Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes

by Terry Southern

  Sarah didn’t wake until light. He was gone. She got up and dressed. Instead of fixing breakfast, she took the hoe from the back steps and went to work in the patch. By midmorning she could no longer feel her arms and shoulders. She tried to straighten up and something moved through her back like a burning knife.

  She sat on the steps with her face in her arms. Much later, she got up, and under the hot sun walked down through the patch and the field toward the sea. Above the throbbing heat of noon she could hear ahead the constant play of the surf, and something more when she began to climb the dunes. But when she reached the top of the dune and looked down onto the vast mirrored sea below, she saw that he stood alone, in apparent dead fatigue, and Sarah could only follow the dull sweep of his eyes on the retreating darkness in the water.

  She lay on the dune for a while after Sid left the beach, plodding past her, back up across the field toward the patch and the house.

  When Sarah reached the house, Sid was asleep. He slept into the afternoon, then went out into the patch with his hoe. She saw as he passed how his mouth was fixed straight, like the breaking length of a black string. After an hour, he was sitting on the back steps.

  From her chair at the kitchen table Sarah watched Sid with his pocketknife whittle off the handle of the hoe. He spent the rest of the afternoon there on the steps, sharpening the end of the hoe handle with his knife, so that finally what was left of the hoe was a sharp-pointed hardwood spear about three feet long. Then he went to bed.

  And Sarah followed. She lay in bed, her eyes opened, turning ever again from where the ceiling spread above them like a veil, to Sid’s face and back, and back again. Night. Night and the image of night.

  She did not awake until late.

  The land on the Gulf between Corpus Christi and Fly is a flat burning waste, with only the most gradual rise of dune above the surf.

  At the still blaze of noon, there is a wildness here in the heat and light, and atop the dunes the air is overhung with a sound like water beating against some distant cliff, but this is the sound of the sun, which strikes and rises from the dead sand in black lined waves.

  As Sarah climbed, crawling, she stopped, feeling the rise of sound and light, turned herself, her eyes, straight into the panic sun, and she slowly stood, her eyes strained to blackness. She was there, on the crest of the highest dune and she dropped to her knees at the sight of the endless sea stretched shorewise in an explosion of light. And below, deep in the burning surf, Sid Peckham fought for his life.

  Sarah lay on the dune, half dazed by the flat crystal brilliance of the scene, as the two bodies heaved and pitched together in some heavy soundless purpose. Now one, now the other in ascendancy, they fell and rose, threshing, their rage a slowly desperate waltz.

  Here from high atop the dune, she heard the muted scream and saw the lunge in the surf below, how the two fell grappling beneath the water, then rose wavering, fixed in heavy changing arcs of strength, leaning now toward the sea, now toward the land, but always flat under the burning sun. They gave no quarter except to fatigue when one beating arc would waver and fall, in favor of sea or shore.

  And then to Sarah the battle seemed locked like a poised weight, and she sprang up from the dune and rushed down to the sea. The hardwood spear stood jutting aslant from the sand below the surf, and as the girl threw herself between them she wrenched the spear from the sand, and turning its point from shore to sea and back, and back again, all her knowing was struck dim by the terrible flux of weight, balance and change, her eyes blind to the tearing sun. Great cloudhead image on the silver screen . . . approach and retreat . . . approach and retreat, the growing approach, approach, approach, uncontained growing, swelling, swelling, swelling, to a scream. “Stop!”

  Lilt. And the surf around them feathered out all white-edged rose, their motion faded to an end as gradual and even as the close of slow music.

  For a long while Sarah stood in the surf seeing only where the water broke silver and red around the upright spear. Then she drew out the spear and facing the sea, she felt the tremor beneath her feet as the weight was dragged away along the sand, under the water. And she was alone.

  Back at the house she worked in the patch until night, then she went to bed.

  Before dawn she awoke, while the moon was still high and there was no sound except the stirring of the night wind in the patch. But beyond the patch and past the field, from down at the sea, she could hear something like the surf on rock cliffs, and above this, the listening that came up through the night.

  She got out of bed and dressed, walked through the kitchen and out the door. Near the back steps, struck straight in the ground was the hoe handle that had been fashioned into a spear. Sarah would know as she passed, from the way its shadow fell under the moon, just how early or late the morning was.

  She crossed the patch and was into the field before she could remember and touch the pocket of her thin dress. There were two coins there: a nickel and a quarter. She stiffened a little and stood still, holding the coins in her hand. A small cloud passed under the moon, and for an instant on the left the dirt road to Fly was only a twisting shadow. Then the cloud was gone, the road to Fly was clear. She realized that the man who sold the tickets would give her the change himself, and she started to walk.

  She walked very slowly, her mind flowing a train of smoothly veiled thought as straight and dark as the narrow road before her.

  The moon had waned and the sun risen by the time Sarah reached the square at Fly. Because she had never been to the Tuesday matinee, she did not know when it began, and so had come early as an assurance. Standing before the plain-front cinema, she saw at once that the glassed box was empty, and in place of the man was a sign reading:

  SHOW—1:00

  OPEN—12:30

  For a long while she stood looking at the display stills that were attached to a kind of wooden bulletin board. Once, after glancing at the glassed box and around the desolate bleak-light square, she slowly raised her hand and touched one of the photographs. She drew her hard-pressing finger across the middle of it, then she went out to the curb and sat down.

  She sat there until noon, then joined the line of children as it began to form.

  When she reached the box, she gave the man the quarter and the nickel.

  “Two?” he asked.

  “One,” said Sarah.

  “Fifteen cents,” said the man, returning her nickel and a dime.

  She picked up the coins and turned aside. But when her eye fell again on the display stills, her brow assumed a crinkle of knowing and she turned back to the man in the glassed box, her face a serious frown.

  “Goin’ to be a reel-less?” she asked.

  The Night the Bird Blew for Doctor Warner

  “I’LL HAVE TO BE a hipster,” Doctor Warner said leaning toward them from out of billowing dark leather while behind this great chair, where study lamplight softened to haze on a thousand grains of dullest panel, there danced in points of twos the refracted amber of glassed cubed-ice in the hands of his two friends opposite—danced, it seemed, on an opaque screen which could measure the wildness of thought and the tedium of conversation.

  “A very hip hipster,” he continued genially, and withdrew himself slightly, for emphasis, “if not, indeed, something more.”

  Dr. Ralph Warner was fifty-five, gray and distinguished, a man of remarkable vigor and personality. He was not a physician, but a learned man of music, who had received many public and institutional honors. An established author and critic, past conductor of the San Francisco, Boston and Denver symphony orchestras, he had become, because of his popular, progressive innovations in policy and repertoire, one of the most beloved and respected men in the musical history of the country.

  “Something more?” said Professor Thomas, stressing his mock surprise with a sickly smile. He loathed strange jargon. “Don’t tell me there’s anything more, Ralph, than being a hipster!”

  “That’s right,
” said the younger George Drew eagerly, “how could anything be more hip than a hipster?” He loved it. “En tout cas, not semantically.” He seemed to repress a spasm of delight, as though the prospect of sprightly argument could give him goose-pimples.

  Dr. Warner allowed his own gaze to grow sober and formulative, staring down at the drink in his hand.

  “Yes,” he said evenly, “you might say that a junky is something more than a hipster.”

  Professor Thomas snorted politely. “Good Lord, from where on earth did they dig up that term?”

  “From its not too earthy grave in Hong Kong harbor, I dare say,” said George Drew coolly, finishing off his drink with a small effeminate toss of his head.

  “Drugs again, I’m afraid, Tom,” put in Dr. Warner, often their genial moderator. “Opiates. Heroin this time.”

  At home with every idiom, Dr. Warner gave himself as wholly to Alban Berg as he did to Tschaikovsky, as devotedly to Tanglewood as to the Juilliard String Quartet; and already, at fifty-five, he had been frequently called a “grand old man of music,” and again, in other contexts, perhaps because his scope naturally tended at some points toward erudition, a “musician’s musician.”

  Now more and more of his time was given over to writing. His work to date consisted of well-received one-volume studies of Brahms, Mozart and Schubert; hundred-page sections on Bach, Beethoven and Wagner; chapters on almost everyone from Palestrina to Schonberg; and a definitive little brochure on Bartók. Dr. Warner’s writing bristled with information and tight parallels, in a style pleasantly fluid, sprinkled with humor, penetrating insights and anecdotes which lacked neither warmth nor sophistication.

  Before the war, and since, he had toured Europe regularly and had guest-conducted every major orchestra from Blackpool to Copenhagen. He was mentioned with frequency and respect in the gossip sections of the weekly news-periodicals.

  But now he had gone into hiding, or so it must have seemed to his biographers, though they knew in truth that he was away, working on his book. It was by no means the Doctor’s only project at hand, though it was perhaps his most ambitious. Musicologists, critics, teachers in the colleges and academies, art-appreciation groups, cultured people everywhere looked forward to its release—a book which was to treat “the whole of Western Music, its origin and development to the present day,” again touted by the publishers as being definitive. And while this claim was absurd, that the book would have certain value there were no doubts, because Dr. Warner, besides bringing to bear “the breadth of a versatile genius welded to almost unprecedented vitality and an all-embracing devotion to music,” was known, in this world of music at least, to be relatively fair, or impartial.

  “Heroin,” said George Drew, pouring himself another. “Treacherous, treacherous.”

  “Amazing prevalence among them,” joined Professor Thomas, unimpressed. “Simply amazing.”

  “Prevalent, Tom? Or standard?” asked Dr. Warner with a show of seriousness. “I’m really beginning to wonder.”

  “God knows!” wailed the Professor unexpectedly, raising his hands. “The whole thing is beyond me. In the first place, how you propose to—to get next to those people is more than I can see.” There was heat and resentment in his voice, and it was only after a moment’s pause that he could reassert a detached and amiable interest in the subject. “For my money, I think I’d stick, primarily at least, to the material already compiled. Lord, there must be a wealth of it.” He exaggerated in a gesture the stack and assortment of books on the study table: popular histories of jazz, exposes and testimonials, confessional stories of reformed drug addicts, whores, and criminals—all of which had been somehow tied to the words “jazz” and “be-bop.”

  “Surface, Tom,” said Ralph Warner. “Purely surface material. It’s never been . . . really lived by anyone qualified to do it up.”

  “Ralph,” began George Drew, “do you actually suppose you can, as Tom says, get next to them?”

  “I think I can, George,” said Ralph Warner. “I-think-I-can. After all, it’s simply another viewpoint. A matter of language really. Vernacular.”

  “Do you know,” said George Drew warming now toward the heart of it, “that you’re very liable to be approached on this drug business yourself? I mean, they might ask you to take some. What do you do then, Ralph?”

  Dr. Warner smiled a little, shyly it seemed. “Then? Why, then I suppose there would be only one thing to do—gracefully.” And so saying, he leaned back in his great chair and slowly raised both hands. “The unhappy part of the business is,” he went on, beaming helplessly, “I have an absolute horror of needles.”

  Before completing the book’s section, “Dixieland and the Blues,” Dr. Warner had meticulously sifted through all the written material on the subject, and had listened to some seven hundred graded recordings, many of them several times, taking copious notes the while. Then he had flown down to New Orleans for an intensive week of firsthand research. When he was not actually listening to music, he ferreted about the Quarter, poking into any narrow opening of whatever half-promise, prowling the blue haze of midnight alleys, tapping carefully on every soundless, dawn-lit cellar door, as though each were his own oak podium.

  He spoke to hundreds of people: strangers, drunks, unknown—and, most often, untalented—musicians, bystanders, children, blind men who touched their canes to the earth in some possible connection with the music. And if, in the handstand’s shadow of an afternoon session, a dog lay stretched in refuge from the heat of day, the Doctor might give it a pat on the head in passing. Then, at night, in the boîtes of the Quarter, instead of taking a table, he stood with his drink where the brass and the smoke were the bluest, at the left front corner of the bandstand, stood with one foot on the raised platform, tie loosened, an easy smile on his face which worked beneath half closed eyes on the blue, blue offbeat, while his free hand, at rest on his raised knee, raced the fingers in subtle and intricate tattoo. At the end of a number, if there was an empty glass on the bandstand, he had it filled, and when the men took a break, he was with them, the ones that hung together around the bar, to pay for the drinks and listen to the slow and easy talk of those who play the blues.

  As soon as one place closed, he went to another, sometimes in the company of one or two musicians, and toward morning they ate together. By seven he was back in his room where he wrote steadily for two hours. Then he would go to bed and sleep until three in the afternoon, get up, dress, and eat again before resuming his tour of the Quarter. He did this for seven days, and during this time he was careful about three things: (1) never to request a number, (a) to talk with no more than one musician at a time about music, and (3) in doing so, to expose his own knowledge, not by dissertation, as the canyon openly yawns its vastness, but by remark, as a mountain will suggest fantastic untold depths through one startling crevasse. And he even had the gall and devotion, one time toward early morning in a booth gone blue-gray with the circling tides of smoke, when a sleepy-faced drummer passed him a sweet cigarette the thinness of two matchsticks, to hold it as he might have been expected, take quick deep drags, wink without smiling, and say in a low voice, “Crazy, man.”

  He never identified himself, but he was usually remembered as “an old guy who knew a goddam hell of a lot about music,” or again, by such as the drummer, as a “pretty stuffy cat.”

  “Ralph,” said Professor Thomas, “let me get this straight. Do you mean you’re going to submit to drug injections?”

  His hands clasped under his chin, Dr. Warner smiled, even sheepishly, though as one could see, with a certain secure pride.

  “What sort of drugs, Ralph?” George Drew came in, having already chosen a side. “Heroin, I imagine,” said Dr. Warner easily. Professor Thomas started to speak, but took a sip from his drink instead and pursed his lips.

  “This may strike you as a bit old-fashioned,” he said then, completely ignoring George Drew, “but isn’t there a very real physiological danger in heroi
n injections—for a man of your age, Ralph?”

  Ralph Warner shook his head. “I won’t main-line,” he said soberly. “Just skin-popping. Anyway, on single dosages, cardiac response is negligible. I’ve looked into it, of course.”

  George Drew, who was thirty-five years old, was beginning to resemble his undergraduate photographs at Princeton. He sat forward in the chair, spoke carefully and, as usual, seemed to put an emphasis on every other word. “Ralph, as I get it, ‘main-line’ is to take the stuff directly into a blood vein; and the other, ‘skin-pop,’ or ‘skin-popping’ is a muscle or tissue injection, right? But now, what exactly is the difference?”

  “Flash,” said Dr. Warner expansively, then paused to smile at Professor Thomas who had audibly scoffed over the question. “You see what I mean by language, eh? Well, the immediacy of effect in main-lining is called the flash. Something you don’t get in skin-popping, where the effect is relatively gradual.”

  “Just what is the effect?” asked Professor Thomas, as though he were already bored with it.

  George Drew shifted in his chair, impatient; and Dr. Warner waved his hands, vaguely protesting. “Oh, I’m sure it’s very subjective, of course, Tom. A sort of will-less euphoria, I suppose. Sensations of security and general well-being. Wish-fulfillment. Self-sufficiency, if you like. Followed, I imagine, by depression, or letdown.”

  From Bach to Be-bop was, by publisher’s choice, the title of Dr. Warner’s book. And the Doctor sometimes told the story of how he had indulged them in this, only, of course, after stressing its obvious anomaly.

  The book’s opening plate was a diagram of the ear, and its second a sample of cuneiform writing; moreover, it was not until page fifty-one that there was mention even of Gregorian chant. And yet he would often end the story by admitting their point that, after all, three-quarters of the book was so concerned, with Bach and thereafter.

  “What I tell them is this: ‘I’ll write it. You can name it, eh? And you can sell it!’ ” A well-received story. A funny story by a famous man, and the way the Doctor would laugh and shake his head gave the impression that he thought publishers like young women, dealings with whom called for, if anything, a slightly amused condescension.