I’m not much of a reader. God knows. I mean, since high school, when that was my job, when I read everything. My adult store of knowledge, like Seymour used to say, is all from the school of fall down six times, get up seven. But there was this one story by Bruno Schulz that changed my entire life. Really not the whole story. Just one page. For years I had it taped to the wall in my bedroom. Then I had a guy at Kinko’s do it in tiny print and laminate it on a card. So, okay: the story is called “Tailor’s Dummies.” The father is this older, crazy guy, a hermit, like Dad, not incidentally, who has this thing about mannequins. Dummies. He sees life in these artificial things, these, you know, made-up forms of human beings. That’s his project. This is the father talking, giving his treatise on dummies and what they mean. I had to order a new copy on Amazon; it just arrived yesterday. Hold on, I’ll get the page.
“The Demiurge,” said my father [MW reading aloud], “has had no monopoly of creation, for creation is the privilege of all spirits. Matter has been given infinite fertility, inexhaustible vitality and, at the same time, a seductive power of temptation which invites us to create as well. In the depth of matter, indistinct smiles are shaped, tensions build up, attempts at form appear. The whole of matter pulsates with infinite possibilities which send dull shivers through it. Waiting for the life-giving breath of the spirit, it is endlessly in motion. It entices us with a thousand sweet, soft, round shapes which it blindly dreams up within itself.
“Deprived of all initiative, indulgently acquiescent, pliable like a woman, submissive to every impulse, it is a territory outside any law, open to all kinds of charlatans and dilettanti, a domain of abuses and of dubious demiurgical manipulations. Matter is the most passive and most defenseless essence in cosmos. Anyone can mold it and shape it; it obeys everybody. All attempts at organizing matter are transient and temporary, easy to reverse and to dissolve. There is no evil in reducing life to other and newer forms. Homicide is not a sin. It is sometimes a necessary violence on resistant and ossified forms of existence which have ceased to be amusing. In the interests of an important and fascinating experiment, it can even become meritorious. Here is the starting point of a new apologia for sadism.
“My father never tired of glorifying this extraordinary element matter. ‘There is no dead matter,’ he taught us, ‘lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life. The range of these forms is infinite and their shades and nuances limitless. The Demiurge was in possession of important and interesting creative recipes. Thanks to them he created a multiplicity of species, which renew themselves by their own devices. No one knows whether these recipes will ever be reconstructed. But this is unnecessary, because even if the classical methods of creation should prove inaccessible for evermore, there still remain some illegal methods, an infinity of heretical and criminal methods.’”
We barely discussed “Tailor’s Dummies” in class. It was just before midterms and Klefkowitz had already told us Schulz wouldn’t be on the test. Too hard, he said. Too weird. I think I was the only person in class who read it. And when I did — after I’d looked up what Demiurge meant — my whole body lit up like a lightbulb. I mean, I didn’t know what it meant vis-à-vis Martin Lipkin. So I went to Klefkowitz, to his office hours, and asked him, what the hell is this? Is this Judaism?
No, he said. I mean, yes. In a sense. But no.
Well, which is it?
He got up from his shelves and put his fingers on this fat purple book — I saw the spine. It read The Zohar. To me that sounded like something out of Ghostbusters. Then he turned and sat back down. No, he said, really weary, you have to find that out for yourself.
Well, what does this part mean? Even if the classical methods of creation should prove inaccessible for evermore, there still remain some illegal methods, an infinity of heretical and criminal methods. What kind of heretical and criminal methods?
Then you know what he did? He slid his chair over to me and put his hand on my face. Like he was a blind man.
You’ll figure it out, he said. The important thing is, you felt something.
All I was really doing in college was thinking about college. As a marketplace. As the final nut to crack in the world of large-scale pot retailing. Seymour kept calling me — he was living up in Burlington by then — new product was coming online, hotter and hotter stuff: cyber-pot, we used to call it. But college networks were so insular. You had to find a way to override all of that and cut out the middleman. So we invented this thing called the Little Green Bus. Maybe you heard of it, at Amherst? It was a college-to-college van service, staffed by students, coordinated by students. By this time the Internet was really up and running and I put the whole reservation thing together that way. Except for the payment. No one would use credit cards online back in those days, so I had to hire a girl in Catonsville, a friend from my econ class, to take orders over the phone.
Anyway: you wouldn’t believe how popular we were. We had three routes: the long one, Duke to Burlington; the short one, Burlington to Princeton; and the east-west, Harvard to Oberlin, stopping at Amherst, Cornell, and Kenyon. And our drivers — well, they were paid a percentage of sales. Some of them made enough for college themselves doing it. We couldn’t pack the vans tight enough. Everyone knew what the Little Green Bus was for. The weed had a brand name: we even had custom-made horns that played “Brown-Eyed Girl.” I swear to God, there were places — Sarah Lawrence was one — where we’d sell out the store and have to send an overnight driver down from Burlington to restock for the rest of the trip south. And we were doing it with a fifteen percent markup for convenience. No one cared. The product was awesome. The whole thing was a guerrilla sales company before the concept existed. Word of mouth. No advertising. No corporate address. All the fleet management was done by a guy Seymour knew in Hartford: he painted the vans, he fixed the vans, he provided the gas cards for the drivers. We paid him in cash. No taxes, no filings. The credit card account went to a Mailboxes place on York Road.
It was genius, and it lasted three years. Longer than we ever imagined. Right through the millennium. Finally, one of our drivers had an accident — in an empty van, by some miracle. Taking it in for service. Rolled it over on 91 near New Haven and ripped the chassis open. Bricks of weed all over the shoulder. Seymour sent the guy bail money and then somehow got him on a plane to Honduras. No names, no evidence, but the whole network had to go overnight. We left fifty thousand dollars out on the road, plus the value of the vans. Just abandoned them wherever they were. One guy drove his off a pier into Lake Erie. Another took his out to Moab, got all the pot out, and then torched it in a bonfire out in the desert, or so the story went.
And all this time Seymour was in Vermont, running the wholesale operation, and I was still here, in Dad’s house, running Little Green Bus and picking up checks from that mailbox out on York. We talked only on pay phones, like real drug dealers. And I was getting a little paranoid, with hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash in the house. Because that’s how much it was. I kept my expenses basically at zero. Survived on Chinese food and those bagged premade salads from the supermarket. Still drove Dad’s old Scirocco. Wore two pairs of black jeans and a black Carhartt hoodie. But the isolation was wearing me down. Alan was long gone. Everyone else from Willow was out of college by now and living in Brooklyn or Berkeley or China. I hadn’t made hardly any friends at UMBC, and I wasn’t playing music or going out much. The work was seven days a week, twenty-four/seven; I had to carry two pagers and a cell every time I left the house, even to walk around the corner.