The Lone Pilgrim (21 page)

I actually spoke once. This was at a formal dinner at the chairman of the department's house. This dinner party was so unusually dull that even through a glaze of marijuana I was bored. Thorne looked as if he were drowning. I myself began to itch. When I could stand it no longer I excused myself and went to the bathroom where I lit the monster joint I carried in my evening bag and took a few hits. This was Lionel's superfine Colombian loco-weed and extremely effective. When I came downstairs I felt all silvery. The chairman of the department's wife was talking about her niece, Allison, who was an accomplished young equestrienne. At the mention of horses, I spoke up. I remembered something about horses I had figured out high. Lionel Browning called these insights “marijuana moments”—things you like to remember when you are not stoned. Since no one had ever heard me say very much, everyone stopped to listen.

“Man's spatial relationship to the horse is one of the most confusing and deceptive in the world,” I heard myself say. “You are either sitting on top of one, or standing underneath one, and therefore it is impossible to gauge in any meaningful way exactly how big a horse is in relationship to you. This is not,” I added with fierce emphasis, “like a man inside a cathedral.”

I then shut up. There was a long silence. I meditated on what I had said which was certainly the most interesting thing anyone had said. Thorne's eyes seemed about to pop. There was not a sound. People had stopped eating. I looked around the table, gave a beautiful, unfocused smile, and went back to my dinner.

Finally, the chairman of the department's wife said: “That's very interesting, Ann.” And the conversation closed above my head, leaving me happy to rattle around in my own altered state.

Later, at home, Thorne said: “Whatever made you say what you said at dinner tonight?”

I said, in a grave voice: “It is something I have always believed.”

The nice thing about being high all the time is that life suspends itself in front of you endlessly, like telephone poles on a highway. Without plans you have the feeling that things either will never change, or will arrange themselves somehow someday.

A look around the campus did not fill the heart of this tender bride with visions of a rosy adult future. It was clear who was having all the fun and it was not the grown-ups. Thorne and I were the youngest faculty couple, and this gave us—I mean me—a good vantage point. A little older than us were couples with worn-out cars, sick children, and debts. If they were not saddled with these things, they had independent incomes and were saddled with attitudes. Then they got older and were seen kissing the spouses of others at parties, or were found, a pair of unassorted spouses, under a pile of coats on a bed at New Year's Eve parties. Then they got even older, and the strife of their marriages gave them the stony affection battle comrades have for one another.

There were marriages that seemed propped up with toothpicks, and ones in which the wife was present but functionless, like a vestigial organ. Then the husband, under the strain of being both father and more to little Emily, Matthew, and Tabitha plus teaching a full course load, was forced to have an affair with a graduate student in Boston whom he could see only every other weekend.

The thought of Thorne and my becoming any of these people was so frightful that I had no choice but to get immediately high. Something would either occur to me, or nothing would happen. Meanwhile, time drifted by in the company of Lionel Browning—a fine fellow and a truly great pothead for whom I had not one particle of sexual feeling. He was my perfect pal. Was this cheating? I asked myself. Well, I had to admit, it sort of was. Thorne did not know how much time I spent with him, but then Linnie was soon to graduate, so I had to get him while I could, so to speak.

In the spring, Thorne went off to a convention of the Historical Society and I went on a dope run to Boston with Linnie. I looked forward to this adventure. It did not seem likely that life would bring me many more offers of this sort. The purity of my friendship with Linnie was never tainted by the well-known number of motels that littered the road from school to Boston. Sex was never our mission.

We paid a visit to a dealer named Marv (he called himself Uncle Marv) Fenrich, who was somewhat of a legend. The legend had it that he had once been very brilliant, but that speed—his drug of choice—had turned his brain into shaving cream and now he was fit only to deal grass to college boys. He also dealt speed to more sinister campus types, and he had tried to con Linnie into this lucrative sideline. But Linnie wanted only quality marijuana and Uncle Marv respected him, although it irked him that Linnie was not interested. He sold what he called “The Uncle Marv Exam Special—Tailored to the Needs of the College Person.” This was a box containing two 5 milligram Dexamyls, a Dexamyl Spansule (15 mgs), two Benzedrines (5 mg), and something he called an “amphetamine football”—a large, olive-green pill which he claimed was pure speed coated with Vitamin B
₁₂
. On the shelves of his linen closet were jar upon hospital-size jar of pills. But his heart, if not the rest of his metabolism, was in grass, and he never shut up.

“Man,” he said, “now this particular reefer is very sublime, really very sublime. It is the country club of grass, mellow and rich. A very handsome high can be gotten off this stuff. Now my own personal favorite cocktail is to take two or three nice dexies, wash them down with some fine whiskey or it could be Sterno or your mother's French perfume, it makes no difference whatsoever, and then light up a huge monster reefer of the very best quality and fall on the floor thanking God in many languages. This is my own recipe for a very good time. I like to share these warm happy times with others. Often Uncle Marv suggests you do a popper or two if you feel unmotivated by any of the above. Or snap one under the nose of a loved friend. Believe me, the drugstore has a lot to offer these days. Now a hundred or so of those little Romilar pills make you writhe and think insects are crawling all over your body—some people like this sort of thing very deeply. I myself find it a cheap thrill. Say, Linnie, have you authentic college kids gotten into mescaline yet? Very attractive stuff. Yes, you may say that it is for people with no imagination, but think of it this way: if you have no imagination, a Swiss pharmaceutical company will supply one for you. Isn't that wonderful what modern science does? Let me tell you, this stuff is going to be very big. Uncle Marv is going to make many sublime shekels off this stuff as soon as he can set it up right. You just wait and see. Uncle Marv says: the streets of Boston and Cambridge are going to be stacked with little college boys and girls hyperventilating and having visions. Now this lysergic acid is also going to be very big, very big. God bless the Swiss! Now, Linnie,” he began rooting in various desk drawers. “Now, Linnie, how about some reds for all those wired-up college boys and girls to calm down after exams? I personally feel that reds go very well after a little speed abuse and I should know. Calm you down, take the reptile right out of you. Uncle Marv is so fond of these sublime red tens.” He paused. “Seconal,” he said rather coldly to me, since it was clear even to a person who was out of his mind that I did not know what he was talking about. “I like to see a person taking reds. This is a human person, a person unafraid to admit that he or she is
very nervous.
You don't want any? Well, all right. But you and this authentic college girl have not come to pass the evening in idle drug chatter. This is business. Reefer for Linnie, many shekels for Uncle Marv. Now, Linnie, this reefer in particular I want you to taste is very sublime. You and this authentic college girl must try some this very instant. Now this is Colombian loco-weed of the highest order. Of Colombian distinction and extremely handsome. I also have some horse tranquilizers, by the way. Interested? Extremely sublime. They make you lie down on the floor and whimper for help and companionship. Uncle Marv is very fond of these interesting new pills.”

He cleared a space on his messy kitchen table and proceeded to roll several absolutely perfect joints. It was extremely sublime grass, and Linnie bought a kilo of it.

“Linnie, it will not fail you,” Uncle Marv said. “Only the best, from me to you.” Linnie paid up, and Uncle Marv gave us each a bennie for a present, which we were very glad to have on the long ride home.

When Thorne came back from his conference, the axe, which had been poised so delicately over the back of my neck, fell. This marked the end of my old life, and the beginning of the new. Thorne had called me from Chicago—he had called all night—and I had not been home.

“You are sleeping with Lionel Browning,” he said.

“I never laid a hand on him,” I said.

“That's an interesting locution, Ann,” said Thorne. “Do you just lie there and let him run his grubby undergraduate hands all over you?”

This was of course my cue. “Yes,” I said. “I often lie there and let almost any undergraduate run his hands all over me. Often faculty is invited, like your colleague Jack Saks. Often the chairman of the department's wife pops over and she runs her hands all over me too.”

The effects of the beautiful joint I had smoked only an hour and a half ago were beginning to wane. I was getting a headache. I thought about the sweet little stash I kept in my lingerie drawer—all the grass I smoked at home tasted vaguely of sachet. I was longing to go upstairs where, underneath my socks, I had a little lump of African hash. I saw my future before me—a very depressing vision. I was fifty. Grown children. Going to the hairdresser to have my hair frosted. Doing some genteel work or other—I couldn't think what. Wearing a knit dress—the sort worn by the wife of the president of the college. Calling grimy boys from pay phones: “Hello, hello? Kenny? Steve? This is Mrs. Speizer calling. Do you have anything for me?”

There I would be in my proper hairdo. Facing change of life and still a total pothead. Locking the bathroom door behind me to toke up. By then Thorne would be the chairman of his department somewhere.

“That wife of mine,” he would say—of course he only spoke this way in my fantasies—“does say the oddest things. Can't keep track of where that mind of hers is meandering to. Goes out at odd hours and what funny boys she gets to do the lawn work. I can't imagine where she gets them from.”

In fact, this was the most depressing thought I had ever had. If you stay high enough you never wonder what will become of you. A large joint was waiting in my jacket pocket. How I longed to smoke it. Somewhere near me was adult life: I knew it. I could feel it breathing down my neck. Professor's wife smokes dope constantly must see shrink. Must grow up. Must find out why she cannot be straight. Why she refuses to enter the adult world. And so on. And Thorne—much sympathy for Thorne—for example, the chairman of the department's wife: “Dear Thorne, you poor thing! All alone in that house with a drug addict! When Ann has been sedated why don't you come over and have dinner with us and our lovely niece Allison and after Ann has been committed to a mental institution, you and Allison can establish a meaningful and truly adult relationship.”

The thing that divides the children from the adults is that children know it's us against them—how right they are—and adults are children who grew up and are comfortable being
them.
Two terrible images flashed before me. One was that life was like an unruly horse that rears up and kicks you in the head. And the other was that my life was like a pane of glass being carried around by a nervous and incompetent person who was bound to let it slip and shatter into zillions of pieces on the pavement. My futureless life, besides being shattered and rearing up, unwound endlessly before me. What was around for me to be? There did not seem to be very much of anything. Suddenly I felt a rush of jaunty courage, the kind you feel when everything has bottomed out and just about every old thing is lost.

“Thorne,” I said. “I smoke marijuana unceasingly and always have. What do you think of that?”

“Incessantly,” said Thorne.

“Thorne,” I said. “I have been stoned from the first minute you laid eyes on me and I am stoned now.”

He regarded me for a moment. “You mean, you came to my class high?” Thorne said. “And you're high now?”

“Yes,” I said. “I was stoned in your class and I am stoned right now but not as stoned as I want to be. So I am going to take this great big gigantic reefer out of my pocket and light it up and I am going to share it with you.”

He looked shocked.

“You can get in jail for smoking that stuff, Ann,” he said in an awed voice.

“An interesting locution, Thorne,” I said. He stopped looking awed and began to look rather keen and hungry. I realized with a sudden jolt of happiness that I could very well change my husband's life in one easy step.

“Take this thing and inhale it,” I said.

“How can I when I don't smoke?” Thorne said.

“Make an effort. Try hard and be careful,” I said. “Go slow and don't exhale for a long time.”

“How long?” Thorne asked.

“Oh, a half an hour or so.” He inhaled successfully several times. In a little while he was high as a kite.

“My,” he said, “this certainly is an interesting substance. I feel I've been standing here for a few centuries. My hands are cold and my mouth is dry. Are these symptoms?”

For an hour Thorne went from room to room having impressions. He was having a wonderful time. Finally, he sat down.

“Were you stoned on our wedding day?” he asked.

“I'm afraid so,” I said.

“On our honeymoon?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“I see,” said Thorne. “In other words, you're like this all the time.”

I said more or less, mostly more.

“In other words,” said Thorne, “since you are like this all the time, you have no idea what it's like to be with me when you're not like this.”