Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes (31 page)

Q. Then you don’t—

A. Oh listen, I’ve known some nice nurses, I don’t say that . . . there’s one
here,
right
here,
on this floor—day-nurse . . . a darling, perfectly darling little old lady—she’s let’s see, how old is [name] now . . . ? She’s sixty . . .
four. Sixty-four
years old! And a
marvelous
nurse! Really. Marvelous sweet old lady! But, I mean, ha, ha, well, I don’t mind telling you it’s . . . well, it’s a
rare
thing, a
very rare thing!

Q. Yes, well–

A. But listen . . . just a minute—what did you say? Just before? You said
why
can’t they make it with them? The patients and so on—is that what you said?

Q. Well, you said they were frustrated . . .

A. Well, but
that’s
not going to change their . . . well, what kind of hospital is
that,
for heaven’s sake! With the nurses getting laid all over the place! You think they
should
do that? Ha, ha, you . . . you’ve got some funny ideas about hospitals!

Q. I didn’t say they
should
do that, I just wondered if they
did.

A. And an all-gay hospital! Ha, ha! That’s very
funny!

Q. Well, you don’t think that’s . . . what, that isn’t even
conceivable?

A. Well, you couldn’t get an all-gay
staff
to treat
only gay patients,
I can tell you that.

Q. But would it be
possible
to have an all-gay staff? I mean are there gay
janitors,
for example?

A. Oh, ho-ho!
Are
there!

Q. Well then, theoretically–

A. Ha, ha! Some of my best friends are gay janitors!

Q. Well, the point–

A. No, no, that was a
joke!

Q. Yes, I realize that, I realize that. It’s very funny.

A. Ho-ho! You didn’t
laugh!

Q. Well . . . I did really. I mean I
recognize
it as a joke. I acknowledge it as a joke. Ha, ha. How’s that?

A. Ha, ha . . . Well,
you
have some funny ideas about hospitals, that’s all I can say.

Q. I don’t have any ideas about it—I wanted
you
to tell
me
about it. I mean we’ve . . . you’ve made certain generalizations, about doctors and so on, so I was asking about
that.

A. About an all-gay hospital?

Q. Well, an all-gay
staff,
yes.

A. Well, it would be a damn good hospital, I can tell you that. Better than any there are
now.

Q. Well, what about the . . . wouldn’t the gay staff try to . . . try to take advantage of the non-gay patients? While they were asleep, or weakened or something?

A. Ha, ha! Well, I mean if you call love and . . . and—well, what do you mean “take
advantage
of”?

Q. Well, I don’t know . . . it seems like they would.

A. Well, anyway,
one
thing—you could be sure of getting plenty of
attention!

Q. Yes . . .

A. And I
do
mean
you!

Q. Uh-huh . . .

A. Ha, ha! Now, now, don’t take it so
person-ally!

M
Y MOST OUTLANDISH DRUG
experience, now that I think about it, didn’t occur with beat Village or Harlem weirdos, but during a brief run with the ten-to-four Mad Ave crowd.

How it happened, this friend of mine who was working at
Lance
(“The Mag for Men”) phoned me one morning—he knew I was strapped.

“One of the fiction editors is out with syph or something,” he said. “You want to take his place for a while?”

I was still mostly asleep, so I tried to cool it by shooting a few incisive queries as to the nature of the gig—which he couldn’t seem to follow.

“Well,” he said finally, “you won’t have to
do
anything, if that’s what you mean.” He had a sort of blunt and sullen way about him—John Fox his name was, an ex-Yalie and would-be writer who was constantly having to “put it back on the shelf,” as he expressed it (blunt, sullen), and take one of these hot-shot Mad Ave jobs, and always for some odd reason—like at present, paying for his mom’s analysis.

Anyway, I accepted the post, and now I had been working there about three weeks. It wasn’t true, of course, what he’d said about not having to do anything—I mean the way he had talked I wouldn’t even have to get out of bed—but after three weeks my routine was fairly smooth: up at ten, wash face, brush teeth, fresh shirt, dex, and make it. I had this transistor-shaver I’d copped for five off a junky-booster, so I would shave with it in the cab, and walk into the office at ten-thirty or so, dapper as Dan and hip as Harry. Then into my own small office, lock the door, and start stashing the return postage from the unsolicited mss. We would get an incredible amount of mss.—about two hundred a day—and these were divided into two categories: (l) those from agents, and (2) those that came in cold, straight from the author. The ratio was about 30 to 1, in favor of the latter—which formed a gigantic heap called “the shit pile,” or (by the girl-readers) “the garbage dump.” These always contained a lot of return postage—so right away I was able to supplement my weekly wage by seven or eight dollars a day in postage stamps. Everyone else considered the “shit pile” as something heinously repugnant, especially the sensitive girl (“garbage”) readers, so it was a source of irritation and chagrin to my secretary when I first told her I wished to read “
all
unsolicited manuscripts and
no
manuscripts from agents.”

John Fox found it quite incomprehensible.

“You must be out of your nut!” he said. “Ha! Wait until you try to read some of that crap in the shit pile!”

I explained however (and it was actually true in the beginning) that I had this theory about the existence of a
pure, primitive, folk-like
literature—which, if it did exist, could only turn up among the unsolicited mss. Or
weird,
something really
weird,
even insane, might turn up there—whereas I knew the stuff from the agents would be the same old predictably competent tripe. So, aside from stashing the stamps, I would read each of these shit-pile ms. very carefully—reading subtleties, insinuations, multilevel
entendre
into what was actually just a sort of flat, straightforward simplemindedness. I would think each was a put-on—a fresh and curious parody of some kind, and I would read on, and on, all the way to the end, waiting for the payoff . . . but, of course, that never happened, and I gradually began to revise my theory and to refine my method. By the second week, I was able to reject a ms. after reading the opening sentence, and by the third I could often reject on the basis of
title
alone—the principle being if an author would allow a blatantly dumbbell title, he was incapable of writing a story worth reading. (This was thoroughly tested and proved before adopting.) Then instead of actually
reading
mss., I would spend hours, days really, just thinking, trying to refine and extend my method of blitz-rejection. I was able to take it a little farther, but not much. For example, any woman author who used “Mrs.” in her name could be rejected out of hand—
unless
it was used with only one name, like “by Mrs. Carter,” then it might be a weirdie. And again, any author using a middle initial or a “Jr.” in his name, shoot it right back to him! I knew I was taking a chance with that one (because of Connell and Selby), but I figured what the hell, I could hardly afford to gear the sort of fast-moving synchro-mesh operation I had in mind to a couple of exceptions—which, after all, only went to prove the consarn rule, so to speak. Anyway, there it was, the end of the third week and the old job going smoothly enough, except that I had developed quite a little dexie habit by then—not actually a
habit,
of course, but a sort of very real dependence . . . having by nature a nocturnal metabolism whereby my day (pre-
Lance
) would ordinarily begin at three or four in the afternoon and finish at eight or nine in the morning. As a top staffer at
Lance,
however, I had to make other arrangements. Early on I had actually asked John Fox if it would be possible for me to come in at four and work until midnight.

“Are you out of your
nut?
” (That was his standard comeback). “Don’t you know what’s happening here? This is a
social
scene, man—these guys want to
see
you, they want to get to
know
you!”

“What are they, faggots?”

“No, they’re not
faggots
,” he said stoutly, but then seemed hard pressed to explain, and shrugged it off. “It’s just that they don’t have very much, you know,
to do.
”

It was true in a way that no one seemed to actually
do
anything—except for the typists, of course, always typing away. But the guys just sort of hung out, or around, buzzing each other, sounding the chicks, that sort of thing.

The point is though that I had to make in by ten, or thereabouts. One reason for this was the “pre-lunch conference,” which Hacker, or the “Old Man” (as, sure enough, the publisher was called), might decide to have on any given day. And so it came to pass that on this particular—Monday it was—morning, up promptly at nine-three-oh, wash face, brush teeth, fresh shirt, all as per usual, and reach for the dex . . . no dex, out of dex. This was especially inopportune because it was on top of two straight white and active nights, and it was somewhat as though an 800-pound bag, of loosely packed sand, began to settle slowly on the head. No panic, just immediate death from fatigue.

At Sheridan Square, where I usually got the taxi, I went into the drugstore. The first-shift pharmacist, naturally a guy I had never seen before, was on duty. He looked like an aging efficiency expert.

“Uh, I’d like to get some Dexamyl, please.”

The pharmacist didn’t say anything, just raised one hand to adjust his steel-rimmed glasses, and put the other one out for the prescription.

“It’s on file here,” I said, nodding toward the back.

“What name?” he wanted to know, then disappeared behind the glass partition, but very briefly indeed.

“Nope,” he said, coming back, and was already looking over my shoulder to the next customer.

“Could you call Mr. Robbins?” I asked, “he can tell you about it.” Of course this was simply whistling in the dark, since I was pretty sure Robbins, the night-shift man, didn’t know me by name, but I had to keep the ball rolling.

“I’m not gonna wake Robbins at this hour—he’d blow his stack. Who’s next?”

“Well, listen, can’t you just
give
me a couple—I’ve, uh, got a long drive ahead.”

“You can’t get dexies without a script,” he said, rather reproachfully, wrapping a box of Tampax for a teenybopper nifty behind me, “
you
know that.”

“Okay, how about if I get the doctor to phone you?”

“Phone’s up front,” he said, and to the nifty: “That’s seventy-nine.”

The phone was under siege—one person using it, and about five waiting—all, for some weird reason, spade fags and prancing gay. Not that I give a damn about who uses the phone, it was just one of those absurd incongruities that seem so often to conspire to undo sanity in times of crisis. What the hell was going on? They were obviously together, very excited, chattering like magpies. Was it the Katherine Dunham contingent of male dancers? Stranded? Lost? Why out so early? One guy had a list of numbers in his hand the size of a small flag. I stood there for a moment, confused in pointless speculation, then left abruptly and hurried down West Fourth to the dinette. This was doubly to purpose, since not only is there a phone, but the place is frequented by all manner of heads, and a casual score might well be in order—though it was a bit early for the latter, granted.

And this did, in fact, prove to be the case. There was no one there whom I knew—and, worse still, halfway to the phone, I suddenly remembered my so-called doctor (Dr. Friedman, his name was) had gone to California on vacation a few days ago. Christ almighty! I sat down at the counter. This called for a quick think-through. Should I actually call him in California? Have him phone the drugstore from there? Quite a production for a couple of dex. I looked at my watch, it was just after ten. That meant just after seven in Los Angeles—Friedman would blow his stack. I decided to hell with it and ordered a cup of coffee. Then a remarkable thing happened. I had sat down next to a young man who now quite casually removed a small transparent silo-shaped vial from his pocket, and without so much as a glance in any direction, calmly tapped a couple of the belovedly familiar green-hearted darlings into his cupped hand, and tossed them off like two salted peanuts.

Deus ex machina!

“Uh, excuse me,” I said, in the friendliest sort of way, “I just happened to notice you taking a couple of, ha ha, Dexamyl.” And I proceeded to lay my story on him—while he, after one brief look of appraisal, sat listening, his eyes straight ahead, hands still on the counter, one of them half covering the magic vial. Finally he just nodded and shook out two more on the counter. “Have a ball,” he said.

I reached the office about five minutes late for the big pre-lunch confab. John Fox made a face of mild disgust when I came in the conference room. He always seemed to consider my flaws as his responsibility since it was he who had recommended me for the post. Now he glanced uneasily at old Hacker, who was the publisher, editor-in-chief, etc. etc. A man of about fifty-five, he bore a striking resemblance to Edward G. Robinson—an image to which he gave further credence by frequently sitting in a squatlike manner, chewing an unlit cigar butt, and mouthing coarse expressions. He liked to characterize himself as a “tough old bastard,” one of his favorite prefaces being: “I know most of you guys think I’m a
tough old bastard,
right? Well, maybe I am. In the quality-Lit game you
gotta
be tough!” And bla-bla-bla.