Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes

by Terry Southern

  Deus ex machina!

  “Uh, excuse me,” I said, in the friendliest sort of way, “I just happened to notice you taking a couple of, ha ha, Dexamyl.” And I proceeded to lay my story on him—while he, after one brief look of appraisal, sat listening, his eyes straight ahead, hands still on the counter, one of them half covering the magic vial. Finally he just nodded and shook out two more on the counter. “Have a ball,” he said.

  I reached the office about five minutes late for the big pre-lunch confab. John Fox made a face of mild disgust when I came in the conference room. He always seemed to consider my flaws as his responsibility since it was he who had recommended me for the post. Now he glanced uneasily at old Hacker, who was the publisher, editor-in-chief, etc. etc. A man of about fifty-five, he bore a striking resemblance to Edward G. Robinson—an image to which he gave further credence by frequently sitting in a squatlike manner, chewing an unlit cigar butt, and mouthing coarse expressions. He liked to characterize himself as a “tough old bastard,” one of his favorite prefaces being: “I know most of you guys think I’m a tough old bastard, right? Well, maybe I am. In the quality-Lit game you gotta be tough!” And bla-bla-bla.

  Anyway as I took my usual seat between Fox and Bert Katz, the feature editor, Old Hack looked at his watch, then back at me.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  “We’re running a magazine here, young man, not a whorehouse.”

  “Right and double right,” I parried crisply. Somehow Old Hack always brought out the schoolboy in me.

  “If you want to be late,” he continued, “be late at the whorehouse—and do it on your own time!”

  Part of his design in remarks of this sort was to get a reaction from the two girls present—Maxine, his cutiepie private sec, and Miss Rogers, assistant to the art director—both of whom managed, as usual, a polite blush and half-lowered eyes for his benefit.

  The next ten minutes were spent talking about whether to send our own exclusive third-rate photographer to Viet Nam or to use the rejects of a second-rate one who had just come back.

  “Even with the rejects we could still run our E.L. trade,” said Katz, referring to an italicized phrase Exclusively Lance which appeared under photographs and meant they were not being published elsewhere—though less through exclusivity, in my view, than general crappiness.

  Without really resolving this, we went on to the subject of “Twiggy,” the British fashion-model who had just arrived in New York and about whose boyish hair and bust-line raged a storm of controversy. What did it mean philosophically? Aesthetically? Did it signal a new trend? Should we adjust our center-spread requirements (traditionally 42-24-38) to meet current taste? Or was it simply a flash fad?

  “Come next issue,” said Hack, “we don’t want to find ourselves holding the wrong end of the shit-stick, now do we?” Everyone was quick to agree.

  “Well, I think she’s absolutely delightful,” exclaimed Ronnie Ron-dell, the art director (prancing gay and proud of it), “she’s so much more . . . sensitive-looking and . . . delicate than those awful . . . milk-factories!” He gave a little shiver of revulsion and looked around excitedly for corroboration.

  Hack, who had a deep-rooted antifag streak, stared at him for a moment like he was some kind of weird lizard, and he seemed about to say something cruel and uncalled for to Ron, but then he suddenly turned on me instead.

  “Well, Mister Whorehouse man, isn’t it about time we heard from you? Got any ideas that might conceivably keep this operation out of the shithouse for another issue or two?”

  “Yeah, well I’ve been thinking,” I said, winging it completely, “I mean, Fox here and I had an idea for a series of interviews with unusual persons. . . .”

  “Unusual persons?” he growled, “what the hell does that mean?”

  “Well, you know, a whole new department, like a regular feature. Maybe call it, uh, ‘Lance Visits. . . .’ ”

  He was scowling, but he was also nodding vigorously. “ ‘Lance Visits. . . .’ Yeh, yeh, you wantta gimme a fer instance?”

  “Well, you know, like, uh, . . . ‘Lance Visits a Typical Teeny-bopper’—cute teenybopper tells about cute teen-use of Saran Wrap as a contraceptive, etcetera . . . and uh, let’s see . . . ‘Lance Visits a Giant Spade Commie Bull-Dike’ . . . ‘Lance Visits the Author of Masturbation Now!’, a really fun-guy.”

  Now that I was getting warmed up, I was aware that Fox, on my left, had raised a hand to his face and was slowly massaging it, mouth open, eyes closed. I didn’t look at Hack, but I knew he had stopped nodding. I pressed on . . . “You see, it could become a sort of regular department, we could do a ‘T.L.’ on it . . . ‘Another Exclusive Lance Visit.’ How about this one: ‘Lance Visits a Cute Junkie Hooker’ . . . ‘Lance Visits a Zany Ex-Nun Nympho’ . . . ‘Lance Visits the Fabulous Rose Chan, beautiful research and development technician for the so-called French Tickler . . .”

  “Okay,” said Hack, “how about this one: ‘Lance Visits Lance,’—know where? Up shit-creek without a paddle! Because that’s where we’d be if we tried any of that stuff.” He shook his head in a lament of disgust and pity. “Jeez, that’s some sense of humor you got, boy.” Then he turned to Fox. “What rock you say you found him under? Jeez.

  Fox, as per usual, made no discernible effort to defend me, simply pretended to suppress a yawn, eyes averted, continuing to doodle on his “Think Pad,” as it was called, one of which lay by each of our ashtrays.

  “Okay,” said Hack, lighting a new cigar, “suppose I come up with an idea? I mean, I don’t wantta surprise you guys, cause any heart attacks . . . by me coming up with an idea,” he saying this with a benign serpent smile, then adding in grim significance, “after twenty-seven years in this goddam game!” He took a sip of water, as though trying to cool his irritation at being (as per usual) “the only slob around here who delivers.” “Now let’s just stroke this one for a while,” he said, “and see if it gets stiff. Okay, lemme ask you a question: what’s the hottest thing in mags at this time? What’s raising all the stink and hullabaloo? The Manchester book, right? The suppressed passages, right?” He was referring, of course, to a highly publicized account of the assassination of President Kennedy—certain passages of which had allegedly been deleted. “Okay, now all this stink and hullabaloo—I don’t like it, you don’t like it. In the first place, it’s infringement on freedom of the press. In the second, they’ve exaggerated it all out of proportion. I mean, what the hell was in those passages? See what I mean? All right, suppose we do a takeoff on those same passages?”

  He gave me a slow look, eyes narrowed—ostensibly to protect them from his cigar smoke, but with a Mephistophelian effect. He knew that I knew that his “idea” was actually an idea I had gotten from Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist, a few evenings earlier, and had mentioned, en passant so to speak, at the last prelunch confab. He seemed to be wondering if I would crack. A test, like. I avoided his eyes, doodled on the “Think Pad.” He exhaled in my direction, and continued:

  “Know what I mean? Something light, something zany, kid the pants off the guys who suppressed it in the first place. A satire like. Get the slant?”

  No one at the table seemed to. Except for Hack we were all in our thirties or early forties, and each had been hurt in some way by the President’s death. It was not easy to imagine any particular “zaniness” in that regard.

  Fox was the first to speak, somewhat painfully it seemed. “I’m, uh, not quite sure I follow,” he said. “You mean it would be done in the style of the book?”

  “Right,” said Hack, “but get this, we don’t say it is the real thing, we say it purports to be the real thing. And editorially we challenge the authenticity of it! Am I getting through to you?”

  “Well, uh, yeah,” said Fox, “but I’m not sure it can be, you know, uh, funny.”

  Hack shrugged. “So? You’re not sure, I’m not sure. Nobody’s sure it can be funny. We all take a crack at it—just stroke it a whil
e and see if we get any jism—right?”

  Right.

  After work that evening I picked up a new Dexamyl prescription and stopped off at Sheridan Square to get it filled. Coming out of the drugstore, I paused momentarily to take in the scene. It was a fantastic evening—late spring evening, warm breeze promise of great summer evenings imminent—and teenies in minies floating by like ballerinas, young thighs flashing. Summer, I thought, will be the acid test for minies when it gets too warm for tights, body-stockings, that sort of thing. It should be quite an interesting phenomenon. On a surge of sex-dope impulse I decided to fall by the dinette and see if anything of special import was shaking, so to speak.

  Curious that the first person I should see there, hunched over his coffee, frozen saintlike, black shades around his head as though a hippy crown of thorns, should be the young man who had given me the dex that very morning. I had the feeling he hadn’t moved all day. But this wasn’t true because he now had on a white linen suit and was sitting in a booth. He nodded in that brief formal way it is possible to nod and mean more than just hello. I sat down opposite him.

  “I see you got yourself all straightened out,” he said with a wan smile, nodding again, this time at my little paper bag with the pharmacy label on it.

  I took out the vial of dex and popped a quick one, thinking to do a bit of the old creative Lit later on. Then I shook out four or five and gave them to the young man.

  “Here’s some interest.”

  “Anytime,” he said, dropping them in his top pocket, and after a pause, “You ever in the mood for something beside dexies?”

  “Like what?”

  He shrugged, “Oh, you know,” he said, raising a vague limp hand, then added with a smile, “I mean you know your moods better than I do.”

  During the next five minutes he proved to be the most acquisitive pusher, despite his tender years, I have ever encountered. His range was extensive—beginning with New Jersey pot, and ending with something called a “Frisco Speedball,” a concoction of heroin and cocaine, with a touch of acid (“gives it a little color”). While we were sitting there, a veritable parade of his far-flung connections commenced, sauntering over, or past the booth, pausing just long enough to inquire if he wanted to score—for sleepers, leapers, creepers . . . acid in cubes, vials, capsules, tablets, powder . . . “hash, baby, it’s black as O” . . . mushrooms, mescalin, buttons . . . cosanyl, codeine, coke . . . coke in crystals, coke in powder, coke that looked like karo syrup . . . red birds, yellow jackets, purple hearts . . . “liquid-O, it comes straight from Indochina, stamped right on the can” . . . and from time to time the young man (“Trick” he was called) would turn to me and say: “Got eyes?”

  After committing to a modest (thirty dollars) score for crystals, and again for two ounces of what was purported to be ‘Panamanian Green’ (“It’s ‘one-poke pot’, baby.”), I declined further inducement. Then an extremely down-and-out type, a guy I had known before whose actual name was Rattman, but who was known with simple familiarity as “Rat,” and even more familiarly, though somehow obscurely, as “The Rat-Prick Man,” half staggered past the booth, clocked the acquisitive Trick, paused, moved uncertainly towards the booth, took a crumpled brown paper bag out of his coat pocket, and opened it to show.

  “Trick,” he muttered, almost without moving his lips, “. . . Trick, can you use any Lights? Two-bits for the bunch.” We both looked in, on some commodity quite unrecognizable—tiny, dark cylinder-shaped capsules, sticky with a brown-black guk, flat on each end, and apparently made of plastic. There was about a handful of them. The young man made a weary face of distaste and annoyance.

  “Man,” he asked softly, plaintively, looking up at Rattman, “when are you going to get buried?”

  But the latter, impervious, gave a soundless guffaw, and shuffled on.

  “What,” I wanted to know, “were those things?” asking this of the young man half in genuine interest, half in annoyance at not knowing. He shrugged, raised a vague wave of dismissal. “Lights they’re called . . . they’re used nicotine-filters. You know, those nicotine filters you put in a certain kind of cigarette holder.”

  “Used nicotine-filters? What do you do with them?”

  “Well, you know, drop two or three in a cup of coffee—gives you a little buzz.”

  “A little buzz?” I said, “are you kidding? How about a little cancer? That’s all tar and nicotine in there, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, well, you know . . .” he chuckled dryly, “anything for kicks. Right?”

  Right, right, right.

  And it was just about then he sprung it—first giving me his look of odd appraisal, then the sigh, the tired smile, the haltering deference: “Listen, man . . . you ever made red-split?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Yeah, you know—the blood of a wig.”

  “No,” I said, not really understanding, “I don’t believe I have.”

  “Well, it’s something else, baby, I can tell you that.”

  “Uh, well, what did you call it—I’m not sure I understood. . . .”

  “ ‘Red-split,’ man, it’s called ‘red-split’—it’s schizo-juice . . . blood . . . the blood of a wig.”

  “Oh, I see.” I had, in fact, read about it in a recent article in the Times—how they had shot up a bunch of volunteer prisoners (very normal, healthy guys, of course) with the blood of schizophrenia patients—and the effect had been quite pronounced . . . in some cases, manic; in other cases, depressive—about 50/50 as I recalled.

  “But that can be a big bring-down, can’t it?”

  He shook his head somberly. “Not with this juice it can’t. You know who this is out of?” Then he revealed the source—Chin Lee, it was, a famous East Village resident, a Chinese symbolist poet, who was presently residing at Bellevue in a straightjacket. “Nobody,” he said, “and I mean nobody, baby, has gone anywhere but up, up, up on this taste!”

  I thought that it might be an interesting experience, but using caution as my watchword (the Times article had been very sketchy) I had to know more about this so-called red-split, blood of a wig. “Well, how long does it, uh, you know, last?”

  He seemed a little vague about that—almost to the point of resenting the question. “It’s a trip, man—four hours, six if you’re lucky. It all depends. It’s a question of combination—how your blood makes it with his, you dig?” He paused and gave me a very straight look. “I’ll tell you this much, baby, it cuts acid and STP . . .” He nodded vigorously. “That’s right, cuts both them. Back, down, and sideways.”

  “Really?”

  He must have felt he was getting a bit too loquacious, a bit too much on the old hard-sell side, because then he just cooled it, and nodded. “That’s right,” he said, so soft and serious that it wasn’t really audible.

  “How much?” I asked, finally, uncertain of any other approach.

  “I’ll level with you,” he said, “I’ve got this connection—a ward attendant . . . you know, a male nurse . . . has, what you might call access to the hospital pharmacy . . . does a little trading with the guards on the fifth floor—that’s where the monstro-wigs are—‘High Five’ it’s called. That’s where Chin Lee’s at. Anyway, he’s operating at cost right now—I mean, he’ll cop as much M, or whatever other hard-shit he can, from the pharmacy, then he’ll go up to High Five and trade for the juice—you know, just fresh, straight, uncut wig-juice—go c.c.’s, that’s the regular hit, about an ounce, I guess . . . I mean, that’s what they hit the wigs for, a go c.c. syringeful, then they cap the spike and put the whole outfit in an insulated wrapper. Like it’s supposed to stay at body temperature, you dig? They’re very strict about that—about how much they tap the wig for, and about keeping it fresh and warm, that sort of thing. Which is okay, because that’s the trip—go c.c’s, ‘piping hot,’ as they say.” He gave a tired little laugh at the curious image. “Anyway the point is, he never knows in front what the price will be, my friend do
esn’t, because he never knows what kind of M score he’ll make. I mean like if he scores for half-a-bill of M, then that’s what he charges for the split, you dig?”

  To me, with my Mad Ave savvy, this seemed fairly illogical.

  “Can’t he hold out on the High Five guys?” I asked, “. . . you know, tell them he only got half what he really got, and save it for later?”

  He shrugged, almost unhappily. “He’s a very ethical guy,” he said, “I mean like he’s pretty weird. He’s not really interested in narcotics, just changes. I mean, like he lets them do the count on the M—they tell him how much it’s worth and that’s what he charges for the split.”

  “That is weird,” I agreed.

  “Yeah, well it’s like a new market, you know. I mean there’s no established price yet, he’s trying to develop a clientele—can you make half-a-bill?”

  While I pondered, he smiled his brave tired smile, and said: “There’s one thing about the cat, being so ethical and all—he’ll never burn you.”

  So in the end it was agreed, and he went off to complete the arrangements.

  The effect of red-split was “as advertised” so to speak—in this case, quite gleeful. Sense-derangementwise, it was unlike acid in that it was not a question of the “Essential I” having new insights, but of becoming a different person entirely. So that in a way there was nothing very scary about it, just extremely weird, and as it turned out, somewhat mischievous (Chin Lee, incidentally, was not merely a great wig, but also a great wag). At about six in the morning I started to work on the alleged “Manchester passages.” Krassner might be cross, I thought, but what the hell, you can’t copyright an idea. Also I intended to give him full and ample credit. “Darn good exposure for Paul” I mused benignly, taking up the old magic quill.