“I’ll see you later,” Bud said. He took a sports jacket from the closet, slipped into it, and then went to the door. “Now take it easy.”
“Sure,” Andy said.
Bud walked out into the hallway and then down the steps. He could not understand Andy’s attitude, and his lack of understanding annoyed him fully as much as the attitude did. He had, after all, taken in what amounted to a complete stranger. He had not expected bootlicking gratitude, but he had expected civility. Andy had apparently awakened this morning with a long hair across, a distrust for everyone and everything, and a resentment toward anyone who was trying to help him.
Well, the hell with Andy.
If he wanted to be the misunderstood martyr of some misunderstood cause, that was Andy’s prerogative. He seemed to hold a misbegotten concept about drugs, anyway, a concept that was hardly linked with the repentance he professed. Whenever he talked about narcotics his eyes glowed and he talked with the rapid fervor of a new father — despite his religious resolve to shed the habit. It was as if he constantly had to reassure himself that what he’d done was not really so bad at all, in spite of the fact that he recognized its badness at the same time. And so, facing this double-headed ogre of repentance and self-justification, he was forced to acknowledge aid gratefully, while simultaneously denying that he needed any aid.
Bud could understand why Andy resented anyone’s watching him. If he was earnest in his desire to break the habit, there was only one person who could help him, and that was himself. But the people who were watching him — and Bud had unfortunately become one of those people — served as consciences more than jailers. They were only interested in seeing that Andy stuck to his resolve.
Or at least they had been interested.
Bud could not speak for Carol, but he certainly knew that he himself no longer cared whether Andy abstained or went right back to the needle. He had never enjoyed the web of circumstance, feeling thwarted and frustrated in its entangling power. Andy had gone out of his life a long time ago, and he did not want him back in it now, and he cursed himself for not having taken a firmer stand the moment Carol called. He had reacted weakly, and he deserved everything he got now, but he still had himself to think about.
He had not imagined the sneering quality in Andy’s voice whenever the impending examination was discussed. He had felt foolish about it in the beginning, until he realized that time was passing rapidly, until he began to suspect Andy of deliberately keeping him away from his studies.
He was certain now that he would fail the examination. There was no doubt in his mind that he would fail it. And the next test was tomorrow. Good God, tomorrow afternoon. If only he had more time, if only the tests were bunched together at the beginning of next week, but no, there was another tomorrow afternoon, and another after that on Friday morning, and he’d be facing those with the knowledge that he’d flunked the first one. If he flunked. Of course he would flunk! He obviously could not study with Andy around. He could tell Andy to shut the hell up, of course, but Andy seemed to be a bottomless cup of memories that never ceased flowing. Andy persisted in going back to the past, and — worse — he had been trapped again and again into going back with him, a sort of helpless prisoner enmeshed in the bowels of a persistent time machine.
Well, the time machine had certainly put the old kibosh on the Milton exam. He discounted that as a definite loss, fired with the knowledge that he somehow had to pass the other exams. Once that was done he would try to wheedle a passing grade for the course from Dr. Mason, and, knowing that old bitch, the task would not be a simple one. But if she were faced with the fact that only her course stood between him and graduation in three and a half, perhaps she would suffer a momentary softening of the heart, the head, and the arteries.
Sourly he contemplated the sickening apple-polishing that lay ahead of him, and the thought nauseated him.
He blamed Andy, but most of all he blamed himself. He had not been cut out for the role of thankless benefactor. He had once been that type of beautific soul who could do a good deed and then silently allow the deed to pass unpraised. But not any more. Oh, sure, Carol would pat him on the head once this was all over and tell him how wonderfully he’d behaved, but he’d long ago stopped seeking praise from anyone.
The big obstacle ahead, for the moment, was the Milton test. And maybe it wasn’t a very big obstacle to Andy’s way of thinking, and maybe it was a very childish thing to be worrying about, but it was nonetheless an enormous obstacle — and facing this obstacle, and realizing he could not surmount it, he felt again this surly despair, this self-condemnation for having so easily been led into the slaughterhouse of Andy’s trouble.
Disgustedly he walked to the subway kiosk and boarded an uptown train.
Now that he was alone in the apartment he felt a little better.
He knew he shouldn’t have snapped at Bud that way, but there were times when the all-seeing eye of Big Brother annoyed the hell out of him. Everyone seemed to be watching, every second of the day. It was like being a two-headed calf in a side show. The people came to watch you, and they watched you carefully, to see what two-headed things did. When you became an addict, you also became a two-headed thing. And maybe one of those heads understood the watching eyes, but the other head resented them immensely.
He’d also been a little sickened by Bud’s behavior. All right, he was a big-shot college boy now, but don’t college boys ever realize that some things in life don’t jell according to the textbook? He had an examination, and that’s all well and good, but he’d acted as if the examination were the Gabriel horn blowing, as if the floods and the fires were going to rain down on his goddamned head if he flunked.
That was the trouble with college boys — everything according to the book. Ants with tweed jackets and pipes.
A college boy studies Economics, and he thinks he knows the secret of a dollar. He gets sixty-five bucks a month from the government, and he studies Economics, and, man, he knows what it’s all about, he knows all about getting out there and earning a buck.
Or he studies American History, and he plots a cycle, and he can interpret everything that’s happening right here and now. Did a fruit get rolled and mugged up on Fiftieth and Broadway last night? Why, man, that’s simple to calculate. We can draw a parallel between this and the Boston Tea Party. How many lumps, please?
He takes a course in Biology, and he knows all about sex then. He knows how the lowly snail does it, and he knows how the tsetse fly does it, but does he ever once realize there’s a vas deferens between the dusty, dry pages of his textbook and a session in bed with a passionate wench? No, not the college boy.
The college boy lives in another world, a world in which he busily sniffs the seats of girls’ bicycles — and Bud was in that world now. And it was a damn shame, because there had once been something between Bud and him, and now that something was dead and gone, and it always pained him to realize that something was dead. All the good things in his life seemed to die sooner or later, mostly sooner, and sometimes he felt that he was outliving his experiences, that he’d seen everything there was to see and done everything there was to do, and now they were all dead, and here he was a living man in a world of dead dreams, an old old man at twenty.
Twenty, was that all?
Not even old enough to vote.
Fifteen, and sixteen, and seventeen, those were the years. Those were the real years, all of them, and he and Bud had shared a good friendship then, all right, one of the best, and what’s happened to it now? How do friendships become non-friendships? The College Boy and the Addict, a play in three acts discussing the rise and fall of a friendship.