Authors: Nino Ricci
The world began to take on the strangeness of a place that I would soon be leaving. Every quality of it seemed a mystery suddenly, the shapes of things, the colours, the odd liveliness of people, continuing in their ways as if some secret energy propelled them, as tireless and as certain as machines. But already a dozen times when I felt close to the thing, went so far once as to remove the screen from the window in my room, stood for a moment, my heart pounding, against the window’s square of empty space, it was the thought of my family that seemed to keep me from it, of the monstrousness of it for them, so far from anything that would make sense to them – they were what I’d wanted so much to escape and yet all that seemed to connect me now to the world, resurfacing out of the murk into which I’d tried to consign them to hold over me this final tyranny, the slender grip of home.
I’d go into the common room sometimes late at night to watch TV, furtive like an intruder, sitting there in the dark through endless late movies trying to lull myself into self-forgetting. Coming in once, I found a group of other people from my floor just lighting up a joint; and before I could withdraw, one of them, Verne, his knees spread with a newspaper bearing a tangle of browning stems and leaves, had pulled to the side of the couch he was on and motioned me to sit beside him.
“Do you toke at all, Vic?”
In the inevitable crossing of paths on our floor in the washroom and halls Verne had always been oddly, reassuringly friendly toward me, seemed with his ragged clothes and his long centre-parted crimp of blond hair to have the benign, distracted look of a prophet or saint. But now his earnestness made me fear he was setting me up for an insult.
“Not really,” I said.
“Not into it?”
The first joint was still passing from hand to hand; Verne had begun to roll another one, casually intent, some small part of him precisely focused on the work while the rest of him floated free, still attentive to me, still awaiting a response.
“I guess I’ve never really tried,” I said, flushing.
“A virgin,” someone said, and laughed. But Verne was still all sincerity and respect.
“You should try a hit,” he said. “Anyway you don’t get much off it the first few times.”
He lit the second joint, the twist of paper at the end of it flaring for an instant as he drew in, then fluttering into ash. Keeping back his first long draw he held the joint a little away from his lips and drew in several more quick bullets of smoke, unthinkingly expert, then still holding his breath offered the joint to me, his eyebrows raised in question and his head nodding to answer, reassuring.
I took a long drag as Verne had done, tried to hold it, coughed it up. Verne finally let out a long thin shaft of smoke.
“You’ll get the hang of it,” he said. “Give it another pull.”
I drew in again, more gently, then again.
The others had begun to talk. I followed the thread of what they were saying, drifted, came back, the joint passing from
hand to hand and then to me again. The conversation had somehow come around to Verne’s dog.
“Between my dog and a person I’d shoot the person, no second thoughts.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious. My dog never hurt anyone.”
The joint continued to pass. My head seemed to have taken on the inflated hollowness of a balloon.
“How does it feel?” Verne said.
“It feels pretty good,” I said, and laughed, strangely, not certain why I’d laughed at all. But some of the others were laughing as well.
“I guess he’s getting the hang of it,” one of them said.
Afterwards Verne seemed to adopt me in some way, taking me on like a novitiate, stopping by my room now whenever he and his friends got together to smoke to invite me to join them. Everything in me resisted at first taking any pleasure from this new friendliness – it seemed too paltry a thing, too tenuous, to abandon all my hopelessness for. But despite myself a small feeling of well-being began to take shape in me. I kept waiting for Verne to turn against me in some way yet he merely continued on in his unquestioning inclusion of me in his world, seeming to require nothing more of me than that I be myself; and somehow this little thing was enough to pull me back, day by day the darkness I’d been in growing more distant till it began to seem a memory of some younger, more troubled self.
Verne smoked up almost daily, a changing assortment of his male friends from the residence gathering in his room late at night and stretching out there on his bed or floor while he rolled joints under the fluorescent hum of his desk lamp; and though I spoke little during these sessions, retreating into the high,
mellow hollowness of my stone, the conversation of the others then seeming to swell and die in odd fits like a kind of code, still I felt comforted by being there in the cluttered intimacy of Verne’s room, by his own mute acceptance of me, the sense of having entered somehow into the residence’s secret life. Verne liked to talk about dope, guilelessly erudite in his arcane knowledge, how it was grown, how its different products were harvested. But I’d think then of the countries it came from, the fields of it slung over jungled mountainsides or tended in the desert like gardens, the greening rows of it, of the sandalled workers who harvested it like coffee or grapes knowing nothing of us or our rituals, only doing a job every day like any other.
In a matter of weeks I’d become a regular at Verne’s sessions. Slowly I began to take on the look of a smoker, let my hair grow, then my beard, started to keep my own supply which I’d steal a few quick hits off in the mornings to get the first subtle luminousness of a high before class. Yet it seemed that what kept me smoking wasn’t pleasure but a failure, the unrealized promise of its first newness, some cataclysm of vision I’d expected that hadn’t come; and more and more the time I spent stoned appeared simply lost to me, with no aftermath but the dull lethargy it left in me the next day. I began to have the sense that weeks of my life had passed as if they’d been lived by somebody else: once, returning stoned to my room from Verne’s, I stared into my mirror and for an instant couldn’t recognize the image I saw there, saw someone who looked like Verne and his friends but who seemed to bear no relation to the person I thought of as myself.
Then as we approached the end of fall term our smoking sessions dwindled in the face of impending deadlines and exams. A slow panic began to build in me at all the work I’d deferred. But when I tried to sit down to it my thoughts refused to focus,
humming in my head like droning insects. I started to smoke up alone in my room, hoping at first to simply quell the roil of my thoughts but then inventing a thousand different excuses, though once I’d smoked I’d merely lie on my bed in a kind of paralysis, unable to work, to go out, to do anything. Finally I bought a dozen bennies from one of the residence dealers, the drug seeming to clear my mind like sun lifting a fog; and afterwards I began to sleep days and work nights, bringing myself up at night with the bennies and then down in the morning with a hit of pot or hash. The world seemed to fall away: there was only my work, the dead calm of the residence at night, the adrenalin rush of the drug coursing through me. One night we had our first snowfall, the snow swirling like a mess of phantoms outside my window and then laid out unbroken in the grey of dawn as if in forgiveness, the campus and the fields north of it stretching white and placid and still to the horizon.
But when I’d finished, my body raw with the memory of its overexertion, I felt only drained and despondent. I spent long hours in the common room watching TV in a kind of daze, its flow of images mesmerizing after my isolation. The news from the Buffalo stations was full of the Watergate hearings, of Chile, of the oil embargo, of Spiro Agnew and Gerald Ford; the stories seemed to follow the same logic as television shows, had heroes and villains, aroused the same sense of an impending climax. Coming into them like that out of nothing I felt a strange disorientation, surfacing to them as from the mind-emptied clarity after a fever. The previous months seemed a dream I’d been through now: I’d come out to discover the world and yet still it eluded me, remote as these flickerings I watched in the common room’s late-night dark.
When Verne had finished his last exam he invited me to go downtown to a place he knew, a college of some sort, where we could pick up some dope. We took the Steeles bus to the subway, then rode down to Bloor and across. At Bloor there was a palpable sense of the nearness of Christmas, people milling on the platform clutching shopping bags and parcels and Christmas carols playing tinnily over the loudspeakers.
We emerged finally into the slushy wet of Bloor Street, coming a little farther west to what seemed an apartment building, tall and plain and new like the buildings at Centennial, of the same grey concrete. A forecourt in front held the huge huddled statue of a man or boy, two leather-jacketed men loitering idly in the shadow of it, eyeing us as we approached, both holding German shepherds like extensions of themselves at the ends of short leashes.
“We’re just here to see a friend,” Verne said to them. “Tom, on the third.”
And one of them looked us up and down with a kind of bored amusement, then nodded us through.
Inside, the building lost all trace of the grey conformity of its exterior. There was a large, careful mural in the lobby, portraits in different hands of various musicians from the sixties; but beside it someone had spray-painted LONG LIVE ELVIS in a crude fluorescent pink. The surrounding walls, the elevator doors, were thick with similar graffiti, much of it indecipherable or merely random slashes and swirls of colour. There was an air to everything of prematurely decayed newness, the carpeting worn and spotted with burns, the ceiling tiles stained and pitted. In a corner, amidst cigarette butts and paper scraps, was what looked like the hardened stool of a dog or child.
We waited at the elevators for several minutes.
“Let’s walk,” Verne said finally.
We went up a dim stairwell to the third floor and came into a long corridor, at one end of it a small child sitting naked on the floor fumbling with a set of large coloured rings. As we watched, a woman emerged from an open doorway nearby dressed only in a flowered sarong, breasts and belly exposed, and bent to pick up the child, her breasts swaying. She caught sight of us as she turned and stared at us indifferently an instant, then disappeared again through her doorway.
“This place is wild,” Verne said.
Verne knocked on a door toward the other end of the corridor and was answered by a tall, muscular man in jeans and a brown leather vest, his hair tied back in a long pony-tail like an Indian’s.
“Verne, my good man.” His voice had the hint of an American drawl. “It’s been a long time.”
He shook Verne’s hand firmly, seeming to distinguish himself from the decay of his surroundings by his air of robust well-being. But when Verne introduced us his energy closed me out, remaining fixed on Verne as if I weren’t there.
“Another one of your converts?”
We passed through a large, gloomy living room or common room of some sort, the windows papered over with newsprint and the furnishings sparse and institutional and worn. From a corner another German shepherd lay glaring at us out of a wicker crib, his low growl rumbling like distant thunder.
“What’s with all the dogs?” Verne said.
Tom grinned.
“How long has it been since you’ve been down here, my son? There’s nothing like a German shepherd to prevent the in-fil-tration of criminal elements.”
But his humour seemed oddly cryptic and private.
He led us down a dim hallway and into a room at the end of it whose door-frame was edged with strips of foam, the door closing behind us with a soft hiss of forced air like a hermetic seal. Inside was a desk with a scale on it, a bed, a few bookshelves; on one wall hung a mask in dark wood, African or Indian, its face contorted into what seemed a shout or a scream. Tom opened a cabinet to reveal a phalanx of sleek stereo components, setting an album rolling on the turntable there with a reflexive efficiency; and then with the same instinctiveness he pulled a baggie from a drawer and began to roll a joint.
There was a bookshelf near where I’d sat, and I began to look through it idly, the titles there as cryptic as Tom’s humour.
“I see this one reads,” Tom said to Verne. “I thought that was going out of style these days.”
“Yeah, Vic’s a real brain.”
But I couldn’t have said how Verne had formed that impression of me.
We smoked a few minutes in silence, Tom meanwhile measuring out baggies of dope on his scale. Stoned, I felt a heightened sense of menace, from Tom, from the dogs, from the building’s otherworldliness. There was something here I couldn’t quite make sense of, some former fundamental upheaval and then its falling away.
Before handing us our bags Tom pulled a vial from a drawer and knocked two tiny pills from it into his palm.
“Purple microdot,” he said to Verne. “On the house. A little Christmas gift.”
He wrapped the pills in a piece of foil and dropped them into one of the bags.
“I dunno, I’m not really into that stuff,” Verne said. “Why don’t you give them to Vic?”
Tom shrugged.
“Suit yourself. Just don’t accuse me of corrupting our youth.”
He handed the baggie to me and took the money I offered him.
“Take it easy on that stuff, my boy,” he said, speaking directly to me for the first time.
Outside the cold had turned cutting with the approach of night.
“Can you believe that place?” Verne said. “It was different before when it was just students and that. Christ, did you get a load of those dogs?”
But I had the sense we’d been diminished somehow by our visit, carrying on in our own small delinquencies with no project beyond the simplest one of getting stoned. I wondered now what had ever connected me to Verne, how we’d spent so many hours in this illusion of shared purpose, how I’d imagined him so much on the inside of things when in the end his life was as small as my own. And yet there was a kind of perfection to him, to his generosity, his essential normalcy, and I would have given anything to live as he did, with his sense of being at home in the world.