The Beggar's Garden (8 page)

“Yes,” I say, still wondering if churlish is bad.

J. Robert's eyes again find my empty crack vials. “And accepting this axiom you must agree as a scientist that it is invariably good to learn, that knowledge is good. Yes?”

I nod.

“Do you truly believe that?”

“Of course,” I say, sounding decisive and intelligent.

“Excellent. So now we arrive at the crux of my proposal, Henry, and that crux being … In the spirit of scholarly inquiry, I hereby formally request your assistance in the procurement and consumption of the drug commonly referred to as crack cocaine.”

“I have no money.” It is the first thing I can think of; next is wishing to have denied ever smoking it.

“Aha! A pragmatist! Of course I have more than adequate funds to suffice for our purposes; think of it as our research grant, and when I say ‘our,' Henry, I am illuminating the fact that you will be an equal participant in the inhalation of the psychoactive substance in question.”

I say nothing. His eyes are so kind and forgiving, they make me want to turn around and see if they are actually meant for someone behind me.

Although he is too foreign-seeming and well dressed to be a cop, J. Robert's eagerness and complex questions put the dealers off. However, even when turning him down, they treat him with more respect than they ever did me, calling him sir, and one of them going so far as to ask why such a fine gentleman would want to get high with a goof like me. Finally, after promising to report all details of the experience, I convince J. Robert to stay back while I complete a transaction. The man is impressed by my large request and American money and says he is from Seattle and is just selling to get home. He stuffs J. Robert's money into his jeans before telling me he has to go pick up more vials because he doesn't have that much on him. I follow him nervously with J. Robert trailing a block behind. He leads us to a rooming house and I wait for a minute while he runs upstairs. I don't have to find out what J. Robert would do to me if I got burned for his money because the man returns with a plastic bag rattling with vials, and I act like the whole thing was no big deal.

The sun is out and fluffy clouds bump together in the sky above the park. Clouds are glorified smoke. My days are defined and determined by the comings and goings of various types of smoke. We are walking briskly now, J. Robert slightly ahead of me. We come upon an old drunk woman lying at the edge of the park, passed out before she could reach its boundary, pickled in the sour jar of her body. I get a whiff of mouthwash vapour, strangely sweet and ironically fresh. Her mouth is loose and open, jaw pushed slightly forward, like she is concentrating on something fragile and complicated. “Alcohol evaporates faster than
water,” I say, but J. Robert is too far ahead to hear me. It's as if this woman is sublimating, I think, solid straight to gas, her life's horrid memories fuming from her rubbery ears. I tighten my grip on the bag of vials and quicken my pace.

He tosses his suit jacket over my TV, unbuttons his sleeves, and shoves them up his arms. “Your apartment is significantly smaller from the inside, Henry.” This is the longest I have ever gone between buying rock and smoking it. He rubs his hands together, sits cross-legged on my mattress. “Teach me everything,” he says, “everything you know.”

As I'm laying out our supplies—pipes, steel wool, lighters, mouthpieces—it starts to rain. It feels as if the room's air is being sucked through the bars out the window and up into the churning clouds, and I feel cold. I explain the entire process to J. Robert, savouring the details, making it sound as complicated as possible. He studies my face, sometimes moving his lips along with me as I talk.

He raises the pipe and his hands are shaking.

“Like I said now, don't scorch it.”

I can't believe I'm telling a genius to be careful. He does a good job melting it and starts to get a toke, but he lowers the pipe trying to watch the rock burn and the liquefied crack dribbles out the end into his lap.

“Goddamn it!” he says with an intense and boyish concentration.

I start coaching, “Don't stop! Keep smoking it, tip it up, that's it, now inhale—go go go go …”

He brings it back to his lips, musters a pretty good one, but blows it out too early.

“I don't feel anything, Henry. Goddamn it, show me properly, you buffoon!”

“Here,” I say, blowing on the scorched pipe to cool it down. I load another rock, cook it, take a big hoot, then hold it to his lips and he fills his lungs. He holds it, blows it out, and shivers. His porkpie hat is tipped back like a newspaperman and his forehead is varnished with sweat.

“That was the one, Henry … Oh yes … I'm getting the picture.” He closes his eyes and leans back on my bed. “I'm experiencing the prologue of an extremely pleasurable sensation now—differing vastly from what I imagined, however, but quite promising.”

I help him smoke more rocks. Then he starts chain-smoking cigarettes, pacing the limited circumference of my room.

“It's no secret I'm a vastly superior theoretician than experimentalist; this is a reality I have always accepted.” I can't imagine how deeply he is thinking.

“Oh, Henry, without your steady hand, your know-how, I would be a stranger to these marvellous sensations. I feel such a marked increase in self-control, vigorous and capable of productive work.”

“I'm glad I could help,” I say.

He kneels beside me. “Henceforth, I shall refer to you as ‘Hank,' because, Hank, I propose you just keep on doing what you do best, hitting those little delectable balls out of the park for me just like Hank Aaron smacking his home runs. Hey, old man? We can be partners. What do you say?”

“Okay,” I say, “partners.”

Either he or I wants to smoke another. So we smoke another. Then he begins a series of brisk jumping jacks in the centre of my room.

“Christ, a man with your kind of prowess, Hank, we could've really used you at Los Alamos. Just imagine it: the world's greatest intellects, working together in seclusion, a truly cooperative effort to stop the greatest evil mankind has ever known, nature's deepest secrets unfurling before us like the desert mesas.”

J. Robert is grunting with exertion and the rain is making the trees outside tell him to
sssshshhhhh.

He finishes, which serves as a good reason to smoke another.

“We could've had a building erected specifically for ingestion; this substance would have tripled both creativity and productivity. A sizable supply could have been requisitioned, and of course rationed and distributed equally. Oh, we would have had a functional device years earlier, we could have vaporized Berlin as soon as Hitler jumped a border, for Christ's sake. Hank, I once tired of your platitudes; now I see you for who you are: a great probing and unflinching mind, steadfast and brilliant, but yet modestly so; not a pompous blowhard of pseudo-academic tripe, but a scientist, in the most unmitigated sense of the word.”

I can't believe what he is saying; my throat burns and I feel like I'm going to cry. I stand up and start telling him about some experiments I've been performing and start moving my hands dramatically like he does as I talk, and I'm explaining about how I have always felt I was born in the wrong time in history and about if I just maybe had a chance to meet some peers or like he said some fellow scientists with similar interests, and now that he is here … Suddenly there is a bang on the wall. It's Steve.

J. Robert comes with me. We are companions. Steve's door is open and we find him nodding out on his bed with his legs splayed in front of his frail body, semi-conscious, his head drifting downward toward his feet. I shake him and he comes around.

Steve whines something about his high being ruined. J. Robert introduces himself and immediately offers Steve some crack, offending him deeply.

“I don't smoke that shit, Bob, it don't do nothing for me. And as far as I can tell the sorry people who really like it, I mean the people who really get it in their blood, are the ones who already hate themselves the most.”

His eyes are rolling back in his head, and he is speaking completely through his nose as if it were a kazoo. “That's why I shoot dope, because I'm selfish, because I treasure myself. And I just don't mind that self feeling like it's floating in a warm sea of warm tongues every single minute for the rest of its life, that's all. Is it so awful, Bob? My advice is you leave my crackerjack friend here out of your—”

J. Robert's voice booms theatrically. “Sir, I must ask you to hold your tongue! Treasure yourself? How asinine! It's philistines like you who cloud the great minds of our nations with your rhetoric of self-worship. This crack cocaine unleashes the truest and noblest potentials in our society! And furthermore …,” but he leaves it because Steve has nodded off again, and this time I don't wake him up. I'm just glad he knows so little of science; if he doesn't recognize J. Robert he can't rat him out. Rat him out to whom I'm not sure.

Back in my room, J. Robert's fuming anger is transforming into a sort of agitated sadness. I think it is probably also due to the fact that he is starting to come down, but I don't tell him.
He comments on the naked futility of existence, on the mercilessness of my light bulb, and then says something in what I think is Dutch. The rain has stopped. Luckily, he wants to smoke more rock, which is good because I do too.

“What made you want to smoke crack in the first place?” I say.

“Excellent question. Because, Hank, to have a sound and crystallized view on something, I feel one must experience it firsthand—to know what one is talking about, that is—and this crack just seems like an area I should form an opinion on.”

I notice sweat stains forming in the armpits of his crisp white Oxford shirt. I want desperately to pick up where we left off, before we were interrupted, eager for him to listen to some more of my theories.

“You know, J. Robert, these pipes are made of Pyrex, the same glass as test tubes.”

“Simple physics,” he says. “Ordinary glass would shatter if subjected to this type of treatment, just like us, huh, Hank? Steeled by the girders of inquiry and knowledge!” He shakes my shoulder and it stabs me with pain, but I don't tell him to stop.

The scientific conversation doesn't last. J. Robert has loosened his tie and is pacing and anxious; he wants to go outside, see the sights, meet the locals, get some air, and of course buy more crack. I fear J. Robert will forget about me if we leave, or that he will disappear and never come back. I tell him we have more than enough to last us the night, and that this neighbourhood is ugly and dangerous and unscientific and we should just stay here and just smoke and talk. He snatches his jacket, begins stuffing his pockets with vials. “Hank, my colleagues call me Oppie. And Oppie is not going to tell you what to do, but Oppie and his narcotics
are going outside, into this night—this night whose force shall break, blow, burn, and make us new!”

I was twenty-six when I first smoked crack.
Crack.
It sounds so ridiculous even when I say it now, so pornographic. I started late in relation to most. I'd just moved to Vancouver, like everybody else. I was at a party I'd overheard some people talking about that afternoon at a coffee shop. Right when I got there, a girl I didn't know asked me if she could borrow some money. I asked her what for but she wouldn't say. I told her whatever it was I would like to be in on it. I was drunk. I didn't think I would have sex with her but I guess I hoped.

After the first glorious toke, I calmly asked how much of it was hers and how much of it was mine, took my share, and left. I fumbled through the dim rooms of the party and out the door, deciding to smoke rock forever.

It's still forever and we are wandering the streets at the mercy of Oppie's arbitrary fancies. He is oblivious to traffic or fatigue and often breaks spontaneously into a run. I give chase and am barely successful in my effort to stay with him. When I do catch up, he puts his arm on my shoulder, breathing heavily. He seems surprised to see me and tells me he's glad I'm here.

The pavement is wet and reptilian, the air thick with evaporation. People are out tonight, like every night, hustling, smoking, chatting, shaking hands, screaming. Everybody is buying, selling, or collecting things of certain or possible value. Oppie is smiling and saying hello to random people, handing out cigarettes and American change to any and all who ask.

Faces swing into our orbit and out again like comets, trajectories forever altered by Oppie's generous crack policies and philosophical musings. He is electric and alive. His interest is insatiable. Lecturing as he walks, he relates mind-bending scientific concepts with ease and grace. We are a team. Although nobody recognizes him, I feel proud to be partying with such a distinguished man of science. Prostitutes approach him and he respectfully tells them he has no interest in “erotic labour” but gives them rocks and kind words. He is a gentleman.

Sitting on a bench in Pigeon Park, we form an accidental alliance with a Native kid whose face, crusted with glue, is making sad and sluggish approximations at consciousness. Oppie is offering him the pipe, but I don't think he even sees it. Oppie blows out a hoot and continues with a conversation I wasn't sure we were having.

“Take this young man, for example, Hank. Here is a fellow theoretician, a physicist; he studies zero as we infinity. He's asking the same question we are, but he's approaching it from the bottom up, beginning with base assumptions, attempting to divide everything by zero. And as you well know, it is at these extremes, these margins, these points which a curve will avoid like poison gas that things really get interesting!”

“You can call it whatever you want, I guess, Oppie, I think he's just trying to kill himself.”