The Children of Hamelin (12 page)

“You’re allowed one free trial group session. Then you can have your first six weeks’ groups and membership for only $50. That doesn’t include private sessions, of course.”

Old Harv sure had it down to a science. One free shot, a cut-rate ounce, and then when you’re good and hooked, the price takes off for the stratosphere.

“Am I expected?” I asked.

“Of course.”

Uh-huh.

At this point in walked Ida, the biddy who had faked the ass-grabbing game with Ted at last week’s party, looking like a female version of Torquemada with her hatchet-face and her hair in a Mrs. Grundy bun. She sat down between Arlene and me and lit a cigarette (blindfold optional).

Followed closely by my lost love from last week, Linda Kahn, who gave me a you’ll-get-yours look and sat down on the other side of Arlene. Then, just as I was beginning to wonder if this was Tom Hollander-versus-six-uptight-chicks night, two guys walked in: a thin, blond cat of about forty in a Madison avenue brown suit and image but with the slightly-mottled skin and rheumy eyes of an obvious rummy; and a kid in blue Levis and checked flannel shirt with medium-long straight black hair that just didn’t fit with his thick Brooklyn-hood face.

The Mad Ave type walked over to me as the kid sat down on the far right-hand chair, held out his hand. I took it; it was soft and squishy.

“Charley Dees,” he said, with a hollow three-martini-lunch smile.

“Tom Hollander.”

Old Charley sat down next to the kid, who muttered “Rich Rossi” across the room at me. Just for kicks, I gave him the “V” sign. He didn’t quite know how to take it.

And then bad, bad vibes walked into the room with Doris. Doris! I had the distinct feeling I had been set up for something.

“Welcome to old home week,” I said sourly.

“Hello Tom,” Doris said from behind some bullet-proof glass wall. She sat down next to good old Charley, leaving a central seat vacant for guess-who.

Not exactly a cozy group. I was sure that this thing was stacked against me—and even paranoids have enemies.

And then the Man entered the Star Chamber and closed the door behind him. Harvey was dressed in the same baggy gray pants and crummy tieless white shirt he had worn at the party. Or was he? I wouldn’t put it past Harvey to have a whole closetful of baggy gray pants and dirty white shirts.

Harvey sat down on the empty folding chair, lit a cigarette, exhaled smoke, and said conversationally: “Are you still smoking pot, Rich?”

Rich squirmed, pouted. He looked more like a Brooklyn hood than ever.

“Come on, Rossi,” Charley said crisply, “a simple yes or no answer.”

“Are you still a lush?” Rich snarled.

“We’re not talking about Charley,” Arlene said.

“Are you still getting stoned every day?” Doris said.

“Ted fucked you lately?” Rich said.

Doris flushed. I think I flushed, too. What kind of crazy shit was this?

“Come on, Rossi,” Charley said, “you ashamed of it?”

“Fuck you, dad. No, I’m not ashamed of it. I just don’t dig listening to all you dumb assholes trying to make me ashamed of it.” Well, well. Maybe Rich wasn’t a complete prick after all.

“Then why do you come to group?” Ida said.

“Same reason I go to the zoo.”

Two points for you, Rich baby.

“Baloney,” Charley said. “You’re hiding from reality.”

“You wouldn’t know reality if it bit you in the ass, creep.”

“Don’t you think you’re reacting a bit hostilely?” Harvey said in his dentist’s voice.

“So?”

“So you’re being defensive,” Linda uptight Kahn said.

“So I’m being defensive.”

“So if you’re being defensive about it, it means you’re ashamed of it,” Charley said.

“You’re trying to make me paranoid!” Rich whined.

“You’re afraid.”

“Yeah, you’re afraid you’re hooked.”

Oh WoW.

“Because he
is
hooked,” Ida said. “He’s been here four months and he’s still turning onto pot. You’re a pot-head, Rich. That’s what you’re afraid of. You can’t stay off drugs.”

“Dope fiend!”

“Junkie!”

The wolf-pack was howling. Ida and Linda and Charley seemed to be getting cheap, pious thrills off the game. Doris, thank God, was beyond that. Arlene—who knows? Rich was trying to stare them down, but his fat lower lip was starting to quiver. Have some balls, man! I telepathed.

“I...” The poor bastard was letting the cretins get to him. I had had just about enough. Rich might be a jerk, but he was on the right side.

“You are all full of shit,” I said loudly.

Heads swiveled. Rich looked at me uncertainly, maybe remembering that “V” I had flashed him and wondering if maybe it
hadn’t
been a put-down.

“You are all full of shit,” I repeated. “Pot isn’t addictive. Pot is just good clean fun.
You’re
the paranoids. Nobody can get...
hooked
on grass.”

Rich grinned at me and made a “V”. “Sock it to ‘em, baby!” he said. Oh WoW. A stoned jerk is still a jerk.

“You’ve been sitting here five minutes and you’ve already got all the answers,” Linda Kahn snarled. “How did you get so smart so fast?”

“Clean living,” I said.

“Tom’s been a junkie...” Doris blurted. Rich’s eyes widened. Jesus, what kind of game was this that turned your friends into consciousless swine? Doris... what’s been done to you, baby?

“Ex-junkie,” I said, “and the little lady knows it.”

“There’s no such thing as an ex-junkie,” Charley said.

“How would you know, wino?” I asked.

“Once a junkie, always a junkie,” Ida chanted like a snotty little smart-ass brat.

“Once a virgin, always a virgin,” I chanted back. Ida blanched, shot me a look of pure hate, and edged to the far side of her chair.

“Hey man,” Rich said respectfully, “you were really a junkie? You really got off smack?”

“Scout’s honor,” I said.

“Junkies have no honor,” Doris said. Jesus! Doris! What the hell’s happening to you?

“That sounds pretty strange coming from you,” I said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Doris said, with genuine innocence.

“You’re supposed to be my friend, remember? So what’s with the dirty-junkie business, Doris?”

“But I
am
your friend, Tom. I remember what you were like then. I said it to help you.”

“Horseshit!” I snarled. But the hell of it was I knew she actually believed it. What were we
doing
to each other here?

“Do you identify with Rich?” Arlene said.

“With every hung-up person in the whole wide universe,” I told her.

“Don’t you think you might have the same problem as Rich?” Harvey suggested.

“What problem? Neither of us has a problem. You jerks have a problem.”

“Then what are you doing here?” Linda Kahn asked smugly.

I looked across Ida at Arlene. Her uptight eyes, her clenched jaw, her hands toying with the fabric of her skirt told me: no, please, no, don’t say it. Well, what the hell, I could take it.

“Just slumming,” I said.

“You’ve got a drug problem,” Doris said quietly.

“Aw come off it, Doris, you know I haven’t had any smack for a long, long time.”

“But you still smoke pot, don’t you?”

“Sure I do,” I said. “In fact, I seem to remember blowing pot with you and Ted on occasion.”

“Not since we’ve been members of the Foundation,” Doris said righteously. “Pot gives you a phony feeling of increased consciousness which keeps you from
really
expanding your consciousness.” Obviously, the Gospel according to St. Brustein.

“In other words,” I said, “Harvey here is dealing a better grade of shit.”

You could almost hear the room gasp. A grin from Rich. An Earth Mother shake of Doris’ head. Linda, Charley and Ida pumping uptight adrenaline into the air. Arlene knowing how I felt but not expecting me to actually
say
it. All grossed-out in their own ways.

Except Harvey. Not a flicker of emotion on his gray pudgy face. “An interesting idea,” he said smoothly. “Let’s try going with it for a while, Tom. Let’s see if I understand you—you’re saying that the Foundation acts like a psychedelic drug because it expands—”

“Not so fast, man! Take your words out of my mouth. I’m saying that your Foundation suckers are like junkies because they’re trying to get the same thing off the Foundation that junkies think they can get off junk. I’m not saying that
either
brand of junkie really gets anything.”

“All right,” Harvey said. “Let’s go with your feeling. You were a junkie, tell us what you wanted from heroin.”

I was about to fake them out by explaining that I had been an atypical junkie, that I had gotten hooked because of Anne. But no, that was the trap, a private thing that was none of their business, a way for them to get inside of me and scramble my brains. I had no intention of playing
that
game, so I decided to wing it—I sure had known enough hard-ass junkies to know where they were at.

“Heroin,” I said, “is a religion and a lover and a way of life. A junkie is never bored—he’s either high or running around like crazy trying to score or scrape together the bread to cop. A junkie has no identity problem—he’s a junkie and that’s his whole bag.”

Ah yes, I was putting on a good show for the peanut gallery. Ida, Linda, Charley (and Arlene?) fascinated at a glimpse into nitty-gritty street-reality, or so they thought, so fascinated they were almost forgetting to be uptight. And I was Rich’s hero at the moment, Captain High. And Doris was giving me a maternal look, proud of me for supposedly baring the secrets of my soul. Dirty voyeurs!

“In other words,” Harvey said, “a junkie is someone with an identity problem.”

“No man, a junkie is someone who has
solved
his identity problem. The operation was a success but the patient died.”

“But why do you feel that being a Foundation member is like being a junkie?”

“Are you putting me on? This is the Foundation for
Total
Consciousness and your thing is
Total
Psychotherapy, right?
Total
—that’s the magic word. You’re pushing a Total Answer. So is the smack dealer. So is the Pope. And all the lost nobodies scoffing up the first Total Dope they get a whiff of...”

Oh yes, I was in good form all right! Rich was totally confused, couldn’t figure out if I was defending his thing or putting it down. Arlene seemed to be entranced at the intellectual structure I was putting together out of sheer bullshit—it figured. Doris was making an effort not to smile, caught between feeling that she should be pissed off at the way I was cutting up the little tin god, and knowing deep inside that I knew a few things about dope that Harvey didn’t. The rest of ‘em were just plain outraged.

But nothing could break through old Harv’s cool. Just as bland as could be, he said: “So you think people look for the same thing in heroin that they look for in the Foundation—something to fill the void inside.”

“You got it, baby.”

“But the void exists?”

“Yeah, the void is alive and well in Argentina.”

“And in you?”

What? Three words, and suddenly there was a cold empty feeling in the pit of my stomach—the void? Void that had led me to Anne to smack to—Aw bullshit!
My
bullshit. Yeah, that was it, old Harv was a mean man with an argument, turning my own bullshit against me, missing the point on purpose, yeah that empty feeling inside, the fear of something that didn’t even exist, it was just a trick is all, trick of Harvey’s trade. Well he’s not gonna get away with pulling that crap on me!

“You’re not listening to me, Harvey,” I said, shaking my finger at him like a schoolteacher lecturing the class dunce. “I said I was an exjunkie. Ex. Ex.
Habla ingles?
That means I do not use smack any more. I am off it. Cured. Finished.”

Harvey smiled a warm, sympathetic, rice-pudding smile that made me want to put my fist through his face. “I believe you, Tom,” he said. “I believe you’re finished with heroin. But what about the need?”

“Look, I just told you, man, I don’t—”

“I know,” Harvey said, breaking in on me without raising his voice. He took a drag on his cigarette, exhaled, considered the smoke. “Take a look at what you’ve said,” he finally continued. “You’ve told us that people turn to heroin out of a need to fill a void inside them, because they don’t know who they are. You’ve told us that
you
were a junkie. Therefore, you’ve told us that you had this need. Now you’re off heroin. And here you are at a Foundation group which you pretend to loathe but actually fear. And which you yourself have equated with heroin. Don’t you see the obvious conclusion?”

“No, I don’t see the obvious conclusion.”

“Don’t you think the need might still be there?” Harvey said.

Time seemed to stop. Something bubbled up from my gut leaving a humming hollow space where it had been and exploded in my head like... like the surge from a needle in my vein. The room’s reality seemed to go dim and flicker. I was back on MacDougal Street with Robin crying for the lost golden summer of my past to which I could no longer belong standing outside the Village Drug Store with Anne trying to cop and remembering the cotton batting comfort of smack coursing along my arteries walking downtown in the cold rain knowing that Ted and Doris were back there in the warm feeling cold and hollow inside.

I remembered stories of acid “return-trips”; was this a residual acid-flash? Or something else?
Why
was I afraid of the Foundation? What was there to be afraid of unless... unless... unless there was something here I couldn’t turn my back on.... The room was whirling around me. Huge eyes out of Keene paintings were staring at me out of seven faces...

“Are you all right?” Arlene asked.

“Yeah... sure...”

“Are you
sure
you’re okay?” Doris said. Her voice was gentle, concerned; she really cared.

“Yeah! Yeah! I
said
I’m okay.”

“You felt something then, didn’t you?” Arlene said. “A need, a longing,
something,
even if you don’t know what that something is—”

“Ah... I dunno...” Sure I felt something, but what would I let myself in for if I told them it was an acid-flash? And that was what it had been, sure, just an acid-bounceback-bummer. Or was it? Or was it really something empty and churning at the core of my being? Could I even trust my own feelings now?