Why didn’t he just split? I kept asking. Oh no, was all he’d say. He couldn’t do that. After all, that’d been his life for twenty years. To quit now would be ridiculous, totally ridiculous. Be a fag? Of course not. Nobody would ever buy shoes from him again. His wife would probably leave him. The kids would look at him funny.
I began to see things differently after that. I began to notice how much people treasured their solidity, their immobility. It made everything safe. And what I noticed now, on my third shot of John’s J & B, was that I was into the same riff. I was a student—that was my gig—and even though I put it down, I was completely into ripping it off for all it was worth. I didn’t mind getting busted in Berkeley, because there I was just another dude. But to have Sukie busted on my turf, in my town, where I was cool—well, that just didn’t make it. It didn’t make it at all, and instead of trying to do something about it I just sat around and waited for somebody to bail me out.
I started over to grab another hit of J & B, paused, and sat down. It was up to me now, as it had always been. I simply hadn’t wanted to look it in the face. If Sukie was still in jail at the arraignment, she’d be up the river; and even if I got her out before then, there was still a chance that she’d go up unless I got her a lawyer as well. I had to do something.
So I dialed O’Leary’s office and demanded to speak to someone, anyone. But I only got a half-witted chick on answering service, who informed me that it was Saturday and everyone was home. Would I please call back Monday? How about home phones, I wanted to know. Well, that depended. Was I a client already? Or was I simply seeking information? No, she was sorry, if I wasn’t already a client she wasn’t permitted to give me any home phones. Lawyers had to sleep, just like everyone else. The office would be open on Monday at nine.
Thank you, bitch. What next? I called up all the bail bondsmen I could find in the book. They had not gone home—they did a thriving business on Saturday night, that much was obvious. But no, they wouldn’t accept a stereo as collateral on a ten-thousand-dollar bond, it wouldn’t be worth it to them, and anyway they’d been getting too many stolen goods for collateral lately. They were taking only large items they could be sure of, like cars, these days. Click.
I poured myself another Scotch, got thoroughly sloshed, and turned on the television to catch the evening news. As it came on, Herbie showed up; he was on his way to dinner and was looking for company. I said I wasn’t hungry but offered him a drink, and he sat down to watch the news with me.
After the usual Vietnam-Central-American-coup-Middle-East-retaliation-domestic-upheaval reports, they came to the local news. And to Susan Blake, a nineteen-year-old resident of San Francisco, California, arrested today at Logan Airport on charges of possession of marijuana. Her suitcase was found to contain forty pounds of marijuana. She will be arraigned Monday. Elsewhere in the city…
“Far out,” Herbie said.
“Yeah,” I said.
He laughed. “Well,” he said, nodding to the TV, “you don’t have to take it personally, just because somebody gets busted.”
I looked over at him. “Herbie,” I said, “that’s my chick.”
There was a long pause while Herbie thought that one over, and I thought that one over. Then Herbie said again, “Far out.”
I didn’t say anything.
“What’re you going to do?”
I shook my head. “I’ve got to get bail for her. I’ve got to get her out of there.”
“That means money,” Herbie said.
“Yeah.” I got up, a little unsteadily, and went into the bedroom to get some cigarettes. When I came out, Herbie was still there, staring at me with a quizzical look on his face.
“How are you going to do it?”
I shrugged. “Your bet’s as good as mine.”
Herbie laughed. “In other words,” he said, “you don’t have any idea.”
I didn’t laugh. Herbie was right.
39
LATER THAT NIGHT IT BEGAN to rain, cold, streaky splatterings against the window, as I stared out at the courtyard. I was wrecked but I was still trying to think of something to do for Sukie. I had been in tight places before, especially when I’d been doing my own dealing. One time in Berkeley a good friend of mine had been busted, busted so badly that if I hadn’t come up with some bread for a lawyer he would have done a couple of years. But getting that bread had been something else—something I just wasn’t up for, this time around.
It was spring—a warm spring, I remembered, staring out at the rain—and I had been so enchanted with Berkeley and the people I’d met, that I’d just kept putting off the business part of my trip. And then, the morning that I was definitely going to see about business, Steven announced that we were going to Big Sur and loaded his VW bus full of camping equipment and charming chicks, and off we had gone, my feeble protests notwithstanding. So that it wasn’t until my last day in town that I had gone to see Ernie, the connection in those days.
I’d found Ernie lying on the living room floor of his gaudily painted apartment, stoned out of his mind on psilocybin. And Ernie had informed me, in rather vague but nonetheless emphatic terms, that there was no grass to be had, at least not down his alley. The gist of our conversation was more accurately that he told me to get the hell out of his place, he was stoned on psilocybin and didn’t want to get bummed on dope deals. That night I’d found out about my friend’s bust, and it was then that I’d decided to do some instant hustling on my own.
The next day I went out on the street. Walked down to the Forum and stood around, just listening, waiting for something to happen. Asking anybody who looked like they knew which way was up if they had any bricks, and always getting No for an answer, but always with a few references (“Shit man, nothing happening far as I know, but you could ask Toad—you know that dude, Toad, wild-looking freak with four fingers on one hand, he’s always up around here about six. He had some bricks last week”). And waiting around to ask Toad, and Sonny, and Detroit Danny, and anybody else that might show up.
And then finally, just when I was about to leave, say the hell with it, and climb back onto the Beantown bird, these four black cats showed up and started talking bricks. And everybody jumped, because Ernie had been, in his own way, telling the truth. There just wasn’t that much dope to be had. So everybody on the street was hungry to get their hands on weed, and they were taking chances they wouldn’t ordinarily take, like fronting bread to strangers, in the hope of scoring some smoke and being the only cat in town with, as the saying goes, shit to burn.
Which set up these four spades, who wouldn’t normally have had a prayer of hustling dope on the Avenue. They were flashy dressers, all conked and zooted, and they looked to be as likely prospects for bricks as a Central Square car salesman. But everybody else seemed to trust them; everybody else was fronting bread to them and dreaming mounds and mounds of dope, so I dreamed too, and we arranged to meet and exchange commodities.
I went off to wait in a supermarket parking lot, and pretty soon a huge white Caddy snaked in and I hopped on board. They didn’t know Berkeley, they said, they’d just driven a load up from San Diego because they’d heard things were dry. So we drove around for a while, looking for a good place to do the deal. The whole time, all they could say was “What’s a cool place? Find a cool place, man, a cool place.” They seemed very nervous and jumpy, which I thought a good sign, a sign they really had stuff. I kept them driving around for a long time in search of the mythical cool place.