“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.