A Diet of Treacle

by Lawrence Block

  Shank left first. He walked away from the condemned brownstone and headed east. He walked two blocks, then jumped in a cab and gave the driver his address.

  He kept peering out the back window. There was no tail and he was very glad. He felt hotter than a stove and the heroin was burning a hole-and-a-half in his pocket. He did not feel at all safe until the heroin and the pot were stashed away in the apartment. Both Anita and Joe were elsewhere when he arrived, which relieved Shank because he sensed it a good idea they remain unaware of the presence of heroin.

  7

  Party time.

  Judy Obershain had money. Her father, a well-to-do Boston businessman, sent her a healthy check once a month to keep Judy out of Boston. He loved his daughter—reservedly, but sincerely—and he knew well enough it would be better all across the board if he and Judy saw each other as little as possible. So the small, gaminish girl used her monthly manna to inhabit an apartment in the West Village and to experience all the kicks available, with the exception, oddly, of the act of losing her virginity. Long ago, when Judy’s mother had been among the living, that good woman had explained again and again to Judy how terrible it would be to cease being a virgin. Judy’s mother, a frigid witch if there ever had been one, had succeeded admirably. Judy, as promiscuous and perverted a girl as one could hope to find anywhere, had remained a virgin.

  Now Judy’s four-room apartment was being devoted to a party. The party was moving nicely. Several gallons of sour red wine were being passed from person to person, and the twenty or so people present were busy getting as high as they could. Judy was happy. The marijuana, purchased from Shank at a cost of a hundred dollars, would soon be brought out and consumed. And from there on the party would become a real blast.

  Nothing could have pleased Judy more. She liked a party that moved.

  She was sitting on the couch now. Next to her a boy and girl were busy with a gallon of wine; periodically, the boy’s hand would fondle her breast. Judy was pleased. The sexier a party became, the better it was.

  Judy closed her eyes, remembering one magnificent party where everybody had gone shriekingly high on mescalin. That particular blast had been an orgy that would have delighted Nero. It had certainly delighted Judy. At one superb point she and another girl had delighted a particular boy—and the effect had been exhilarating.

  Thinking about that began to warm Judy. Here we go again, she thought. Life is just a bowl of cherries. And I am one of them.

  A boy passed. He had a full beard, long hair, rather wild eyes. His name was Nick Long and his prowess was legendary, and Judy was intent either on proving or disproving it.

  She caught at his arm. “Sit down,” she said. “I’m lonesome.”

  Nick looked at her, considered, sat down.

  “You and I,” she said, “really ought to get acquainted. You’ve got to pay attention to the hostess. It’s the first rule of genteel party-going.”

  “If we were in a room all by ourselves,” he said, “then I could really pay attention to you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Uh-huh. You look nice, baby. I could ball with you and enjoy it. We could both enjoy it.”

  “You’re hot stuff, huh?”

  “The best.”

  She grinned like a monkey. “There are ground rules,” she said. “Rules of the house.”

  “I’ve heard.”

  “The word is rather widespread,” she admitted. “The rules suit you?”

  “They might,” he said. “I hear you’re a woman of the world.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  They got up and she tucked her arm in his. Nobody paid any particular attention to them as they left the party and found a bedroom temporarily unoccupied.

  When Judy and Nick returned to the party the wine had all but been consumed, which meant only it was time to break out the pot. Judy had already rolled it that afternoon and she brought out the cigarettes with glee, the party-goers shared unanimously with the exception of Anita Carbone. Pot continued to repel Anita; she disliked the party, too, for that matter. She wanted to go home.

  But Anita said nothing about her wish. She knew Joe wouldn’t like it at all. As a matter of fact, Joe had lately become increasingly critical of her. Nothing she did seemed to please him. She could not be sure of what might be wrong. Sometimes he apparently thought she was too square, while at other times he told her she was trying too hard to be hip, and still other times…

  But it was hard to say, really, exactly what was bothering Joe. He would tell her she was trying to run his life. Well, she mused, maybe she was trying to impose her will on him. She didn’t want to, certainly, but it was hard for her to weigh whether she was or no. She had discovered one thing. Her escape had been one from something rather than to something else. She had run away from the twin beacons of Harlem and Long Island, but she had not reached anything satisfyingly conclusive. The life she and Joe had become involved in had not yielded anything particularly characteristic. Actually, a lack of values predominated. Perhaps this very lack of values, Anita reflected, might be enough—for the time being, at least—and give her a chance to breathe, while she could discover what she really wanted, what niche in life she could comfortably occupy. For the first time, Anita felt she should think of her life with Joe as a temporary thing, and not as an end in itself.

  She let her gaze rove about the room. Judy was passing out the cigarettes-no sooner offered than eagerly snatched. These people, Anita thought. The ones who said: This is the life, this is what it’s all about. They were wrong, she felt. They had to be wrong. They made such a great show of not caring what other people thought, and yet they were so desperately concerned with coming on strong. In rejecting the values of a society they couldn’t cope with, they had made the drastic mistake of setting up their own society—every bit as illogical as the one they had rebelled against. And they had bowed to their own society’s false values while they had rejected a little too vehemently the false values of the repudiated society.

  And there Anita stood, dead center. And not knowing which way to turn, because no path seemed open. Where next?

  “Anita—” Joe began.

  She turned.

  “You going to smoke, baby?” he said, his tones gentle.

  His face played with a smile. Her failure to open the doors to the sky via marijuana amused him more than it annoyed him. His half-teasing, half-coaxing commentary continued.

  “You don’t have to, baby. But you better not breathe too deep. All these people smoking, they’ll get you high by being in the same room. Just a little high, but high. And with the wine you’ve been drinking you just might get an edge on. A little burn, like. You want that to happen? What do you say, baby?”

  Lee Revzin, the poet, was lighting up a joint in the corner. He held the flame to the twisted end of the cigarette and drew in deeply. Then he passed the joint to a girl with long red hair whose name Anita did not know.

  “Or do you want to go home?” Joe asked. “You could pick up your marbles and go home, baby. Play it safe. Go all the way home, to grandma. You might dig that. You could tell that Ray Rico cat what a wild life you’ve been leading. Impress the hell out of him.” He was being very nasty now and the words hurt her. But still she knew that he did not really mean them. He had wanted to make love before the party and she hadn’t felt like it. So he was taking out his frustrations on her, whipping her with his unsatisfied maleness. She did not like it but she could not blame him for it.

  “I’ll smoke,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Really.” But why? She asked herself. She didn’t want to. Or did she? And if so, why? Maybe to share more of his world. Maybe to sink herself further. Maybe because she needed him more than she wanted to admit. Maybe because, for some irrational reason, she was beginning to feel something for him she didn’t want to name. Maybe love.

  Joe held a joint between his thumb and forefinger and smiled at Anita. “Hemp,” he said. “Te
a, gauge, grass. A million names for a million games. Let’s blow up, little girl.”

  He lit it and took the first drag, then handed it to her. She needed no instructions. She had seen him do it and she had watched Shank.

  So she took the cylinder of marijuana and put it in her mouth. She drew the mixture of smoke and air deep, deep, deep into her lungs. It did not taste pleasant and she wanted to cough. But it was a sin to cough, to waste the smoke forever, so she held on to it. It stayed down until she had to let out her breath, by which time he had passed the joint back to her for another drag.

  The high came gradually, reaching Anita before she became aware of it. Living with Joe in an environment of which marijuana had been part of the day-by-day routine, she had grown to believe that pot itself was largely a state of mind, that the weed affected you only if you worked the effect up all by yourself. A sort of auto-hypnosis, the way she had understood it. As a result, the effect marijuana now had upon her was rather startling.

  She closed her eyes and thought, nevertheless, that she could see. An illusion, of course, and she recognized it as such, but it was nonetheless enjoyable. Her body felt dynamically alive, every muscle a substance she could see, hear, feel. She listened to the blood rushing through veins and arteries, and quivered to the softness of her enveloping clothing. A record, loaded with flamenco music, played full blast, and she not only heard each note but the space between them as well.

  She felt Joe’s hand on her arm and her whole body wakened to his touch. Suddenly she wanted him, wanted him more than ever, sex more beckoning than it had ever been before. She itched and throbbed with desire.

  “Joe…” She muttered.

  His arms circled her from behind, his hands kneading her breasts. It occurred to her that everybody could witness her and Joe, but it also occurred to her that she did not care. The sensations were delicious, far more so than they ever had been. Her eyes were clenched tightly shut, and every square inch of her tingled with the joy caused by his wonderful, marvelous hands.

  “My sweater, Joe,” she said. “Take it off. Touch me, touch me, it feels so good, so fine, so wonderfully fine, and I’m high, I’m way up in the air, way way way up in the air—”

  Joe took off her sweater, the air cool on her bare breasts.

  The air.

  Then his hands.

  She even imagined she could sense the pattern of his fingerprints as he fondled her warm breasts in his warm hands.

  It felt divine.

  After several eternities he released her. And, her eyes still clenched tightly shut, she felt him spin her lazily around to her back.

  Then, as he crouched over her, her mind reeled. This is vulgar, she thought. This is common, not ladylike at all. What would Grandma think? She would disapprove.

  But her sensations were so overwhelmingly exhilarating…

  Anita knew what was happening. Joe was removing her slacks. Not ladylike at all, but so nice…

  And then Joe was really making her, through and through, and it wasn’t right because there they were in a roomful of people and everybody could see them, movement by movement.

  But it felt so good, so velvetly good, and her hips were humming like a dynamo and trying to behave like a centrifuge, whirling, swirling with her good man who felt so good, good, good!

  And it got better and better and better until the sky fell in and the world blew up in a shower of stars—you hear me? Stars, stars all over so your body could smile all over at the sight of all your secrets flowing out…

  “Let us consider the semantics of Hip,” Lee Revzin said. “Let us take the words apart and see the interior of the star-spangled world. Let us probe the quintessence of hipness and reduce a subculture to words.” He was seated in an armchair. His eyes were closed, his head angled back. He spoke in a loud, clear voice and did not pause for breath.

  “The Hip does not make love,” he went on. “The Hip makes it. To make love implies a dualism of motive, a double effort involving two people. So the Hip does not make love. He makes it. It is individual. It is coeducational jazz with an organic goal in mind. It is Reichian, Wilhelm Reichian. Let’s all have an orgasm, boys and girls. Let’s make it.”

  The girl put a cigarette in his mouth, struck a match for him. Without opening his eyes he accepted the cigarette and took the light. He inhaled, then blew out the smoke without removing the cigarette from his mouth. He left it there while he spoke.

  “Consider the verb make. It will reveal unto us, boys and girls, the constructive illusion in a destructive subculture. Make. The universal verb, the inevitable. I can’t make it, baby. Let us make another scene. Let us make it. Make, make, make. It means everything, anything. A universal. A perfect universal. The unfortunate fact is that it also means nothing at all. Because, boys and girls, nothing is made, created, constructed, built. Make all day and make all night and make nothing. Lord, we fished all night and caught nothing. Lord, we made it all night and we didn’t make a mother-loving thing.”

  The cigarette burned down to his lips while he went on talking and smoking. The girl took the cigarette from him and put it out. She replaced it with a fresh cigarette.

  “Then there is the nomenclature of Hip,” Lee Revzin said. “Man first, then Baby. Call everybody man and remember no names. Then call everybody baby. Strangers and afraid in a world we just can’t make. Where are you, Housman? Where is everybody?”

  He coughed and the girl took the cigarette away from him. He smiled gratefully.

  “I will recite a poem,” he said. “A poem to the world. A panegyrical paean for the poor peons. A poem, for the love of the lord, a poem.”

  He said:

  Never is a naughty word

  Summer is a winter crutch

  Lovers in a cinder block

  Make a scene of nothing much.

  Captains of the somewhere fleet

  Say their prayers and go their ways

  Lovers on a vacant roof

  Sing the song of sometimes praise.

  When the world is upside down

  Inside out and also ran

  See the prairie horses rush

  Sifting gold in frying pan.

  Halt the horses of the mind

  Still the voice of autumn snakes

  When somebody drops the clutch

  That’s the time to hit the brakes.

  The girl applauded wildly. “There’s more,” he said. “Then you may applaud. Beat your hands together with passion. The ego needs it. Also the id. We will of course omit the super-ego. We will always omit the super-ego.”

  He went on in an Epicene and passionless frog-croak:

  Slit the skins of silver eggs

  Splash the ground that summer sings

  Music mourns dead birds

  Breath is sweet in broken things.

  The girl applauded still more wildly.

  “I wish I knew what in the world it means,” Lee Revzin said, more to himself than to the world. “It has to mean something. It really has to.”

  The girl said nothing. She was busy unzipping him, stimulated beyond imagination by the force of his poetry.

  Shank, meanwhile, was bored.

  That was surprising. Judy Obershain’s parties had never bored him in the past. The people had interested him and the activities had appealed.

  Now, however, he was bored.

  The boredom, he decided, had a number of causes. For one thing, the thrill of smoking marijuana by way of being part of a group function no longer served to send him into the stratosphere. Pot was a part of his daily life—he bought it, he sold it, he smoked it. He found it no more delightful to smoke in public than in private. And the spectacle of twenty or more idiots blowing their brains out so thoroughly that they lost control of themselves was humorous no longer.

  Another factor was his discovery that, although he was one of the youngest present at the party, the others seemed incredibly immature to him. He attributed this feeling partly to a change in his s
tatus. He was selling hard goods now; in fact he had made his first sale just a few hours ago. Basil could talk his head off about the similarity on the legal plane of marijuana and heroin. But Shank’s eyes were not those of the law, and for him a radical difference existed between the two drugs, so that he felt immeasurably superior to the idiots balling all over Judy Obershain’s apartment. Pot was fine, you could take it or leave it, Shank thought; smoke it on Madison Avenue or the Upper East Side or the Village. But junk was serious business—and pot was for kiddies. Now he was a businessman. You didn’t sell junk for the hell of it, Shank ruminated. You sold it for a profit, a good profit. Moreover, the stuff had a quick turnover and, as Basil had described it, a captive audience. You could make three, four, five bills a week if you were cool about it. And this potential for enormous profits further contributed to raising him above the level of the rest of the party-goers.

  Even the sex was dull. Shank gave a mental shrug. He just plain wasn’t in the mood and there was no way to force it. The party was dragging him, the people were dragging him, the whole aura of child-play, love-play, sex-play was dragging him.

  So he got up, carrying a good load from the pot he had smoked but carrying it easily, understanding it, able to master it with ease. Unlike Anita, who had just tried it for the first time and now was fornicating like a rabbit in the middle of the living-room floor. Shank walked to the door after stepping over a pair of errant lovers, and left the apartment.

  The building elevator was the self-service type. But instead of pushing the button for the ground floor, he pressed for the floor below, the third, and headed for the apartment directly below that of Judy Obershain’s. He rang the bell. Rang it once, waited, then leaned on it.

  The people were not home.

  He opened the door with a key that fitted a surprising number of doors. He walked in, shut the door and began looking around for something to steal. Then, all at once, he decided there was no point to burglarizing the place. He was making enough money. He didn’t need any more.

  Instead, he used the phone to call Bradley Galton, his stepfather, long distance. When Brad Galton answered, Shank waited for a second or two and then unleashed a stream of the wildest profanity he could think of. He did not pause for breath until the line went dead.