The Children of Hamelin (10 page)

Poor Arlene looked as if she had fallen down a rabbit-hole. “But what can you
tell
someone like this woman? She obviously needs psychiatric help. Can you tell her that?”

“I tell her she’s a great writer, but this story isn’t quite suitable for the marketplace, that she should write another story and another ten dollar check and that the next one will probably make it.”

“But the woman’s
hopeless!”

“It is the Dirk Robinson philosophy that no one is hopeless who can still write checks.”

“But you’re
lying
to her!”

“She doesn’t think so. She
knows
she’s a great writer who just needs a little minor help. We tell them exactly what they expect to hear.”

“That’s horrid.”

“Indubitably,” I said. So much for the handicap. Now the game should start to get interesting.

“You know,” Arlene said, making some kind of dialectical leap from indignation to crusading, “you’re really in a position to help people like this. Isn’t there some way you could refer at least the ones in New York to the Foundation for Total Consciousness?”

Now
there’s
an idea! “Y’know, you may just have something there...” I said thoughtfully. “Dirk just might go for it—if you think Harvey would give him a kickback.”

“
A
kickback!”

“Oh, not a big one,” I soothed. “Dirk would probably settle for something like 5% of the first year’s take. He’d figure to make it up on the volume.”

Ted couldn’t take it any longer. “Cut it out, man,” she said. “She thinks you’re serious.”

“But I
am
serious, Ted,” I said with a big Dickie Lee shit-eating smile. “Dirk would go for it. Don’t you think old Harv would?”

“Aw shit!” Ted said.

“And as a side-deal, Harv would get 5% of the fees from all the twitches he could refer to Dirk.”

“Are you equating this disgusting swindle with
the Foundation for Total Consciousness?”
Arlene practically shrieked.

“Sure,” I said blandly. “Fundamentally, it’s the same con. Dirk and Harvey are both master bullshit artists. Same clientele, potentially. They’re both peddling answers to a lot of empty people. They’d get along fine.”

A long, long, grossed-out silence. Ted, Doris, and Arlene exchanged shocked looks. Then the same kind of fever seemed to put a sheen on their six eyeballs: the intense rodent-mindlessness of a Salvation Army topkick in the presence of a sinner, the look of Dickie Lee about to persuade a neophyte fee-reader with delusions of conscience of the morality of the operation. Well, I couldn’t say I hadn’t asked for it.

“Look, Tom, I didn’t really want to get into it,” Ted said unconvincingly, “but you’ve really got a crazy paranoid thing going about Harvey. You should’ve seen yourself last week, man!”

I clocked Arlene; she was hunched forward like a rooting section. I was now damn sure there was more to this evening than met the eye. I was willing to bet the three of them had come here to play games with my mind. Okay, four can play that game too....

“Will you admit one thing, Ted?” I said. “Will you admit that I should know a junkie’s face when I see one?”

Another long awkward silence. Doris and Ted looked at each other uneasily, probably wondering how to sweep the subject under the rug. Arlene just looked puzzled. I was back out ahead of them.

I looked straight into Arlene’s big green eyes. “I was a junkie, you know,” I said conversationally. “A pretty heavy habit.” Her eyes got wider, then seemed to narrow, and a muscle in her jaw twitched.

“Yes, but he’s been off it for a long time, right Tom?” Doris said quickly.

“Right,” I said.

“How... how did you manage to stop?” Arlene said, suddenly the uptight square chick trying to make small talk with a Dope-Fiend. “Analysis...? Lexington? Synanon?”

“Boredom,” I told her. “It got to be a drag, so I gave it up for Lent.”

“Cold Turkey?”
she said. “Just like that?”

Oh WoW.

“Just like that.”

“But wasn’t it...? I mean, I’ve heard that junkies almost never kick it by themselves. The withdrawal symptoms...”

“Are greatly exaggerated by bullshit artists who write about dope-fiends,” I said. “And by junkies who use it as an excuse to take the next shot. I did a certain amount of puking and shivering and sweating and screaming for a few days. Combine three consecutive days of the twenty-four hour virus with a migraine, malaria and a bad hangover and you’ll get the idea. Fun it ain’t, but honest, you can live through it.”

Muscles all over Arlene relaxed; her eyes got warmer; I almost got the feeling she was undressing me in her mind. She was impressed. And no wonder—here was a chick who was convinced she needed a shrink because of penis-envy or some other Freudian fairy tale face to face with a junkie who had locked himself in a room and beat 99 to 1 odds by going “Cold Turkey.” Thanks to
The Man With the Golden Arm
& Co., I was now a bona fide existentialist hero in her eyes. God bless you, Otto Preminger.

“But you
couldn’t
have been... the usual junkie,” she said admiringly. “I mean, it
is
true that most of them can’t stop.” Now
I
was reasonably impressed. Also, she had handed me the straight-line I was angling for.

“Most of them don’t want to stop,” I said. “It’s not the withdrawal bummer—that’s just an easy cop-out. It’s why they become junkies in the first place. Most junkies become junkies because they’re junk-prone personalities. I became a junkie because I was living with a junkie and it was what came naturally. When I got good and tired of her bad scenes, I threw her out, and once she was gone, there was no reason for me to stay on smack. So I stopped. Because I’m not a junk-prone personality. You and Ted and Doris are.”

“What???” More or less in chorus.

“Man, that’s the Foundation! All of you sitting there and mainlining old Harv’s Total Consciousness junk.”

“
Bullshit
, man!” Ted said. “You’re just playing word-games and you know it.”

But Arlene seemed to be even more fascinated than before. “What do you mean?” she said earnestly. Old Ted had said exactly the wrong thing; the would-be writer side of her had been turned on. She leaned a little closer. I could fee the warmth of her body beside me know.

I turned to her; Ted and Doris were strictly excess baggage now, whether they knew it or not.

“Why do you go to the Foundation?” I said.

“Why... ah... to achieve Total Consciousness...”

“What’s Total Consciousness?”

“I don’t know how to put it into words...”

“You want to be a writer and you can’t put it into words?”

She frowned, smiled, then shrugged and said: “Well... ah, Harvey says it’s... losing your ego hang-ups... being able to live totally in the immediacy of now... Kind of a Buddhist thing, the annihilation of the ego...”

“Ego-death?”

“Well... I suppose so, but I mean not as
negative
as it sounds...”

“Ego-death doesn’t sound negative at all the way some people say it.”

“You mean Timothy Leary and his acid cult?”

“Uh huh. You could say they’re acid-junkies.” Did I really believe that? Was Robin an acid-junkie? Well, what the hell, true or not, it was the right move in the game.

“But acid isn’t like heroin,” Arlene said. “Heroin isn’t a psychedelic.” Of course she was right; that
was
the difference: heroin turns you off, acid turns you on.

“Neither is the Foundation for Total Consciousness,” I said.

Arlene and I stared at each other, me projecting, she receiving, I thought. I hoped. Win or lose, she was at least giving me a good game.

“Bull-shit
it isn’t!” Ted said. “Total Psychotherapy is the only real consciousness-expander.”

I kept my eyes locked on Arlene’s. “See?” I said, smiling at her, not bothering to answer Ted. “He admits it’s a drug.”

“But not like heroin...”

“Oh no?” I said. “It hooks you, doesn’t it? It changes your head like junk.”

“Acid changes your... head too, doesn’t it?”

“Sure, but the idea is to come back—it’s called an acid
trip,
right? But people who get hung-up on junk like the Foundation or heroin want their heads to
stay
changed.”

“I think I see...” Arlene said slowly. “You’re right about one thing anyway... the Foundation’s thing is to make the change permanent...”

The lines of relationship in the room were on the verge of shifting. Ted, Doris and Arlene had come in together; I was the outsider. With a little nudge, Ted and Doris would become the outsiders, and Arlene and I....

“Aw bullshit,” said Ted.

Now I looked at him, but it was a posture I made strictly for Arlene’s benefit. “You mean you
don’t
want the Foundation to change your head?” I said.

“Well sure... but...”

“But there are good changes and bad changes,” Doris said.

“Yeah,” said Ted, “and the Foundation puts you through good changes.”

“How do you know that till you’ve changed?” I said.

Silence.

“You don’t,” I said. “You know you don’t know—you just hope. Question is, Arlene Cooper, why do you hate Arlene Cooper so much that you’re willing to take the chance of letting some cat play with your mind when all you really know is that he’ll change you, for better or worse, in sickness or in health, till death do you part?”

She stared at me as if I could be her next guru-candidate. Which, of course, was exactly the idea. “Sometimes... sometimes you’ve got to take that chance, I guess...” she finally said.

“But only with someone who’s taking the same chance with himself on
you,”
I said. Our eyes bored holes in each other.

“I... I suppose that’s one of the things a man and a woman want out of a relationship,” she said.

I nodded. “I’d be willing to take that chance with you....”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Ted and Doris fidgeting, exchanging glances, realizing, I hoped, that it was time for a quick exit.

“I... I... might be willing to take that chance on you too,” Arlene said. A jaw muscle twitched.

“But you’re afraid.” I smiled at her. “I’m a little afraid too,” I said. “That’s a good sign.” I touched her hand lightly. She didn’t pull it away.

“Maybe we... should... talk about it...” she said.

“Well, uh, look,” Ted said loudly, “we gotta be going. Gotta make my private session with Harvey in about an hour. Coming, Arlene?”

“I don’t have a session tonight,” she said. Aha!

“It’s still pretty early,” I said. “Why don’t you stick around and we can....”

She smiled at me, squeezed by hand.

“All right,” she said, with just enough uptightness coming back into her voice to let me know that she knew that I had a bit more in mind than discussing the ethical structure of the universe.

Check.

And mate?

I closed the door behind Ted and Doris, slid the policelock bar into place and walked back through the clutter of the kitchen to the doorway of the living room, where I stood quietly for a moment clocking Arlene Cooper.

She was sitting up very straight on the edge of the couch, staring at the bookcases against the far wall, or maybe just staring. Her medium-length blonde hair looked coppery and sensual in the orange light, but the line of her jaw was firmly set, her eyes seemed withdrawn behind those glasses, and her fingers were toying nervously with the folds of her black skirt. Standing there, I got a cold feeling in my stomach, fighting the warmth in my groin; digging her in a just-the-two-of-us-alone situation, I was pretty sure this was going to be a lot more complicated than I had thought.

Girding my equivocal loins, I entered the lion’s den, sat down beside her, smiled, and was surely about to think of a brilliant lead-in, when she began to knead her hands together and said:

“Look, Tom, I don’t want you to think... I mean that I usually... put myself in this... kind of situation at the spur of the moment... I mean... I’m not...”

Oh shit, I thought, honest baby. I’ll just respect the ass off of you! “Not what?” I said, with all the deep, serious concern I could muster.

“Well... you know... I don’t usually go... hopping into bed with guys I’ve just met....” Smoothing the cloth of her skirt with her hands now.

“Why not?” I said.

“Why not! What do you think I am?”

“A girl,” I said. “What do you think
I
am?”

Now at least she was puzzled instead of angry. She looked at me strangely, cocking her head to one side like a parrot.

I took her hand. It was cold and sweaty and rigid in mine, but she didn’t pull it away.

“Let me tell you my terrible secret,” I said. “Many times in the past, I’ve been perfectly willing to hop into bed with girls I’ve just met. In fact, I’ve done it on every occasion I could. Do you now consider me cheap? Am I just an easy lay? Will you now use me callously and then toss me aside?”

She laughed; the lines in her face relaxed and her hand softened in mine. But it went rigid again and the muscles in her jaw tightened as the laugh passed and she said: “But you’re a
man.”

“Nice of you to notice.”

“You know what I mean—”

Oh WoW, did I know what she meant! I was getting the shitty end of Ye Olde Double Standard, only upside down and backwards.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said. “But do you really know what you mean?”

“I know how men think.”

“Really? Are you on the Pill?” (Might as well kill two birds with one stone.)

“Of all the—” She pulled her hand away.

“Take it easy. I’m not trying to be gross,” I said. “I’m just trying to show you something about yourself. Humor me for a minute.
Are
you on the Pill?”

“Well... yes—”

“Okay. Now, it’s logical to assume that you’re on the Pill because you don’t want to get pregnant, right?”

“Right.”

“And unless you
really
have delusions of grandeur, there’s only one way to get pregnant, right?”

“So?”

“So if you’re on the Pill, you’re walking around thinking it might happen at any time.”