“Have a seat,” said the man behind the desk. He had thinning curly hair and small eyes hidden behind wire-rim glasses. “I’m Roy. Have you seen the menu?”
He handed Alex a menu.
Alex sat in one of the chairs. On top of the table was a scale and a pile of pot, a huge fortune of marijuana. Roy pushed his glasses back up his nose again and again even when they hadn’t slid down. It was like people who spend all their time flicking the cigarette between their fingers even when there is absolutely no ash.
“What’s your name again?”
“Alex.”
“Alex, Alex, Alex,” he muttered. He didn’t look at Alex directly. His lips were wet and red. There was something a little shriveled and prunelike about him, but also he radiated a certain odd warmth. “So how’s Eggfield?” he said suddenly, looking at Alex.
“He’s all right,” said Alex.
“Eggfield’s crazy, isn’t he?” said Roy to no one in particular. He said it to the table, as if he were talking to the pot. “He’s a good kid. But crazy. I can tell.”
“He’s always seemed pretty together to me,” said Alex.
“Huh?” said Roy. He looked at Alex very hard, nearly squinting, as though just noticing for the first time he was there. “What can I do for you? Have you seen the menu? Have a look at the menu. Levi, this is…kid, what’s your name?”
“Alex.”
“Hi,” said Levi, and they shook hands.
Levi wore an army jacket and faded jeans and combat boots and a yarmulke. He had a beard. His face was heavily lined but he also looked young. He sat with an unlit joint between his fingers, which were nubby and nail-bitten. He looked like a badly lapsed rabbi.
“So anyway,” said Levi. “Dylan was there, and we were all wondering when the next bus was coming, and there was the whole question…”
“Of who was going to get on the bus,” said Roy.
“Exactly,” said Levi. “We were all committed to very specific projects, so one of us was going to have to drop everything…”
“And follow the motherfucker,” said Roy.
“Exactly,” said Levi. He reached over to the table for a lighter, flicked it, and lit up the joint. After he took a long drag he held it out to Roy, who then held it out to Alex.
Alex looked up from the menu. It was like a menu at a restaurant except instead of food the menu listed different kinds of pot—Acapulco, Colombian, Panama Red, and Thai Stick—along with an assortment of mushrooms and acid. The last time he had been here with Walker they had bought some Thai and it had gotten them and quite a few of their friends incredibly stoned.
Alex had subsequently, and with Walker’s permission, called all his friends and taken orders for more, collecting the money in advance, and was now holding a fairly large sum of cash in preparation for a major score. Part of him thought he should be straight so he could figure things out and be clear about what was what, especially since the whole business involved fractions—each of his friends had signed on for an eighth—and he was terrible at math. The other part of him wanted to get stoned.
He took a hit of the joint and held his breath. The two men kept talking in the fairly paranoid, abstract, and unintelligible way they had been, while Alex tried to concentrate and figure out how much of what he wanted to buy.
“Kid,” said Roy. “You know the rules, right?”
“I think so,” said Alex.
“The rules are you never come without calling first, you never bring anyone without telling me first, and you don’t smoke anything near this building. And you don’t tell people where you got it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
The phone rang.
“Research,” said Roy. “I’m not going to talk to you about Nixon,” he said into the phone. Alex watched him chew his lips. He was very anxious. What Nixon had to do with pot he couldn’t imagine. He listened some more. “It’s all going into the book. You can read about it when I’m finished.” He put the phone down. “Fucking parasites,” he said.
As soon as he put the phone down it rang again.
“Research,” he said. “You alone?” he said. “Hold on.”
He stood up and went to the window, opened it, stuck his head out very quickly for a peek down the block, then came back to the phone. “Come on over,” he said.
Then he turned to Alex.
“So,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
NOTHING MUCH WAS different after having smoked. But it was. He became more aware of the dog sitting quietly at Roy’s feet. The long emptiness of the loft became theatrical and fraught with possibilities. The air had an earthy, dank smell, the smell of things rotting and growing. His thoughts began to burn and tingle; he felt like the edge of a piece of paper that was catching fire. The thoughts and sensations rushed faster and faster. It was as if his thoughts were asteroids appearing from the future, smashing against the hot protective atmosphere of reality and exploding in balls of fire. The point where the future turned into the past was right in front of his nose and everything kept rushing marvelously past him and then it was gone.
There was no hurry, apparently. Alex watched another customer, a wiry man with a baseball cap and a mellow demeanor, come and go, making a quick order for a half ounce of Panama Red. Then a fat man in a suit with a head of dense curly hair, much denser and thicker than Roy’s, came in with another guy in a long trench coat. They asked for an ounce in accents that were so heavily inflected with mobsterese that Alex thought it was a joke. Then they proceeded to tell—or rather the fat guy told, while the other guy stood silently behind him listening and nodding—about how he was recently in a shootout and had been shot in the leg. “I had no choice but to go into a roll,” he said. “So I got hit in the leg instead of the stomach, which was good, because the stomach burns, let me tell ya.” Then he lifted his pants leg and there was a white gauze bandage and he lifted that off and there was a round bloody hole scabbing over. It was about the most thrillingly gross thing Alex had ever seen.
“So then I take out my piece and get off like five shots.” At this he reached under his jacket and removed a handgun, pointed it at some imaginary enemy at the wall, and went, “Pow pow pow pow!”
“Whoa, man! Hey! Hey! Put that away! Jesus,” said Roy.
“That was only four shots,” said Levi.
“Whateva,” said the mobster, and put the gun back. “That’s how it went, right?” His accent no longer seemed like a joke.
The man in the trench coat nodded.
What followed was a long session of misunderstanding between the mobster and Roy, who by comparison was a sweet innocent guy, hardly a criminal at all, more like a neighborly hot dog vendor.
Roy said, “The ounce is on the house,” and tossed a plastic baggie of pot across at the mobster, who put his money down, which required Roy to clarify that the pot was for free, to which the mobster replied that he wanted to pay for an ounce, to which Roy said, “No, I insist, really.”
Finally what became apparent was that if Roy was giving an ounce away, then the mobster would take a second ounce too, and pay for that one; just from looking at him his general ethos seemed to be the more the better. It took a long time to work out, because everyone was either very stoned or stupid or both.
When the mobster left, Roy sighed and went to the back and returned with a drink. “It’s a lime rickey,” he said to Alex and Levi. “You guys want one? It keeps the blood sugar up.”
Alex and Levi both declined. Alex took a look at Levi sitting there in his army jacket, then looked down at his own. An army jacket was about being really pissed off at some unnamable corruption in the world. It was Alex’s prize possession.
The thing about it he so liked was the multitude of pockets inside and outside, of different shapes and sizes, into which he stuffed money, or tissues, or gum, or whatever.
He liked it so much he had worn it all through the previous sweltering summer, in the middle of which he had been mugged. Two boys t
hrew him into an alley and pressed him against the wall. They frisked him while one of them put his wide palm on Alex’s mouth so he wouldn’t scream. He didn’t intend to scream but meanwhile he couldn’t breathe. The two kids were wearing tank tops. One of them had a big afro. They had tan skin, very pale, and were very lean. They pushed their fingers into the army jacket’s myriad pockets. This went on for about five minutes. Alex stood there trying to breathe through this kid’s palm. Eventually he was getting very short of breath and just pointed to the pocket within which was about four dollars. At the time he felt vaguely proud of his jacket for its powers of concealment. He brushed himself off and watched as they ran down the street with the long loping strides of happy antelopes. He thought they were beautiful, and right away he knew there was something strange about this thought.
Later, when he got upstairs, he went to take a pee, and while he was standing there in the soft bathroom sunlight, with the warm summer air on his skin, watching the pee go into the toilet bowl, he was suddenly convulsed with tears. It was weird how it happened that way.
Finally Roy turned to Alex and asked, “What can I do for you?”
He had told Roy how much he wanted (three-quarters of an ounce, all in eighths) and had put his money on the table when a young girl emerged from a back room somewhere and ambled up to the table with a leash in hand. She had dirty-blond hair and freckles and very wide and, Alex thought, experienced eyes. She looked very mature for a kid, like one of those extremely precocious children who have to wait around through most of their youth until they’re old enough to have experiences they have for a long time been ready to have.
“Here, pookie,” she said. She nudged the dog with her foot. It growled. “Come on, kiddo. Time for a walk.”
The dog scumbled spastically to its feet. She put the leash on.
“Do you need anything from the store?” she said to Roy.
He asked for a Coke.
Alex walked out with her. The cold afternoon air braced his red cheeks. Everything was spinning, and there, again, across the street, was the swirly yippies sign, sitting mysteriously above the ramshackle storefront that looked already like something discovered on an archaeological dig far off in the future. The girl yanked the dog in one direction and the dog yanked her in the other. Alex, stoned as hell, wanted very much to ask her what the yippies were. He thought she would know. He thought she could explain all sorts of things to him.
Instead he watched her and the dog engage in a game of tug-of-war. Only for a moment did she let her eyes flicker across his face, and he thought he saw a hint of embarrassment in them, that she couldn’t make the dog walk in her direction, that she had a pot dealer for a father, and other things.
“So, um,” Alex began.
“Arnie!” she screamed.
“I was wondering…”
But he was too shy, and she was too preoccupied with the dog, and maybe too shy as well, and eventually she pulled Arnie in the direction of the Bowery. Alex watched them turn the corner. Arnie, previously so reluctant, was now dragging her forward.
He walked west, in the opposite direction, towards the subway. He had the pot stashed in one of the pockets of his army jacket. The sky was purple. His career as a pot dealer was getting off to an excellent start—in the upcoming days he would take each baggie and, for some inexplicable reason, wrap it up in a piece of paper so that they looked like white batons. On each one he carefully wrote out the name of the recipient in neat script as though it were a present to be handed out at Hanukkah. When he got to school he convened everyone at lunchtime and it was as though he were giving out gifts. He realized this was something his mother would do, make things nice like that, make them special, and it revolted him a little to think of the overlap of dealing pot and his mother.
The connection was weirdly present, though.
A year earlier she had found a nickel bag in one of the pockets of his army jacket one day while he was at school, and confronted him when he came home. It was the first one he had ever bought, and it seemed grossly unfair that he should be busted on his first time.
Her face was furious and grave. The nickel bag sat on the kitchen table. She had washed the jacket and found it. It sat there connecting two parts of the world that were not supposed to connect. The expression on his mother’s face caused him grief. It was as though she was hurting herself over this nickel bag; she was making this tiny object inflict a kind of physical pain on herself that he couldn’t help but feel, too.
“What is that?” she said, and didn’t take her eyes from his. It was obvious she knew what it was. Yet it wasn’t. His mother was so damn uncool. He examined the possibilities of an incredible fabrication. Could he say it was pipe tobacco or maybe some weird thing he had stolen from the chemistry lab? Or that he didn’t know what it was? For a moment he wanted to laugh, to giggle.
“It’s marijuana, isn’t it?” said his mother. Her voice was flat and devoid of the slight musicality which drove him insane with annoyance and also was an essential bedrock of comfort and stability and sanity for him. Her voice was that of a prosecutor, though she couldn’t even pull that off. It had too much emotion for a prosecutor. She was in an agony over this.
“Mom…” he said, trailing.
“Are you smoking this?” And then, very loud: “I want you to answer me!” The voice was horrible. Huge and fiery. She trembled with rage. It cut him to some place he hardly knew existed. Again, amidst his terror, a strange desire to laugh overtook him. He breathed deeply.
“Look,” he said. “This is just an experiment. Someone gave that to me. I forgot I even had it. I tried it once. All right? But I didn’t like it. I don’t care about it.” She was listening. Her brow was furrowed with concern. It was just a nickel bag. Why was everything such a big deal! But he stayed calm. A little progress had been made, and he had to capitalize on it. There was something about the sheer intensity of his mother’s focus on him that gave him the confidence of a performer who knows he has his audience’s entire undivided attention.
“It was just a freak accident, me having this. I don’t want it.” He picked it up. “I want to throw it out.” The look of relief that came over her face, slight yet perceptible, was heartbreaking. She didn’t want this little bag of pot to exist any more than he did.
He went to the garbage with it, lifted the lid, and watched the bag fall into the garbage pail with a little thump, like a tea bag. Then he shut the pail. She still had that look. He opened the pail, retrieved the little pregnant envelope, and upended it, pouring the leaves down. The bag fluttered down after the pot.
“See?” he said. She had come to stand beside him. The look of pain was still etched in her brow, and around her mouth, and he was suddenly hurt and terrified by it, worried that it wouldn’t go away.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said, and was aware simultaneously of being dishonest and manipulative with her, wanting to smooth this aberration over, and also of a nearly excruciating realness of his feelings, a brightness of his own emotion which he could hardly bear. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he said again, and they hugged. And then he finally was converted. He no longer wanted to lie to her, no longer wanted to later retreat into the camaraderie of a retold parental bust story with Nick and Walker, but was truly penitent. The reformist urge swept through him like fire.
NOW, WALKING DOWN Bleecker Street, he vowed to be incredibly cautious about his current stash. That night he returned home, got past his mother safely, and hid the pot. The army jacket was laid on a chair, and he watched television, a quiet Saturday night in front of the television. There was a local news program on. A special feature on a guy who went through garbage. He wore a three-piece suit and pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose again and again. There was a ridiculous scene of this man walking down a well-groomed street in his suit, pausing before a set of garbage pails, casting that particular kind of shoplifter’s look-around before reaching in and grabbing a garbage bag, and then sprinting down t
he block at full speed and jumping into a waiting van that sped away, as though it were a bank robbery.
The man had just stolen some of Richard Nixon’s garbage. He had stolen Bob Dylan’s garbage, too. It was, he told the reporter, an important form of academic research.
“JESUS, ROY, YOU’RE famous!” Alex said when he next saw him. “I had no idea.”
“This is why you have to be careful, kid. Don’t go blabbing that everywhere,” he said. “I don’t want you ruining my reputation.” But he seemed pleased that Alex had discovered this other life of his.
Over the next couple of years they became friendly, though Alex only bought small quantities for personal use. His dealing career had ended abruptly shortly after it started.
“I don’t want people to think of me as a dealer,” he had confided to Walker, and Walker, ever the rationalist, had responded, “Then you shouldn’t sell them drugs.” So he didn’t.
He became an old-timer at Roy’s. He accepted his lime rickeys. He occasionally saw Levi, who was always agitated about the lenient, pacifist position of the Jewish Defense League and babbling on at high speed about wire tapes, trails, the CIA. It was a peculiar mixture of radical Zionism and radical antiestablishmentarianism, and Alex assumed it was a folly. He watched Arnie the dog get older, and learned that puppy Dobermans get their ears taped because it makes them stand straight up for the rest of their lives. He watched a certain blank look of fatigue etch itself deeper and deeper into the face of the woman who had first pulled Arnie away. But he never saw the girl with the freckles again, and could never bring himself to ask about her.
The Sleep-Over Artist Page 7