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"I've got a block against this stuff," Arctor said.
" ‘—will soon determine,' " his official prompter said, unheeding, " ‘and then retribution will swiftly follow. And at that moment I would not for the life of me be in their shoes.' "
"Do you know why I've got a block against this stuff?" Arctor said. "Because this is what gets people on dope." He thought, This is why you lurch off and become a doper, this sort of stuff. This is why you give up and leave. In disgust.
But then he looked once more out at his audience and realized that for them this was not so. This was the only way they could be reached. He was talking to nitwits. Mental simps. It had to be put in the same way it had been put in first grade: A is for Apple and the Apple is Round.
"D," he said aloud to his audience, "is for Substance D. Which is for Dumbness and Despair and Desertion, the desertion of your friends from you, you from them, everyone from everyone, isolation and loneliness and hating and suspecting each other. D," he said then, "is finally Death. Slow Death, we—" He halted. "We, the dopers," he said, "call it." His voice rasped and faltered. "As you probably know. Slow Death. From the head on down. Well, that's it." He walked back to his chair and reseated himself. In silence.
"You blew it," his superior the prompter said. "See me in my office when you get back. Room 430."
"Yes," Arctor said. "I blew it."
They were looking at him as if he had pissed on the stage before their eyes. Although he was not sure just why.
Striding to the mike, the Lions Club host said, "Fred asked me in advance of this lecture to make it primarily a question-and-answer forum, with only a short introductory statement by him. I forgot to mention that. All right"—he raised his right hand—"who first, people?"
Arctor suddenly got to his feet again, clumsily.
"It would appear that Fred has something more to add," the host said, beckoning to him.
Going slowly back over to the microphone, Arctor said, his head down, speaking with precision, "Just this. Don't kick their asses after they're on it. The users, the addicts. Half of them, most of them, especially the girls, didn't know what they were getting on or even that they were getting on anything at all. Just try to keep them, the people, any of us, from getting on it." He looked up briefly. "See, they dissolve some reds in a glass of wine, the pushers, I mean—they give the booze to a chick, an underage little chick, with eight to ten reds in it, and she passes out, and then they inject her with a mex hit, which is half heroin and half Substance D—" He broke off. "Thank you," he said.
A man called up, "How do we stop them, sir?"
"Kill the pushers," Arctor said, and walked back to his chair.
He did not feel like returning right away to the Orange County Civic Center and Room 430, so he wandered down one of the commercial streets of Anaheim, inspecting the McDonaldburger stands and car washes and gas stations and Pizza Huts and other marvels.
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 holoscanner 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 eventualy, 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. "Goodby." 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.
"And they say it's been fucked over. Sabotaged. Cut wires, and like sort of weird stuff—you know, freaky things. Shorts and broken parts. Barris said he'd try to—"
"I'm going right home," Arctor said, and hung up. My primo possession, he thought bitterly. And that fool Barris tinkering with it. But I can't go home right now, he realized. I've got to go over to New-Path to check on what they're up to.
It was his assignment: mandatory.
3
" ‘—will soon determine,' " his official prompter said, unheeding, " ‘and then retribution will swiftly follow. And at that moment I would not for the life of me be in their shoes.' "
"Do you know why I've got a block against this stuff?" Arctor said. "Because this is what gets people on dope." He thought, This is why you lurch off and become a doper, this sort of stuff. This is why you give up and leave. In disgust.
But then he looked once more out at his audience and realized that for them this was not so. This was the only way they could be reached. He was talking to nitwits. Mental simps. It had to be put in the same way it had been put in first grade: A is for Apple and the Apple is Round.
"D," he said aloud to his audience, "is for Substance D. Which is for Dumbness and Despair and Desertion, the desertion of your friends from you, you from them, everyone from everyone, isolation and loneliness and hating and suspecting each other. D," he said then, "is finally Death. Slow Death, we—" He halted. "We, the dopers," he said, "call it." His voice rasped and faltered. "As you probably know. Slow Death. From the head on down. Well, that's it." He walked back to his chair and reseated himself. In silence.
"You blew it," his superior the prompter said. "See me in my office when you get back. Room 430."
"Yes," Arctor said. "I blew it."
They were looking at him as if he had pissed on the stage before their eyes. Although he was not sure just why.
Striding to the mike, the Lions Club host said, "Fred asked me in advance of this lecture to make it primarily a question-and-answer forum, with only a short introductory statement by him. I forgot to mention that. All right"—he raised his right hand—"who first, people?"
Arctor suddenly got to his feet again, clumsily.
"It would appear that Fred has something more to add," the host said, beckoning to him.
Going slowly back over to the microphone, Arctor said, his head down, speaking with precision, "Just this. Don't kick their asses after they're on it. The users, the addicts. Half of them, most of them, especially the girls, didn't know what they were getting on or even that they were getting on anything at all. Just try to keep them, the people, any of us, from getting on it." He looked up briefly. "See, they dissolve some reds in a glass of wine, the pushers, I mean—they give the booze to a chick, an underage little chick, with eight to ten reds in it, and she passes out, and then they inject her with a mex hit, which is half heroin and half Substance D—" He broke off. "Thank you," he said.
A man called up, "How do we stop them, sir?"
"Kill the pushers," Arctor said, and walked back to his chair.
He did not feel like returning right away to the Orange County Civic Center and Room 430, so he wandered down one of the commercial streets of Anaheim, inspecting the McDonaldburger stands and car washes and gas stations and Pizza Huts and other marvels.
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 holoscanner 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 eventualy, 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. "Goodby." 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.
"And they say it's been fucked over. Sabotaged. Cut wires, and like sort of weird stuff—you know, freaky things. Shorts and broken parts. Barris said he'd try to—"
"I'm going right home," Arctor said, and hung up. My primo possession, he thought bitterly. And that fool Barris tinkering with it. But I can't go home right now, he realized. I've got to go over to New-Path to check on what they're up to.
It was his assignment: mandatory.
3
Charles Freck, too, had been thinking about visiting New-Path. The freakout of Jerry Fabin had gotten to him that much.
Seated with Jim Barris in the Fiddler's Three coffee shop in Santa Ana, he fooled around with his sugar-glazed doughnut morosely. "It's a heavy decision," he said. "That's cold turkey they do. They just keep with you night and day so you don't snuff yourself or bite off your arm, but they never give you anything. Like, a doctor will prescribe. Valium, for instance."
Chuckling, Barris inspected his patty melt, which was melted imitation cheese and fake ground beef on special organic bread. "What kind of bread is this?" he asked.
"Look on the menu," Charles Freck said. "It explains."
"If you go in," Barris said, "you'll experience symptoms that emanate up from the basic fluids of the body, specifically those located in the brain. By that I refer to the catecholamines, such as noradrenalin and serotonin. You see, it functions this way: Substance D, in fact all addictive dope, but Substance D most of all, interacts with the catecholamines in such a fashion that involvement is locked in place at a subcellular level. Biological counter-adaptation has occurred, and in a sense forever." He ate a huge bite of the right half of his patty melt. "They used to believe this occurred only with the alkaloid narcotics, such as heroin."
"I never shot smack. It's a downer."
The waitress, foxy and nice in her yellow uniform, with pert boobs and blond hair, came over to their table. "Hi," she said. "Is everything all right?"
Charles Freck gazed up in fear.
"Is your name Patty?" Barris asked her, signaling to Charles Freck that it was cool.
"No." She pointed to the name badge on her right boob. "It's Beth."
I wonder what the left one's called, Charles Freck thought.
"The waitress we had last time was named Patty," Barris said, eyeing the waitress grossly. "Same as the sandwich."
"That must have been a different Patty from the sandwich. I think she spells it with an i."
"Everything is super good," Barris said. Over his head Charles Freck could see a thought balloon in which Beth was stripping off her clothes and moaning to be banged.
"Not with me," Charles Freck said. "I got a lot of problems nobody else has."
In a somber voice, Barris said, "More people than you'd think. And more each day. This is a world of illness, and getting progressively worse." Above his head, the thought balloon got worse too.
"Would you like to order dessert?" Beth asked, smiling down at them.
"What like?" Charles Freck said with suspicion.
"We have fresh strawberry pie and fresh peach pie," Beth said smiling, "that we make here ourselves."
"No, we don't want any dessert," Charles Freck said. The waitress left. "That's for old ladies," he said to Barris, "those fruit pies."
"The idea of turning yourself over for rehabilitation," Barris said, "certainly makes you apprehensive. That's a manifestation of purposeful negative symptoms, your fear. It's the drug talking, to keep you out of New-Path and keep you from getting off it. You see, all symptoms are purposeful, whether they are positive or negative."
"No shit," Charles Freck muttered.
"The negative ones show up as the cravings, which are deliberately generated by the total body to force its owner—which in this case is you—to search frantically—"
"The first thing they do to you when you go into New-Path," Charles Freck said, "is they cut off your pecker. As an object lesson. And then they fan out in all directions from there."
"Your spleen next," Barris said.
"They what, they cut—What does that do, a spleen?"
"Helps you digest your food."
"How?"
"By removing the cellulose from it."
"Then I guess after that—"
"Just noncellulose foods. No leaves or alfalfa."
"How long can you live that way?"
Barris said, "It depends on your attitude."
"How many spleens does the average person have?" He knew there usually were two kidneys.
"Depends on his weight and age."
"Why?" Charles Freck felt keen suspicion.
"A person grows more spleens over the years. By the time he's eighty—"
"You're shitting me."
Barris laughed. Always he had been a strange laugher, Charles Freck thought. An unreal laugh, like something breaking. "Why your decision," Barris said presently, "to turn yourself in for residence therapy at a drug rehab center?"
"Jerry Fabin," he said.
With a gesture of easy dismissal, Barris said, "Jerry was a special case. I once watched Jerry Fabin staggering around and falling down, shitting all over himself, not knowing where he was, trying to get me to look up and research what poison he'd got hold of, thallium sulfate most likely … it's used in insecticides and to snuff rats. It was a burn, somebody paying him back. I could think of ten different toxins and poisons that might—"
"There's another reason," Charles Freck said. "I'm running low again in my supply, and I can't stand it, this always running low and not knowing if I'm fucking ever going to see any more."
"Well, we can't even be sure we'll see another sunrise."
"But shit—I'm down so low now that it's like a matter of days. And also … I think I'm being ripped off. I can't be taking them that fast; somebody must be pilfering from my fucking stash."
"How many tabs do you drop a day?"
"That's very difficult to determine. But not that many."
"A tolerance builds up, you know."
"Sure, right, but not like that. I can't stand running out and like that. On the other hand …" He reflected. "I think I got a new source. That chick, Donna. Donna something."
"Oh, Bob's girl."
"His old lady," Charles Freck said, nodding.
"No, he never got into her pants. He tries to."
"Is she reliable?"
"Which way? As a lay or—" Barris gestured: hand to mouth and swallowing.
"What kind of sex is that?" Then he flashed on it. "Oh, yeah, the latter."
"Fairly reliable. Scatterbrained, somewhat. Like you'd expect with a chick, especially the darker ones. Has her brain between her legs, like most of them. Probably keeps her stash there, too." He chuckled. "Her whole dealer's stash."
Charles Freck leaned toward him. "Arctor never balled Donna? He talks about her like he did."
Barris said, "That's Bob Arctor. Talks like he did many things. Not the same, not at all."
"Well, how come he never laid her? Can't he get it on?"
Barris reflected wisely, still fiddling with his patty melt; he had now torn it into little bits. "Donna has problems. Possibly she's on junk. Her aversion to bodily contact in general—junkies lose interest in sex, you realize, due to their organs swelling up from vasoconstriction. And Donna, I've observed, shows an inordinate failure of sexual arousal, to an unnatural degree. Not just toward Arctor but toward …" He paused grumpily. "Other males as well."
"Shit, you just mean she won't come across."
"She would," Barris said, "if she were handled right. For instance …" He glanced up in a mysterious fashion. "I can show you how to lay her for ninety-eight cents."
"I don't want to lay her. I just want to buy from her." He felt uneasy. There was perpetually something about Barris that made his stomach uncomfortable. "Why ninety-eight cents?" he said. "She wouldn't take money; she's not turning tricks. Anyhow, she's Bob's chick."
"The money wouldn't be paid directly to her," Barris said in his precise, educated way. He leaned toward Charley Freck, pleasure and guile quivering amid his hairy nostrils. And not only that, the green tint of his shades had steamed up. "Donna does coke. Anybody who would give her a gram of coke she'd undoubtedly spread her legs for, especially if certain rare chemicals were added in strictly scientific fashion that I've done painstaking research on."
"I wish you wouldn't talk that way," Charles Freck said. "About her. Anyhow, a gram of coke's selling now for over a hundred dollars. Who's got that?"
Half sneezing, Barris declared, "I can derive a gram of pure cocaine at a total cost to me, for the ingredients from which I get it, not including my labor, of less than a dollar."
"Bullshit."
"I'll give you a demonstration."
"Where do these ingredients come from?"
"The 7-11 store," Barris said, and stumbled to his feet, discarding bits of patty melt in his excitement. "Get the check," he said, "and I'll show you. I've got a temporary lab set up at the house, until I can create a better one. You can watch me extract a gram of cocaine from common legal materials purchased openly at the 7-11 food store for under a dollar total cost." He started down the aisle. "Come on." His voice was urgent.
"Sure," Charles Freck said, picking up the check and following. The mother's dingey, he thought. Or maybe he isn't. With all those chemistry experiments he does, and reading and reading at the county library … maybe there's something to it. Think of the profit, he thought. Think what we could clear!
He hurried after Barris, who was getting out the keys to his Karmann Ghia as he strode, in his surplus flier's jump suit, past the cashier.
"What do we pick up here?" he asked Barris, who was casually strolling about the aisles of stacks of food.
"A spray can," Barris said. "Of Solarcaine."
"Sunburn spray?" Charles Freck did not really believe this was happening, but on the other hand, who knew? Who could be sure? He followed Barris to the counter; this time Barris paid.
They purchased the can of Solarcaine and then made it past the cop and back to their car. Barris drove rapidly from the lot, down the street, on and on at high speed, ignoring posted speed-limit signs, until finally he rolled to a halt before Bob Arctor's house, with all the old unopened newspapers in the tall grass of the front yard.
Stepping out, Barris lifted some items with wires dangling from the back seat to carry indoors. Voltmeter, Charles Freck saw. And other electronic testing gear, and a soldering gun. "What's that for?" he asked.
"I've got a long and arduous job to do," Barris said, carrying the various items, plus the Solarcaine, up the walk to the front door. He handed Charles Freck the door key. "And I'm probably not getting paid. As is customary."
Charles Freck unlocked the door, and they entered the house. Two cats and a dog rattled at them, making hopeful noises; he and Barris carefully edged them aside with their boots.
At the rear of the dinette Barris had, over the weeks, laid out a funky lab of sorts, bottles and bits of trash here and there, worthless-looking objects he had filched from different sources. Barris, Charles Freck knew, from having to hear about it, believed not so much in thrift as in ingenuity. You should be able to use the first thing that came to hand to achieve your objective, Barris preached. A thumbtack, a paper clip, part of an assembly the other part of which was broken or lost … It looked to Charles Freck as if a rat had set up shop here, was performing experiments with what a rat prized.
The first move in Barris's scheme was to get a plastic bag from the roll by the sink and squirt the contents of the spray can into it, on and on until the can or at least the gas was exhausted.
"This is unreal," Charles Freck said. "Super unreal."
"What they have deliberately done," Barris said cheerfully as he labored, "is mix the cocaine with oil so it can't be extracted. But my knowledge of chemistry is such that I know precisely how to separate the coke from the oil." He had begun vigorously shaking salt into the gummy slime in the bag. Now he poured it all into a glass jar. "I'm freezing it," he announced, grinning, "which causes the cocaine crystals to rise to the top, since they are lighter than air. Than the oil, I mean. And then the terminal step, of course, I keep to myself, but it involves an intricate methodological process of filtering." He opened the freezer above the refrigerator and carefully placed the jar inside.
"How long will it be in there?" Charles Freck asked.
"Half an hour." Barris got out one of his hand-rolled cigarettes, lit it, then strolled over to the heap of electronic testing equipment. He stood there meditating, rubbing his bearded chin.
"Yeah," Charles Freck said, "but I mean, so even if you get a whole gram of pure coke out of this, I can't use it on Donna to … you know, get into her pants in exchange. It's like buying her; that's what it amounts to."
"Exchange," Barris corrected. "You give her a gift, she gives you one. The most precious gift a woman has."
"She'd know she was being bought." He had seen enough of Donna to flash on that; Donna would make out the shuck right off.
"Cocaine is an aphrodisiac," Barris muttered, half to himself; he was setting up the testing equipment beside Bob Arctor's cephalochromoscope, which was Bob's most expensive possession. "After she's snorted a good part of it she'll be happy to uncork herself."
"Shit, man," Charles Freck protested. "You're talking about Bob Arctor's girl. He's my friend, and the guy you and Luckman live with."
Barris momentarily raised his shaggy head; he scrutinized Charles Freck for a time. "There's a great deal about Bob Arctor you're not aware of," he said. "That none of us are. Your view is simplistic and naive, and you believe about him what he wants you to."
"He's an all-right guy."
"Certainly," Barris said, nodding and grinning. "Beyond a doubt. One of the world's best. But I have come—we have come, those of us who have observed Arctor acutely and perceptively—to distinguish in him certain contradictions. Both in terms of personality structure and in behavior. In his total relatedness to life. In, so to speak, his innate style."
"You have anything specific?"
Barris's eyes, behind his green shades, danced.
"Your eyes dancing don't mean nothing to me," Charles Freck said. "What's wrong with the cephscope that you're working on it?" He moved in closer to look for himself.
Tilting the central chassis on end, Barris said, "Tell me what you observe there with the wiring underneath."
"I see cut wires," Charles Freck said. "And a bunch of what look like deliberate shorts. Who did it?"
Still Barris's merry knowing eyes danced with special delight.
"This crummy significant crud doesn't go down with me worth shit," Charles Freck said. "Who damaged this cephscope? When did it happen? You just find out recently? Arctor didn't say anything the last time I saw him, which was the day before yesterday."
Barris said, "Perhaps he wasn't prepared to talk about it yet."
"Well," Charles Freck said, "as far as I'm concerned, you're talking in spaced-out riddles. I think I'll go over to one of the New-Path residences and turn myself in and go through withdrawal cold turkey and get therapy, the destruct game they play, and be with those guys day and night, and not have to be around mysterious nuts like yourself that don't make sense and I can't understand. I can see this cephscope has been fucked over, but you're not telling me anything. Are you trying to allege that Bob Arctor did it, to his own expensive equipment, or are you not? What are you saying? I wish I was living over at New-Path, where I wouldn't have to go through this meaningful shit I don't dig day after day, if not with you then with some burned-out freak like you, equally spaced." He glared.
"I did not damage this transmitting unit," Barris said speculatively, his whiskers twitching, "and doubt seriously that Ernie Luckman did."
"I doubt seriously if Ernie Luckman ever damaged anything in his life, except that time he flipped out on bad acid and threw the livingroom coffee table and everything else besides out through the window of that apartment they had, him and that Joan chick, onto the parking area. That's different. Normally Ernie's got it all together more than the rest of us. No, Ernie wouldn't sabotage somebody else's cephscope. And Bob Arctor—it's his, isn't it? What'd he do, get up secretly in the middle of the night without his knowledge and do this, burn himself like this? This was done by somebody out to burn him. That's what this was." You probably did it, you gunjy motherfucker, he thought. You got the technical know-how and your mind's weird. "The person that did this," he said, "ought to be either in a federal Neural-Aphasia Clinic or the marble orchard. Preferably, in my opinion, the latter. Bob always really got off on this Altec cephscope; I musta seen him put it on, put it on, every time as soon as he gets home from work at night, soon as he steps in the door. Every guy has one thing he treasures. This was his. So I say, this is shit to do to him, man, shit."
"That's what I mean."
"What's what you mean?"
" ‘As soon as he gets home from work at night,' " Barris repeated. "I have been for some time conjecturing as to who Bob Arctor is really employed by, what specific actual organization it is that he can't tell us."
"It's the fucking Blue Chip Redemption Stamp Center in Placentia," Charles Freck said. "He told me once."
"I wonder what he does there."
Charles Freck sighed. "Colors the stamps blue." He did not like Barris, really. Freck wished he were elsewhere, maybe scoring from the first person he ran into or called. Maybe I should split, he said to himself, but then he recalled the jar of oil and cocaine cooling in the freezer, one hundred dollars' worth for ninety-eight cents. "Listen," he said, "when will that stuff be ready? I think you're shucking me. How could the Solarcaine people sell it for that little if it has a gram of pure coke in it? How could they make a profit?"
"They buy," Barris declared, "in large quantities."
In his head, Charles Freck rolled an instant fantasy: dump trucks full of cocaine backing up to the Solarcaine factory, wherever it was, Cleveland maybe, dumping tons and tons of pure, unstepped-on, uncut, high-grade cocaine into one end of the factory, where it was mixed with oil and inert gas and other garbage and then stuck in little bright-colored spray cans to be stacked up by the thousands in 7-11 stores and drugstores and supermarkets. What we ought to do, he ruminated, is knock over one of those dump trucks; take the whole load, maybe seven or eight hundred pounds—hell, lots more. What does a dump truck hold?
Barris brought him the now empty Solarcaine spray can for his inspection; he showed him the label, on which were listed all the contents. "See? Benzocaine. Which only certain gifted people know is a trade name for cocaine. If they said cocaine on the label people would flash on it and they'd eventually do what I do. People just don't have the education to realize. The scientific training, such as I went through."
"What are you going to do with this knowledge?" Charles Freck asked. "Besides making Donna Hawthorne horny?"
"I plan to write a best-seller eventually," Barris said. "A text for the average person about how to manufacture safe dope in his kitchen without breaking the law. You see, this does not break the law. Benzocaine is legal. I phoned a pharmacy and asked them. It's in a lot of things."
"Gee," Charles Freck said, impressed. He examined his wristwatch, to see how much longer they had to wait.
Now and then a dealer, realizing he was about to be busted, took refuge in one of the drug-rehabilitation places, like Synanon and Center Point and X-Kalay and New-Path, posing as an addict seeking help. Once inside, his wallet, his name, everything that identified him, was stripped away in preparation for building up a new personality not drugoriented. In this stripping-away process, much that the lawenforcement people needed in order to locate their suspect disappeared. Then, later on, when the pressure was off, the dealer emerged and resumed his usual activity outside.
How often this happened nobody knew. The drug-rehab outfits tried to discern when they were being so used, but not always successfully. A dealer in fear of forty years' imprisonment had motivation to spin a good story to the rehab staff that had the power to admit or refuse him. His agony at that point was mainly real.
Driving slowly up Katella Boulevard, Bob Arctor searched for the New-Path sign and the wooden building, formerly a private dwelling, that the energetic rehab people operated in this area. He did not enjoy shucking his way into a rehab place posing as a prospective resident in need of help, but this was the only way to do it. If he identified himself as a narcotics agent in search of somebody, the rehab people—most of them usually, anyhow—would begin evasive action as a matter of course. They did not want their family hassled by the Man, and he could get his head into that space, appreciate the validity of that. These ex-addicts were supposed to be safe at last; in fact, the rehab staff customarily officially guaranteed their safety on entering. On the other hand, the dealer he sought was a mother of the first water, and to use the rehab places this way ran contrary to every good interest for everyone. He saw no other choice for himself, or for Mr. F., who had originally put him onto Spade Weeks. Weeks had been Arctor's main subject for an interminable time, without result. And now, for ten whole days, he had been unfindable.
He made out the bold sign, parked in their little lot, which this particular branch of New-Path shared with a bakery, and walked in an uneven manner up the path to the front door, hands stuffed in his pockets, doing his loaded-and-miserable number.
At least the department didn't hold it against him for losing Spade Weeks. In their estimation, officially, it just proved how slick Weeks was. Technically Weeks was a runner rather than a dealer: he brought shipments of hard dope up from Mexico at irregular intervals, to somewhere short of L.A., where the buyers met and split it up. Weeks's method of sneaking the shipment across the border was a neat one: he taped it on the underside of the car of some straight type ahead of him at the crossing, then tracked the dude down on the U.S. side and shot him at the first convenient opportunity. If the U.S. border patrol discovered the dope taped on the underside of the straight's vehicle, then the straight got sent up, not Weeks. Possession was prima facie in California. Too bad for the straight, his wife and kids.
Better than anyone else in Orange County undercover work, he recognized Weeks on sight: fat black dude, in his thirties, with a unique slow and elegant speech pattern, as if memorized at some phony English school. Actually, Weeks came from the slums of L.A. He'd learned his diction, most likely, from edutapes loaned by some college library.
Weeks liked to dress in a subdued but classy way, as if he were a doctor or a lawyer. Often he carried an expensive alligator-hide attaché case and wore horn-rimmed glasses. Also, he usually was armed, with a shotgun for which he had commissioned a custom-made pistol grip from Italy, very posh and stylish. But at New-Path his assorted shucks would have been stripped away; they would have dressed him like everyone else, in random donated clothes, and stuck his attaché case in the closet.
Opening the solid wood door, Arctor entered.
Gloomy hall, lounge to his left, with guys reading. A pingpong table at the far end, then a kitchen. Slogans on the walls, some hand-done and some printed: THE ONLY REAL FAILURE IS TO FAIL OTHERS and so forth. Little noise, little activity. New-Path maintained assorted retail industries; probably most of the residents, guys and chicks alike, were at work, at their hair shops and gas stations and ballpointpen works. He stood there, waiting in a weary way.
"Yes?" A girl appeared, pretty, wearing an extremely short blue cotton skirt and T-shirt with NEW-PATH dyed across it from nipple to nipple.
He said, in a thick, croaking, humiliated voice, "I'm—in a bad space. Can't get it together any more. Can I sit down?"
"Sure." The girl waved, and two guys, mediocre in appearance, showed up, looking impassive. "Take him where he can sit down and get him some coffee."
What a drag, Arctor thought as he let the two guys coerce him to a seedy-looking overstuffed couch. Dismal walls, he noticed. Dismal low-quality donated paint. They subsisted, though, on contributions; difficulty in getting funded. "Thanks," he grated shakily, as if it was an overwhelming relief to be there and sit. "Wow," he said, attempting to smooth his hair; he made it seem that he couldn't and gave up.
The girl, directly before him, said firmly, "You look like hell, mister."
"Yeah," both guys agreed, in a surprisingly snappy tone. "Like real shit. What you been doing, lying in your own crap?"
Arctor blinked.
"Who are you?" one guy demanded.
"You can see what he is," the other said. "Some scum from the fucking garbage pail. Look." He pointed at Arctor's hair. "Lice. That's why you itch, Jack."
The girl, calm and above it, but not in any way friendly, said, "Why did you come in here, mister?"
To himself Arctor thought, Because you have a bigtime runner in here somewhere. And I'm the Man. And you're stupid, all of you. But instead he muttered cringingly, which was evidently what was expected, "Did you say—"
"Yes, mister, you can have some coffee." The girl jerked her head, and one of the guys obediently strode off to the kitchen.
A pause. Then the girl bent down and touched his knee. "You feel pretty bad, don't you?" she said softly.
He could only nod.
"Shame and a sense of disgust at the thing you are," she said.
"Yeah," he agreed.
Seated with Jim Barris in the Fiddler's Three coffee shop in Santa Ana, he fooled around with his sugar-glazed doughnut morosely. "It's a heavy decision," he said. "That's cold turkey they do. They just keep with you night and day so you don't snuff yourself or bite off your arm, but they never give you anything. Like, a doctor will prescribe. Valium, for instance."
Chuckling, Barris inspected his patty melt, which was melted imitation cheese and fake ground beef on special organic bread. "What kind of bread is this?" he asked.
"Look on the menu," Charles Freck said. "It explains."
"If you go in," Barris said, "you'll experience symptoms that emanate up from the basic fluids of the body, specifically those located in the brain. By that I refer to the catecholamines, such as noradrenalin and serotonin. You see, it functions this way: Substance D, in fact all addictive dope, but Substance D most of all, interacts with the catecholamines in such a fashion that involvement is locked in place at a subcellular level. Biological counter-adaptation has occurred, and in a sense forever." He ate a huge bite of the right half of his patty melt. "They used to believe this occurred only with the alkaloid narcotics, such as heroin."
"I never shot smack. It's a downer."
The waitress, foxy and nice in her yellow uniform, with pert boobs and blond hair, came over to their table. "Hi," she said. "Is everything all right?"
Charles Freck gazed up in fear.
"Is your name Patty?" Barris asked her, signaling to Charles Freck that it was cool.
"No." She pointed to the name badge on her right boob. "It's Beth."
I wonder what the left one's called, Charles Freck thought.
"The waitress we had last time was named Patty," Barris said, eyeing the waitress grossly. "Same as the sandwich."
"That must have been a different Patty from the sandwich. I think she spells it with an i."
"Everything is super good," Barris said. Over his head Charles Freck could see a thought balloon in which Beth was stripping off her clothes and moaning to be banged.
"Not with me," Charles Freck said. "I got a lot of problems nobody else has."
In a somber voice, Barris said, "More people than you'd think. And more each day. This is a world of illness, and getting progressively worse." Above his head, the thought balloon got worse too.
"Would you like to order dessert?" Beth asked, smiling down at them.
"What like?" Charles Freck said with suspicion.
"We have fresh strawberry pie and fresh peach pie," Beth said smiling, "that we make here ourselves."
"No, we don't want any dessert," Charles Freck said. The waitress left. "That's for old ladies," he said to Barris, "those fruit pies."
"The idea of turning yourself over for rehabilitation," Barris said, "certainly makes you apprehensive. That's a manifestation of purposeful negative symptoms, your fear. It's the drug talking, to keep you out of New-Path and keep you from getting off it. You see, all symptoms are purposeful, whether they are positive or negative."
"No shit," Charles Freck muttered.
"The negative ones show up as the cravings, which are deliberately generated by the total body to force its owner—which in this case is you—to search frantically—"
"The first thing they do to you when you go into New-Path," Charles Freck said, "is they cut off your pecker. As an object lesson. And then they fan out in all directions from there."
"Your spleen next," Barris said.
"They what, they cut—What does that do, a spleen?"
"Helps you digest your food."
"How?"
"By removing the cellulose from it."
"Then I guess after that—"
"Just noncellulose foods. No leaves or alfalfa."
"How long can you live that way?"
Barris said, "It depends on your attitude."
"How many spleens does the average person have?" He knew there usually were two kidneys.
"Depends on his weight and age."
"Why?" Charles Freck felt keen suspicion.
"A person grows more spleens over the years. By the time he's eighty—"
"You're shitting me."
Barris laughed. Always he had been a strange laugher, Charles Freck thought. An unreal laugh, like something breaking. "Why your decision," Barris said presently, "to turn yourself in for residence therapy at a drug rehab center?"
"Jerry Fabin," he said.
With a gesture of easy dismissal, Barris said, "Jerry was a special case. I once watched Jerry Fabin staggering around and falling down, shitting all over himself, not knowing where he was, trying to get me to look up and research what poison he'd got hold of, thallium sulfate most likely … it's used in insecticides and to snuff rats. It was a burn, somebody paying him back. I could think of ten different toxins and poisons that might—"
"There's another reason," Charles Freck said. "I'm running low again in my supply, and I can't stand it, this always running low and not knowing if I'm fucking ever going to see any more."
"Well, we can't even be sure we'll see another sunrise."
"But shit—I'm down so low now that it's like a matter of days. And also … I think I'm being ripped off. I can't be taking them that fast; somebody must be pilfering from my fucking stash."
"How many tabs do you drop a day?"
"That's very difficult to determine. But not that many."
"A tolerance builds up, you know."
"Sure, right, but not like that. I can't stand running out and like that. On the other hand …" He reflected. "I think I got a new source. That chick, Donna. Donna something."
"Oh, Bob's girl."
"His old lady," Charles Freck said, nodding.
"No, he never got into her pants. He tries to."
"Is she reliable?"
"Which way? As a lay or—" Barris gestured: hand to mouth and swallowing.
"What kind of sex is that?" Then he flashed on it. "Oh, yeah, the latter."
"Fairly reliable. Scatterbrained, somewhat. Like you'd expect with a chick, especially the darker ones. Has her brain between her legs, like most of them. Probably keeps her stash there, too." He chuckled. "Her whole dealer's stash."
Charles Freck leaned toward him. "Arctor never balled Donna? He talks about her like he did."
Barris said, "That's Bob Arctor. Talks like he did many things. Not the same, not at all."
"Well, how come he never laid her? Can't he get it on?"
Barris reflected wisely, still fiddling with his patty melt; he had now torn it into little bits. "Donna has problems. Possibly she's on junk. Her aversion to bodily contact in general—junkies lose interest in sex, you realize, due to their organs swelling up from vasoconstriction. And Donna, I've observed, shows an inordinate failure of sexual arousal, to an unnatural degree. Not just toward Arctor but toward …" He paused grumpily. "Other males as well."
"Shit, you just mean she won't come across."
"She would," Barris said, "if she were handled right. For instance …" He glanced up in a mysterious fashion. "I can show you how to lay her for ninety-eight cents."
"I don't want to lay her. I just want to buy from her." He felt uneasy. There was perpetually something about Barris that made his stomach uncomfortable. "Why ninety-eight cents?" he said. "She wouldn't take money; she's not turning tricks. Anyhow, she's Bob's chick."
"The money wouldn't be paid directly to her," Barris said in his precise, educated way. He leaned toward Charley Freck, pleasure and guile quivering amid his hairy nostrils. And not only that, the green tint of his shades had steamed up. "Donna does coke. Anybody who would give her a gram of coke she'd undoubtedly spread her legs for, especially if certain rare chemicals were added in strictly scientific fashion that I've done painstaking research on."
"I wish you wouldn't talk that way," Charles Freck said. "About her. Anyhow, a gram of coke's selling now for over a hundred dollars. Who's got that?"
Half sneezing, Barris declared, "I can derive a gram of pure cocaine at a total cost to me, for the ingredients from which I get it, not including my labor, of less than a dollar."
"Bullshit."
"I'll give you a demonstration."
"Where do these ingredients come from?"
"The 7-11 store," Barris said, and stumbled to his feet, discarding bits of patty melt in his excitement. "Get the check," he said, "and I'll show you. I've got a temporary lab set up at the house, until I can create a better one. You can watch me extract a gram of cocaine from common legal materials purchased openly at the 7-11 food store for under a dollar total cost." He started down the aisle. "Come on." His voice was urgent.
"Sure," Charles Freck said, picking up the check and following. The mother's dingey, he thought. Or maybe he isn't. With all those chemistry experiments he does, and reading and reading at the county library … maybe there's something to it. Think of the profit, he thought. Think what we could clear!
He hurried after Barris, who was getting out the keys to his Karmann Ghia as he strode, in his surplus flier's jump suit, past the cashier.
***
They parked in the lot of the 7-11, got out and walked inside. As usual, a huge dumb cop stood pretending to read a strokebook magazine at the front counter; in actuality, Charles Freck knew, he was checking out everyone who entered, to see if they were intending to hit the place."What do we pick up here?" he asked Barris, who was casually strolling about the aisles of stacks of food.
"A spray can," Barris said. "Of Solarcaine."
"Sunburn spray?" Charles Freck did not really believe this was happening, but on the other hand, who knew? Who could be sure? He followed Barris to the counter; this time Barris paid.
They purchased the can of Solarcaine and then made it past the cop and back to their car. Barris drove rapidly from the lot, down the street, on and on at high speed, ignoring posted speed-limit signs, until finally he rolled to a halt before Bob Arctor's house, with all the old unopened newspapers in the tall grass of the front yard.
Stepping out, Barris lifted some items with wires dangling from the back seat to carry indoors. Voltmeter, Charles Freck saw. And other electronic testing gear, and a soldering gun. "What's that for?" he asked.
"I've got a long and arduous job to do," Barris said, carrying the various items, plus the Solarcaine, up the walk to the front door. He handed Charles Freck the door key. "And I'm probably not getting paid. As is customary."
Charles Freck unlocked the door, and they entered the house. Two cats and a dog rattled at them, making hopeful noises; he and Barris carefully edged them aside with their boots.
At the rear of the dinette Barris had, over the weeks, laid out a funky lab of sorts, bottles and bits of trash here and there, worthless-looking objects he had filched from different sources. Barris, Charles Freck knew, from having to hear about it, believed not so much in thrift as in ingenuity. You should be able to use the first thing that came to hand to achieve your objective, Barris preached. A thumbtack, a paper clip, part of an assembly the other part of which was broken or lost … It looked to Charles Freck as if a rat had set up shop here, was performing experiments with what a rat prized.
The first move in Barris's scheme was to get a plastic bag from the roll by the sink and squirt the contents of the spray can into it, on and on until the can or at least the gas was exhausted.
"This is unreal," Charles Freck said. "Super unreal."
"What they have deliberately done," Barris said cheerfully as he labored, "is mix the cocaine with oil so it can't be extracted. But my knowledge of chemistry is such that I know precisely how to separate the coke from the oil." He had begun vigorously shaking salt into the gummy slime in the bag. Now he poured it all into a glass jar. "I'm freezing it," he announced, grinning, "which causes the cocaine crystals to rise to the top, since they are lighter than air. Than the oil, I mean. And then the terminal step, of course, I keep to myself, but it involves an intricate methodological process of filtering." He opened the freezer above the refrigerator and carefully placed the jar inside.
"How long will it be in there?" Charles Freck asked.
"Half an hour." Barris got out one of his hand-rolled cigarettes, lit it, then strolled over to the heap of electronic testing equipment. He stood there meditating, rubbing his bearded chin.
"Yeah," Charles Freck said, "but I mean, so even if you get a whole gram of pure coke out of this, I can't use it on Donna to … you know, get into her pants in exchange. It's like buying her; that's what it amounts to."
"Exchange," Barris corrected. "You give her a gift, she gives you one. The most precious gift a woman has."
"She'd know she was being bought." He had seen enough of Donna to flash on that; Donna would make out the shuck right off.
"Cocaine is an aphrodisiac," Barris muttered, half to himself; he was setting up the testing equipment beside Bob Arctor's cephalochromoscope, which was Bob's most expensive possession. "After she's snorted a good part of it she'll be happy to uncork herself."
"Shit, man," Charles Freck protested. "You're talking about Bob Arctor's girl. He's my friend, and the guy you and Luckman live with."
Barris momentarily raised his shaggy head; he scrutinized Charles Freck for a time. "There's a great deal about Bob Arctor you're not aware of," he said. "That none of us are. Your view is simplistic and naive, and you believe about him what he wants you to."
"He's an all-right guy."
"Certainly," Barris said, nodding and grinning. "Beyond a doubt. One of the world's best. But I have come—we have come, those of us who have observed Arctor acutely and perceptively—to distinguish in him certain contradictions. Both in terms of personality structure and in behavior. In his total relatedness to life. In, so to speak, his innate style."
"You have anything specific?"
Barris's eyes, behind his green shades, danced.
"Your eyes dancing don't mean nothing to me," Charles Freck said. "What's wrong with the cephscope that you're working on it?" He moved in closer to look for himself.
Tilting the central chassis on end, Barris said, "Tell me what you observe there with the wiring underneath."
"I see cut wires," Charles Freck said. "And a bunch of what look like deliberate shorts. Who did it?"
Still Barris's merry knowing eyes danced with special delight.
"This crummy significant crud doesn't go down with me worth shit," Charles Freck said. "Who damaged this cephscope? When did it happen? You just find out recently? Arctor didn't say anything the last time I saw him, which was the day before yesterday."
Barris said, "Perhaps he wasn't prepared to talk about it yet."
"Well," Charles Freck said, "as far as I'm concerned, you're talking in spaced-out riddles. I think I'll go over to one of the New-Path residences and turn myself in and go through withdrawal cold turkey and get therapy, the destruct game they play, and be with those guys day and night, and not have to be around mysterious nuts like yourself that don't make sense and I can't understand. I can see this cephscope has been fucked over, but you're not telling me anything. Are you trying to allege that Bob Arctor did it, to his own expensive equipment, or are you not? What are you saying? I wish I was living over at New-Path, where I wouldn't have to go through this meaningful shit I don't dig day after day, if not with you then with some burned-out freak like you, equally spaced." He glared.
"I did not damage this transmitting unit," Barris said speculatively, his whiskers twitching, "and doubt seriously that Ernie Luckman did."
"I doubt seriously if Ernie Luckman ever damaged anything in his life, except that time he flipped out on bad acid and threw the livingroom coffee table and everything else besides out through the window of that apartment they had, him and that Joan chick, onto the parking area. That's different. Normally Ernie's got it all together more than the rest of us. No, Ernie wouldn't sabotage somebody else's cephscope. And Bob Arctor—it's his, isn't it? What'd he do, get up secretly in the middle of the night without his knowledge and do this, burn himself like this? This was done by somebody out to burn him. That's what this was." You probably did it, you gunjy motherfucker, he thought. You got the technical know-how and your mind's weird. "The person that did this," he said, "ought to be either in a federal Neural-Aphasia Clinic or the marble orchard. Preferably, in my opinion, the latter. Bob always really got off on this Altec cephscope; I musta seen him put it on, put it on, every time as soon as he gets home from work at night, soon as he steps in the door. Every guy has one thing he treasures. This was his. So I say, this is shit to do to him, man, shit."
"That's what I mean."
"What's what you mean?"
" ‘As soon as he gets home from work at night,' " Barris repeated. "I have been for some time conjecturing as to who Bob Arctor is really employed by, what specific actual organization it is that he can't tell us."
"It's the fucking Blue Chip Redemption Stamp Center in Placentia," Charles Freck said. "He told me once."
"I wonder what he does there."
Charles Freck sighed. "Colors the stamps blue." He did not like Barris, really. Freck wished he were elsewhere, maybe scoring from the first person he ran into or called. Maybe I should split, he said to himself, but then he recalled the jar of oil and cocaine cooling in the freezer, one hundred dollars' worth for ninety-eight cents. "Listen," he said, "when will that stuff be ready? I think you're shucking me. How could the Solarcaine people sell it for that little if it has a gram of pure coke in it? How could they make a profit?"
"They buy," Barris declared, "in large quantities."
In his head, Charles Freck rolled an instant fantasy: dump trucks full of cocaine backing up to the Solarcaine factory, wherever it was, Cleveland maybe, dumping tons and tons of pure, unstepped-on, uncut, high-grade cocaine into one end of the factory, where it was mixed with oil and inert gas and other garbage and then stuck in little bright-colored spray cans to be stacked up by the thousands in 7-11 stores and drugstores and supermarkets. What we ought to do, he ruminated, is knock over one of those dump trucks; take the whole load, maybe seven or eight hundred pounds—hell, lots more. What does a dump truck hold?
Barris brought him the now empty Solarcaine spray can for his inspection; he showed him the label, on which were listed all the contents. "See? Benzocaine. Which only certain gifted people know is a trade name for cocaine. If they said cocaine on the label people would flash on it and they'd eventually do what I do. People just don't have the education to realize. The scientific training, such as I went through."
"What are you going to do with this knowledge?" Charles Freck asked. "Besides making Donna Hawthorne horny?"
"I plan to write a best-seller eventually," Barris said. "A text for the average person about how to manufacture safe dope in his kitchen without breaking the law. You see, this does not break the law. Benzocaine is legal. I phoned a pharmacy and asked them. It's in a lot of things."
"Gee," Charles Freck said, impressed. He examined his wristwatch, to see how much longer they had to wait.
***
Bob Arctor had been told by Hank, who was Mr. F., to check out the local New-Path residence centers in order to locate a major dealer, whom he had been watching, but who had abruptly dropped from sight.Now and then a dealer, realizing he was about to be busted, took refuge in one of the drug-rehabilitation places, like Synanon and Center Point and X-Kalay and New-Path, posing as an addict seeking help. Once inside, his wallet, his name, everything that identified him, was stripped away in preparation for building up a new personality not drugoriented. In this stripping-away process, much that the lawenforcement people needed in order to locate their suspect disappeared. Then, later on, when the pressure was off, the dealer emerged and resumed his usual activity outside.
How often this happened nobody knew. The drug-rehab outfits tried to discern when they were being so used, but not always successfully. A dealer in fear of forty years' imprisonment had motivation to spin a good story to the rehab staff that had the power to admit or refuse him. His agony at that point was mainly real.
Driving slowly up Katella Boulevard, Bob Arctor searched for the New-Path sign and the wooden building, formerly a private dwelling, that the energetic rehab people operated in this area. He did not enjoy shucking his way into a rehab place posing as a prospective resident in need of help, but this was the only way to do it. If he identified himself as a narcotics agent in search of somebody, the rehab people—most of them usually, anyhow—would begin evasive action as a matter of course. They did not want their family hassled by the Man, and he could get his head into that space, appreciate the validity of that. These ex-addicts were supposed to be safe at last; in fact, the rehab staff customarily officially guaranteed their safety on entering. On the other hand, the dealer he sought was a mother of the first water, and to use the rehab places this way ran contrary to every good interest for everyone. He saw no other choice for himself, or for Mr. F., who had originally put him onto Spade Weeks. Weeks had been Arctor's main subject for an interminable time, without result. And now, for ten whole days, he had been unfindable.
He made out the bold sign, parked in their little lot, which this particular branch of New-Path shared with a bakery, and walked in an uneven manner up the path to the front door, hands stuffed in his pockets, doing his loaded-and-miserable number.
At least the department didn't hold it against him for losing Spade Weeks. In their estimation, officially, it just proved how slick Weeks was. Technically Weeks was a runner rather than a dealer: he brought shipments of hard dope up from Mexico at irregular intervals, to somewhere short of L.A., where the buyers met and split it up. Weeks's method of sneaking the shipment across the border was a neat one: he taped it on the underside of the car of some straight type ahead of him at the crossing, then tracked the dude down on the U.S. side and shot him at the first convenient opportunity. If the U.S. border patrol discovered the dope taped on the underside of the straight's vehicle, then the straight got sent up, not Weeks. Possession was prima facie in California. Too bad for the straight, his wife and kids.
Better than anyone else in Orange County undercover work, he recognized Weeks on sight: fat black dude, in his thirties, with a unique slow and elegant speech pattern, as if memorized at some phony English school. Actually, Weeks came from the slums of L.A. He'd learned his diction, most likely, from edutapes loaned by some college library.
Weeks liked to dress in a subdued but classy way, as if he were a doctor or a lawyer. Often he carried an expensive alligator-hide attaché case and wore horn-rimmed glasses. Also, he usually was armed, with a shotgun for which he had commissioned a custom-made pistol grip from Italy, very posh and stylish. But at New-Path his assorted shucks would have been stripped away; they would have dressed him like everyone else, in random donated clothes, and stuck his attaché case in the closet.
Opening the solid wood door, Arctor entered.
Gloomy hall, lounge to his left, with guys reading. A pingpong table at the far end, then a kitchen. Slogans on the walls, some hand-done and some printed: THE ONLY REAL FAILURE IS TO FAIL OTHERS and so forth. Little noise, little activity. New-Path maintained assorted retail industries; probably most of the residents, guys and chicks alike, were at work, at their hair shops and gas stations and ballpointpen works. He stood there, waiting in a weary way.
"Yes?" A girl appeared, pretty, wearing an extremely short blue cotton skirt and T-shirt with NEW-PATH dyed across it from nipple to nipple.
He said, in a thick, croaking, humiliated voice, "I'm—in a bad space. Can't get it together any more. Can I sit down?"
"Sure." The girl waved, and two guys, mediocre in appearance, showed up, looking impassive. "Take him where he can sit down and get him some coffee."
What a drag, Arctor thought as he let the two guys coerce him to a seedy-looking overstuffed couch. Dismal walls, he noticed. Dismal low-quality donated paint. They subsisted, though, on contributions; difficulty in getting funded. "Thanks," he grated shakily, as if it was an overwhelming relief to be there and sit. "Wow," he said, attempting to smooth his hair; he made it seem that he couldn't and gave up.
The girl, directly before him, said firmly, "You look like hell, mister."
"Yeah," both guys agreed, in a surprisingly snappy tone. "Like real shit. What you been doing, lying in your own crap?"
Arctor blinked.
"Who are you?" one guy demanded.
"You can see what he is," the other said. "Some scum from the fucking garbage pail. Look." He pointed at Arctor's hair. "Lice. That's why you itch, Jack."
The girl, calm and above it, but not in any way friendly, said, "Why did you come in here, mister?"
To himself Arctor thought, Because you have a bigtime runner in here somewhere. And I'm the Man. And you're stupid, all of you. But instead he muttered cringingly, which was evidently what was expected, "Did you say—"
"Yes, mister, you can have some coffee." The girl jerked her head, and one of the guys obediently strode off to the kitchen.
A pause. Then the girl bent down and touched his knee. "You feel pretty bad, don't you?" she said softly.
He could only nod.
"Shame and a sense of disgust at the thing you are," she said.
"Yeah," he agreed.