Lucky Us (4 page)

I stuck to my guns. But Maureen was becoming a legendary personality—everybody loved telling stories about her last wacky piece of hostility—and we were a
conspicuous couple, two bits of local color. I think I enjoyed this, having been a wallflower all my life, but I knew enough to be wary.

Neither of us went to class all that much, although for a while I had liked college. Just before exams in May was a busy time in the trade; any students who weren't taking speed to cram were coping with their guilt by smoking. I got in a sizable shipment (plastic-wrapped bricks with those touristy names, Acapulco Gold or Maui Zowie, as if we were all in a Dorothy Lamour movie) and the whole world showed up at the apartment. I'd come in for lunch and seven people would be waiting outside. At night Maureen would want to see the money—she would flip through the bills and smile in a sexy way—and I would lock it all up in a metal box and act very prim and businesslike.

One night when I was doing the count she got silly and set a pile of twenty-dollar bills on fire in the sink. Money doesn't burn all that fast, so I rescued most of it, but there were two or three bills gone, with the rest charred on one edge like pirate money. “What the fuck do you think I'm doing this for?” I said. “I'm working my brains out so you can do this?”

Maureen was laughing. She was lost in her own hilarity. I should've just let her be but I was insulted. I got very
self-righteous—oh, a nineteen-year-old explaining the exacting toils of pharmaceutical capitalism—and Maureen threatened to burn everything I owned. My stereo, my unabridged dictionary—she came at them with a cigarette lighter. I talked her down from this idea, and then we made love and fell asleep, and at four in the morning I gathered up my clothes and my safebox and a suitcase full of dope.

Maureen slept with her arms around her head and her legs twisted up in her girlish nightgown. I was in love with Maureen, as far as I could have been then, but I was afraid of what we would do if we stayed together, what cliff we'd follow each other over. I woke her up and said, “I think I have to go.”

“Why would I care?” Maureen said. “Go.” I went to kiss her good-bye and she bit my lip, hard. She laughed when I yelped. “You think you're so slick,” she said. “You'll see.”

“You think you know everything,” I said, and I walked out the door with my bleeding lip and I went to my friend Joel's.

So I wasn't there when two cops knocked on the door the next night. The cops made a mess of everything and scared Maureen, who really didn't know where I was and could only think to be perky and flirtatious with the cops. I heard about it later.

I thought there was a lesson in this. I thought there had been too much home visiting, too many people going in and out. I had liked having everybody want to know me and shake my hand and repeat things I said but I was all of a sudden sick and tired of it. I didn't want to be frivolous and social anymore. I wanted to sell in greater quantities to a smaller number of people. This seemed to me a further refinement of my ideas.

Maureen had most of my worldly goods (the record collection and the color TV) and I left them with her. I took my money and I bought a car, a finned gas guzzler that was only five years old. I had the notion that I could just drive to a state near Mexico (Texas or Arizona or California) and I could buy in volume at bargain rates, fresh from the border. I barely knew how to drive, I had never been further west than Philadelphia, I really only knew how things worked in Brooklyn. Why did I think I could do this? Smoke had aerated my vistas; I saw a bright frontier ahead, a wide sunny expanse. Already I had done so well. I drove my white Pontiac around the neighborhood. I couldn't parallel park but I was okay on left turns. When I took off from Joel's place, he said, “Ride ‘em, cowboy,” and I was giddy, waving good-bye.

Once I got on the highway, I had to concentrate in order to drive and the rhythm of the road leading into
the horizon was a new sensation to me. I was bug-eyed and happy, levitating on my own tension. When the radio got too staticky, I kept it on anyway; everything was interesting.

Outside Youngstown, Ohio, after dark, a highway patrol car, with its siren wailing, came up behind me. It was not impossible that Maureen had sent him; such a thing wasn't beyond her. I braked so fast my car swerved and fishtailed as I was pulling over. I got out to try to explain.

“Don't you ever
ever
,” he said, “leave your vehicle when you've been stopped unless someone asks you. Got that?” I slipped back inside. When I got the registration out of the glove compartment, the white paper twists of three joints peeked out at me from under a map.

“Where did you learn to drive?” the cop wanted to know. He leaned over to whiff my breath. It shocked me to have him so close. At home that would have been a direct challenge. Here, it was at least a threat. He was just like the bullying highway cops I had seen in movies. My ears were ringing from fear, but for a moment I thought I was going to laugh.

“Tell me why you were wavering out of your lane,” he said.

I said I didn't know. My voice was a nasal grunt. I sounded very New York.

“You don't
know
?” he said. “You think ignorance is cute?”

Neither of us spoke for a few seconds. Then he turned from me, as if I bored him unspeakably, and he got back in his car and drove away. I was mortified that I had been a person who'd almost laughed. One snorting outburst and I could have had him searching that car. For an hour I wanted to just turn around and go home.

But by the time I found a motel, I was phoning Joel collect from a booth and telling the whole thing as a highly amusing story. Jesus Christ. Holy shit. Do you believe it? I was back to being a lucky pup.

It is harder to learn things than people think. A whole string of experiences can be merely a continuum of wrong conclusions. I got off the phone with Joel feeling jolly and clever.

Two nights later I stopped in Tucson because someone had once told me it was an upbeat town. By then I was road-worn and dazed. I took a room in an old, faded-glory hotel downtown. In the daytime I walked around, looking at vistas of bare hills and cactus in the distance, and walking past streets of square buildings, pink and sand colored and white. The place looked like a Western! I felt disembodied, I'd become a mute audience. After the morning hours the weather was very, very hot, and the
bright, deep blue of the sky had a wicked opacity. In the afternoon I lay in my room and read.

I didn't know a soul. My hotel room was the site of a loneliness, a walled isolation that I believed to be elementally human, but wanted to get away from anyway. When I couldn't sleep at night, I went out to the bar attached to the hotel and drank beers without speaking. A harsh levity was going on around me; I sat in it as if it were music. I was quite homesick.

In the second week of this, I gave a woman at the bar the eye. “You look like Julie Christie,” I said, and she didn't even mind how stupid this was. She was glad to have a long conversation about who was the best one on
Laugh-in
, which was playing on the bar's TV, and she made fun of my Brooklyn accent. I told her a story about my rowdy brothers and she laughed and touched my arm. When we left the bar together, I thought,
this is simple, life should be simple
.

We went back to her place, and when we were half dressed, she offered me a joint and said lazily, “You're so pretty.” I have never had that kind of looks, only the romance of the occasion could have planted that idea in her, but her words did put me at my ease, utterly, and I lay back, smug as a cat, taking hits off some very decent dope. What I liked about grass was the way it caused me
to pay attention, to notice detail and texture and sequence. Without it, things went by too fast. I leaned against the headboard in my undershirt, taking my time, and thinking about what it meant
to take your time
. We mused on this together, I and the woman, whose name was Sandy, and then we made love in a slow, highly saturated way, each instant packed with what seemed to be a remarkable amount of sensation.

And that was the beginning of a phase in my life I called, even then, being a happy idiot. I willed myself to be more childish than I was. Sandy, who had dropped out of school to work for a friend who made leather clothing, had a naturally easy disposition, which was loosened even more by the prevailing customs. She was an innocent debauchee, friendly and playful.

“What a hostess,” I said, when she offered me a pipeful after breakfast that first morning. “Where did you get this?”

It was a question I had been waiting to ask. Thus, through Sandy, I met the dealers of that small, sleepy city—there was Ron the Mon and Horacio and DelMar and Freddie Trips and Phyllis Schnaderman, a New York girl. I don't know why I had to go visit so many of them to discuss my bulk-buying strategy—this was not prudent
—but a heroic zeal overtook me. I would get in my car, whose interior was like a bed of hot coals when I opened the door, a real test of dedication, and I would tool over to some bungalow surrounded by prickly pear and creosote bushes, with a yellow-eyed dog and a wrecked car in the yard.

I seemed to feel obliged to sample the local reefer many times over before I made the big buy. I rented a little one-room shack and people stopped by to hang out. We listened to music and watched the games on TV. At night we made dinners. This was a pretty festive time.

It was dawning on me that I didn't
have
to do anything. When I called home, I noticed how fast everyone in my family talked. Where were they going in such a hurry? Once I said to my mother something my grand-father had always said—
chi telo fa far?
who is making you do it?—and she said, “What the hell are you talking about? Someone's making me do things every minute.” I told Sandy maybe I was never going back.

R
ON THE
M
ON
(Phyllis Schnaderman gave him that name—he was just a redneck from Tempe) pointed out that I was using up my principal and shrinking my investment opportunities. “You going to seize the moment,” he said, “or piss it away?” I regarded this as a
serious philosophical question and had several discussions about it. I no longer thought
seizing
was the way to approach a moment. What would be proved really if I worked this great trick of transforming my little pile of coins to a bigger pile of coins? The whole thing was beginning to seem not worth doing. I had gone past it to something else, beyond effort and beyond goals. I did mean this, as an idea.

Ron was indignant when he heard me. “I guess the rest of us fools are hustling our butts off for nothing,” he said. “I guess I'm a fool, right?”

“I don't think I said that.”

“You think everyone's a fool,” Ron said.

“I don't, but what if I did?” I said. “Who gives a shit what I think?”

Ron gave me an oily smile. And then he took his cigarette and held it against Sandy's couch to burn a large, scorching hole. “No big deal,” he said, as Sandy screamed. “What fool would worry about this furniture?”

I was wrenching the cigarette away from him, but he kept trying to burn me with it, and he got me a few times. I went into a kind of frenzy, a zone I had never been in before—I kept hearing Sandy yelling, and I had the idea that I had to protect her. I socked him in the mouth and we danced around and held each other, trying to get out
of each other's grip, and he tried to hold the cigarette against my eye. I kept shouting, “What is it, Ron? What is it?” I was weeping from squinting that hard. Horacio and DelMar came in from the yard when they heard me bellowing, and they got him off me. I had a burn in the corner of my lid but I was okay.

They dragged Ron out of the house and I watched them throw him in his car. He yelled, “Fuckheads,” and he drove off. Sandy was sobbing and I had to keep telling her he wasn't coming back, as if I knew. The whole thing made me nauseous and wild. Hadn't everything been fine? Which part was the false part?

The next day I got a very weird phone call from Freddie Trips. Ron had been arrested that night—cops came to his house with a search warrant. Freddie said, “I hope you're satisfied, but that wasn't your best idea.”

“Not
my
idea,” I said.

“Right,” he said.

When I went to the bar that night, I had trouble striking up anything like a conversation. Oh, a few people—women mostly—chattered at me, but a lot of the others just looked at their shoes. They were sure I had turned Ron in, and I had only Sandy, giggling behind me, to back me up.

I didn't want to stick around to settle this. I had been
really happy there, I will say that, but all that idiot joy had made me lax. I was mad at the place for letting me get so stupid. At home my mother used to pull down the corner of an eye, meaning
watch out
, when she talked about certain people. I had been born knowing more than I knew now.

When I told Sandy I was thinking more about going back east, she said, “I understand,” which really gave me the willies. I did my buying in a hurry, after all that planning, and I did a lot of tricky things to the car to make it a giant container. Sandy made me a good-bye dinner the night before—she was always nice to me—and a few people showed up to wish me luck.

When I got up in the morning someone had scrawled
Adios, Asshole
on the car's windshield in magic marker. I didn't know who had written it and it wasn't a cheering thing to see before taking off in a vehicle stuffed to the gills with illegal plant life.

O
N THE HIGHWAY
I noticed I didn't like seeing vultures in the sky ahead of me or hearing any rustling in the backseat. I also couldn't stand noticing any vehicle too close behind me or any highway patrol car waiting by the side of the road.

In a motel in Oklahoma, a clerk made me show him my
driver's license for ID, a practice I had never heard of. I had a funny feeling. I ate my supper in a diner and then at midnight I put my luggage back in the car and I took off. I downed some speed to keep me up and I drove all night. I thought I had made a lucky escape. I thought my whole life was a shaggy dog story of close calls and smart moves.