The Drifters (60 page)

With the sixth hour, death returned. From the bed came horrible screams and contortions which so sickened me that I had to turn away, but Gretchen, fearing that I might abandon her, crawled off the bed to grab at my legs and plead with me to stay. When her hands found the reassurance she needed in the hard leather of my shoes, she collapsed on the floor, and I was powerless to get her back into bed. She remained there, a quivering mass.

I cannot accurately describe the next half hour, for it was a damnable hell, with moaning voices, sobbing throats, a dozen arms clutching at me. Looking back, of course, I realize that Gretchen was not about to die; she was merely in the grip of some powerful delusion, but at the time it was the most terrifying experience I had ever had to suffer through. My panic was increased when she returned to the long-drawn ‘Accccchhhhh!’—but after she had uttered this cry a dozen times or so, she began to relax and the gentle waves that had passed over her body at the beginning of the trip returned, bringing with them the expansive colors and the protracted sounds.

She spent the seventh hour sleeping, the first half on the floor, the second half in bed, for now when I tried to hoist her up, she cooperated and clung to me for a moment. ‘Thank God you were here,’ she whispered, and lapsed into the final unconsciousness from which she would emerge a human being once more.

Gretchen was never able to tell the others of her trip. Apparently the terrors had been so destructive that she considered herself fortunate to have survived them, and now banished recollection from her mind. But when Monica
and Cato kept pestering the others to try the acid—they even propositioned me to join them—Gretchen was infuriated when they approached Joe. Placing her hand on Joe’s arm, she said, ‘If I saw things as clearly as you do, Joe, I wouldn’t need any mind-expanding,’ to which Monica replied, ‘But how can he tell what the world’s like until he sees it for real?’ and Gretchen said, ‘What I saw, I didn’t need to see,’ and Monica goaded her. ‘Were you afraid?’ and Gretchen replied, ‘No, I accepted what I saw and made my peace with it. It’s buried. And I’m content to leave it buried.’ To this, Monica said, ‘Until the day it explodes and destroys you,’ and Gretchen said, ‘I think that’s what life is—keeping things in balance, delaying the explosion a little longer. When it finally comes … it’s death.’ To Joe, she said, ‘You’d be insane to try it. You don’t need it.’

‘Are you implying that I do?’ Monica demanded.

‘We’re all different,’ Gretchen said. ‘Maybe you can handle it. I can’t.’

‘You suggesting Joe can’t?’ Monica asked. ‘Big man like him?’

‘If you ask me bluntly, I do have doubts that Joe could handle it. He has such an intense personality it might blow him to hell.’ She paused and stood back and studied Joe, then said, ‘Sometimes it’s the big strong ones that destroy themselves. You don’t need to prove anything, Joe.’

So Monica and Cato turned to Yigal, asking how he could comprehend the inner structure of science if he failed to perceive it in its LSD forms. ‘Believe me when I say this,’ Monica insisted, ‘the new discoveries in science will come from men who use LSD. They’ll see relationships you clods will never dream of. Look, if an ignoramus like me can look at a fragment of broken concrete and see every molecule … each of them standing alone by itself …’ She shrugged her shoulders at his obstinacy.

But when Monica and Cato renewed their pressures on Britta, they encountered a vigorous and final reaction. For several days she fended them off with polite refusals, but when they argued with her one morning in the plaza that she would never understand sex unless she participated in the act while under the influence of LSD, she became angrier than we had ever seen her; she raised her
arms against them and said, ‘Goddammit, you lay off me. You’re just like my father and the gramophone records.’

This was such a startling statement that we all stared at her. She was leaning against the statue as she said, ‘I take my beliefs from that experience, and none of you can change them, so don’t try, Monica.’

‘What beliefs?’ Monica asked mildly. It always surprised me how these young people could come to the edge of a fight and retreat without damaged egos. It was a marvelous attribute, which we lose as we grow older. If Britta had spoken so harshly to me, I’d have been subdued for three days, but little Monica blithely said, ‘Okay, let’s hear her pitch.’

‘I told Mr. Fairbanks about how my father had an obsession about an opera,’ Britta said. ‘
Pêcheurs de Perles.
It’s involved and has to do with Ceylon, but accept the fact that when I was a little girl he used to play its arias incessantly. He really loved them. They were a part of him.

‘He knew them only on old records made by Italian singers. Caruso, Tetrazzini, Gigli. Good, but Italian. So with the first paycheck I got from Mr. Mogstad—I worked for him, the jerk—I sent away to Oslo to get an Angel recording of the complete opera. It was the most money I’d spent up to then—bringing him the opera he loved wrapped in glassine paper. He had tears in his eyes when he took it. He put the first record on his machine as if it were a jewel—you know, not touching the edges.

‘Then the damnedest thing happened. When he heard the voices singing in French—the way the opera was written—he grew quite angry and shouted, “What are they doing?” I’ll never forget one passage. The priestess is asking the gods to protect the fishermen. In the Italian record, to save money they didn’t use a chorus, just the soprano’s voice with a violin representing the chorus. In the new record, of course, they used a full chorus, and the effect was stunning, but he cried, “What are they doing back there?” And you know, he played that wonderful opera only once. The French voices, the real music, a live chorus—they were too much for him.

‘He wanted to imagine the opera as it had been on his first old records—wispy voices singing in Italian. I realized then that if he ever did get to Ceylon … it would destroy him. He’d expect it to be like the colored photographs
he’d seen years ago when he was hiding in the mountains. Real Ceylon would kill him.’

‘Meaning what?’ Monica asked.

‘What you seek, Monica, is a vision of the world … not the world.’

‘And you?’

‘I want the world exactly as it is. If God wrote it in French, I don’t want it in Portuguese.’ She laughed at the pretentiousness of what she had just said and told us about an experience in Tromsø.

‘In the winters we had constant snow. On the whole island you wouldn’t see one patch of earth or highway. All covered. So much snow fell that our plows piled it up along the sides of the road, maybe eight feet deep. Our roads became canals cut down through the snow—a kind of safety wall on each side, so that nothing bad could happen to you unless you crashed into somebody at an intersection. Late at night we kids used to look for a mad taxi driver named Skaanevik. We’d give him what money we had and pile in for a drive across the island to the airport. Why did we do this? Because Skaanevik was the craziest driver in Norway. He’d get his taxi up to fifty miles an hour and go roaring down one of these roads protected by snow walls on each side. To turn a corner, he’d slam on the brakes—and we’d ricochet off the walls for a hundred yards, side to side. What could happen to us? When he came to an intersection he’d flash his lights off and on, and anyone on the side road would stop and the driver would say to his passengers, “We’d better wait. Skaanevik may be driving.” And we’d go roaring through, lurching from side to side and bouncing off the walls. It was marvelous, with the stars overhead and wind blowing through the pine trees.’

‘So what?’ Monica asked.

‘So I’m not afraid,’ Britta said. ‘I was the one who told Skaanevik, “Go faster.” But I want the thrills to be real ones … made out of this earth … with me in control. I don’t want dreams. So you lay off.’

Monica propositioned her no more.

I tried to be judicious in what I said about marijuana and LSD to the young people, because I did not want to
be a fraud. As a former fund salesman, and now an international investor, I had often found myself skating on the far edges of truth and had been forced to develop what the English call ‘a nice regard for honesty.’ I refused to tell young people what I did not believe myself, and in my reactions to drugs I was on tricky ground.

When I first started working out of Geneva, I was sent to Cambodia to sell mutual funds to Americans employed on a dam being built by Morrison-Knudsen of Idaho, and in my spare time I hung around the Bijou Hotel in Phnom Penh, where a covey of American newspapermen had assembled to report on Cambodia’s independence from France. I found the city a new experience, a blend of tedium and challenge. For whole weeks there would be nothing to do except watch the thin-hipped girls in their
sampots
; at intervals bizarre events would remind you that you were in an oriental city, where the rules were different.

I became good friends with the newspapermen, who were also affected by the tedium and exhilarated by the adventure. We visited Buddhist shrines, walked morning rounds with the saffron-robed monks begging rice, went upland to the brooding temples at Angkor, and picked our way into the dives.

In Phnom Penh two rivers meet, the muddy Mekong and the smaller Tonle-Sap, and near their confluence stood several rows of low grass-covered huts. Coolies and sweepers occupied these quarters, and you could tell which families were making money by the fact that over their grass roofs they had placed squares of corrugated iron, the sign of affluence throughout Southeast Asia.

One evening, when the flies were heavy in the Bijou, a Denver newspaperman about twenty-five said, ‘Let’s go down to the waterfront,’ and all who heard him understood what he meant. About seven of us said, ‘Why not?’ and we hired four rickshaws and set out. I was wedged in with the Denver man, and on the way he told me, ‘I figured it would be silly to be stuck in Phnom Penh and not try it.’ I agreed and so, apparently, did the others.

Our rickshaws pulled up beside the Mekong at a hut with a corrugated roof. In the door stood a very thin Cambodian or Chinese—we couldn’t tell which—nodding to us pleasantly. He ushered us in and asked in French,
‘Have any of you smoked opium before?’ We all said no, and he assured us, ‘It’s no great thing. I will show.’

He had two smoking rooms, each big enough to accommodate six, and we divided into two groups, the Denver man staying with me. The traditional idea of inert bodies stretched out on narrow bunks, which most of us imagined as the opium bit, did not apply. We sat in chairs, and a serving man brought us lighted pipes, which exuded a dense but not copious smoke with a distinctive heavy odor that was not unpleasant.

We inhaled slowly, expecting, I am sure, to be knocked flat by the power of the opium, but nothing much happened, at least not in my room. I was aware that the smoke was more penetrating and lingering than that of ordinary tobacco, but nothing more. My senses did not reel, nor did I see visions, nor did I experience that lethargy which is supposed to be the hallmark of the opium user.

I can speak of these things with a certain authority because all of us made careful observations during the session and compared notes when we returned to the Bijou. We concluded that if opium were the menace writers claimed, its effects were cunningly concealed. As newsmen and people who worked in various parts of the world, we would have felt cheated had we been denied this opportunity to judge the phenomenon at first hand.

For six of the seven that was that. The Denver man wanted to investigate a little more thoroughly, so he discovered the location of a posh establishment in the residential area of the city and invited me to accompany him. I told him, ‘No more opium for me,’ and he said, ‘Who’s urging? Just wait for me while I see how this thing really works.’

So a rickshaw took us to an ornate structure that could have been a whorehouse in 1880 Denver, for it had the same red plush and mirrors, the same kind of relaxed indifference in the waiting salon. The owner, this time definitely Chinese, spoke with us in good English, and my friend explained that he was an American reporter who would like to see the place and then have a pipe or two in one of the good rooms. The proprietor bowed.

This time we did see the reclining couches and the nearly unconscious men drifting on clouds of their own making. They had retreated from reality and from all responsibility. ‘Regulars,’ the Chinese told us. He had a
larger establishment, perhaps a dozen rooms, with not a woman in any of them, and I received then the impression which I still hold, that narcotics and sex are not good companions, in spite of recent propaganda to the contrary. We ended in a small, well-decorated room, where the Denver man said, ‘I’m going to smoke till something happens.’

While he was so occupied, I returned to the salon, where I talked with the owner about his business. He told me he received his opium from China … no trouble … the French had approved the trade in their day and now the Cambodians continued. It was his opinion that few Phnom Penh citizens were damaged by the drug. ‘Most of my customers are older men who have finished with their work and their women. For them, life is over. If they depart relaxed … it makes it just a little better.’

After an hour of such discussion, broken by the arrival and departure of obviously well-to-do men in their fifties, we were interrupted by a servant. He whispered something to the host, who broke into laughter. ‘Your friend is vomiting,’ he said, and a little while later the Denver newspaperman returned to the salon, very pale and much embarrassed. ‘Opium will never sweep the world,’ he said.

Two weeks later, however, he insisted that we visit another establishment to sniff heroin, and I remember that from this we did derive a sensation of power, and of fear. Two of the time-killing Americans even tried injecting small amounts of heroin into their arms, and they reported a definite bang. ‘Frightening,’ the Denver man said. ‘I’d never meddle with any of that stuff a second time.’ Later that year, when I was doing some work in Tokyo, I roomed with him for three weeks. He was engaged in a tempestuous love affair with a Ginza night-club dancer named Hiroko-san; they had known each other for about three years, and during his absence in Phnom Penh she had started taking injections of helipon, a heroin derivative much used in Japan.