nodding over at the bricks.

“Sure,” I said.

“Listen,” Lou said, sitting down with us. “Listen, guys, yesterday was nothing compared to the one I just dropped.”

Musty suddenly turned on Lou. “Why don’t you just forget about your bowels for a while?”

Lou looked hurt. “What’s the matter with you? Just ’cause you almost got your ass busted today doesn’t mean I have to—”

“Just shut up,” Musty said. “I don’t feel like hearing about it any more, and I’m sure Harkness here doesn’t either.”

Lou looked over at me, defensively. “You don’t like hearing about it?” he demanded. I shrugged.

“Look, Lou,” said Musty, suddenly smiling. “Why don’t you go for a nice long walk. The air’d do you good, you’ve told me that it does you good a million times.”

Lou looked sour. Finally he said, “Okay, I’ll go. But I’m not walking. Give me the keys to your wheels.”

Musty laughed. “Haven’t got the wheels here,” he said. “Too hot. I left them in the garage down by the Holly Street place. And I’m sure as hell not giving you my bike, if that’s what you’re thinking about. Nobody drives my bike. Except me.” There was a silence, while Lou looked glum and Musty laughed some more. Then he said, “What about you?” I realized he was talking to me. “How about it, Harkness? Did you drive over?”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to sound noncommittal. I wasn’t too big on giving the car to some dude I didn’t know from a hole in the ground.

“Well,” Musty went on, “Lou here is cool. Aren’t you, Lou?” Lou nodded. I was thinking just then that I’d hang around for a while and taste the dope, so what the hell. “Come back soon,” I said, pulling out the keys. “And just don’t bust it up, okay? It’s not my car.” We all laughed and Lou hustled out the door.

“He’s a weird little dude,” I said, but Musty was already over in the corner, opening one of the bricks. He removed the tin foil first, then the paper wrapping. On the paper was a peace sign and the words BERKELEY 890. I wondered what it meant and then realized it must be the gram weight—not a bad one at that. A righteous brick, eight hundred ninety grams. Below that was a large, stenciled M. Musty saw me looking at it and laughed.

“My trademark,” he said. “I wanted to get one of those hand-press stampers, so I could punch it right into the brick. But, shit, you know what they want for those things?”

“No,” I said, thinking that Musty was pretty cocky. Or else pretty fucking good.

“Like a thousand bucks, man. I looked into it.”

It was cocky, but it wasn’t unheard of, trademarking your own dope. A lot of dudes had done it, most notably Augustus Stanley Owsley III, who’d helped put acid in the dictionary. He used to stamp a little owl right into his tabs; it was like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. It meant that the acid was pure, with a good base and a uniform three-hundred-five-mic dose. It also meant another two bucks a tab on the street.

Musty pulled a hunk off one of the bricks, and began rolling some joints. While he rolled he talked about the dope supply, the way things were getting tight. “It’s the same all over the country,” he said. “Christ. Used to be a year-round business, now it’s getting seasonal. It’s only April now, and the squeeze is on already. Everybody’s cracking down.”

“Cracking down?” I said. “Dealers, or what?”

“Well, dealers, yeah, but mainly it’s the full-scale crackdowns that hurt. Like the American government leans on the Mexicans, and the Mexes, dumb fuckers, start burning crops. And then the border guards start getting honest and the FBI decides to do nothing but hassle big runners—and things get tight.”

“Shit,” I said. “The FBI? Haven’t they got better things to do?”

“Never have before,” Musty said. “Old J. Edgar and the boys have been mowing down straw men for years—communists, dope fiends, hidden persuaders, anything they can think of. Anything that sounds tough but can’t fight back. They’re smart, man. If they didn’t keep everybody hopped up about the red menace and the international dope conspiracy, then they’d have to really get down to work and do something. Like go after the mob—and the mob’s a tough cookie, man. The mob’d bust J. Edgar’s balls.” He sighed, finished one joint, licked it, set it aside, and started on another. “Listen,” he said, “you know why the mob doesn’t deal dope—and why the only people who get busted by the FBI are punk pushers like me? You know why? Because the mob doesn’t want anything to do with grass. They’re not interested. Grass is small-time, and it’s too bulky to move without a lot of hassle. But mainly they’re not interested because there’s no real money in it. Like a dude can smoke dope his whole life, and if the supply gets cut off it won’t hassle him to stop smoking. Or if somebody’s fucking the market and the price goes up, he can stop smoking. Or if the stuff he’s getting is cut with milk sugar or oregano or whatever, he can stop smoking, and wait till something better comes along. ’Cause your basic teahead isn’t hooked, dig, he hasn’t got a monkey on his back. He’s blowing his weed ’cause he digs it, period. If things get too hot, or too expensive—zap! No dope market.” I nodded. Big deal. But Musty was getting into it.

“Now you figure this,” he said. “The mob doesn’t go for dope at all, see, because they’re a business organization, out to make money. They’re interested in shit that gives you a habit, creates a real market. A market that stays to buy whether the shit is only ten percent potency, or whether the price jumps five-hundred percent after the first week of supply. A market that stays no matter what, a market of guys who’ll do anything they have to do to keep getting their daily fix. But the FBI isn’t working on that market, see. They’re out busting dope fiend creeps like me who turn innocent teeners on to a stick of mary jane every now and then.”

“Far out,” I said. There was nothing else to say. I had heard it all before. Anybody who was into dealing had heard it all before.

“Goddamn right it’s far out,” Musty said. “It’s also a drag to talk about.” He paused and I hoped he was through, but he suddenly picked up again. “And I’ll tell you what else is a drag,” he said. “A real bummer this is, too. You got any idea how many people are blowing dope these days?” I shrugged. “A hell of a lot, man,” he said. “A hell of a lot. Ten or twenty million, if you read Life magazine. Five percent of this country, bare minimum. You have any idea how much dope all those people consume?” I shook my head. He shook his head back. “A hell of a lot, man,” he said again. “And I’ll tell you what happens. The heat, see, the heat figure they gotta stop all these people from blowing dope, ’cause otherwise they’re going to have a country full of drug addicts on their hands, right? Right. Okay, so they crack down on the dope supply, they make it hard as hell for a normal Joe to get his hands on some normal smoking dope. And they figure that’s good, see, they’re doing their job and preventing everybody from getting addicted. Right?” He laughed bitterly. “But then look what happens. There’s not enough dope around, so the shitbird dealers start burning the scene down. And they don’t have any more good weed than the next man, so they sell shit—any kind of shit—and they cut it with something to give it a kick. And the people who know what weed’s all about, see, they’re not getting burned, ’cause they know better. But the people who don’t know better, they get screwed.”

He threw his hands up, then rapped the table once more. He was getting pretty excited. “Like these dudes who try to sell you a lid and say, ‘Drink it as tea’—all that means is that they’re pushing some ragweed cut with meth, and you aren’t going to buy their crummy lid, right? Right. You know that, and I know that. But some high school punk isn’t gonna know that, and he’s gonna go home and fix himself up some tea, and if he does it often enough he’s gonna have a speed habit. Too much, huh? This country has a potential drug nightmare on its hands, and the pigs are busting their balls to keep it going. All the time telling the straight mommies and daddies what a good job they’re doing, keeping dope out of the kiddies’ hands, when actually they’re responsible for hooking more little ignorant brats on more kinds of shit than you can even think of. It’s too much.”

He sighed, and seemed to run out of steam. He sat back in his chair, shaking his head, then seemed to remember the joints he had rolled. He lit one and took a drag, then handed it to me. “Comes on nice,” he said. “Just wait.”

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.

“It means,” she said, “oh, just that you don’t fuck with what you don’t understand.”

“I’m not nice,” I said, withdrawing my hand. “As a matter of fact, I’m impotent. And I don’t like people who make jokes about it. So let’s have another smoke and forget about it.”

She nodded, and as she did she leaned forward to light the joint in the flame of the candle, her skin glowing smoothly, hair pulled back as far as it would go, as if to keep it out of the flame and as I watched her fiercely puffing on the joint, I understood. There was something a little odd about her left eye, which had been covered until now by hair, it seemed a little out of focus. It made me happy and angry at the same time, this ridiculous, dangerous, vicious game we were playing, now that I began to understand the rules, and I could not laugh as I wanted to. Finally I said, “Give me the joint, would you?”

She handed the smoke over and got up to change the record. “What do you want to hear?” she asked, from behind me.

“You just put that on, just a minute ago.”

“I don’t like it,” she said.

“Big deal,” I said.

I could hear her flipping through the albums. They made a slapping sound and she said, “It doesn’t bother you?”

I was suddenly angry with her for drawing it out. She had trusted me, she had shown me—and now what was all this crap? I said, “Is it supposed to?”

She came back over. “That was not nice,” she said.

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

Very softly, “Are you pissed?”

“No, why should I be?” I was blowing my mind.

She was quiet for a long time before she spoke again. Her voice was full and throaty when she did. “Do you have someone?”

“Are you asking, or do you want to know?” It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to talk about, just then.

I flashed on Annie and she said, “Yeah, that happened to me, too.”

I looked at her, disbelieving.

“This guy and I had a real good thing going,” she went on, “but he thought he could treat me like shit.”

I looked at her, feeling something like affection. I thought I was going to laugh when she said, “You remind me a little of him,” and I breathed out in a rush.

“Thanks, I’m overwhelmed.”

She laughed. “No, no,” she said, “just the way he looked. And you don’t even look that much like him. He was a prick.”

“Oh,” I said, not knowing what else to say but suddenly laughing at the whole scene, at the fear and anger which was so important and then not even important enough to be remembered. I looked up at her and she was laughing too.

“The only thing is”—still laughing—“I can’t stand those duds you got on. Do you go around like that when you’re in Cambridge?” I nodded. “All the time?” I nodded again. “I couldn’t stand it,” she said. “It must be like walking around inside a tank.”

“Yeah, well—”

“Why don’t you get out of them?”

“I’m wrecked,” I explained, and she just nodded and came around the table and leaned over to undo my shirt. I pulled her down to me on the floor and kissed her hard.

Then she was tickling my ear with her tongue, saying, “Your jacket’s going to get dirty.”

“It comes clean.”

“Come on,” she said, “let’s get in bed.”

“You were taking my shirt off,” I said, kissing her. She started unbuttoning and I picked her up and carried her to the bed.

“Is everyone at Harvard such a gentleman?” she whispered, and I dropped her. Laughs.

Somebody was knocking on the door.

“He’s not in,” I said, and sat down to take my socks off. Another, heavier, knock, and a thick voice asking for me. “Nobody’s home,” I said. Christ, take a hint.

And then the door was open and three cats were in the room, all wearing gray pin-stripe suits and looking like walk-ons for Robert Stack. Dangling their wallet badges before I could get my glasses on.

“FBI,” said the first man.

15

“YOUR NAME HARKNESS?” barked another.

“Yes,” I said.

“You rented a ’69 Mustang from Hertz today?”

“Sounds familiar. What can I do for you?”

Silence. Then, “We just want to look around.” Spoken in typical deadly Oh Nothing plainclothesman tones. Deadly. The speaker was a skinny guy with a crew cut. He had 86-proof brains you could smell across the room, and his neck was covered with acne. He started looking and so did the other two, poking here and there in the room and in the corridor outside.

I suddenly remembered Sukie’s lid and got a woozy rush of anticipation, but I couldn’t see it on the table, so maybe she’d stashed it. At any rate, I decided to try to get them out of the room as soon as possible.

“Since we haven’t been formally introduced…” I said. Nobody looked up. “You wouldn’t mind telling me what you’re doing here?” I continued.

“We would,” Crew Cut said. Okay, fair enough.

“In that case, you wouldn’t mind producing a search warrant.” Fuck these dudes. First thing I’d done when I’d gotten into dealing was to read a manual on search-and-seizure techniques, complete with the latest test cases, rights of the citizen, common police ploys. All the dope, as the saying goes. And so I wasn’t about to stand around and watch while these jokers turned the place upside down.

I repeated my question.

“Why don’t you shut up,” Crew Cut said.

I decided to be indignant. “You know as well as I do that you need a search warrant to go over this place,” I said.

Sukie was lying on the bed, the blankets twisted around her, looking unhappily at her dress on the floor. One of the cops stepped on the dress as he walked around the room.

“And I have a witne—”

“Listen, Harkness,” the third one said, fat with glasses and a choked, menacing voice, “if I were you I’d keep quiet just now, because—”

“Because what, cop?” I said. I was getting mad. “Right now you’re up for breaking and entering, illegal search and, for all I know, seizure, besides—”

“Besides, you’re under arrest,” Crew Cut said. “For possession. Put your shirt on, you’re coming down with us.”

I couldn’t believe it. I just stared at them as they moved around the room, shuffling and sniffing and poking at things. I was trying to figure out if one of them had picked up Sukie’s lid, but they didn’t act like it.

“I’m what?”

“Under arrest, candy-ass. Now move it.”

If they were bluffing, I figured, I might as well follow them down the line. “On charges of possession?” I said. “I’m clean. Go ahead, look around all you want, you won’t find anything on me.”

I was scared and Crew Cut was looking pleased. “Sure we don’t need a search warrant?” he said.

“Let’s go, kid,” said another.

There was nothing to do but go. Sukie gave me a So Sad To Be Lonesome look as I got dressed, and I saw how suddenly cold and tired she looked, huddled up in the blanket. Meanwhile the cops kept looking around, but miraculously didn’t find anything, not even the roaches. I got all my clothes on and was knotting my tie.

“Forget that,” Crew Cut said. “There’s plenty of time for that.”

I watched them nosing around the room, and felt like laughing. It was almost impossible to take them seriously, with their cops-and-robbers huffing and puffing and the staid, predictable way they played the scene. As if they were actually playing a scene. I felt like I was watching TV—this kind of thing happened to people on TV, not to real flesh-and-blood persons. I was a spectator at my own bust.

Then one of them turned to the dude with the glasses and said, “Hey Murph, you want the girlie?” I felt tight and weak until Glasses said, “Naw. Just candy-ass here.”

Then they twirled me around, grabbed both wrists and pulled them tight behind me, and slapped on the cuffs. Wrenched them shut.

“What’s the point of that,” I said. “I’m non-violent.” It was a joke, if a grim one.

“How are we s’posed to know that?” said Crew Cut, dead serious.

“He’s bleeding,” said Sukie. “You’ve got them on so tight he’s bleeding.” I hadn’t noticed, but I took her word for it.

“Relax, lady,” said Glasses, the one they called Murph. “Lover-boy here can take it. Right?” He slapped me on the back and I stumbled out of the room.

Out in the hallway I went up against the wall. A good frisk with a knee in the balls, special delivery from Crew Cut.

“What the hell,” I said, “you watched me get dressed.” Very loud, hoping to wake someone up.

“Shut up,” they said, taking me downstairs.

In the downstairs hall, I could see their faces better. Crew Cut was very young, with pimples all over his face as well as his neck. No wonder he was being the tough guy, I thought. This may be his debut. He was glowering ferociously as we left the house.

The second guy looked like a butcher putting on airs. A nouveau riche butcher. Rolled old ladies for their opera tickets so he could fart in a box seat. Butcher needed a shave and some deodorant.

The third guy Murph, the one with the glasses, looked strangely familiar. He was a mean-looking son of a bitch, short and stocky, with closely cropped gray hair, forty-five years old, maybe fifty. His face was smooth, round, complacent: the face of a pig who’d been getting fattened by the farmer all year but hadn’t yet figured out what for. His voice was as stiff as his walk and sounded like he’d forgotten how to laugh.

Law and Order, I thought. Bring Us Together.

Outside, the patrol car was waiting, a bored cop in the driver’s seat. We drove off into the night, one narc on each side of me. Nobody said anything. The narcs seemed suddenly as bored and passionless as the automaton at the wheel. Finally I said, “What have you got on me, anyway?”

No answer. Everybody was engrossed in the empty, pale night streets.

“Well listen,” I said, “long as you’re running me in, you might as well—”

“Just shut up, huh, punk?” one of them said. Lazily, enjoying it.

I couldn’t believe it. What was this shit, anyway, the drive-ins or a special number they did for guys like me.

After a few minutes one of them turned to me. “We got your friend,” he said.

“My friend?”

“Yeah. We got him. Took us a while to find out where you were. Sorry about the delay.” Chuckles. I was delighted to see that somebody was having a good time.

“My friend?” I said again.

“Look, buddy, how dumb are you? There’s no use fucking around with us. It’s over. We got the whole story. Picked up your friend and found the shit. So don’t fucking waste our time.”

Crew Cut turned around from the front seat to look at me. “See, punk, this time it’s for real. It’s all for real.” Then he laughed. “Christ, you guys are all the same. Like that guy we picked up last week—hey, Murph, you ’member the guy on the beach? Yeah. We picked up this guy on the beach in Frisco last week, busted him while he was shooting up. He had his whole outfit right there with him, along with half a bag of scag, and he was so smacked out of his mind that the whole way in to the station he wouldn’t do nothing but tell us what a great guy God was.” Titters all around. Crew Cut was being appreciated. “Goddamn. The whole way, the guy stuck to this one story. Said he just went down to the beach to meditate, ’cause he wanted a bag of scag so bad that he’d decided to pray to God, and suddenly—this is what he says, he says, ‘and then suddenly, Officer, God answered my prayers, and that bag, my bag you got there, that bag just dropped into my lap, right out of the sky.’ Wouldn’t tell us anything more. Christ, you guys are all the same.”

More titters. Even the cop who was driving joined in. I suddenly felt very uncomfortable.

“I want to see my lawyer,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Crew Cut. “At the station.”

16

I FINALLY GOT THE STORY when I was booked. Lou was driving around in the car and the brake lights hadn’t been working, so the cops pulled him over for a routine check. And Lou hadn’t had his license, and nothing but rental papers in place of registration, so they had decided the car was stolen, called in the FBI, and given him a good going-over. Along with the car. It was then that they’d found a lid of Lou’s grass under the seat.

So they ran him in, and he swore that it was my grass and my car, and that he’d just innocently borrowed it. He had become extremely helpful, and even gave them Musty’s address.

So they busted me.

It was just a freak accident, the kind of dreary, half-assed thing that could happen to anybody. I couldn’t even get very angry about it.

The walls of the cell were green.

17

NOTES FROM JAIL: BROUGHT TO you by the silent majority of Alameda County. Arrival sensations. Jail really exists. Astoundingly dull. In conception, execution, duration, the idea of jail is a watershed in man’s inanity to man. Does have its good points. A raving genius couldn’t possibly have thought of a simpler way to drive one absolutely crazy. Sense deprivation child’s play compared to this. Jail is will deprivation. No life. Death meaningless. Ambition a torture. Failure a vision in steel.

More: It goes on. Green everywhere, bathroom green. Like going blind from an overdose of ethyl crème de menthe. County runs a tight ship. Enter jail proper, all personal effects removed and checked. Money, matches, belt, shoestrings. Don’t want people hanging themselves by their shoestrings. Then on to converted shower stall, also green, big enough for three men sitting. Five men are standing. Pay phone on wall, am allowed two calls, lawyer and bondsman. Names of bondsmen scrawled all over the wall, no lawyers. Search-and-seizure manual forgot to tell me they take my money away when I come in. I can’t call. Others are calling. Suddenly realize they’ve been through all this before. Have to have been through it to know the ropes, like everything else. Whacked out old bestubbled wino asking everyone if he can blow them. Sorry bud. Gets heavy and I start singing. Very effective. Yell till your lungs burst but singing drives the guards crazy. Transferred immediately to cell by myself.

Cell: Incredible. Everything electric, controlled from out in the hall. No keys, like in the movies. Bars four inches apart and cross-riveted, can’t cut and bend. Mine one of eight cells looking onto large room connected to mess room and guards’ corridor. Altogether ten doors for the one block, all controlled from corridor. More green. Bare bulbs on all day all night, no sunlight. No air. No idea what time, they have taken my watch. Might slit my wrists. Know that x amount of time has elapsed due to unidentifiable slop brought around twice a day. Never eat but go out to mess room, a chance to leave the cell. Doors lock behind even in mess. Four steel slats riveted to wall in my cell, one has a blanket. Somehow it is cold after dinner, good to have a blanket. Light directly overhead through grating, wish I had something to poke it out. Combination can-drinking fountain in my cell, attached to wall. I piss on mess floor. Anything to fuck them up.

Amusements: Good deal of writing on the wall. Jails probably the most creative places in America. No time, have to create your own. Tremendous variety. Slogans, dates, epithets, jokes, obscenities. Some take me back to fourth grade, others brilliant. Everything indelible because scratched into paint of wall. No pens allowed. Layers of painted-over graffiti beneath current coat of paint. Deciphering these provides blessedly time-consuming endeavor. One magazine in cell, old copy of Life last seen in parents’ living room. The Grandeur That Was Egypt. Very appropriate for jail. All is Lost Empire here. Carefully drawn life-size penis inserted into Nefertiti’s mouth on cover. Excellent job. Flash: someone smuggled a pen in to do that. Have to know the ropes. Not eating makes me sleepy. I sleep a lot, surprisingly good dreams. All of things I cannot have. In one dream I order a Coke, the guard brings it. I wake up crying so happy and see green. Back to sleep. I have no matches and can’t smoke. Guards won’t give me any, the cunts. First meal third day they come and take me out. Everything sharp and clear in my head from not eating. Gums hurt from no nicotine. Down the hall the desk. This the Out of Stater? Yeah. Two of the plainclothesmen who picked me up are here. No one in cells looks up as I go. Why bother? They’re still in. Manila envelope with what looks like my name on desk. Wristwatch, belt, ballpoint, blah blah blah. Piece of paper sign here. Where? Here. Plainclothesmen pull my hands behind again, on with the cuffs. Wait a minute, I hear my voice. First time I’ve spoken in three days. It sounds crystal clear. Wait a minute, I had twenty bucks on me when I came in here. Frown behind the desk. See the receipt? See your signature? You signed on, you’re signed off. So get the hell out. Wait a minute, I repeat, I had twenty bucks, see the twenty in the corner there? Behind the desk heavy now. He’d like to work me over cuffed, I think. So that’s your game, huh? he says. Looking at plainclothesmen like Do Him Good For Me. That’s your cell number! he says. About face. Have to know the ropes. Forward march past two guards and through a thick steel door, locks inside and out. Small sign on door says BE SURE TO CLOSE TIGHT AS YOU GO. Don’t worry, fellas, you don’t have to say it twice.

18

INTERROGATIONS WAS A FLIGHT UP and had padded chairs. It was a small room but on the way up I passed through an office of busy secretaries and big broad glass windows with the sun coming through. And then I realized that if they’d just wanted to interrogate me they could have done it in the cell, and a lot more privately, too. The fact that they were doing it here meant only one thing—I was out.

Inside the room they took the cuffs off and I found myself facing Crew Cut and Fats. They sat and stared at me.

“What day is this?” I said.

“Tuesday,” Fats said.

I nodded. Groovy. Economics on Friday. I hoped that Herbie would be in good form when I got back.

Then the third guy came in, the head pig, and sat down at a desk after making a lot of noise taking off his coat and unbuckling his shoulder holster. He reached into his desk and fumbled around for a moment.

I reached into my Manila bag and got out my cigarettes. But no matches. I shook out a cigarette and looked over at the pig, who was still fumbling in the desk. I hoped he was going to produce a light.

Instead he whipped out a plastic Baggie full of grass and stuck it in my face. That was supposed to scare me shitless. I turned to Crew Cut and said, “Got a match?”

“I don’t smoke,” he said.

I looked at the second guy, who just shook his head slowly, like he could hardly be bothered shaking his head at me.

So I reached into my Manila envelope and pulled out my belt and put it on. Then I put in my shoelaces, and wound my wristwatch, and put my pen in my pocket. Silence until the head pig said, “There are some questions we’d like to ask you.”

I turned to face him. “You got a light?”

“I don’t smoke,” he said. Nicotine stains all over his fingers.

“There are some questions we’d like to ask you,” Crew Cut said.

“Before you go,” Deskman speaking, significant tone. It was good to know that I’d been right about getting out, and I got a heady adrenalin rush of anticipation. “Tell us about your friend.”

“My friend?”

“Now let’s not waste each other’s time, fella,” Crew Cut said. “We’ve been through all this before.”

“We know all about you,” Deskman said. I noticed how thick his glasses were.

There was nothing to say. I still wanted a smoke.

“We got your friend, he’s in the other room if you want to speak to him,” Crew Cut said. Sure you do, chum. “And we’ve got your marijuana here”—Deskman lifted the bag in the air and gazed at it—“so you might as well play ball. Now are you going to tell us about it or not?”

“About what?”

They didn’t blink. “About the whole thing.”

“There isn’t any whole thing,” I said. “I’ve never been to Berkeley before—I’m a student in Boston and I happen to be on vacation, which is almost over now, thanks to you gentlemen—and I met the girl I was with when you picked me up on Telegraph that afternoon. And we got along, so she offered to put me up.” Smirks all around. “And this guy, Lou, whoever he is, needed a car, and she knew him and said he was all right, and I lent him my car. Now the fact that he was busted with an ounce of marijuana in my car may be legal grounds for hassling me, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to know what it’s all about. I haven’t got the slightest idea what he was doing with the dope, or where he got it from. Why don’t you ask him?”

“We have. He said it was yours.”

“Mine? I don’t even smoke marijuana. I haven’t touched dope for years. There’s a lot of things you can try and pin on me, but a possession rap isn’t one of them.”

“You’ve got one on you right now, buddy boy.”

“Did you by any chance do any fingerprints off this bag of marijuana? Did you by any chance find any of my prints? Or did you simply take his word for it, that ’cause it was my car it was my bag of dope? Isn’t it usually the case that where there’s a lid, there’s a pound, or a kilo, or a number of kilos? And did you find any dope in the young lady’s room that night, or on my person at that time? And have you found any since then?” I was getting worked up and I remembered suddenly the tracks on Lou’s arms and decided to take a new tack. “In other words are you doing anything except hassling me on the word of a paranoid speed freak who borrowed my car and then laid a bum rap on me?”

“Relax, Harkness,” said Deskman. “Yeah, we did all those things, and we ain’t got much on you. But the fact remains that it was your car, and the dope was in it, and we can make things pretty uncomfortable for you on your, ah…” he paused, savoring his own thoughts “… vacation. Unless you come around and talk dirt with us.”

“Talk to you. I have been talking to you. And so far it hasn’t gotten me anywhere.” I was doing the indignant-citizen number now and enjoying it immensely, after doing time for what even they admitted was a pretty thin hustle. “I want a cigarette. I haven’t had one for three days. Don’t any of you guys have a match?”

Deskman nodded to Crew Cut, who grudgingly reached in his coat and pulled out some matches. Handed them to me. As if on signal, all three of them pulled out their butts. I lit mine, looked around at all of them, and blew the match out. Threw it on the floor, put the book in my pocket. Crew Cut was staring at me. Deskman again, suddenly, intensely:

“You a good friend of O’Shaugnessy’s?”

The question caught me completely by surprise and I was glad I had the cigarette. Took a long drag. It tasted unbelievably good. Meanwhile, my thoughts not at all under control. Had they busted Musty that night, after I’d gone, and were they now keeping it from me? Had they been watching him the whole time, and me, and known why I was in the house? Had they seen my car at the first house that afternoon and followed it, hoping to catch me with something? (It didn’t seem like Hertz to have no tail lights.) Had they planted the dope on Lou just so they could run me in? The last made the most sense, ’cause it would explain their letting him off with a few questions, and “taking his word” that it was my dope. Just how much did these pigs know? It was all happening very fast. I decided the least I could do was make them work for it.

“O’Shaugnessy?” I said.

“Yeah, Harkness, you know Padraic J. O’Shaugnessy? Big pusher, long black hair and a moustache? Ring any bells?”

“No, I don’t know any O’Shaugnessy. Is this another one of Lou’s ideas?” I had to find out.

“No, your friend Lou didn’t have anything to do with it. So you don’t know any O’Shaugnessy, huh, kid? Fred”—to Crew Cut—“What’s the name he uses on the street—what do the creeps call him?”

“Musty,” said Crew Cut, with the expression of a man who’s blown lunch and missed the bowl.

“Know anybody by the name of Musty?” Deskman asked, leaning forward.

“Musty,” I said, trying to sound as if I was mulling it over. “Yeah, I met a cat named Musty. He was with Lou when I met Lou at the house that night. When Lou asked me for the car. Wears his hair in a ponytail, is that the guy you mean?” Said in a tone of intense distrust, as if that were just the kind of weirdo a nice clean-cut Harvard boy like myself could never forget.

“Yeah, that’s the one. Seems that you have an excellent memory, Harkness, when you feel like it.”

“I do have an excellent memory,” I said, “but not for people’s last names when I only know their first.”

“Okay, wise-ass,” said Crew Cut. “Didn’t learn nothing in the cooler, huh? That kinda talk’s gonna get you nowhere around here. We don’t wanna know how smart you are. We know all about you and this O’Shaugnessy. So let’s have it. Is he the one who gets you the shit? Where does he get it? Where’d you meet him? Who do you deal the shit to? C’mon, Harkness, let’s have it. Now!”

The vibrations in the room were getting a bit tense. They were going through the kind of verbal foreplay that cops do when they’re deciding whether or not to really hassle you. But Crew Cut had blown the scene, I could see that from the way Deskman was glaring at him. He’d given it all away. They knew I was connected with Musty, but they didn’t know how, or why, or when, or where. And probably they didn’t even really know, they just had a damned good hunch.

Deskman shifted position, took his glasses off and looked through them. Put them back on his nose, and said, “Now, Harkness, you got a trial coming up, a hearing tomorrow. You play ball with us and things could go very smoothly. You don’t, and your vacation’s going to be something of a financial disaster.”

Blew it again, Deskman. Trial. Hearing. That meant everything was all right.

“I’m not saying another thing till I see a lawyer,” I said.

“You could’a spoke to your lawyer anytime,” Crew Cut exploded.

“Not after you thugs took all my money, I couldn’t.”

“You didn’t have any money, Mr. Excellent Memory,” Fats said, breaking his silence. “I seen you sign the sheet.”

“I had twenty bucks, goddammit, and you saw me tell the guy that, too. And you saw how he hustled me out of it, and you played along with him and dragged me up here. Sign the sheet, my ass.”

“You wanna go back down and talk it over with him?”

“I want to get out of here, right now,” I said. “I know damn well somebody’s paid my bail, or you wouldn’t have me up here, and you’ve got no right to hold me any longer. I’m not saying another thing till I see a lawyer. I don’t care if it’s just one of your crummy P.D.s. You wanna try and make those phony charges stick, go ahead.”

Deskman looked at me, sizing me up. He knew that I knew that it was all over and he had to let me go. But it wasn’t over yet. He held the bag up to the light, swung his chair around to face me and shoved it under my nose. “How long you been smoking this shit?” he said.

“I told you, I don’t smoke marijuana.”

“How long?” he said, like I better answer.

“I smoked, maybe two years. Maybe more. Don’t any more.”

“O’Shaugnessy turn you onto this shit, huh?”

“No, he didn’t,” I said. Absurd questions.

“LSD,” said Crew Cut, dragging on his cigarette fiercely, “what about that shit, you take that too?”

“I don’t recall being busted for that,” I said.

Deskman leaned forward, a strange gleam of satisfaction in his eye, as though he’d just destroyed the golden calf single-handed.

“Tell me, Harkness,” he said, “is it good kicks?” I looked at him, astonished. So that was the problem. Well, there wasn’t anything I could do for his head. I shrugged and said, “Better than alcohol.”

It was pointless to bait the pig, but I couldn’t help enjoying it when he suddenly began to sweat. His face got red and his lower lip twitched. “Only it’s not legal, is it, Harkness? And that doesn’t bother you, does it, Harkness? You don’t give a fuck for the law. You can’t be bothered with what’s legal and what isn’t. The whole fabric of society is a big joke to you, isn’t it? You’re just so smart you can do whatever you want, can’t you, Harkness?”

“How do you figure that?” I said.

“I don’t have to figure it, Harkness,” he shouted. “I know it. I know all about you.”

“You know all about me?” I said, and looked at him. He was serious. “You should’ve considered the priesthood, Lieutenant. This isn’t a job for you, it’s a calling.”

His eyes flashed when I said that. He rocked feverishly in his chair for a moment, and then said, “Okay. Okay, Harkness. You’re pretty funny, you’re a pretty funny guy. You got a lot of quick answers, a lot of smart-guy, know-it-all answers. And you go to your big Ivy League school and wear your English clothes and your old man buys you everything and you’re sick, you’re sicker than hell and all the bastards like you… But let me tell you something, punk.”

His face was now very red. I waited for him to tell me something, seeing as how he knew all about me.

“Tomorrow, punk,” he said, “tomorrow you’re going to be in front of a judge, and that judge is going to know you weren’t very helpful. And you’re gonna get a felony for all your efforts, see? A big fat felony.” He held an open hand out to me, and crushed the air, squeezing the felony, big and fat. “And you might even do some time for this one, Harkness, because society isn’t going to put up with your kind of liberal shit any more, you better believe that. We aren’t going to put up with it forever—your drugs and your sick life and your disrupting and your crime.”

“Disrupting? Listen, I was trying to get some sleep when—”

“Shut up,” the pig said. “You better learn to shut up, Harkness, and you better learn fast. Because when you get out of here all your cars and your money and your slick girl friends aren’t going to get this off your record, no matter how much you talk. You’re going to have to explain this one, Harkness, everywhere you go. Every time you try to get a job you’re going to have to do some explaining, and every time you apply for a loan. And no matter how much explaining you do, it’s never gonna go away.”

He paused to catch his breath, and shook his head at me. “Sure, Harkness,” he said viciously. “I know. Sometimes it happens, a good boy like you. Good family, good education—you just slip up, and make one little mistake. But you’ve made your mistake this time, see, Harkness, and you’re gonna be explaining it for the rest of your life. The rest of your crummy life.”

Deskman put out his cigarette in an ashtray next to me, and I could smell the fumes as I said, “Well, it seems that everybody gets their kicks somehow.”

19

WITH THAT HE STOOD up from behind the desk, and I saw again how small he was. Beware the Small Man. He waved to the other two.

“All right, boys, get him out of here.” His face was strained; he was showing great forbearance. I stood up and he came over to me, until he was just a few inches away. I was half a head taller than he was, and he didn’t like that.

“You’re a really funny guy, Harkness,” he said in a low voice. He began to speak slowly, but the words picked up as he went. “A real funny guy, a joker, a know-it-all. I bet all your friends think you’re a funny guy and a know-it-all, too.”

And with that, suddenly, he kneed me in the groin. It was very quick, and I coughed and bent over, leaning on the desk.

“You’re scum,” the pig said. “And we’re going to break you and your kind of scum, curb you like dogs so that decent people don’t have to step in your shit. So decent people don’t even have to look at you, see, Harkness? So that they won’t even have to know you’re there.”

And he kicked again, and I coughed again and fell back into my chair, my pack of cigarettes falling out and spreading like white splinters over the floor. The pig gave a final snort and walked out, leaving me doubled-over in the chair, trying to get my breath. When I finally looked up I saw a cigarette being offered. Crew Cut held it out, looking sort of embarrassed to be offering me a smoke, but too embarrassed not to. The other cop was trying not to look at anything, peering out into the outer office.

I took the butt and Crew Cut lit it. After a drag or two I felt a little better. The pain was sliding away. I wiped the tears from the sides of my eyes. “That’s a man the force can be proud of,” I said.

Crew Cut looked pained, and swallowed a couple of times. “Murphy feels strongly about all this,” he said.

“I noticed,” I said. “Is he always like that?”

“Murphy feels strongly about these things,” Crew Cut said again. “He thought he could find out a lot more from you than he did. He couldn’t, so that’s that, and—”

And then it hit me. “Murphy?” I said.

Crew Cut and Fats exchanged glances.

“Lieutenant Murphy, old FBI man, now a narc?”

The two of them stood up. It was time to go.

“Didn’t he used to work in Boston?” I asked.

“He still does, kid. He’s out here following up a smack case. Now let’s go.”

And I was out the door and through the office very fast. On the way downstairs I began to understand.

20

LIEUTENANT JOHN L. MURPHY WAS a familiar name in Boston, and a household word in Cambridge. Narc squads are usually distinguished only for their irritatingly obvious presence—you see a freaky guy wearing white socks, and you know he’s a narc—but Murphy had been doing his damnedest to change the image. He was tough, fast, and imaginative. He was also a screaming sadist and a crook.

There were a lot of stories about him, but I’d never taken them too seriously. When somebody on the streets tells you about a narc who busts people single-handed, makes deals with them, takes their bread or their dope and then works them over and turns them in anyway—well, that’s a little hard to believe. I mean, the image is a bit too desirable to be true. Everybody wants a good reason to hate cops. They’re The Enemy.

I was converted when Murphy busted Super Spade. Super Spade was a loping, agile, funky, beautiful, good-time dude, whose face had been glowing in Harvard Square for years, long before the college boys had even heard of dope. Super was sort of the grand old man of the street. Everybody liked him, and everybody was unhappy when he got busted.

After he got out, he came over to see John to borrow some bread for a lawyer. And he blew our minds when he told us the story, because Murphy had busted him and the story was like all the other Murphy stories. Murphy had busted him alone; the warrant was in order, and Super had been caught holding eight bricks. So far so good. Then Murphy began talking about how much Super’s eight bricks were worth, and how much time he’d probably draw for that kind of quantity. And Super finally made the connection and suggested that perhaps he and Murphy could work something out.

Which they proceeded to do. Super came up with three hundred bucks in cash and laid it on Murphy. Then Murphy, having already handcuffed him, beat the shit out of him—and then took him in. Next day Super found out he had three charges against him: possession of marijuana, resisting arrest, and attempting to bribe an officer. When he asked the judge how much the bribe had been, the judge told him fifty dollars.

So far it seemed like Murphy was just another rough cop, playing it a rough way. But also in Super’s apartment was a glass jar with five hundred acid flats. Super hadn’t mentioned them to Murphy, but he found when he got home that the flats were all gone. And soon after that a friend in Roxbury told him about the sudden fast market in the midst of a dry season: all sorts of good acid around, and outasight smoking dope.

Anyway people had been telling these stories for a long time, and it was getting harder to simply dismiss them as street jive. The street people were unanimously in favor of taking Murphy apart, of busting his ass good. Partly because he’d become something of a legend and something of a symbol, but mostly because he had crossed the line and was playing dirty.

A rough and tough cop he could be, and for that he would be hated and respected. But as a thief with a badge, a guy who broke the rules and regulations we all play by, as that kind of person he could never last.

At least, everyone hoped not.

21

I WALKED OUT INTO THE Berkeley sun and stood there, just soaking it up. The light hurt my eyes at first and I sneezed and rubbed my nose.

“Gesundheit,” said a voice behind me.

I turned and she was in my arms, crying, kissing me and crying.

“Hi,” I said. It was happening very fast, all of it.

“What did they do to you?” she said.

“Nothing. Punched me in the cubes some. That seemed to be about all they knew how to do.” I laughed. Getting punched in the chops suddenly seemed absurd.

“Oh, my poor Peter,” she crooned, stroking my head.

“Umm,” I said, thinking, It was worth it just to feel this.

“My poor, poor Peter,” she went on. “You didn’t have to do all that.”

“What’dya mean?” I laughed. “I didn’t think I had much choice in the matter.”

“No, for me,” she said.

“Oh, Christ, forget it. One bail is better than two any day.”

“My poor Peter,” she said again, and kissed me.

My rented car was over in the lot. I had the keys back; we went and got into it.

“The hearing is set for tomorrow,” she said. “Did they tell you?”

“More or less,” I said. I started the car and drove out of the lot, not exactly sure where I was going. I wanted to go to a beach somewhere. A quiet beach.

“Hi,” she said, and grinned broadly this time.

We were off.

As I drove I said, “Who paid my bail? Musty?” I would have to wire home for some bread to pay him back. That was good of him. The last time I sat in there until I almost rotted, waiting for somebody to come up with a lousy fifty dollars.

I looked over at her and she was smiling. “What’s so funny?”

She just shook her head.

We crossed the Richmond Bridge, and then went through the hills, coming finally to the summit and turning right down an old farm road. The sea was visible from the road but we had to go way down, past miles of grazing land that stood between us and the cliffs down to the water. When we finally got down to the beach, it was deserted.

“Great beach, huh?” I said, but she was already out and running down the sand. It was almost a joyful run, but not exactly. I ran after her and caught her. The sun overhead was fierce and bright.

“Hey,” I said. “Who paid my bail?”

She just smiled.

“What’d you do a thing like that for?”

She shrugged. “It seemed like a good thing to do with the money.”

“Seriously,” I said. I was suddenly in a serious mood. “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Seriously.”

“It’s a great mystery,” she said and giggled, broke free and began walking down the beach. I walked after her.

“Didn’t they tell you that they don’t give it back?”

“I know,” she said.

“Well, why?”

“Don’t get frantic.” She kicked the water as it slid up the sand. It sparkled off her feet, into the air, then splattered down onto the sand.

“I’m not frantic. I just want to know.”

“You’re making such a big deal out of it.”

“I’m not.”

“Yes you are.”

And she giggled and started running again, and I chased her, and it all began to seem ridiculous. She was right; I was making a big deal out of it. I finally caught her and tackled her and she laughed very loud beneath me.

“That was a very nice thing you did for me,” I said.

She kissed me, pulled me down hard. “You bet your ass,” she said.

Very stoned, sitting on the beach just back far enough from the water so the sand was dry and still warm from the setting sun, watching the water hiss up toward us. She said, “I can’t get me out of your mind.”

I knew what she meant.

22

WALKING DOWN WHAT SEEMED LIKE miles of endless corridors, our footsteps echoing, I said, “I’m surprised you have a key.”

She laughed.

It was close to midnight, and the building around us was silent. The walls were painted light green, a little like jail; the building reminded me of an institution. “It used to be welfare offices or something,” she said, “before it was sold and converted.”

“Cheery,” I said.

“It gets better.”

As we passed them, she showed me the lounges for the performers. They looked like airport lounges or something, sort of plush but impersonal. Very soundproofed. I suddenly began to notice how everything off the corridors was soundproofed.

Then we came into another room, marked STUDIO A. Shock: it was like a heavy living room. Persian carpets on the floor, hangings on the walls, colors and textures. “Like a very nice cathouse,” I said.

“Close,” she said. And out came another joint. She lit up as I wandered around the room. There were microphones everywhere, and a stand for guitars, and a piano in the corner. I sat down at the piano.

“Do you play?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“You play anything?”

I shook my head, and plunked out “Chopsticks.” She laughed, and then said, “Stay there,” and left the room. I walked around, breathing in the luxury, and then began to drift into the sense of working with my group, the cigarettes and the quiet talk and everybody getting together, getting their heads and fingers loosened…

“Hello,” she said. Her voice was funny. I turned around and saw the drapes pulling back to reveal a glass wall, and her behind the glass, staring in at me. The lights in the other room were overhead, harsh and funny. I could see the room was filled with recording equipment, decks and spools and dials and consoles; she was wearing earphones. A flash on the mechanical sense: there was money in all this, and manufactured products, industry just like everywhere else. The flash faded. She made a gesture for me to go toward the microphone.

I tapped it. “Is this thing working?” I heard my own voice, from speakers mounted somewhere in the room. It was working.

“We, uh, just want to play a few numbers that we know well, because we’ve never played together before.”

She knew where that line came from, and she smiled. I began to get into it.

“My name is, uh, Lucifer Harkness…”

Something happened. The voice was warbling as it came back to me. She was flicking buttons. I laughed. “What’re you doing to me?”

Now it was echoing, Doing to me, to me, to me, me.

“Yeah, well, actually…”

This time it was thin, high, squeaky, if your memory served you well. It startled me. “This is getting to be a drag,” I said. I wanted to play something, now was the perfect time to be able to do it, but I didn’t know how. It was finally hitting home, the foolishness of it, that I couldn’t even do simple chords on a guitar, I couldn’t do anything. Hopeless. I began to get depressed, and she must have sensed it, because she suddenly came around, opening the studio door, and led me out of there.

“It’s because the place is deserted,” she said. “Empty buildings are always depressing.” She smiled and squeezed my hand.

23

SHE CAME TO THE HEARING with me. I had a clean shirt and tie and I stood up straight for the judge. She sat in the back of the hearing room; I glanced back once to look at her.

The judge asked me if my legal rights had been properly attended to, since I didn’t have a public defendant by my side. I didn’t mention to the judge that I’d been through that whole riff before and it was a drag, because the P.D. doesn’t give a screw about what happens to you, he just wants to look good in front of the judge. So I told the judge that everything had been taken care of, but that in this instance I preferred to defend myself. The judge looked a little amused and a little pleased at that, and told me to proceed.

My defense was pretty weak, but logical. It included such helpful hints as the fact that I was scheduled to leave California the next day, providing I didn’t get hung up in jail and cost the good taxpayers additional expense. I also said that I had no relationship with the primary defendant in the case, i.e., the lid of dope, and that I considered it a freak accident that did not merit my bearing the weight of its consequences any more than I already had.

The judge replied that I had a sharp, clever, and discerning mind, but that I obviously knew nothing about the law. Which, he added, meant nothing, since all charges had been dropped by the D.A.’s office, and if I would speak to the clerk before leaving the courtroom, I was free to go.

I was pleasantly dazed. I thanked the judge, who told me not to thank him, and I left.

Sukie laughed as we walked out the door.

24

THE NEXT DAY WE WENT up to Tilden, very early, to watch the sun come up over the Bay. It was cold and dark when we arrived, and we huddled under a blanket drinking Red Mountain and feeling the dry warmth spread outwards. From the top of the ridge you could see everything, Oakland and Berkeley below, and Richmond and Mt. Tamalpais in the distance.

Around six-thirty some freaks showed up and did a dance to greet the morning, while the mists slowly disappeared below and the sun spilled across the Bay. And then suddenly it was time to leave, to return to the world of cars and sewage systems and plane schedules and Burger Kings. We went directly to her room and got in bed, blowing dope and drawing each moment out, as if we could forestall evening.

Late in the afternoon I went downstairs to find Musty, who was in the kitchen, where I’d first seen him. He was drinking jasmine tea, smoking a butt, and selling a couple of bricks to a fantastic-looking thirty-five-year-old chick. The chick split when I showed, taking the bricks with her in an alligator handbag.

“You see?” Musty said, as she left. “All types.” Then he grinned. “Look at the ass on her. Beautiful.” He sighed, got up, and brought out my ten bricks. “Listen man,” he said, “I’m sorry about Lou. He’s a little speedy, you know. Bad scene. Does up three bags a day.”

“What the hell,” I said, feeling magnanimous. “Past tense.”

Musty glanced at me as he set the scales on two pounds even and weighed the bricks, one by one. “You’re a good head, Harkness,” he said. “I can dig why Sukie balls you.” I didn’t really feel like talking about that. “Got a knife?” he said.

I gave him my Swiss Army job and he sliced the bricks open. They cut clean through, no rocks, no clay, practically no sticks. They were righteous keys, all right. “Dig the way the blade goes through?” he said. I nodded.

I’d already tasted the dope, so there was nothing left to do but soak the bricks in Coca-Cola for a minute, so they wouldn’t smell too bad, and wrap them up. Then into my aluminum-lined suitcase and do up both sets of locks. The ten bricks fit very nicely without shaking or banging when I picked up the suitcase.

Musty held out a hand. “Be cool,” he said, “and say hello to John for me.”

I went back down the hall, heading for the staircase to say goodbye to Sukie. I dreaded going up those stairs and then down again, but I found her standing in front of the door, raincoat over her shoulder.

“I’ve got to drop the car at the airport,” I said.

She nodded.

“How’re you going to—”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said.

I already had my ticket, so when we got to the airport we just stood around and made each other uncomfortable until they announced boarding for my flight. I kissed her quickly. We were standing underneath a billboard that said GET AWAY FROM IT ALL. I considered taking a later flight and calling John to say I’d gotten stuck in traffic, but the truth was that the East was seeping back into my brain again, the East and Boston and wet roads and hour exams. I knew I had to go.

She kissed me again. “Will I see you…” She stopped.

“Sure,” I said, squeezing her. “Sure, of course you will.” I was definitely getting back into my Eastern frame of mind, I realized, complete with an enormous paranoia about departure scenes and weeping chicks.

“When will I see you?” Very calmly. At least she was calm.

“I don’t know. Soon as possible. I don’t know.”

“I never write letters,” she said, not letting up. All I could think was, Why do they always have to do this?

“Neither do I,” I said. Which was not completely true. I write them and never mail them. “But I’ll call.”

“Will you?” Pleased.

“Yeah, soon as my exams are over.”

“Tell me what day?” Still pleased.

“I don’t know what day. Soon.”

“Okay,” she said, subdued, and then they were announcing the final boarding call for my flight, and I hustled for the plane.

She said she’d watch my plane from the observation deck, but by the time I was buckled in at the window the sun was almost gone and I couldn’t see her at all.