Form a dilapidated cardboard box, buried in straw twice his height, tiny halt of fuzz yapped at me with such force that he somersaulted backwards. I loved him on sight.
A pedigree Pomeranian, three weeks old and five inches long, the little creature become a part of my life. He was beautiful, white and fluffy. He reminded me of smack. There was only one name for him—Bach, after the beautiful boy in Amsterdam who was the first person I met who did smack.
At the Ritz Hotel the desk clerk grimaced at Bach and made me promise to keep him in the bathroom and off the carpet. Oh, little Bach. I hated going out and leaving him. I cut short my visits to Dipti's. On one visit I ran into Neal.
"NEAL!" We kissed and hugged and held hands as we told our monsoon stories.
Neal was doing badly. He hadn't been able to do business during that monsoon, either—the second in a row. He had no money, no dope (one always managed to get habit-keeping dope; "no dope" meant not enough to enjoy), and no place to stay. He asked if I could shelter Eve, him, and Ha until they left for Goa.
Of course. Again I was happy to help him. I even told him I'd give him half the supply of dope I'd brought from Thailand, so he could make money selling it and we could put together a scam.
At the hotel I laid one of the mattresses from my twin beds on the floor, and the four of us slept wall to wall. I chose the floor mattress to be near Bach. Though I'd had him only two days, he laid his furry self by me. Ha, of course, went crazy for him.
"Bakt!" she giggled. "Keo's dog!"
Neal, Eve, and Ha eventually went not to Goa, but to Poona, where Bhagwan's ashram was. I left for Goa, taking a cabin on the boat. My load of purchases filled the entire space. The wonderful puppy slept by my face, despite the bugs I could see crawling on his skin. In the morning, as we docked in Panjim, I attempted to remove the shit he'd deposited on the pillow but gave up and hid the pillow under the sheets.
Fourth Season in Goa
1978 — 1979
NORMALLY CRACKED, DRIED, and Med by the sun, the paddy field was sprouting four-foot-high rice plants. Green grew everywhere: on the paths, the space between my house and Graham's. Even the garbage dump bloomed with growing things.
Bach loved it. The first time we crossed the paddy field on the way to Gregory's restaurant, I lost him in the grass. He'd jumped off the road somewhere along the way.
"Bach?" I called when I turned and saw emptiness. "Bach! Where'd you go? Aloha, Bach. Where are you?"
The tiny thing had disappeared amid the stalks. It took me forever to track him and he left muddy footprints on my neck.
I took Bach with me everywhere, though not everyone liked having him as a visitor. Since the Goa Freaks socialized around mattresses on the floor, the floor also served as a table top, which gave Bach access to people’s sacred possessions. Open containers of coke and smack and silver trays of tobacco occupied a hallowed space in the centre of the floor. To Bach it was a space to sniff through and explore. His chin would be flecked with tobacco and his nose powdered with white before I'd have time to scoop him up.
I could always tell when Bach had sniffed coke. He'd be so cute. He'd become hyper and run from one end of the room to the next, picking up one thing, seeing another, dropping the first, and picking up something else. Since everything was bigger than him, he'd trip over whatever he attempted to carry.
He came with me to the beach too. When I'd go for a swim, he'd follow to the water's edge and bark when I left him on shore. Up and down the sand he'd run, crying and barking. I'd have to come out and carry him into the surf with Inc.
Now that I had my own dope, I could spend time with Canadian Jacques without feeling as if I were with him for drugs alone. My private stash was not going to last long, though, especially since I'd given half to Neal. I contemplated making a run to Bangkok to supply myself for the year, but I lacked a connection, a person in Thailand to sell me dope. Thai connections were cherished and guarded, probably the only secret that Goa Freaks kept.
Goa Freaks favoured scam talk above other topics of conversation, and one day, while I was discussing runs with Jacques, he referred to his contact in Chiang Mai, an employee at a certain hotel. "You can go to him, if you he said. "Mention my name. He knows me well."
I couldn't believe what Jacques had so casually given me. Speechless, I felt as if he'd handed me a family heirloom. People paid money for that information or grovelled for it. "Oh . . . hey, thanks," I said, memorizing the name and place and making Jacques a bhong. Wow—I had a Thai connection.
I felt Big Time as I imagined flying to Thailand to buy my own load. If I bought a sizeable quantity, I could party for the whole season without scrounging from friends. I could sell a portion and keep myself solvent.
I decided to include Neal in the plan in order to ease his financial troubles. Though I hated leaving Bach, I made an overnight trip to Poona to see Neal.
What a shock! I'd known in Bombay that things had gone awry for Neal, but I hadn't realized the sorry state he'd sunk to. I found him in the pigpen he'd made of his hotel room.
"This place looks like a suitcase exploded," I said, gazing at the mess. "Don't you let the maid in?"
"Never let too much lying around," he explained. "I could never collect everything I'd need to hide from her."
No, he hadn't sold any of the dope I'd given him; in fact, what I'd given him was just about gone.
I sat on the messy bed and noticed I was the only one sitting . . . With the curtains shut, Neal and Eve shuffled through the dimness like characters from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Ha followed suit. The three of them reminded me of windup toys, moving awkwardly in separate orbits.
"What are you doing in Poona, anyway?" I asked Neal.
"Um know. Not much. The usual, whatever that is." He giggled. "Do you go to the ashram?" None of them were wearing malas or orange clothes, I noticed.
"No. Not really."
"Then why did you come here?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. Seemed like a good idea at the time, and now we're just here." Another giggle and he circled the bed. He took hold of a piece of paisley material without seeming to notice it. He cleared a space on the cluttered bureau, looked around, paused, shoved a candle into the space, and strolled to the other side of the room. "It's not bad here," he said. "Kind of peaceful. We don't go out much." He picked up a yellow lungi and dropped the paisley. He back stepped to the bed, wrapping the lungi around his arm before letting that drop too. "Want a toot of coke?" he asked, after discovering his glass block beneath a pile of debris.
"Uh, sure," I said, wondering how he afforded coke.
He attempted to chop some. CLACK, CLATTER, CLINK. The razor blade slid from his grasp and fell among a hodgepodge collection of Eve's little objects. Rather than bunt for it, he continued chopping with the jagged end of a broken ball point pen. THUNK, THUNK, THUNK.
"Uh . . . Neal. Let's put a scam together. I want to go to Thailand and bring back enough dope to last me the year. I'm tired of buying it from other people."
"Okay," he said, stopping to look at me a moment. He put down the block, then shock his bangs and examined the ceiling fan. "Whatever you want to do." He scratched his head and sauntered off, bumping into Eve, who ambled similarly in the other direction. Now he was in the bathroom, using the piece of pen to rub at a streak in the sink.
"I think I have enough money for a pound of smack," I continued. "I'll split it with you when I get back."
I watched Neal grab a syringe and aim it at the ceiling fan like a machine gun. Aha! Syringe. They were fixing coke! No wonder they were so spacey. They had to be doing a lot of it to be that weirded-out. How were they paying for it?