The Children of Hamelin (16 page)

“Dig,” I said, “you got five light nickels out of the ounce, plus one for the house, right?”

She filled another nickel bag. “Yeah,” she said, “but I haven’t sealed them yet. I’ll buy some oregano and fill them out before I deliver them.”

I took a final drag on my joint and roached it into the ashtray. Robin took a last drag too and roached her joint, keeping up nicely. Holding it in, I tried to organize the irrefutable logic of my argument. The room was reeling and it wasn’t easy. I exhaled. Robin exhaled and started rolling another joint.

“Look,” I said, “You wouldn’t smoke a pure oregano joint, would you?”

She giggled. “I’ve never been
that
hard up,” she said.

“All right. So no one can get high off oregano—if someone could, it’d be the Nobel Prize for sure. So if you stick some oregano in those light nickels, it doesn’t
really
make the count any better, now does it?”

Robin lit the joint, took a drag, passed it to me. “But it. Looks like. Better count,” she wheezed.

“Shit!” I said. “Are you dealing pot or making pizzas? It may look like a better count, but it
isn’t,
girl.” I took a drag. Robin was filling cheapo nickel bags again.

“Man,” she said, “you are one righteous cat! What you’re saying makes sense to me, but it won’t make sense to these nickel bag freaks. They get awful uptight if the count looks short.”

I passed her the joint. “Tell them the truth,” I said.

“Huh?” she said around a lungful of smoke. She filled the last pay envelope. Now there were ten unsealed nickel bags on the table and about a dime’s worth still on the magazine.

“Dig,” I said, “what you do is buy one little box of oregano. Then, when you lay a nickel on a customer, you say: ‘Here’s your nickel, baby. It looks like a short count, but it’s an uncut bag.’ Then if he bitches, you whip out the box of oregano and tell him: ‘If you really want to smoke oregano, be my guest.’”

Robin goggled at me. “Wow,” she said, “are you stoned! That’s a weird idea.... You don’t think it’d really work?”

I picked up a nickel bag, licked the flap, sealed it and tossed it back on the table with a flourish. “In certain limited circumstances,” I said, “honesty is actually the best policy. Dig the advantages: not only do you get a reputation for honesty, but one box of oregano will last you forever.”

I sealed another nickel bag to punctuate my sermon. Robin took another drag—perhaps to reinforce her moral fibre—shrugged, and then began sealing nickel bags herself.

When we had finished sealing up all the nickels, I had—aside from a gluey tongue—a fine feeling of moral accomplishment. I had shown a previously-disreputable connection the error of her ways and guided her firmly to the straight and narrow. I had saved ten poor innocents from the possibly-carcinogenic horrors of excessive oregano inhalation. And I had succeeded in asserting my authority in my own pad. Were I a Boy Scout, surely I would qualify for a dealing Merit Badge.

Still, something I couldn’t put my finger on was still nagging at me: I remembered I had been pissed off at something besides the horrors of oregano before I got sidetracked and now I couldn’t remember what. Ah, I was probably just so stoned I was imagining things. It would not do to give in to paranoia.

“Man,” Robin said, “you are something else. The more I think about that oregano number the better it sounds. I mean, after all, over the years the cost of oregano
does
add up....”

Jeez, the sheer classlessness of the chick! She was so classless that she was the essence of classlessness which gave her classlessness a class of its own—she was the archtypal street-urchin, the pure thing itself. Hmmm... that was probably why she was such a good fuck: no moral, ethical, or esthetic hang-ups at all.

“You ever been a dealer?” she asked.

Well now, anyone who’s ever been a junkie has copped smack with other people’s money, one way or another. Lots of times Anne and I had gotten together enough bread from other junkies to buy a few bags in one lump and shave enough off each one to keep a free bag for ourselves. But I had
never
gone out and bought smack with my own capital and then resold it. An all-important technical point: I had never been anything more than an occasional connection, never had become anything as loathsome as a pusher.

“Certainly not!” I told her indignantly.

“You’d sure be a good one,” Robin said.

And how’s
that
for a compliment? But she was looking straight at me and her eyes were huge and shining and the world was spinning around them like they were the twin navels of the universe and the fire of total sincerity burned behind them and all for me.
She really meant it.
And she really meant what she meant by it: I was
muy macho,
a hip and groovy cat in her book. I felt a surge of affection from my head down to my cock for this totally innocent, totally corrupt chick. Corrupt by conventional values, which maybe I hadn’t quite blown out of my system; but totally innocent by her own standards. She had never sold herself out because from where she stood, there was no way to sell yourself out except by refusing to act out the feral impulse of the moment. Didn’t I really envy her that? And at the same time dig her for it...?

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all week,” I said, and meant it in a weird way.

She laughed, snuggled close to me on the couch and leaned her head on my shoulder, pressing her soft check against mine. I stroked her long silky hair. She touched me lightly on the thigh, and I put my arm around her. She lifted her face to me, parted her lips, and we kissed.

Feeling the clean hardness of her teeth against mine, the soft wet world-filling reality of our tongues touching, I felt a great weight lifting off my soul. I felt my mind, hang-ups, worries, fears, reservations, past, all that sorry bullshit, melting into the pure animal reality of tongues and teeth and spit and skin.

Short blond hair (long and black)—lighting the surge of a needle in my vein—open bag of smack on red Con Ed spool table—”You’d be a great dealer,” she said. “Let’s go down to Snook’s and collect some quarters”—streets are full of narcs—hit them with police-lock bar—three-to-five for this for sure—”Come on, you can’t just stop”—“You’re a beautiful cat”—living room full of pot-smack in all the sugar bowls—Tiger O.D.ed last night—cut with oregano—dirty spike—I was awake. I was awake with Anne naked in the bed beside me dead to the world.

No... no... I shook myself mentally. Robin, not Anne. Just a dream. This is reality—now, Robin, pot, not smack.

Now I was wide awake, I realized that I was straight, and, realizing that, I realized how stoned I had been.

Ten nickel bags sitting on my living room table—reality.

Jesus, Robin had cut up two ounces of pot in my pad, and I had been too stoned to even bitch about it; all I could think of was some damn stupid thing about oregano!

Waves of paranoia washed over me—not bust paranoia, no I didn’t seriously believe that the cops were about to break in and find those damn ten nickel bags all cut up and ready to peddle to high school kids on street-corners. No, it was the existence of those ten nickel bags in my pad and the dream of Anne melting into Robin pot melting into smack me melting into... into something used again... too much dope in the apartment... games being played with my head... just a connection... never been a dealer technically... tell it to the judge...

Robin turned over in her sleep. Her face was relaxed and peaceful; her lips pouted around a baby’s smile.

Get ahold of yourself, man! You’re getting paranoid over nothing; a bad dream, is all. The chick digs you, is all. Don’t blow it. Don’t be square. Don’t get paranoid.

I let out a deep breath and closed my eyes. What, after all, was there to be uptight about? I wasn’t uptight about smoking pot with her; why should those ten nickel bags put me on a bummer? Don’t be a hypocritical shit, man!

Yeah, sure I would be cool in the morning.

But I would damn well make sure she took the stuff with her tomorrow and didn’t try to stash it here. I wouldn’t blow what I had going with her by getting righteous over her thing. But I wouldn’t let myself get eaten by it again, either.

Thing to do was maintain, man, maintain!

“Dear Mr. Casey:

Thanks very much for your hard-hitting article, ‘The Man Who Turned Off the World.’ With drugs so much in the news today, one would think that such an article on J. Harry Anslinger, the man most responsible for the prohibition of marijuana in the United States, would find a ready market. Indeed your piece has much to recommend it in the way of literary skill, exhaustive research, and particularly passion...”

“You look like you’re gonna puke, man,” Bruce Day said. It was 2:30 Wednesday afternoon, the exact center of the Dirk Robinson work week, when five o’clock Friday is just as far away as nine o’clock Monday and the week seems like it has gone on forever and will probably never end.

I looked up from my letter to Mr. George Casey, waved the manuscript in Bruce’s face and said: “It’s things like this that make this job disgusting.”

“Another sickie?” Bruce asked.

“I wish that’s all it was,” I said. “I’m getting that old
Miss Lonelyhearts
feeling again.”

“And this, too, shall pass away, or so they tell me,” Berkowitz grunted without bothering to look up from his typewriter.

I ignored him. “This thing,” I told Bruce, “Is the Dirk Robinson cherry of one George Casey, a nineteen-year-old kid living on Avenue D. According to his letter, he’s just finishing out a year’s probation, having been busted for pot at the tender age of eighteen.”

“I Was a Teen-Age Pothead?”
Bruce asked.

“I wish it was,” I sighed. “But what it is is a kind of ultimate poison-pen letter called ‘The Man Who Turned Off the World.’ A meticulously researched put-down of our beloved former Chief Narc J. Harry Anslinger. The kid seems to have read every word of Anslinger’s that ever saw print and everything ever written about him. He takes little pieces out of context and strings them together with his own obsessions and paranoia and proves that Anslinger is responsible for every disaster in the past thirty years, possibly excluding the Second World War.”

“So what’s your problem?” Bruce asked.

“I like it.”

“In your heart, you know he’s right, eh?”

I nodded. “But in my guts, I know he’s nuts. The kid expects us to sell the thing to either
Life
or
The Reader’s Digest.
You know—’The Most Unforgettable Character I Never Met.’”

Bruce gave me a nasty, pious grin. “Why don’t you pass it on to Dickie?” he said.

“Are you nuts? Dickie’d just bounce it and get pissed off at me in the bargain.”

“True,” said Bruce, “but the look on Dickie’s face—”

“Day, you have no soul!”

“And then when Dickie bounces it, you can go over his head to the Man himself... the look on
Dirk’s
face—”

“As he boots Tom’s ass out the door,” Berkowitz observed without missing a beat on his typewriter.

“There is that,” Bruce admitted. “But just what is your real problem with the damned thing? You
know
we’re not going to market it...”

“Problem is,” I said, “that I know no magazine would touch it with a fork. Not only is it a propaganda piece for the International Dope-Fiend Conspiracy, it’s probably instant libel suit too. What do I tell the cat?”

“Man, I don’t understand you,” Bruce said. “You tell him what you just told me.”

I look at Bruce, trying to
esp
it to him. Bruce was what you might call a “gentleman dealer”: he liked pot but didn’t like to pay for it, so he’d buy a key every few months and deal enough of it to get his bread back and keep the rest to smoke. Bruce would understand why I was identifying with this Casey twitch, why I was hung up over what to tell him, if I told him about last weekend’s scene. But if I told Bruce, I’d also be telling Berkowitz, who I just didn’t make for a connection for even a fellow-traveller of connections, and sooner or later it would get to Dickie. I had the feeling it would only make points for me in a weird way with Dickie—but Richard Lee, Vice President of Dirk Robinson Literary Agency, Inc., in his secret identity as a company fink would be honor bound to report to the Man. That might be interesting, but then again it might be
too
interesting: it might blow the one thing that kept Dirk from manipulating me the way he manipulated everyone in the office, the fact that I was totally opaque to him. If Dirk knew I was involved with dope, he might can me. Or worse, it might be some kind of key to my head for him, in which case I could easily end up as another pawn in the Big Game. Dirk had made it obliquely clear to me on several occasions that I could have a pro desk if I asked for it. That I knew this, and that he knew I knew, and that I had made no moves in that direction, kept me in the position of playing with his head, instead of vice versa. Which was the way I intended to keep it. Therefore, I had better not run off at the mouth.

“Thing is,” I said, “that almost any underground newspaper
would
print it, and that would make the kid happy. But you know what Agency policy is on referring suckers to nonpaying markets—”

“More to the point,” Bruce said, “if the kid has a dope record and that thing sees print, it’ll keep the fuzz crawling all over him till they find something to bust him for.”

Yeah, Bruce was right. It was kindly old Uncle Tom’s (ugly thought right there!) duty to tell the kid to cool it before he ends up on Dry Tortugas. And that was really what was bugging me: less than a week after Robin did her thing in my pad, here I was speaking
ex cathedra
telling some kid to cool it before he got himself busted.

“I guess it’s my duty as a member of the New York Literary Establishment to tell him to shit-can it,” I sighed.

“Now
there’s
a thought!” Bruce said. “I’ll cherish your image of fee-readers as members of the Establishment every time I get to thinking of us as the Wage Slaves of Fifth Avenue.”