69 Barrow Street (6 page)

“Who?”

“Your girlfriend—the one you ate breakfast with. Susan Rivers, I think you said her name was.”

“Don’t ask her, Stella.” His voice was flat and devoid of emotion.

“But I’ll
have
to, darling. Otherwise we’ll be one person short. And I’m sure she’ll be delighted to come. She’ll probably have a marvelous time.”

“I don’t want you to ask her, Stella.”

She looked across the room at him, a smile on her face. “You mean you’ll be coming to the party?”

He shut his eyes. Then he opened them again, defeated. “All right,” he said. “I’ll be coming to the party.”

B
ETWEEN 9 AND 9:30 THAT EVENING
five men and five women opened the outer door at 69 Barrow Street. In turn they pushed the buzzer in the vestibule marked
James Lambert,
walked through into the hallway and waited for Stella to let them into the first-floor apartment.

At first glance they appeared to be just a normal crowd of people between the ages of twenty and thirty. They were dressed informally, but there was nothing striking about their appearances, nothing that would indicate Bohemianism or non-conformity of any sort. They looked extremely average—a nice, quiet crowd of young people getting together for a few drinks and a good time.

But Ralph knew better.

He had met them all before. All of them had been to previous parties of Stella’s. In addition, more than a few had been Stella’s sexual partners.

Ralph knew them all quite well.

Jimmy and Rhonda Henderson sat together on the couch sipping drinks from water tumblers. Jimmy’s black hair was clipped close to a large skull that teetered precariously on his small, thin frame. Small, piggish eyes stared out from his head and surveyed the room. Rhonda, who had married him when she woke up one morning and found herself pregnant, was a soft honey blonde with huge eyes and creamy skin. She stood several inches taller than Jimmy. It wasn’t hard to tell by a glance at Rhonda that she was an extremely stupid girl. Her eyes had a perpetually vacant stare and her conversation was, to say the least, uninspired. There was, in fact, only one thing Rhonda could do at all well. But she was an expert at it.

Jimmy made his living—a rather good living—peddling marijuana. A good list of steady customers left him with around $300 a week after he paid off the local patrolman. While Stella bought too little marijuana to rank as a good customer, a sale to her meant an invitation to one of her parties. And he liked Stella’s parties.

Near the window a very tall and very thin young man stood with his arm around a short, plump girl. The thin young man’s name was Roger Brann. The plump girl was Sally; nobody knew her last name. Neither of them had jobs.

They had been living together for several months on their unemployment checks.

Roger Brann was 22 years old.

Sally was almost 16.

Ralph sat alone by himself, avoiding the others. In the background weird modern jazz played on Stella’s hi-fi, filling the room with strangely erotic rhythms and harmonies.

Stella was talking earnestly with two other couples—David and Elaine Jordan and Luke and Betty Swinnerton. The Jordans started out as just an ordinary married couple, until they both decided that there was something lacking in ordinary married life. They got involved in a few minor wife-swapping deals with men who worked in the same advertising agency as David. Then they discovered the Village and Stella’s crowd and their problems were solved. They were still very happily married, very much in love with each other. They looked upon the sexual experimentation of the Village as a release, a way to let off steam and to keep their own marriage fresh and exciting.

The Swinnertons, although both under thirty, had always seemed a little older than the other people in the room. It was hard for Ralph to determine just why this was true. He decided that it was in the way they pursued their “kicks.” The others in the room approached depravity and dissipation in a madcap search for pleasure, hungrily chasing down every possible escape they could find. Luke and Betty were different. Like the Hendersons, they had married when Betty thought she was pregnant. In their case it turned out to be a fake pregnancy but they remained married when they found out it was more or less the same as living together. And when Luke and Betty looked for kicks they did it in a totally dispassionate way, as though they had already given up all hope of achieving any genuine happiness. They continued to dissipate because it was their life, the only life they had known for years. But nothing touched them and nothing moved them.

They stood talking to Stella and the Jordans, but they seemed a million miles removed from the conversation. There was a hollow stare in Luke’s eyes. Betty kept her eyes closed and shifted her weight from one foot to the other, snapping her fingers absently in time to the music, humming softly to herself.

One other couple remained—Larry Colestock and Maria Raines. The two of them shared a cold-water flat on the East Side off Third Avenue. Ralph didn’t know Larry well at all, but he would never forget Maria, with her large, brown eyes and jet-black, shoulder length hair.

He had met her at another party of Stella’s, two or three months ago. Stella had met her and invited her to the party, and when she came Stella slipped a powder into the girl’s drink.

The powder was called Spanish Fly.

Maria had been a virgin. That night Stella led the little girl to the bedroom in back and ten men, one after the other, put an end to Maria’s virginity and ripped away her self-respect as they tore her inside. Then, when the men had finished with the girl, Stella took her in her strong arms and held her close for the remainder of the night.

That had been either the beginning or the end of Maria, depending on how you looked at it. She left her family and moved permanently to the Village. Looking vaguely for love, she took whatever happened to come her way. Nothing mattered to her any more.

A wave of shame washed over Ralph.

He had been one of the ten men that night.

Stella walked to the window and pulled the shade all the way down. While she didn’t mind at all if passers-by watched Ralph make love to her, there were certain things that she didn’t want anybody to see. Then she walked to the middle of the room and held up a hand for silence.

“All right,” she said. “Okay, everybody. It’s time for us to get started. You got everything, Jimmy?”

Henderson nodded. He took a small, bulging envelope from his pocket and handed it to her. Stella ripped open the envelope and dumped the contents into the palm of her right hand.

The joints were about one-third the thickness of a regular cigarette. The ends were twisted to keep the weed from spilling out. Stella counted the joints, unable to keep the anticipation from showing on her face as she did so. Then she picked one up between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand and examined it carefully.

“Twelve of them,” she announced. “Twelve bombers. Enough to knock us out of our heads.”

There was a low murmur of approval from the others.

“C’mon,” she said. “Everybody get seated in a circle on the floor and we’ll get the ball rolling.”

The group formed a circle on the large oriental rug. Ralph found himself seated between Maria Raines and Elaine Jordan. He wished fleetingly that he was somewhere else, anywhere but here. He liked marijuana, enjoyed the effect it had on him, but he knew what it would do to the party.

Stella put the first of the cigarettes between her lips and accepted a light from Henderson. She dragged deeply on the joint with her lips slightly parted so that she would smoke it properly, taking in a mixture of air and smoke. She drew the mixture directly into her lungs in order to get the maximum effect, rather than puffing on it and then inhaling as with a regular cigarette. In this way the maximum amount of smoke was absorbed into the bloodstream and the greatest possible effect achieved.

As soon as she had finished dragging on the joint she passed it to Henderson. By keeping the cigarette moving around the circle less of the smoke was lost than if each person smoked a joint by himself. She held the smoke in her lungs as long as possible.

When she let out her breath she was smiling.

“Cool,” she murmured. “Deep.”

Stella was getting the second joint going by the time the first one reached Ralph. He took it between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and brought it to his lips. Despite his misgivings, the sharp odor of marijuana present in the room had made him anxious to turn on, to smoke some of the pot and get high.

He sucked greedily on the joint and tasted the familiar taste of the marijuana, felt the familiar sting as the hot smoke scorched his throat and lungs. He took in as much smoke as he could hold and passed the joint to Elaine. Then he let his eyelids drop shut as he felt the marijuana hit home.

By the time he breathed out Maria was handing him the second joint. He repeated the process. This time the smoke caused less pain to his throat and lungs and he could feel the drug beginning to work, loosening him up and increasing his sensory perceptions. His mind felt much clearer and he could close his eyes and become very conscious of all the organs in his body. He heard his heart pounding out a firm, steady rhythm, felt the blood coursing through veins and arteries, listened to the contraction and relaxation of muscles when he moved his fingers.

One by one they smoked the twelve joints. When the cigarettes had burned down so far that they couldn’t be smoked any longer they were extinguished, and what remained was known as the roach. Henderson walked around the circle, his beady eyes gleaming unnaturally, and passed out a roach to each of the smokers. They each removed some of the tobacco from the end of a regular cigarette and stuffed in the roach, twisting the end of the cigarette to keep it in place.

Then the roaches were smoked. It was like the slaughterhouses in Chicago, where they boast of using “all of the pig but the squeal.” Not a grain of the precious marijuana was wasted.

Ralph was very high, higher than he had been in months. He remained on the floor with his legs out in front of him and his eyes closed. Everything felt so good, so perfectly peaceful. Nothing mattered anymore. To hell with Stella, to hell with Susan, to hell with everybody. He just didn’t care about a thing, not a single thing.

He stood up precariously and surveyed the room. He felt completely at ease now. A voice—Stella’s—suggested that all the girls strip to the waist, and he leaned up against the wall and watched as each of the women removed her blouse and bra, tossing the clothes to the floor.

He walked over to Elaine Jordan. She was talking to her husband and her back was turned to Ralph. He reached around her from the back and his hands closed over her huge breasts. Her breasts were very firm and the nipples were hard and warm. He moved closer to her and the perfume wafted from her soft brown hair to his nostrils. The marijuana, which made every sense stronger and more acute, made his sense of smell so sharp that her perfume tickled his nose.

Calmly, almost absently; he began to manipulate her breasts with his hands. She went on talking very intently to David, her husband, hardly even noticing what Ralph was doing, and he buried his face in her soft hair and went on caressing her breasts.

Stella slipped her arm around Luke Swinnerton’s waist and let her breasts push against his chest. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “You didn’t seem to be getting any charge from the pot?”

“It’s no kick for me anymore.”

“How come?”

He shrugged.

“Tell me.”

Silently he rolled up the sleeve of his left arm and showed her the arm. It was dotted with needle marks all the way up and down the main vein. Her eyes widened.

“Horse,” he explained. “Heroin.”

“How long?”

“A month, maybe two.”

“Are you hooked?”

“Through the bag and back again.”

“That’s too bad. What does Betty think?”

Luke shrugged again. “She’s hooked, too.”

“You mean you got her started?”

Luke smiled sadly. “Betty’s a good little chick. She figured if I was going to have a habit she wanted to keep me company. She’s a good chick, you know?”

Maria took David Jordan by the hand and led him away from his wife. Elaine was still standing in the same position but now her eyes were closed. Ralph continued to stroke her breasts.

Maria said: “You want to make it with me?”

David’s eyes travelled the length of her body. They took in the long black hair, the big brown eyes, the soft little breasts and the strong, golden thighs.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that’s a scene.”

“Greek?”

“What do you mean?”

“Greek style,” she explained. “That’s how I feel like making it.”

He shook his head.

“Aw, why not?”

“I don’t like it.”

“Come on.” She took him by the hand again and tried to pull him toward the bedroom in the back. He resisted her.

“Why not?” she demanded.

“It’s just not my scene. I’ll make it French, if you want. I dig it that way.”

“Larry and I did it like that this afternoon. I want to do it Greek style.”

“Later,” he said, freeing himself and dismissing her. “It’s just not my scene.”

Roger Brann caught Jimmy Henderson by the arm. Roger’s hair had fallen over into his eyes and his lips were very pale.

“You seen Sally?” he demanded.

“She disappeared into the bedroom with Larry Colestock a minute or two ago.”

“Little bitch.”

“Hell, you don’t expect her to stick with you all the time, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“Then what’s bugging you?”

“I don’t know. She coulda told me.” Jimmy laughed.

“Say,” Roger said. “You know, sometimes I get pretty fed up with women.”

Jimmy looked at him.

“You know what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“Well? Are you interested?”

Jimmy thought for a moment. “What the hell,” he said finally. “It’ll be something new.”

“You never done it before?”

Jimmy shook his head.