“Bummer,” Gesh said, flailing his hair with a plastic brush.
I didn’t mean to be insensitive, but I couldn’t have agreed more: it was an inauspicious beginning, and the shock of it dampened my mood as automatically as would the news of an earthquake in Cincinnati or the outbreak of the Third World War. Gesh sat in the corner, a beer between his legs, subdued, watching me. What could I say? It was too bad, a shame and a pity and all that. Still, we were off the farm, and that alone was enough to ignite us again. Before long we were dribbling beer down our chins and bellowing along with Orff. We ate the sandwiches, drank the beer, graduated from Orff to the Stranglers, the Rude Boys and finally the Armageddon Sisters, and then flung ourselves out the door.
Our first stop was the Mexican laundry, where we deposited eight swollen sacks of towels, T-shirts and undershorts in varying stages of fermentation and stained with paint, grease, sweat, tomato paste, Rose’s Lime Juice and the essence of bear. Next we drove up to Ashbury Heights to visit one of Gesh’s acquaintances, a recreational pharmacologist who occupied the dingy servants’ quarters of a twenty-room Edwardian mansion he shared with a lawyer and his wife, a lesbian couple, three Iranian students and an out-of-work carpenter. We passed through an iron gate, ascended marble steps. Gesh knocked.
There was a cacophony of canine yelps and snarls, a scrambling of paw and toenail against the inner door and then the irascible tones of a distant voice: “Coming. Coming.” A moment later, a short angry character with a buzzhead haircut simultaneously swung back the door and kicked savagely at a pair of trembling Gordon setters. “Yeah?” he said, pinning us with a malevolent look.
“Rudy in?” Gesh said.
Without a word, Buzzhead simply turned and walked off into the shadows, leaving the door wide open and the skittish dogs shivering at the doorframe. I followed Gesh, pulling the door shut behind me, the wet noses of the dogs poking at my hands as we passed through a crepuscular entrance hall jagged with furniture — highboys, lowboys, armoires, sideboards. The entrance hall gave onto a drawing room heaped with boxes of clothes and books and smelling of cat litter. “This way,” Gesh said, and we followed a paneled corridor past another disused room, descended a flight of stairs and pushed through a curtain into a small apartment.
There was an odor of onions, tobacco, rubbing alcohol. In the corner, stretched out on a bare mattress and spotlighted in the glow of a tensor lamp, a man with plaited hair held a paperback book to his face. Aside from the mattress, which lay on the floor, and a number of milk crates ranged against the wall and stuffed with books, shoes, clothing and newspapers, the only furniture in the room was a safe the size of a refrigerator. “Hey,” the man said as we entered the room, and then he sprang up from the bed like a predator, snarling, “Get out, get out, you fucking beasts!”
He was referring to the dogs.
“Goddammit,” he muttered, and there was real vehemence in his tone. “Stinking hairy bastards.” Then he grabbed Gesh’s hand and his face erupted in a grin. “Gesh!” he boomed. “How the fuck are you?”
Gesh said he had no complaints, and then nodded at me. “Rudy,” he said, “Felix.” I opted for the soul shake, but Rudy came straight on and twisted my hand around as if it were a salami on a string. Then he turned abruptly, padded to the safe and began spinning the tumblers. “So,” he shouted over his shoulder, “you hear anything from Ziggy?”
Gesh responded to this — no, he hadn’t heard from Ziggy but someone had told him he was waiting tables in Lahaina — while I studied Rudy. Aside from one or two of the pus-eyed reprobates clutching bottles in doorways off Mission Street, Rudy was the oddest, unhealthiest, most unsavory-looking character I’d laid eyes on in years. He was barefoot, wearing a torn pair of Jockey shorts and a ribbed turtleneck sweater with a NUKE THE WHALES button appended to the shoulder; his bare legs were hairless, the skin more yellow than white. His hair was plaited in tight cornrows that alternated with furrows of pink scalp as if his head were the blueprint for a maze, he was chinless and skinny as a concentration camp survivor, his nose was shoved up into his face and his eyes were too big for their sockets, stretching the lids like beer bellies poking out from beneath shrunken T-shirts.
When the safe swung open, I saw pharmaceutical scales, bags of mannitol and cocaine, plastic tear-sheets of Mandrax stacked like corrugated cardboard, a big food-storage Baggie full of twenties wound tight as pencils and secured with rubber bands. Rudy extracted a miniature medicine vial from the safe, and then fished around in one of the milk baskets for a bag of pot and a package of cigarette papers. For the next half hour we sat cross-legged on the floor beneath posters of John Lennon, Margaret Thatcher and the Pope, and deposited various substances in our oral and nasal cavities while we shammed the roles of host and guest. The conversation consisted of ejaculations like “Um, yeah, that’s good,” and a continuing exchange between Rudy and Gesh that invariably began with one or the other of them saying “What do you hear from X lately?” After a while they seemed to run out of mutual acquaintances and a paralyzing silence fell over the room. This was the signal for Gesh and me to rise and lay out half our weekend’s allowance — painstakingly hoarded against our eight-dollars-per-diem salary — for two grams of coke and fifteen Quaaludes. Then we wished Rudy well and went out to tear the town apart.
It was six o’clock. We drove to North Beach, parked, and ambled down the street in a blaze of neon. I was feeling good, the pavement clicking beneath my heels, windows struck with light, people on the street, music in the air. After the months of exile, after the countless deadening hours that weighed on us like some wasting disease, this was exhilarating, a rush, and even the clash of traffic and the stink of exhaust gladdened my heart. I’d been around the world with Magellan, eaten my own shoes and seen the worst, and now I was home again. When Gesh said, “Let’s have a cocktail,” I was already dancing in the street.
The first place we stepped into featured thundering rock and roll and naked women grunting in a mud pit. We had two stingers and one quack apiece, and perked ourselves up in the men’s room with a line of coke. I stood with my back to the bar, propped on my elbows, and watched the artificial mud cling to the nipples and moisten the crevices of the wrestling women. My teeth were on edge, and I found myself leaning into Gesh and shouting nonstop over the music as the coke worked on the verbal centers of my brain. This was good, I thought, this was what I wanted: excitement, cheap and loud. I felt expansive, generous, witty and invulnerable.
Twenty minutes later, as the effect of the coke waned and the methaqualone began to pour sand in my joints, I waxed philosophical. What was this need, I mused, for chemical oblivion? The world was full of drunks, junkies, kat-chewers and ether-sniffers. Kids stuck their heads in buckets of paint thinner, bears bloated on fermented berries, cats rolled in catnip. And here I was, stoned and getting stoneder, on holiday from my new vocation — itself an indictment — and watching a pair of big-titted women slog around in a tub of artificial mud. Understanding hit me like a truck: I was a degenerate. I was no part-time scholar and contractor on the rebound from the recession, I was a dope fiend and a dope dealer, saboteur of lives and minds, a gutless profit-monger and mammon-worshipper. Jerpbak had been right to single me out and pin me to the walclass="underline" I was dangerous, subversive. Suddenly I felt depressed, filled to the neck with sadness like a carafe with bad wine.