Roaming aimlessly along like this on the public street with all kinds of people, he always had a strange feeling as to who he was. As he had said to the Lions types there in the hall, he looked like a doper when out of his scramble suit; he conversed like a doper; those around him now no doubt took him to be a doper and reacted accordingly. Other dopers—See there, he thought; “other,” for instance—gave him a “peace, brother” look, and the straights didn’t.
You put on a bishop’s robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty soon you’re a bishop. So to speak. What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.
What really fouled up his sense of who and what he was came when the Man hassled him. When harness bulls, beat cops, or cops in general, any and all, for example, came cruising up slowly to the curb near him in an intimidating manner as he walked, scrutinized him at length with an intense, keen, metallic, blank stare, and then, often as not, evidently on whim, parked and beckoned him over.
“Okay, let’s see your I.D.,” the cop would say, reaching out; and then, as Arctor-Fred-Whatever-Godknew fumbled in his wallet pocket, the cop would yell at him, “Ever been ARRESTED?” Or, as a variant on that, adding, “BEFORE?” As if he were about to go into the bucket right then.
“What’s the beef?” he usually said, if he said anything at all. A crowd naturally gathered. Most of them assumed he’d been nailed dealing on the corner. They grinned uneasily and waited to see what happened, although some of them, usually Chicanos or blacks or obvious heads, looked angry. And those that looked angry began after a short interval to be aware that they looked angry, and they changed that swiftly to impassive. Because everybody knew that anyone looking angry or uneasy—it didn’t matter which— around cops must have something to hide. The cops especially knew that, legend had it, and they hassled such persons automatically.
This time, however, no one bothered him. Many heads were in evidence; he was only one of many.
What am I actually? he asked himself. He wished, momentarily, for his scramble suit. Then, he thought, I could go on being a vague blur and passers-by, street people in general, would applaud. Let’s hear it for the vague blur, he thought, doing a short rerun. What a way to get recognition. How, for instance, could they be sure it wasn’t some other vague blur and not the right one? It could be somebody other than Fred inside, or another Fred, and they’d never know, not even when Fred opened his mouth and talked. They wouldn’t really know then. They’d never know. It could be Al pretending to be Fred, for example. It could be anyone in there, it could even be empty. Down at Orange County GHQ they could be piping a voice to the scramble suit, animating it from the sheriff’s office. Fred could in that case be anybody who happened to be at his desk that day and happened to pick up the script and the mike, or a composite of all sorts of guys at their desks.
But I guess what I said at the end, he thought, finishes off that. That wasn’t anybody back in the office. The guys back in the office want to talk to me about that, as a matter of fact.
He didn’t look forward to that, so he continued to loiter and delay, going nowhere, going everywhere. In Southern California it didn’t make any difference anyhow where you went; there was always the same McDonaldburger place over and over, like a circular strip that turned past you as you pretended to go somewhere. And when finally you got hungry and went to the McDonaldburger place and bought a McDonald’s hamburger, it was the one they sold you last time and the time before that and so forth, back to before you were born, and in addition bad people—liars—said it was made out of turkey gizzards anyhow.
They had by now, according to their sign, sold the same original burger fifty billion times. He wondered if it was to the same person. Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into permanence long ago, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had jammed in the
on
position. How the land became plastic, he thought, remembering the fairy tale “How the Sea Became Salt.” Someday, he thought, it’ll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald’s hamburger as well as buy it; we’ll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won’t even have to go outside.
He looked at his watch. Two-thirty: time to make a buy call. According to Donna, he could score, through her, on perhaps a thousand tabs of Substance D cut with meth.
Naturally, once he got it, he would turn it over to County Drug Abuse to be analyzed and then destroyed, or whatever they did with it. Dropped it themselves, maybe, or so another legend went. Or sold it. But his purchase from her was not to bust her for dealing; he had bought many times from her and had never arrested her. That was not what it was all about, busting a small-time local dealer, a chick who considered it cool and far-out to deal dope. Half the narcotics agents in Orange County were aware that Donna dealt, and recognized her on sight. Donna dealt sometimes in the parking lot of the 7-11 store, in front of the automatic holo-scanner the police kept going there, and got away with it. In a sense, Donna could never be busted no matter what she did and in front of whom.
What his transaction with Donna, like all those before, added up to was an attempt to thread a path upward via Donna to the supplier she bought from. So his purchases from her gradually grew in quantity. Originally he had coaxed her—if that was the word— into laying ten tabs on him, as a favor: friend-to-friend stuff. Then, later on, he had wangled a bag of a hundred for recompense, then three bags. Now, if he lucked out, he could score a thousand, which was ten bags. Eventually, he would be buying in a quantity which would be beyond her economic capacity; she could not front enough bread to her supplier to secure the stuff at her end. Therefore, she would lose instead of getting a big profit. They would haggle; she would insist that he front at least part of it; he would refuse; she couldn’t front it herself to her source; time would run out—even in a deal that small a certain amount of tension would grow; everyone would be getting impatient; her supplier, whoever he was, would be holding and mad because she hadn’t shown. So eventually, if it worked out right, she would give up and say to him and to her supplier, “Look, you better deal direct with each other. I know you both; you’re both cool. I’ll vouch for both of you. I’ll set a place and a time and you two can meet. So from now on, Bob, you can start buying direct, if you’re going to buy in this quantity.” Because in that quantity he was for all intents and purposes a dealer; these were approaching dealer’s quantities. Donna would assume he was reselling at a profit per hundred, since he was buying a thousand at a time at least. This way he could travel up the ladder and come to the next person in line, become a dealer like her, and then later on maybe get another step up and another as the quantities he bought grew.
Eventually—this was the name of the project—he would meet someone high enough to be worth busting. That meant someone who knew something, which meant someone either in contact with those who manufactured or someone who ran it in from the supplier who himself knew the source.
Unlike other drugs, Substance D had—apparently—only one source. It was synthetic, not organic; therefore, it came from a lab. It could be synthesized, and already had been in federal experiments. But the constituents were themselves derived from complex substances almost equally difficult to synthesize. Theoretically it could be manufactured by anyone who had, first, the formula and, second, the technological capacity to set up a factory. But in practice the cost was out of reach. Also, those who had invented it and were making it available sold it too cheaply for effective competition. And the wide distribution suggested that even though a sole source existed, it had a diversified layout, probably a series of labs in several key areas, perhaps one near each major urban drug-using spot in North America and Europe. Why none of these had been found was a mystery; but the implication was, both publicly and no doubt under official wraps, that the S. D. Agency—as the authorities arbitrarily termed it—had penetrated so far up into law-enforcement groups, both local and national, that those who found out anything usable about its operations soon either didn’t care or didn’t exist.
He had, naturally, several other leads at present besides Donna. Other dealers he pressured progressively for larger quantities. But because she was his chick—or anyhow he had hopes in that direction—she was for him the easiest. Visiting her, talking to her on the phone, taking her out or having her over—that was a personal pleasure as well. It was, in a sense, the line of least resistance. If you had to spy on and report about someone, it might as well be people you’d see anyhow; that was less suspicious and less of a drag. And if you did not see them frequently before you began surveillance, you would have to eventually anyhow; it worked out the same in the end.
Entering the phone booth, he did a phone thing.
Ring-ring-ring.
“Hello,” Donna said.
Every pay phone in the world was tapped. Or if it wasn’t, some crew somewhere just hadn’t gotten around to it. The taps fed electronically onto storage reels at a central point, and about once every second day a printout was obtained by an officer who listened to many phones without having to leave his office. He merely rang up the storage drums and, on signal, they played back, skipping all dead tape. Most calls were harmless. The officer could identify ones that weren’t fairly readily. That was his skill. That was what he got paid for. Some officers were better at it than others.
As he and Donna talked, therefore, no one was listening. The playback would come maybe the next day at the earliest. If they discussed anything strikingly illegal, and the monitoring officer caught it, then voiceprints would be made. But all he and she had to do was keep it mild. The dialogue could still be recognizable as a dope deal. A certain governmental economy came into play here—it wasn’t worth going through the hassle of voiceprints and track-down for routine illegal transactions. There were too many each day of the week, over too many phones. Both Donna and he knew this.
“How you doin’?” he asked.
“Okay.” Pause in her warm, husky voice.
“How’s your head today?”
“Sort of in a bad space. Sort of down.” Pause. “I was bumtripped this A.M. by my boss at the shop.” Donna worked behind the counter of a little perfume shop in Gateside Mall in Costa Mesa, to which she drove every morning in her MG. “You know what he said? He said this customer, this old guy, gray hair, who bilked us out of ten bucks—he said it was my fault and I’ve got to make it good. It’s coming out of my paycheck. So I’m out ten bucks through no fucking—excuse me—fault of my own.”
Arctor said, “Hey, can I get anything from you?”
She sounded sullen now. As if she didn’t want to. Which was a shuck. “How—much do you want? I don’t know.”
“Ten of them,” he said. The way they had it set up, one was a hundred; this was a request for a thousand, then.
Among fronts, if transactions had to take place over public communications, a fairly good try consisted of masking a large one by an apparently small one. They could deal and deal forever, in fact, in these quantities, without the authorities taking any interest; otherwise, the narcotics teams would be raiding apartments and houses up and down each street each hour of the day, and achieving little.
“ ‘Ten,’ ” Donna muttered, irritably.
“I’m really hurting,” he said, like a user. Rather than a dealer. “I’ll pay you back later, when I’ve scored.”
“No,” she said woodenly. “I’ll lay them on you gratis. Ten.” Now, undoubtedly, she was speculating whether he was dealing. Probably he was. “Ten. Why not? Say, three days from now?”
“No sooner?”
“These are—”
“Okay,” he said.
“I’ll drop over.”
“What time?”
She calculated. “Say around eight in the P.M. Hey, I want to show you a book I got, somebody left it at the shop. It’s cool. It has to do with wolves. You know what wolves do? The male wolf? When he defeats his foe, he doesn’t snuff him—he pees on him. Really! He stands there and pees on his defeated foe and then he splits. That’s it. Territory is what they mostly fight over. And the right to screw. You know.”
Arctor said, “I peed on some people a little while ago.”
“No kidding? How come?”
“Metaphorically,” he said.
“Not the usual way?”
“I mean,” he said, “I told them—” He broke off. Talking too much; a fuckup. Jesus, he thought. “These dudes,” he said, “like biker types, you dig? Around the Foster’s Freeze? I was cruising by and they said something raunchy. So I turned around and said something like—” He couldn’t think of anything for a moment.
“You can tell me,” Donna said, “even if it’s super gross. You gotta be super gross with biker types or they won’t understand.”
Arctor said, “I told them I’d rather ride a pig than a hog. Any time.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Well, a pig is a chick that—”
“Oh yeah. Okay, well I get it. Barf.”
“I’ll see you at my place like you said,” he said. “Good-bye.” He started to hang up.
“Can I bring the wolf book and show you? It’s by Konrad Lorenz. The back cover, where they tell, says he was the foremost authority on wolves on earth. Oh yeah, one more thing. Your roommates both came into the shop today. Ernie what’s-his-name and that Barris. Looking for you, if you might have—”
“What about?” Arctor said.
“Your cephalochromoscope that cost you nine hundred dollars, that you always turn on and play when you get home—Ernie and Barris were babbling away about it. They tried to use it today and it wouldn’t work. No colors and no ceph patterns, neither one. So they got Barris’s tool kit and unscrewed the bottom plate.”
“The hell you say!” he said, indignant.