by Ira Wood
“This is what she wanted to give us?” I asked Marge. We looked at the pile, maybe a thousand dollars in all. “But why did we have to drive down?”
“Come help me with this,” her mother called. We found her rooting through the back of a closet, pushing aside a card table, old rubber boots, winter coats they hadn’t worn since they’d left Detroit. Upon locating an enormous cardboard box she had me haul it onto the bed. Dust blew up in a plume. The box flaps crumbled. “Careful!” She sounded afraid. “Please be careful.” As I prepared to dig out the contents she edged me aside, plunged her hands in the box and proceeded to remove Christmas ornaments wrapped in yellowed tissue paper, carousel horses, golden bells, rhinestone-studded eggs—all decades old, all purchased from dime-stores—sleighs, angels blown from glass, candy canes, ballerinas, a winking Cheshire cat.
“I collected them,” she whispered. “Every one.” Raised in an orthodox Jewish family and having married a Presbyterian, this was tantamount to sin. “It’s all yours now.” She beamed at Marge and me. Here was her treasure to bequeath: too fragile to take on a plane and along with the mound of dollar bills too large for a suitcase; only a car was sufficient to carry it all away.
When the morning came to say our good-byes, I strolled to the curb with Marge’s father. He had liked having another man around and had warmed to my presence even as he still seemed somewhat puzzled as to who I was. “Well, thank you for a terrific visit,” I said, pumping his thin and weightless hand.
But her mother had something more to say, something private, and I watched them as they tarried on the front steps, Marge trying to get away as she must have tried all her life and her mother clinging to her elbow, refusing to let go.
“I want to see you marry him,” her mother said. This from a true psychic, from a woman who had read me inside out, who had never met me before and never would again, but somehow knew my past, my character, my every rotten indiscretion. And still she insisted, “Marry him.”
“Mother, I’ve been married twice.”
“So what? So have I.”
“This is ridiculous. I just got divorced.”
“Are you listening to me?”
“Do you know how much younger he is?”
All of this was repeated to me, of course. I could make out very little at the time. I could see Marge trying to avoid her mother’s eyes and then submitting to a stronger will, looking deeply into them with the same skeptical skew of her lips that must have punctuated decades of mother daughter disagreements. What passed between them was as inexplicable to me as the bond between a mother with a tenth-grade education and a daughter who was to write forty-five books, as improbable as a middle child in an immigrant family of nine children instructing her own daughter how to perform an abortion on herself and the terrified college freshman who had the strength to do it.
“I know he’s a good man,” her mother insisted.
“Enough.” Marge kissed her mother’s cheek. “Good bye. I’ll call you.”
“Marry him,” were the last words her mother was to say to Marge in person.
And in spite of everything Marge knew about me, and everything she was about to discover, she did.
THE SYLLOGISM
A syllogism, you may recall from Logic 101, is an argument containing three propositions, two of which are premises and the third a conclusion, to wit: Drugs make you stupid. You do drugs all the time. Therefore, you are too stupid to know how stupid you are. I grasped this in my sophomore year of college, not in the classroom but on the day I sought out the secret address of a place to buy acid. Passed on to me in a whisper, the place was impossible to miss. Indeed, if I happened upon a complete stranger to the neighborhood and asked, “Where can I buy LSD?” he would probably shrug, “How am I supposed to know? Try that dump with the purple door.”
The purple door was never locked. If this didn’t strike you as stupid enough, in lieu of a curtain in the front bay window there was a big red flag with a stencil cut of a marijuana plant. Entering for the first time I was blown back with the odor of cat urine so strong my eyes swelled shut. The front room was dark, lit only by a bare blue light bulb swinging on a wire. A naked man, hairy and thin, stood in the middle of the floor on a mat of outspread newspapers. He was surrounded by an admiring circle of young women wearing long beaded earrings and gauze-thin halter tops. He turned in slow circles, arms pressed to his sides like the wings of a trussed turkey, and smiled beatifically as the women cooed encouragement. “Let it go,” their soft voices whispered. “Let it all go and be free.”
Cast in blue light his shriveled cock and balls were like robin eggs in a wire nest. His tongue flicked at his coarse black beard. “Let it go,” the chanting went on. Over and over the soft voices chanted, “Let it go, be free. . . .” The man squeezed his eyes in fierce concentration. One woman exhorted him, “There is no past. There is only now. Be here now... ,” she rocked forward and back as if in a trance, “. . . and be free.”
I couldn’t see it from where I stood, but heard it hit the newspapers, like the smack of two cupped palms. The odor crossed the room as chanting gave way to applause. He raised his arms in victory each time he squeezed out another turd and shouted “Freedom! Freedom!” while turning in box steps on the sticky newspaper.
At the time I was smoking a lot of marijuana. I was paranoid about everything, perennially tired, late with my class work, depressed, anxious, and forgetful. One day at breakfast, my first joint of the day in one hand, a coffee cup in the other, I was complaining to a roommate about the sorry state of my inexplicably miserable life. She said, “Maybe you should stop smoking dope.” This struck me as a revelation. In all the times I had pondered my problems, all the while smoking dope, I had never come to this conclusion. Remember the syllogism.
But there was one drug that seemed to make you smart. Cocaine made you smart. Cocaine was the opposite of marijuana. It sharpened the intellect and shattered the inner censor. Even better, cocaine felt like something I’d been waiting for all my life.
When I was a child I was clumsy and overweight, something of a laughing stock in school, and an embarrassment to my parents who felt, certainly with my best interests at heart, that I would have a much better chance in life if I became thin and wiry, an athletic American boy. The prevailing treatment at the time, routinely prescribed by pediatricians, was dextroamphetamine, administered in enormous black capsules. Commonly issued to combat troops and popular with cross-country truck drivers, these were known on the street as Black Beauties. The Urban Dictionary describes the effects as “a mild to moderate euphoria, increased hyperactivity, increased awareness of surroundings, increased interest in repetitive or normally boring activities, decreased appetite, and decreased ability to sleep,” which just about nails the way I went through elementary school. When I got older and read the beat poets I discovered that speed was commonly used by hipsters in an era of stifling conformity, the experience enhanced by cigarettes, espresso, jazz, and intense conversation. But I was ten years old. I had grandma, Hebrew school, and years of inexplicably sleepless nights filled with nothing but doo-wop and Jean Shepherd on the all-night radio. I have no idea of the medical repercussions of a childhood hooked on diet pills, only that I experienced life as a treadmill set at high, going nowhere very fast. I wondered why my friends didn’t spend entire afternoons rereading the same paragraph in the World Book Encyclopedia, or watching in euphoric wonderment as an ant climbed the window jamb. Which is why, when I did coke for the first time, I experienced a fuzzy and romantic longing for the past. My childhood came back to me: the shakes, the grinding teeth, the dry mouth, and above all the sublime ability to focus, to shut out everything in this vast and complicated world except repetitive or normally boring activities. Like writing.
Coke gave you not only the concentrative facility to immerse yourself in any insignificant task whatsoever, but the conviction that whatever arse-backwards and pointless thing you were doing deserved the Nobel Pri
ze. As a child I could make no use of this facility but now the adrenaline rush, the confidence, the exquisite ability to concentrate at last had a focus. I have read that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde in six days. For some time he had been musing on the idea of the duality of good and evil coexisting in a man’s nature. But while sick in bed, taking a medication suffused with a potent cocaine derivative popular in Victorian times, he wrote the first draft in a kind of frenzy, running down the stairs in his bathrobe, reading drafts to Ms. Stevenson, tearing back upstairs with her encouragement to write more. If I can extrapolate from my own experience it was the confluence of idea and drug that enabled him to write so quickly. I seriously doubt it was just the cocaine. If it was the drug alone he would have run downstairs to beg Ms. Stevenson for a quickie and run back up to write nothing but drivel. Or so it went with me and Ms. Piercy.
I was turned on for the first time at a dinner party and remember stealing into the bathroom to take notes on a roll of toilet paper. For months I’d been grinding away on a second novel that was supposed to be funny, and here I had discovered the perfect tool to complete it. At 4 A.M. every day I drank a huge mug of coffee and chopped my first lines of coke. Within seconds I was overtaken by voice. It wrung my nerves and flowed through my fingers. It was the voice of my loud and sarcastic Brooklyn uncles, of comedians in Catskill mountain hotels, the New York Jewish voice that excited and nurtured me as a child but began to fade when I went to college then moved to New England, as I tried ever harder to fit in and tone it down. I finished the first draft of the novel in a matter of months only to begin the long frustrating process of submitting it for publication. And that’s when the problem started.
I was finished with the novel but not the coke. I was like a runaway subway train speeding underground with no passengers. I had the energy, I had the concentration, I had the time, but there was more milk in a green coconut than ideas in my head. I was a hyper-graphic perpetual motion machine overwhelmed with the urge to write. Regardless of the quality or the content, I wrote pages and pages and with no inclination to revise. I had a stack of yellow legal pads a foot thick, every page covered front to back in illegible longhand scrawl. And because I was on cocaine and totally empowered, completely without fear, I thought every word profound.
As I was now living with Marge, over a hundred miles from Boston, I procured my drugs on Cape Cod, from a middle-aged iron woman who surfed, swam long distances outdoors seven months a year and ran a furniture restoration business on her own. She lived in an old farm house near Pleasant Bay with an enormous yellow barn, did her deliveries in a two-ton pickup truck, boasted a string of lovers that included the most famous abstract expressionists in the New York school, and cared for an ever increasing pride of cats fathered by a huge calico tom named Caesar. Although her skin was as tough as a lizard’s, wrinkled by age and weather, she cut a handsome figure, with a tight athletic body, high cheek bones, a Maori tattoo on her bicep, silver white hair which she grew to her waist, and heavy native jewelry made of ivory and turquoise. Raised in New Zealand, she’d been an Olympic swimmer before locating to Manhattan where she operated an antique gallery on Lexington Avenue. In the late seventies she moved to Cape Cod with her much older husband, an architect who succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver. Since his death she’d had a series of affairs with much younger and very buff seasonal workers from Jamaica who became her source of drugs.
Although she hosted dinner parties for gallery owners and antique dealers and their wives—smoky, vodka-swelled affairs in which the drinking began at eight and it wasn’t until ten-thirty that she absently strolled into the kitchen to start the roast—she was a woman who mostly liked men, who identified with men, with the image of the archetypal tough guys and outlaws of her generation. Because I was a man who had come of age in an era of less extreme sexual identities and found her attitudes as naïve as they were outdated, we treated each other with caution.
She was fun company in a group but tête-à-tête conversation was difficult with a woman who referred to her last one-night-stand as a henpecked wuss for returning to his wife, or a temperamental woman friend as deserving a good hard bitch slap. However, she was the only person I knew who always had quality cocaine. No hundred-mile trips to Boston, and worse, the long slow paranoid drives home, eyes scouring the rear-view for a state trooper; no loud sports bars enduring a TV hockey game while waiting for a white suburban college dropout dealer who fancied himself a gangsta. I could shop safely, on-Cape, except for one glitch. My dealer was perfectly happy to receive a kilo of coke flown up from Kingston inside a gift box of mangoes, cut it into tightly wrapped origami-like one-gram packages and sell them at an enormous profit, but she saw herself as a craftsperson, an athlete, a doyenne of the furniture restoration business, and did not like to think of herself as selling drugs.
Therefore every desperate attempt on my part to score and likewise every opportunity on hers to move product occasioned the semblance of a formal social visit.
Although I never called her unless I wanted drugs, and as my habit grew had to do so on a regular basis, she received each phone call with an eruption of surprise, as if I had unexpectedly turned up after a three-year backpacking adventure in the Hindu Kush. “Oh, look who’s here. Your old lady let you out of the house without your leash?”
“Just in the neighborhood.”
“Oh, yeah?” As she lived about forty miles away this was a lie too ridiculous to acknowledge. “What’s new?”
Under the best of circumstances this question has the potential to immobilize me in a state of profound introspection. Nothing is ever really new with me. The alarm rings at seven. I make café au lait. I work out on a rowing machine while watching ESPN SportsCenter. I spend the better part of every day with my face in a MacBook Pro, writing something that at best no one will see for years. On St. Patrick’s Day I plant the peas; on Thanksgiving morning I spread manure. Even something out of the ordinary, a vacation, a gall bladder operation, a large check in the mail, has been anticipated for some time so it does not meet the criteria of new. Add to this state of bewilderment the fact that I have been watching my stash diminish, putting off calling her until I am totally desperate for drugs, sitting in my car within sight of her front door at eight-thirty in the morning. “Uh, not much new with me. You?”
Unfortunately everything. “Hey, Caesar got another little bitch pregnant, did I tell you that?” Last month. “That stud has the biggest balls I’ve ever seen on a cat. You ever see his balls?” She had pointed them out on numerous occasions. “You know what he left me?”
“A dead squirrel on your door mat.”
“I told you that? More than my limp-dick ex-boyfriend ever did for me. You know the new antenna he put on the pickup? It fell off. He was a worse mechanic than he was a fuck. . . .” There was more. Her bidet was leaking. A seagull had dropped a quahog that dented her windshield. Her favorite female cat had fleas. It is frankly unfathomable to me that someone would consider the minor irritations of daily life to be of even remote conversational interest but it was as if I had turned a spigot that came off in my hand. She didn’t have enough avocados to make guacamole. She craved Chimichangas but they gave her gas.
As usual I awaited any chance to seize an opening. “So, you’ll be home? I could pick up some avocados in town.”
Once inside her house there were the cats to admire, as well as any new pieces of furniture she had restored, music she was currently listening to. Tea was served. There were stories about people I had never met, an armoire the size of a refrigerator freezer to be lifted from her truck, at which point I’d ask, as absently as I could, “You have any coke?”
She never answered the question directly but shrugged resignedly and ascended the stairs to her bedroom, leaving me no choice but to follow. “You and Marge still fuckin’?” she’d ask, rummaging through her night table drawer. “A lot of guys stop fucking their wives.” But as I stood at th
e foot of her king bed, a cat on my shoulder, a mug of cold chai in my hand, trying not to look at the erotic painting over her bed or the enormous silicone dildo or the oozing tube of KY jelly and above all her breasts, falling out of her open bathrobe, a headache coming on, my morning shot to shit, all I wanted was to overpay for a few grams of cocaine and get out of there.
“My husband used to fuck me every day of the week. I ever tell you that?” Indeed she had. “That man had a cock like an Indian elephant.”
And so it went every time, usually for an hour or more, until she, too, grew bored, or decided I was some kind of neutered asexual half-man for not making a pass, or an interior alarm went off signaling the requisite amount of time had gone by to designate this a visit and not a drug deal. Then, “Hey!” she would say, as if just remembering, as if she had eight starving people over for dinner and had yet to put the roast in the oven. “I got some really good shit,” she would say, and sell me my drugs so I could go home.
My wife is a writer of prodigious literary output but some day it will be discovered by an astute grad student connecting the dots in her archive that her production increased significantly on the day that I rented an office outside the house. Working with someone like me under the same roof is a challenge even for those with unshakable concentration, impossible if you are at all sensitive to the sounds of a creature in pain. When one is told that he snores, it is difficult to believe. It is tempting to say, Prove it, tape me. But no one ever does. Once, at the end of a short call, I accidentally left my phone off the hook with the answering machine running and discovered that listening to myself writing is like being in bed next to someone with obstructive sleep apnea. Even people in my office building will occasionally ask after me, having heard me through the walls groaning or talking to myself or come upon me wandering the parking lot in a cold sweat. In the years that I was doing cocaine, however, I was working at home. I was quietly engaged in my study for hours, as my wife was in hers. She had no idea what was going on. I had always been prone to peaks of euphoria that alternated with troughs of intense envy and pessimism. I had always had a frantic drive for sex. Moreover, I tended not to show the effects of coke wearing off until the cocktail hour. For someone who had no idea that her husband had developed a secret drug habit I must have seemed an awful lot like a frustrated writer who drank. Except for the money. The money kept disappearing.