Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes

by Terry Southern

  “What do you think it’s like to the side?” I asked.

  Emmanuel finally controlled his curious mirth long enough to turn around. “What do I think it’s like?” he asked. “Man, it’s lions and tigers! And . . . big . . . pointy rocks! Why? What do you think it’s like?” And fairly shouting with laughter, he handed me another joint.

  “Goats,” said Pablo with grotesque snicker. “There are the goats there.”

  “All right, man,” I said, and lay back with a groan to express my disquiet.

  Pablo snorted. “Man, I’m swingin’!” he said, reassuringly.

  Emmanuel broke up completely now and laid his head down laughing. “Pablo’s swingin’!” he cried. He could hardly speak. He had to hold onto the rocking dashboard to keep from falling to the floorboards. “Ma-a-an, Pablo is . . . too . . . much!”

  It was too much all right. I lay there smoking, my thoughts as bleak as the black rolling top I stared at, though gradually I did discern, or so it seemed, a certain rhythm and control taking hold of the erratic pitching of the car, and the next time I sat up the road, too, seemed in fairly good shape.

  The moon had come out and you would get glimpses now and then of things alongside—strange dwarf trees and great round rocks, with patches of misty landscape beyond. It was just about then that the headlight caught a road sign in the distance, a rickety post akimbo with a board nailed to it (or maybe tied with a strand of vine) across which was painted, crudely to be sure, “Puente,” which, in these circumstances, would mean toll bridge.

  “Crazy road,” I heard Pablo say.

  There was a bend in it just after the sign, and the glow of a kerosene lamp ahead—which proved to be from the window of an old tin shack; and in front of the shack there was a barrier across the road: a large, fairly straight tree limb. Beyond it, vaguely seen, was the small, strange bridge.

  When we had stopped by the shack, we could see that there was someone inside, sitting at a table; and, after waiting a minute while nothing happened, Pablo jerked his head around at me.

  “You make it, man,” he said, handing me his billfold, “I can’t make these greaser.”

  “Very well,” I said, “you rotten little Fascist spic.” And as I got out of the car I heard him explaining it again to Emmanuel: “Man, I can’t make these greaser.”

  Inside the shack, the lamp was full up; but, with the chimney as jagged and as black as a crater, I couldn’t see too much of the room’s appointments—only a shotgun leaning against the wall near the door, the barrel so worn and rust-scraped that it caught the yellow light in glints harder than brass. But I could see him all right—bigger than life, you might say, very fat, his sleeves twisted up, playing with cards. There was a bottle half filled with tequila on the table. I remember this because it occurred to me then, in a naïve, drug-crazed way, that we might have a pleasant exchange and finish off with a drink,

  “Good evening,” I said (with easy formality), then followed it up with something colloquial like, “what’s the damage?”

  He was squinting at me, and then beyond, to the car. And I recall first thinking that here was a man who had half lost his sight playing solitaire by a kerosene lamp; but he was something else as well, I realized, when I took it all in: he was a man with a very sinister look to him. He was smoking a homemade cigar, gnarled and knotted enough to have been comic, except that he kept baring his teeth around it, teeth which appeared to have been filed—and by humanity at large, one might presume, from the snarl with which he spoke, as he finally did:

  “Where are you trying to go?”

  “Corpus Christi,” I said.

  It occurred to me that it might be less involved, not to say cheaper, if I didn’t divulge our full itinerary.

  “Corpus Christi, eh?” He smiled, or it was something like a smile; then he got up, walked to the door, glanced at the car, spat out some of his cigar, and walked back to the table. “Five dollars a head,” he said, sitting down again.

  “Five dollars,” I said, more in a thought aloud than a question, “Mexican dollars.”

  He made a sound, not unlike a laugh, and took up the cards again.

  “You think you’re Mexican?” he asked after a minute, without raising his head.

  I had to consider it briefly. “Oh, I see—you mean, ‘a-fool-and-his-money . . .’ that sort of thing.”

  “You said it, my friend, I didn’t.”

  “Yes. Well, you’ll give me a receipt, of course.”

  “Receipt?” He laughed, spitting and wiping his mouth on his arm. “This isn’t Monterrey, you know.”

  I hesitated, determined for the moment, in the responsibility to the rest of my party, not to be so misused; then I put my hands on the edge of the table and leaned forward a little. “I think you’ve probably picked the wrong crowd this time, Pancho,” I said.

  Whereas, actually, it was I who had picked the wrong party, for he laid his head back laughing with this—and an unpleasant laugh it was, as we know.

  “Pancho,” he said, getting up, “that’s funny.” Still laughing and wiping his hand across his mouth, his eyes half shut so that I couldn’t quite see where he was looking, he walked around the table. “That’s very funny,” he said.

  And you can appreciate how for a moment it was like a sequence in a film, where someone is supposed to be laughing or scratching his ear, and suddenly does something very aggressive to you—except that I stepped back a little then, and he walked on past me to the door . . . where it seemed my show of apprehension had given him not so much a fresh lease as a veritable deed on confidence.

  “You don’t need a receipt,” he said, turning from the door, his eyes still two smoked slits, “you can trust me.” Then he flicked his cigar with an air and gave his short, wild laugh, or cough, as it were. But when he faced the car again, he sobered quickly enough. And Emmanuel and Pablo were sitting there, peering out, frowning terribly.

  “What have you got inside?” he asked, and his tone indicated this might be the first of several rare cards he intended.

  Somehow I felt it would not do to involve my friends, so I started reaching for the money.

  He kept a cold, smoky silence as he watched me count it out. Then he took it, leaning back in the smug, smiling, closed-eyes strain against cigar smoke and the effort of pressing the loot deep into his tight trousers.

  “Yes,” I said. “Well, thanks for everything.”

  He grunted, then stepped out and raised the barrier. I started to get into the car, but he said something and turned back into the shack, motioning me with him.

  “Wait,” he said, as a quick afterthought, and from one dark side of the room he came up holding a cigar box.

  “You want to buy some good marijuana?”

  “What?”

  “Marijuana,” he said, letting the word out again like a coil of wet rope, and proffering the lid-raised box for my inspection.

  “Very good,” he said, “the best.”

  I leaned forward for a look and a sniff. It didn’t appear to be the greatest; in fact, it didn’t appear to be Mexican—and it looked like it was about fifteen years old.

  “What is it, a spice of some kind?”

  “Very good,” he said.

  “How much?”

  “How much will you give?”

  I took a pinch and tasted it.

  He nodded toward the car. “Perhaps your friends. . . . I’ll make you a good price. You tell me your price, I’ll make you a good price. Okay?”

  I stared at the box for a minute, then made an eccentric grimace. “You don’t mean . . . you don’t mean marijuana . . . the loco weed? What, to smoke?” I shook my head vigorously, backing away. “No, thanks!” I said, while his face went even more sour than one might have expected.

  “Come back when you grow up!” he snarled, shutting the box; and for the first time, as he turned into the shadow of the shack, he seemed slightly drunk.

  The bridge itself was noteworthy. A bit lon
ger than the car, but not a foot wider, it consisted of oil drums held together with barbed wire and covered with wooden planks, only the outer two of which seemed at all stationary. The device was secured at each bank by a rope attached to stakes driven into the ground.

  We held back a few seconds before embarking, taking it all in. Then, as we crossed over, the whole thing sank about two feet, completely out of sight, swaying absurdly, as the black water rose up in swirls just above the running boards.

  Nobody commented on the bridge; though once we were across, onto the road, and I was resting on the seat again, Emmanuel said:

  “What happened back with the greaser, man?”

  “Five dollars a head.”

  “That swine.”

  “That rotten greaser swine,” said Pablo.

  “You said it,” I said, closing my eyes. I had not gotten to bed the night before; I was thinking, too, of a certain time-honored arrangement in Mexico whereby a cigar box full of marijuana is sold to a foreigner and then retrieved by the merchant at customs. I once heard that the amount of annual foreign revenue so gained in the consequent fines is second only to that from the tax on the shade-and-barrier seats at the bullfight. And I soon began to wonder, here on the soft-focus margin of sleep, how many, many times that particular box I just looked at had been sold. Ten? Twenty? How many miles? How many missions? Fifty missions to Laredo, and they would decorate the box and retire it. And smoke it. But, of course, it was no good. Why would they use anything good for a scheme like that? No, it would be like those bundles of newspaper money left for kidnapers; I suppose they send to New Jersey for it. Anyway, I decided not to mention the incident to my friends; it would only excite them unduly.

  I must have been asleep when we reached Corpus Christi, because when I came up again to have a look, the car was already stopped. We were in the middle of the square, and Emmanuel was saying: “Man, dig this . . . scene. Dig this . . . scene,” while Pablo was just sitting there, leaning forward over the wheel, his arms hanging to each side of it.

  The town, if it may so be called, is simply this square of one-story frame buildings, fronted all around by a raised, wooden, sidewalk arcade. Besides the car we were in, there were two or three others parked in the square along with several small wagons that had mules or donkeys hitched to them.

  “Now, this is your true Old West, Pablo,” I began. “Notice the attempt at a rather formal—” But what I had failed to notice was that the shadowed arcades, all around the square, were lined with people. They were leaning against the storefronts, and lying on the wooden sidewalk, or sitting on the raised edge of it—not just grown people, but children as well; children, a number of whom were to be seen crawling about, in the manner of the very young indeed. This struck me as odd because it was now about two o’clock in the morning. But what was really more odd was the pure, unbroken torpor which seemed to overhang the crowd. For a large group of people—perhaps 200—their inactivity was marvelous to look upon, like an oil painting. It seemed that all of them were leaning, sitting, or lying down; and it was not apparent that they were even talking to each other. And here and there was someone with a guitar, his head down, as though playing for only himself to hear.

  As I was speculating about the possible reasons for this, my attention was suddenly caught by something that was happening to a wall nearby, the side of one of the buildings—it seemed to be soundlessly crumbling, and I thought now I must be out of my skull entirely. But it was not crumbling, it was simply oozing and changing color all over, green, and shades of green, changing from one instant to the next, from bottle-dark to shimmering-Nile; and this, in a strange and undulating way. Had we been in Rockefeller Plaza or the Gilbert Hall of Science . . . but here there was no accounting for it. And while I was assuring myself that first-rate hallucinations are only doubted in retrospect . . . Emmanuel saw it too. I knew he had seen it because he quickly leaned forward and began changing the radio stations. Then he turned around with an odd look on his face. “Man, what is that? On that wall.”

  “Well,” I said, “it must be oil . . . or something like that.”

  “Oil? Man, that’s not oil. What’s happening? That wall is alive.”

  “Listen, let me get out of the car for a minute,” I said, perhaps because of his tone. “I’m . . . curious, as a matter of fact, to see what it is myself.”

  As I got out of the car, I felt that if I took my eyes off the wall for a second, when I looked back it would have become just an ordinary wall—so I kept looking at it, and walked toward it then, very deliberately until I was there, leaning forward from two feet away to peer at it; and while I must have known before, it was not until my face was six inches from the wall that the field finally did narrow to the truth, a single moving inch: a green roach. For, true enough, that’s how it was: alive—with a hundred thousand green-winged flying roaches, ever moving, back and forth, sideways and around, the wings in constant tremulous motion.

  I looked around at the people then, sitting and leaning nearby. I started to say something—but I was distracted to see that they as well were covered with the roaches . . . not in quite the profusion of the wall, but only for the reason that from time to time they passed a hand in front of their faces, or shrugged. So I was not too surprised when I looked down at myself and saw that I, too, even as they and the immobile wall . . . and then I heard the sound, that which had been in the air all along—a heavy ceaseless whirring sound—and it was a sound which deepened intensely in the dark distance of the night above and around, and it seemed to say: “You think there are quite a few of us down there—but if you only knew how many of us are out here!”

  I thought I understood why the people weren’t talking: because the roaches would get in their mouths; or sleeping: because they would crawl up their noses. But I may have really felt that it was not so much because of this, but because of something else, past or impending.

  I stuck my trousers into my socks, and my hands into my pockets, and started back to the car. I had heard about the green flying roaches, how they settle on a town like locusts, and now I felt a gleeful anticipation, like the first of a party to swim an icy stream—toward springing the phenomenon on Pablo and Emmanuel. I thought it might be good to pretend to have scarcely noticed: “What, those? Why, those are bugs, man. Didn’t you ever see a bug before?”

  When I got back to the car, however, I saw they had already surmised. Indeed, half the car was covered: the windshield wipers were sweeping, and inside, Pablo and Emmanuel were thumping wildly against the side-glass in trying to jar the creatures off.

  “You finicky spies!” I shouted, snatching the door open and pretending to scoop and fan great armfuls in on them. Emmanuel jerked the door closed, and locked it; then he rolled the window a crack, and raised his mouth to it: “Man, what’s happening?” he asked and quickly closed the glass.

  I stood outside, gesticulating them out and pretending to shout some emergency information. Pablo had started the car, and was racing the engine, sitting all hunched over the wheel; I got a glimpse of his maniacal frown and it occurred to me that an experience like this might be enough to snap his brain.

  After a second, Emmanuel rolled down the window just a bit again.

  “Listen, man,” he said, “we are going to drive over nearer to the bar, so we can make it into the bar—you know?”

  I looked around the square. So they had already found the bar. None of the buildings had signs on them, but I suppose it wasn’t too difficult to tell. I saw it then, too, on the side we had come in, and next to it, a café.

  “Let’s go to the café first,” I said, “that would be much cooler.”

  Emmanuel nodded, and as I turned away, I knew he would be relaying it to Pablo: “The café first, man, that’s much cooler.”

  We reached the door of the café at the same time, and went right in.

  It was an oblong room, with a hard dirt floor and raw-wood walls; there were about ten tables, set two by two
the length of the place—bare boards they were, nailed to four sticks, and accompanied by benches. We sat at the first one, near the door.

  The place was not quite empty. There was a man, who was evidently the proprietor, sitting at a table at the end of the room, and a man who was evidently drunk, sitting at a table on the opposite side. The man who was drunk had his head down on the table, resting it there as in sleep; his head kept sliding off the table, causing him to shake and curse it, and then to replace it carefully, while the proprietor sat across the room, watching him. I construed the situation as this: that the proprietor was ready to close, and was waiting for the drunk to leave; this possibility seemed strengthened by the way he simply remained seated when we came in, staring at us until we ordered some coffee. When he had brought it, he went directly back to his table and sat down, there to resume watch on the drunk. There seemed to be a point of genuine interest for him in watching the drunk’s head slide off the table. I noticed that it did, in fact, drop lower each time.

  There were fewer roaches here, though still enough so that you might want to keep your hand over the coffee, or, in drinking it, hold it as though you were lighting a cigarette in the wind. Pablo didn’t drink his coffee, however, and didn’t bother to protect it, so that after a minute there were four roaches in it, thrashing about, not unlike tiny birds at bath. Whenever one of the roaches was scooped out to the rim of the cup, it would crawl along for an instant, fluttering like a thing possessed, and then jump back in. Pablo was poking about in the cup with a matchstick, and both he and Emmanuel regarded the roaches with manifest concern. Pretty soon they were talking about them as though they could distinguish one from another. “Dig this one, man, he’s swinging!”

  “Don’t hold him under, man, he can’t make it like that!”

  For my own part, I was content to watch the drunk and the proprietor, and this was as well, for, very soon, there was a bit of action. The drunk straightened up and started looking around the room. When his eyes reached our party they stopped, and after a minute, he leaned toward us and vomited.