A Diet of Treacle (3 page)

There weren’t that many—of the others. You could walk all over the Village and never notice them, not unless you were one yourself and consequently knew what to look for. They varied in age, appearance and dress, but a boy like Shank knew how to spot them.

They were lost people, bored people, tired people, angry young people, zen people, beat people. They were tagged with more labels than you could shake a stick of pot at, but the people themselves scorned the labels and spent little time worrying about them. Shank himself shrugged at labels. He knew there were two classes of people in the world—the ones he liked and the ones he didn’t.

The ones he didn’t could go in a body to hell, as far as he was concerned. The ones he liked were going to hell, too, but he happened to be going on the same boat they were—and that made the difference. The people he gravitated to smoked marijuana or gobbled benzedrine or drank cough syrup or chewed peyote. They talked with each other, walked with each other, sat with each other and slept with each other. They listened to jazz, deep and grinding hard bop, and they spoke their own language, the inner language of Hip.

There was Lee Revzin, an anemic-looking young man whose hair was forever falling into his eyes, sandy blond hair he neither cut nor combed. Lee wrote poetry, weird stuff Shank found impossible to understand, but he knew the poetry had Soul and if that was Lee’s scene it was okay with him.

There was Judy Obershain of the china-doll face, a small, cute, nervous girl who talked and moved like a Disney cartoon. She had experienced sexual relations with forty-seven men, but although the carnal in its many forms attracted Judy, the idea of pain she was convinced was associated with the loss of virginity was the one prospect that terrified her. Shank took her to his room one night but left her virginity where he found it, practically untouched. He thought she was a little nuts, but if that was her scene it was okay with him. Because she was one of Shank’s people.

And there were many others. The ones who lived in the Village or on the lower East Side. The ones who lived uptown or in Brooklyn or the Bronx or Queens or even Jersey and who came to the Village to meet the rest. The ones who blew in from Chicago or the coast, the ones who left and the ones who came back. People who wrote or painted or who did nothing at all. Negroes who slept with whites in the frantic shift to change the color of their skins; and whites who slept with Negroes for the opposite shift.

And Joe, of course. Joe Milani, Shank’s friend, older than most of the others, who once had been to Korea and to college and who now had no scene at all—who just floated, never wanting anything, never needing anything, just drifting and tasting and touching and seeing and smelling and hearing, drifting around and digging everything, going nowhere and doing nothing. He and Joe lived together now on Saint Marks Place near Avenue A, and the two of them were very tight. Joe was older, seven years older, but his age did not matter. Joe was a wop, but there was a world of difference between Joe and the dago bastards who owned everything in the Village. Joe was a little nuts in some ways, but Shank did not sit in judgment.

That was Joe’s scene, and Shank let it go at that.

The man Shank was expecting sat down next to him. The man wore a white shirt open at the neck and a pair of grey gabardine trousers. The man was nervous.

“Are you Shank?” he said.

Shank nodded.

“Are you holding?”

“I never hold, man.”

The man hesitated. “Phil told me—”

“Phil?”

“Phil Carroway. Short guy with a goatee.”

Shank nodded again, remembering Phil Carroway.

“He said—”

“I never hold,” Shank said. “I’ve got some stuff back at my pad, if you’ve got the time.”

“Where do you live?”

Shank told him.

“I’d like to get some.”

Shank turned and studied the man out of the corner of his eye. Well-dressed, clean-shaven, eager as a sixteen-year-old at a whorehouse for the first time. A Madison Avenue type trying to be hip, looking for a kick and ready to pay for it. Square as they come, but his wallet was full and he would pay good money for a few joints.

Shank stood up. The man hesitated, then rose and stood next to him awkwardly. “Let’s make it,” Shank said. “It’s a long walk.”

“We can take a cab,” the man said. “I’ll pay for it.”

Shank nodded shortly and they walked over to Fifth where the man flagged a taxi. The man held the door for him and Shank hopped in, sinking heavily into the seat.

The square had bread, heavy bread, if he was ready to lay out cab fare just to make a buy, Shank decided. The square was going to be profitable, he decided.

   Shank held the cigarette paper between the thumb and index finger of his left hand. He poured marijuana into the paper from a small brown envelope. When the paper held a sufficient quantity, he rolled it expertly, wetting the gummed edge by a flick of his tongue, then twisting the ends so the marijuana would not dribble out.

Then he took the cigarette once again between the thumb and the index finger of his left hand and examined it thoughtfully. He held it to the light, checking for possible punctures in the paper. Putting it to his lips, Shank drew on it experimentally to make sure it would smoke properly.

Then he tossed it across the room to Joe Milani, who caught it one-handed, studied it momentarily, and dropped it into his pocket.

“Did you score?” Shank said.

Joe shook his head.

“What happened?”

Joe thought for a minute. Then he shrugged. “I picked her up is all. Picked her up and won the bet.”

“How come you didn’t ball her?”

“I don’t know.”

Shank said nothing. The guy never pried, Joe thought. He was a clever son of a bitch—he just sat there waiting and pretty soon you told him whatever it was he was waiting to hear. Non-directive as all hell.

“I don’t know,” Joe said again.

Shank remained silent.

There were so many things you didn’t know, Joe thought, and it was such a general pain to bother trying to think things out, especially when there was no point-thinking them out to begin with.

“Name’s Anita Carbone,” Joe said. “Lives up in wop Harlem with her grandmother.”

Shank shrugged.

“College chick,” Joe continued. “Psych major at Hunter, comes downtown once every third blue moon.”

“Pretty chick.”

“Yeah.”

More silence.

“Look, I didn’t even try to make it with her,” Joe said. “I don’t think I could have if I tried, and it’s like there’s no future in it anyway. She’s a nice square little thing with a good head and a good body and that’s all.”

“Where did you take her?”

“Around. We walked around for a while and sort of talked at each other. After a while I let her buy me a hamburger at Riker’s. Then I put her on a subway and she zipped off to Harlem and I came down here. That’s all.”

“You gonna see her again?”

“No.”

“No?”

Joe frowned. “What for, man? Like I told you—she’s a nice square little chick and all and we have nothing to talk about and nothing to do. So what for?”

Shank let it drop. “I worked a deal while you were walking around with her,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“I sold some cut-down stuff to a Madison Avenue type for more than it was worth.”

“What did you get?”

“Twenty cents for twelve.”

A cent was a dollar in hip parlance. Twenty cents was twenty dollars, twenty dollars for maybe four or five dollars worth of pot. Joe whistled.

“He’s happy,” Shank said. “Now he can throw a party for a dozen people who want to feel hip and they can all blow off the tops of their heads. He’ll get high for the first or second time in his life and he’ll turn some square little chick on for the first time and she’ll come across, also for the first time. He’s getting his twenty’s worth out of the bit.”

“Sure.”

“Everybody’s smoking now,” Shank said. “A guy like this one thought he was pretty far out a few years ago when he had a martini on an empty stomach. Now he starts reading and talking to people and he decides that juice isn’t far out at all. So he has to reach a little farther.”

Joe nodded.

“He’ll dig it,” Shank went on. “It’s a bigger kick than juice. Besides, it’s illegal. He can get a year and a day just for holding and he knows it. That makes it more of a kick. He can feel like all the hippies he reads about.”

“The gospel according to Saint Jack.”

“I’m hip, man. He reads Kerouac and he decides to get remote. You shoulda been there, man. You would’ve got a kick out of the way he came on. Like it was all something out of a spy movie, you know? Sitting down next to me and talking out of the side of his mouth and all. And he fell over when he saw the pad, like we were living on the other side of the moon and it was heaven on wheels.”

“Everybody’s smoking it,” Joe said. “A year or two and they’ll make it legal.”

“You kidding.”

“Why? They’ll have to, with everybody turning on right and left. By the time everybody knows it’s harmless and non-habit-forming they won’t be able to keep the law on the books. It—”

“You’re nuts, man.”

Joe looked at him, and Shank went on.

“Things get legal because somebody wants them legal, man. Things don’t get legal because somebody doesn’t want them legal. You think anybody wants pot legal? You think the Mob wants it legal when they can sell it? You think the liquor lobby wants it legal when nobody would drink juice any more if it was? Hell, you think I want it legal? I pull in close to a bill a week selling it, a hundred pennies per keeping squares high. If it’s legal they’ll sell it in the drugstores, man. Won’t that be a bitch?”

Joe nodded, and Shank hauled himself to his feet.

“Gotta go,” he announced. “You got any idea what time it is?”

“Few minutes after eight.”

“That late?”

“Around there.”

“Then I better jump.”

“What’s happening?”

“I got a few things going.”

Joe leaned back on the bed and watched Shank go out the door and slam it behind him. The younger boy’s footsteps sounded on the stairway, then stopped. The front door banged.

Joe stretched out on the bed, rested his head on the pillow and stared up at the ceiling whose cracked plaster had fallen away in jagged patches. The floor was bare and dirty and the furniture was quietly falling into ruin, the stuffing leaking from the one chair, and broken bedsprings digging down at crazy angles. Joe alternated between feeling sorry for himself and despising himself, usually was in one mood or the other except for the times a fix lifted him into another mental sphere. In a straight sense, without the realization of marijuana or the stimulation of benzedrine or the sogginess of alcohol or the diffusion of mescalin to eliminate moodiness, he either hated Joe Milani or loathed the world so unnecessarily cruel to him.

You had always been a good enough kid, Joe would tell himself on occasion. Your folks had loved you and you had loved your folks and Rochester hadn’t been a bad place to live in. You had run around with a decent bunch of kids and you had done okay in high school and had never gotten into any trouble. Everybody had liked you then. What in the hell had happened to you?

Two years in Korea had happened to you, Joe would answer—two years in Korea shooting at people and having the bastards shoot back at you. You had stumbled around, freezing, mud up to your neck and bullets all over the damned place. And then you had had a year in college on the GI bill, the professors throwing things at you that had neither made sense nor mattered a hell of a lot, and there had been nothing to do and no place to go and nobody to be with.

That’s what happened to you, Joe would decide. You had been a good kid and they had sent you to Korea to make the world safe for Syngman Rhee, who had been nothing but a fascist bastard to begin with and who was finished now anyway and the Koreans behind half-a-dozen eight balls. They had sent you over there and when they had brought you back there had been nothing stateside for you. Nothing had mattered any more, nothing had fit any more, and when you had gone home to Rochester there had been nobody to talk to. The same people had been there, the same guys—even if they had aged a year or two they had only gotten deader from the neck up. Your folks had been there but it hadn’t been the same with them, and the girls had been there and it hadn’t been the same with them, either, and all in all Rochester hadn’t been worth a damn and New York University had been worth less of a damn and the whole world had gotten dead set on driving you out of your alleged mind.

Sure, Joe thought.

Or, his mood alternating, he would accuse himself: You’re just a no-good bastard and you’ve screwed up everything you’ve ever touched. Yeah, you had been a happy enough guy in high school. You had never had a thought in your life and you had never done anything except swing bats at baseballs and bang silly little girls in back seats. So you had gone through basic training and had started shaking when they sent live ammo ten feet over your head. So you had shipped to Korea and had aimed your gun at the sky most of the time because you had been too scared to kill anybody. You hadn’t had enough guts to have been a conscientious objector or enough guts to have been a soldier—but you had had an anonymous enough body to have been stuck in the middle, a gun in your hand and a hole in your head.

And you had found a woman in Japan, little Michiko, flat-faced Mickey, the sweetest and warmest woman in the world, Mickey of the saffron arms and legs and thighs and breasts and belly, a girl named Mickey who had loved you. And, you gutless no-good wop son of a bitch, you hadn’t had the guts to make a Sayonara scene. You had left her there.

Joe Gutless. You had dropped out of NYU because you hadn’t been able to knuckle down and study. You had left Rochester because it had been too tough for you to adjust, and you hadn’t wanted to do anything unless it was real easy. No guts, no push, no drive, no interest in anything or anybody. You were a faceless wop named Joe Gutless Milani who deserved whatever you got.