Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes

by Terry Southern

  Q. What, for their jobs?

  A. Or for their souls! Ha, ha.

  Q. Well, surely some of the doctors like you—I can’t see how you could stay on unless—

  A. Oh some of the doctors, yes! The really, really good . . . well, great ones, do, yes—they appreciate my work and I appreciate theirs. We respect each other. But how many good doctors are there? One in a billion? Not to mention great doctors—which are practically non-existent!

  Q. Well . . . I don’t understand—do you mean there aren’t any really good ones . . . or any that like you?

  A. No! I don’t mean that, I don’t mean that. What I mean . . . Well, take Dr. Schweitzer . . . I’ve never met Dr. Schweitzer, but I think he must be a great doctor, and I think . . . well, I know, he would understand what I’m doing. And there are others, right here, not great, but good . . . the best . . . and they like me; they respect me.

  Q. Well . . . let’s see, how about—

  A. Listen, don’t get the idea that I’m giving a big buildup to the whole . . . well, whole profession, if you like, of hospital attendants—or male nurse, whatever . . . I mean, don’t take me as a typical example by any means. I mean some of the others—well I wouldn’t want to say.

  Q. Why, what are they like?

  A. Well, I’ll tell you this much, it isn’t because they like people they’re there!

  Q. What is it? Why is it?

  A. Well, they’re sadists, a lot of them—especially in the mental wards . . . big, insensitive—well, you’ve got no idea, what goes on in some of those wards—animals, like apes . . . big cruel apes! They just sit around waiting for someone to blow his stack so they can slam him!

  Q. Really? Slam him?

  A. That’s what they call it—”slammin’.” Somebody blows his stack and they yell “Slam him, Joel Slam that nut!” What it really means, what it’s supposed to mean is that you put him in the slammer, like, you know, in a padded-cell, and slam the door—but it means the subduing part too.

  Q. And how do they do that?

  A. How? Are you kidding? Any way they feel like. With their fists, if they can—that’s what they really like . . . I mean the tough ones are proud of their reputations for never using the sap—you know, the leather thing . . . the black-jack. Or they may say “Big Joe had to use the sap!” which means that it was a really bad case if Big Joe had to use the sap! But of course a real nut is as strong as about four ordinary people.

  Q. Well . . . but they aren’t all like that, are they? Is that just the mental ward?

  A. The mental ward. No, there’s another kind, the exact opposite—not opposite, but completely different—they work in hospitals to be close to morphine, so they can get morphine. They couldn’t care less about hitting anybody—they just sort of step aside . . . I guess hoping the guy will fall out the window or something. And when they have to sap him, they just tap him on the back of the head—no expression, nothing . . . they live in a world apart, some of them have terrible, terrible habits—I mean that would cost them two or three hundred dollars a day if they didn’t work at the hospital.

  Q. And they get morphine—how do they get it?

  A. Oh well, they get it! Ha, ha, they have to get it—I mean they would get it if you . . . if you put it in a safe and dropped it to the bottom of the ocean! They’re like Houdini when they go after that—nothing could stop them, nothing! I mean they don’t even worry about how to get it—all they want is to be in the vicinity of it, because, if they are, they’ll get it! And you know there’s a lot of morphine in a big hospital.

  Q. Well, what do you think . . . I mean, are they good at their work?

  A. No! They’re like zombies—no feeling, none at all . . . they can’t help the patient. Why I have some wonderful relationships in the mental wards—but they don’t care, about the patient, about anything . . . they don’t even speak to anyone. Not to me anyway—none of them will even speak to me.

  Q. But they must do their job . . .

  A. Of course! They do their job. They make sure of that, that they do their job! Yes, that’s true, they do their job and they do it very . . . well, very thoroughly—I mean, you see, they cannot afford to get fired, so . . . so they do their job very . . . very well, in a way. Very careful and serious—but never a smile or a kind word for anyone. Oh no, they’re too serious! Ha! Well, I certainly wouldn’t have them in my hospital. I can tell you that!

  Q. What, you mean . . . well, do you think about that? About hospital administration?

  A. Yes! That’s what I’d really like to do—I’d like to organize my own hospital!

  Q. What would you . . . would you have . . . an all-gay staff?

  A. What? Ha-ha! No-ooo! Don’t be silly! What an idea! Ha, ha, ha! An all-gay hospital! Well, who knows . . . maybe it would work out that way . . . who knows? I mean, one thing I do know, I would not, repeat not, use women nurses!

  Q. You would not?

  A. No! I would not! And I know what you’re thinking, but I don’t care, it isn’t true, I would definitely not use them.

  Q. Yes . . . well, why not?

  A. Why not? For the very simple reason that a hospital . . . a hospital should be . . . clean . . . efficient . . . well-run! With an atmosphere of love and . . . human affection, human warmth! And care for the patient! People who care about the patient! And not just constant . . . bitching about having their period! Or not having their period! Or having their menopause! Or not having their menopause! Or washing their hair! Or not washing their hair! God!

  Q. Is that–

  A. Do you know . . . let me just say this . . . do you know that nurses . . . women nurses, are one hell of a lot more trouble than the patients are? That’s right. They’re always sick—always sick! If it isn’t their period, it’s something else. Something’s wrong with their breast! Or their insides—ovaries! womb! uterus! vulva! tubes! And God knows what else! Christ, if I hear another nurse talk about her goddamn tubes . . . !

  Q. Well–

  A. I know, I know . . . I’m exaggerating. All right, all right, you’re right . . . I am. But . . . But! . . . it’s only an exaggeration. Do you follow? I mean it is true . . . it’s true, but exaggerated. Right? Do you dig? And here’s something else, and this is true—most nurses, almost no nurse, in fact, is married . . . they’re sexually frustrated, and bitter, baby . . . bitter, bitter, bitter!

  Q. Well, can’t they make it with the doctors, or the patients? I mean—

  A. Yes! Of course! Oh, they do, they do! With the doctors, patients, interns . . . ward-boys, janitors—anybody! Listen, I could tell you . . . well, that’s why you can never find one of them! They’re either . . . lying down in the rest-rooms, coddling their period, or they’re off somewhere getting laid! In the . . . the broom-closet or someplace! Ha!

  Q. Then you don’t—

  A. Oh listen, I’ve known some nice nurses, I don’t say that . . . there’s one here, right here, on this floor—day-nurse . . . a darling, perfectly darling little old lady—she’s let’s see, how old is [name] now . . . ? She’s sixty . . . four. Sixty-four years old! And a marvelous nurse! Really. Marvelous sweet old lady! But, I mean, ha, ha, well, I don’t mind telling you it’s . . . well, it’s a rare thing, a very rare thing!

  Q. Yes, well–

  A. But listen . . . just a minute—what did you say? Just before? You said why can’t they make it with them? The patients and so on—is that what you said?

  Q. Well, you said they were frustrated . . .

  A. Well, but that’s not going to change their . . . well, what kind of hospital is that, for heaven’s sake! With the nurses getting laid all over the place! You think they should do that? Ha, ha, you . . . you’ve got some funny ideas about hospitals!

  Q. I didn’t say they should do that, I just wondered if they did.

  A. And an all-gay hospital! Ha, ha! That’s very funny!

  Q. Well, you don’t think that’s . . . what, that isn’t even conceivable?

 
A. Well, you couldn’t get an all-gay staff to treat only gay patients, I can tell you that.

  Q. But would it be possible to have an all-gay staff? I mean are there gay janitors, for example?

  A. Oh, ho-ho! Are there!

  Q. Well then, theoretically–

  A. Ha, ha! Some of my best friends are gay janitors!

  Q. Well, the point–

  A. No, no, that was a joke!

  Q. Yes, I realize that, I realize that. It’s very funny.

  A. Ho-ho! You didn’t laugh!

  Q. Well . . . I did really. I mean I recognize it as a joke. I acknowledge it as a joke. Ha, ha. How’s that?

  A. Ha, ha . . . Well, you have some funny ideas about hospitals, that’s all I can say.

  Q. I don’t have any ideas about it—I wanted you to tell me about it. I mean we’ve . . . you’ve made certain generalizations, about doctors and so on, so I was asking about that.

  A. About an all-gay hospital?

  Q. Well, an all-gay staff, yes.

  A. Well, it would be a damn good hospital, I can tell you that. Better than any there are now.

  Q. Well, what about the . . . wouldn’t the gay staff try to . . . try to take advantage of the non-gay patients? While they were asleep, or weakened or something?

  A. Ha, ha! Well, I mean if you call love and . . . and—well, what do you mean “take advantage of”?

  Q. Well, I don’t know . . . it seems like they would.

  A. Well, anyway, one thing—you could be sure of getting plenty of attention!

  Q. Yes . . .

  A. And I do mean you!

  Q. Uh-huh . . .

  A. Ha, ha! Now, now, don’t take it so person-ally!

  The Blood of a Wig

  MY MOST OUTLANDISH DRUG experience, now that I think about it, didn’t occur with beat Village or Harlem weirdos, but during a brief run with the ten-to-four Mad Ave crowd.

  How it happened, this friend of mine who was working at Lance (“The Mag for Men”) phoned me one morning—he knew I was strapped.

  “One of the fiction editors is out with syph or something,” he said. “You want to take his place for a while?”

  I was still mostly asleep, so I tried to cool it by shooting a few incisive queries as to the nature of the gig—which he couldn’t seem to follow.

  “Well,” he said finally, “you won’t have to do anything, if that’s what you mean.” He had a sort of blunt and sullen way about him—John Fox his name was, an ex-Yalie and would-be writer who was constantly having to “put it back on the shelf,” as he expressed it (blunt, sullen), and take one of these hot-shot Mad Ave jobs, and always for some odd reason—like at present, paying for his mom’s analysis.

  Anyway, I accepted the post, and now I had been working there about three weeks. It wasn’t true, of course, what he’d said about not having to do anything—I mean the way he had talked I wouldn’t even have to get out of bed—but after three weeks my routine was fairly smooth: up at ten, wash face, brush teeth, fresh shirt, dex, and make it. I had this transistor-shaver I’d copped for five off a junky-booster, so I would shave with it in the cab, and walk into the office at ten-thirty or so, dapper as Dan and hip as Harry. Then into my own small office, lock the door, and start stashing the return postage from the unsolicited mss. We would get an incredible amount of mss.—about two hundred a day—and these were divided into two categories: (l) those from agents, and (2) those that came in cold, straight from the author. The ratio was about 30 to 1, in favor of the latter—which formed a gigantic heap called “the shit pile,” or (by the girl-readers) “the garbage dump.” These always contained a lot of return postage—so right away I was able to supplement my weekly wage by seven or eight dollars a day in postage stamps. Everyone else considered the “shit pile” as something heinously repugnant, especially the sensitive girl (“garbage”) readers, so it was a source of irritation and chagrin to my secretary when I first told her I wished to read “all unsolicited manuscripts and no manuscripts from agents.”

  John Fox found it quite incomprehensible.

  “You must be out of your nut!” he said. “Ha! Wait until you try to read some of that crap in the shit pile!”

  I explained however (and it was actually true in the beginning) that I had this theory about the existence of a pure, primitive, folk-like literature—which, if it did exist, could only turn up among the unsolicited mss. Or weird, something really weird, even insane, might turn up there—whereas I knew the stuff from the agents would be the same old predictably competent tripe. So, aside from stashing the stamps, I would read each of these shit-pile ms. very carefully—reading subtleties, insinuations, multilevel entendre into what was actually just a sort of flat, straightforward simplemindedness. I would think each was a put-on—a fresh and curious parody of some kind, and I would read on, and on, all the way to the end, waiting for the payoff . . . but, of course, that never happened, and I gradually began to revise my theory and to refine my method. By the second week, I was able to reject a ms. after reading the opening sentence, and by the third I could often reject on the basis of title alone—the principle being if an author would allow a blatantly dumbbell title, he was incapable of writing a story worth reading. (This was thoroughly tested and proved before adopting.) Then instead of actually reading mss., I would spend hours, days really, just thinking, trying to refine and extend my method of blitz-rejection. I was able to take it a little farther, but not much. For example, any woman author who used “Mrs.” in her name could be rejected out of hand—unless it was used with only one name, like “by Mrs. Carter,” then it might be a weirdie. And again, any author using a middle initial or a “Jr.” in his name, shoot it right back to him! I knew I was taking a chance with that one (because of Connell and Selby), but I figured what the hell, I could hardly afford to gear the sort of fast-moving synchro-mesh operation I had in mind to a couple of exceptions—which, after all, only went to prove the consarn rule, so to speak. Anyway, there it was, the end of the third week and the old job going smoothly enough, except that I had developed quite a little dexie habit by then—not actually a habit, of course, but a sort of very real dependence . . . having by nature a nocturnal metabolism whereby my day (pre-Lance) would ordinarily begin at three or four in the afternoon and finish at eight or nine in the morning. As a top staffer at Lance, however, I had to make other arrangements. Early on I had actually asked John Fox if it would be possible for me to come in at four and work until midnight.

  “Are you out of your nut?” (That was his standard comeback). “Don’t you know what’s happening here? This is a social scene, man—these guys want to see you, they want to get to know you!”

  “What are they, faggots?”

  “No, they’re not faggots,” he said stoutly, but then seemed hard pressed to explain, and shrugged it off. “It’s just that they don’t have very much, you know, to do.”

  It was true in a way that no one seemed to actually do anything—except for the typists, of course, always typing away. But the guys just sort of hung out, or around, buzzing each other, sounding the chicks, that sort of thing.

  The point is though that I had to make in by ten, or thereabouts. One reason for this was the “pre-lunch conference,” which Hacker, or the “Old Man” (as, sure enough, the publisher was called), might decide to have on any given day. And so it came to pass that on this particular—Monday it was—morning, up promptly at nine-three-oh, wash face, brush teeth, fresh shirt, all as per usual, and reach for the dex . . . no dex, out of dex. This was especially inopportune because it was on top of two straight white and active nights, and it was somewhat as though an 800-pound bag, of loosely packed sand, began to settle slowly on the head. No panic, just immediate death from fatigue.

  At Sheridan Square, where I usually got the taxi, I went into the drugstore. The first-shift pharmacist, naturally a guy I had never seen before, was on duty. He looked like an aging efficiency expert.

  “Uh, I’d like to get some
Dexamyl, please.”

  The pharmacist didn’t say anything, just raised one hand to adjust his steel-rimmed glasses, and put the other one out for the prescription.

  “It’s on file here,” I said, nodding toward the back.

  “What name?” he wanted to know, then disappeared behind the glass partition, but very briefly indeed.

  “Nope,” he said, coming back, and was already looking over my shoulder to the next customer.

  “Could you call Mr. Robbins?” I asked, “he can tell you about it.” Of course this was simply whistling in the dark, since I was pretty sure Robbins, the night-shift man, didn’t know me by name, but I had to keep the ball rolling.

  “I’m not gonna wake Robbins at this hour—he’d blow his stack. Who’s next?”

  “Well, listen, can’t you just give me a couple—I’ve, uh, got a long drive ahead.”

  “You can’t get dexies without a script,” he said, rather reproachfully, wrapping a box of Tampax for a teenybopper nifty behind me, “you know that.”

  “Okay, how about if I get the doctor to phone you?”

  “Phone’s up front,” he said, and to the nifty: “That’s seventy-nine.”

  The phone was under siege—one person using it, and about five waiting—all, for some weird reason, spade fags and prancing gay. Not that I give a damn about who uses the phone, it was just one of those absurd incongruities that seem so often to conspire to undo sanity in times of crisis. What the hell was going on? They were obviously together, very excited, chattering like magpies. Was it the Katherine Dunham contingent of male dancers? Stranded? Lost? Why out so early? One guy had a list of numbers in his hand the size of a small flag. I stood there for a moment, confused in pointless speculation, then left abruptly and hurried down West Fourth to the dinette. This was doubly to purpose, since not only is there a phone, but the place is frequented by all manner of heads, and a casual score might well be in order—though it was a bit early for the latter, granted.

  And this did, in fact, prove to be the case. There was no one there whom I knew—and, worse still, halfway to the phone, I suddenly remembered my so-called doctor (Dr. Friedman, his name was) had gone to California on vacation a few days ago. Christ almighty! I sat down at the counter. This called for a quick think-through. Should I actually call him in California? Have him phone the drugstore from there? Quite a production for a couple of dex. I looked at my watch, it was just after ten. That meant just after seven in Los Angeles—Friedman would blow his stack. I decided to hell with it and ordered a cup of coffee. Then a remarkable thing happened. I had sat down next to a young man who now quite casually removed a small transparent silo-shaped vial from his pocket, and without so much as a glance in any direction, calmly tapped a couple of the belovedly familiar green-hearted darlings into his cupped hand, and tossed them off like two salted peanuts.