“You say heroin or other narcotics. Isn’t marijuana a narcotic?”
“Well, that depends—on your definition—but strictly speaking, a narcotic means—something that produces sleep—from narcos in Greek, ‘to sleep’—but in the usual sense it means pain-killing and sensory-dulling medications—sleeping pills—and these drugs, as you know, are nearly all addicting—the term narcotic—to most people—means addicting drug—though not, of course—to doctors.” Blink, blink.
Sally Scott looked him right in the eye. “How dangerous is marijuana?”
“Well, that depends again—on your definition—an automobile—is pretty dangerous—and so is aspirin, liquor, and cigarettes—the same thing—all medications—all drugs, broadly speaking—are dangerous and you are better off without them. In terms—of purely pleasure-producing drugs—like cigarettes and coffee—and alcohol—we can say that marijuana—so far as we know—may be a better drug to take—for pleasure—that is, safer and less addicting—but then—we know little about it.”
“When you say a better drug…”
“In terms of side effects—long-term damage—something like alcohol, as you know—is a terrible drug—physically addicting—psychologically disrupting—literally a poison to brain cells, a neurotoxin—and yet it is perfectly acceptable—to society.”
“Alcohol is a poison to brain cells?” Sally Scott asked, astonished. “But alcohol is used in all civilizations around the world.”
“Yes,” the doctor said. “That is true.”
After half an hour of this, I got up off the couch and said to John: “Got a lid?”
John raised an eyebrow. “Studying?”
“The exam’s tomorrow,” I said, “and I don’t know a fucking thing about the course.”
John shrugged.
“Well, it’s not Spots and Dots, you know,” I said. Spots and Dots was the toughest course offered by the Fine Arts Department. Modern Western Art 1880–1960. Blind men had been known to pass.
“Top drawer of my dresser,” John said. “But only take one.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. I opened the drawer and took a Baggie, one of the fuller-looking ones. Herbie was particular about his payoffs. When I came back, John said, “By the way, check your desk?”
I shook my head, and went into the other room to check my desk. There was a stack of mail on it; on top, in a cream-colored envelope, some sort of invitation. The handwriting on the front was Annie’s. I tore it open. It was an invitation to attend the Piggy Club Garden Party the next Saturday. I looked at the postmark on the envelope; it had been mailed a week before. Too late to give a negative reply. I went out and threw it in John’s lap. “Did you rig this?”
John looked shocked. “You mean, arrange it?”
“No, dammit, I mean call her up and tell her I was out of town.”
John said, “I knew you’d be back in time.” He smiled. “To accept,” he added.
“Get bent,” I said.
“It’s a peace offering, you know,” John went on. “It means she still likes you.”
“Get bent,” I said again. John was a member of the Piggy Club, and he was having a moment of fun at my expense. We both knew that Annie was now making it with a club member, and we both knew that club members were not permitted themselves to invite women to the parties.
“You don’t want to go?” John said, now acting surprised.
“Me? Not want to go to the Piggy Club Picnic? You’ve got to be kidding. I can hardly wait.”
“Garden Party,” John amended. He sighed. “Little late to call her up and refuse, isn’t it?”
That was unnecessary, and as I left the room I slammed the door behind me. Typical John interaction. I was furious and, in a sense, grateful for the pressures of the coming exam. No chance to brood on it. It feels so good when I stop.
Down the hall was Herbie’s room. Herbie was a weird little cat, sort of a cross between Mr. Natural and Dr. Zharkov. He was a senior, and seventeen years old. He’d come from somewhere in West Virginia, where his father worked in the mines and his mother worked in the mine offices; one of those trips. Mother had noticed very early that Herbie was not like the other children and had taken him to a testing center that the government ran for mentally retarded children. The testing people had found that Herbie’s I.Q. could not be accurately measured—and not because he was retarded. They’d sent him to a special high school in New York, and then they’d gotten Harvard interested in him. Herbie hadn’t taken a math course that was listed in the catalog since his first year at Harvard, nor, for that matter, an economics course or a physics course. He was now working up at the Observatory, taking a side degree in astrophysics.
I came in and found him sitting in his bentwood rocker, rocking back and forth. He wore dungarees and a garish print shirt, and he was smoking a joint the size of an expensive cigar.
“Peter,” he said, when he saw me.
“Herbie,” I said, and sat down across from him.
Herbie scratched his head. “Let’s see, now.” He looked across the room at a wall calendar. “Economics, is it?”
I nodded.
“All right,” he said. “We can take an hour.” He held out his hand. I dropped the Baggie into it. He squeezed it, feeling the texture, then held it up to the light; finally tossed it onto his desk. “Sold,” he said. “There’s paper and pencil on the desk. Let’s get started. It’s all very simple,” he said. “The internal dynamics of the European nation-state in the early part of the seventeenth century eventually necessitated the manipulation of the economy to serve the political interests of the state. That concept in turn led—am I going too fast?”
“Just fine,” I said, scribbling as fast as I could. “Just fine.”
28
I HATE THE MORNINGS BEFORE exams. I always go to breakfast, because I’ve been up all night, and I feel really ragged, and I have coffee and that makes me feel even more ragged. And I read the paper and shoot the shit and try to forget that I have an exam at 9:07 and that I haven’t studied for it.
If you can get with some good breakfast discussion, then you can forget the exam coming. A discussion like whether women with small boobs have better orgasms than women with big boobs.
But there wasn’t any such discussion the morning after I got back from San Francisco. I just sat there with my coffee and notes, and I felt ragged. It was so absurd, the school riff: all that time spent in school, which in the end amounts to the morning of an exam and the hour or two of the exam itself.
Across the dining hall, a few industrious wimps were still studying: jamming down those last few pages of notes, knowing full well that it might make the difference between an A-minus and a B-plus. I thought of the Romans stuffing themselves with food, then sticking their fingers down their throats, vomiting it up and starting to eat again. Of course, if you eat that way, you must be much more interested in the process of eating than you are in the nutritional value of the food you take in. You must also have the stomach for it.
Pretty soon the wimps were dumping their trays, and hustling feverishly out the door, talking to themselves. The time had come. I got up and left with them.
The exam was held in Memorial Hall, a cavernous medieval sort of building, with desks in long rows. The proctors wandered from desk to desk with their hands clasped behind their backs. The best proctors—the most professional ones—remained entirely and haughtily aloof. But the graduate students and section men who were there to answer questions about the exam questions, as well as to be proctors, were pretty bad. A lot of them liked to walk from student to student and check out what was being written.