(lxxi)
Sweet William finds me as he always finds me, backed against a wall with a Camel in my hand, staring, abstracted, at the crowd basking in the sun: Barbie and Ken, going to college. He sits beside me without a word, Our minds wander a few moments in parallel.
He begins, then.
“Last night was pretty strange.”
A sharp direct look beneath lowered eyebrows. He inhales ashmatically on his Pall Mall.
“I was taking shots of Tequila at the Good Earth when this friend of mine I haven’t seen for a while comes in, fast Eddie, you may remember him, he’s an artist, the one who did the sculpture on Broadway? it looks like a jungle gym, eveybody hates it, anyway, so I ask him how’s it going, and he smiles, you know, it was weird, like he couldn’t talk. and he’s makingthese gestures, you know, like some kind of sign language, which I can’t figure out, but I follow him into the john anyway and he has these two joints of Columbian, you know, so we do these and this liberates my sensibility, so to speak, and then we were out in the bar taking some more shots and this guy David comes in, from Aspen, he’s a dealer, and he’s talking to us about this journal he’s going to start in conjunction with the Naropa Institute, right, about which I meant to ask you, and also about this concept I find in James about the primitive grounds of experience, but anyway so I’m talking to david and we decide to go to this party, but first we have to stop off and make a drop, so we go to see this guy Wolfgang who escaped from East Germany, you know, but he sleeps with his motorcycle, I mean it’s really strange, but he’s not there anyway but his roommate is, this guy Jerry who drinks Coors for breakfast, I’m not kidding, I’ve seen him, he puts it on his cornflakes, and thn this lady comes in who is really strange and it’s weird because as soon as she walks in the door she like jams her hand down my pants, you know, and she looks at me, you know, and we go for a ride in her car, which is some Mercedes, and we do some lines at the stoplight and all the time she’s giving me this handjob, and we make it to the party which it turns out is in Ward, twenty miles up the canyon into this devious altitude, right, and there is this guy Weird Billy about whom I may have told you, anyway we get there and there’s a rubber sheet on the floor and everybody is covered with Mazola lying around on it and we’re doing lines of mescaline and crystal meth and there’s a roast pig, no shit, on the table, with an apple in its mouth, and I’m eating and grease is running down my chin and I’m covered with grease and Mazola and my brain is fried and suddenly I have this flash and I’m a caveman, you know, a fucking Neanderthal, and I jump out the window stark naked and start howling at the moon, after which I forget what happens for a while but then I’m talking to this lady whom I have never seen before and she is asking me all these weird questions, you know, and I can’t figure out what she is talking about except she escaped from this CIA detention camp somewhere and she wants me to run these plans for an antimissile laser to Uruguay, which is still difficult for me to follow because I am still as you would say laboring in the Pleistocene, but anyway we get out of there and go down the canyon, eighty miles an hour in this old Chevy she’s driving and I am scared shitless but we get to her apartment and I fuk her three or four times and I start telling her about Cambridge, you know, it was weird, when I was at harvard, and I am telling her about my tutor and the sherry, you know, he would pour me a glass of sherry when I went to see him every week, and we’d talk about what I was reading, you know, and he’d give me a list of things to read for the next time I’d see him, and he was just this neat old guy, you know, and he was the one who got me into Pragmatism in fact, and I still call him up every once in a while, and he gave me these books which are pretty valuable, an edition of Peirce and like that, and anyway I am thinking about this and we’re drinking Bacardi and then I don’t remember anything. you know, it was weird, like I blacked out. which has never happened to me before, and when I wake up this morning I am home in bed and the place smells and the cats got in through the window again and got into the garbage, fifteen bags of garbage all over the kitchen and the door’s hanging open and I have to go and see my committee today and I can’t even remember where this lady lives and it’s strange, you know?”
I laugh briefly. I light another cigarette.
The sharp direct look beneath lowered eyebrows. He inhales asthmatically on his Pall Mall. his eyes shift.
I laugh again.
“But it’s strange,” he says.
“It’s like the time we were hitching back from the Cape after Spring break and got a ride from this old guy, I keep thinking I am going to run into him again, he was an artist and he lived there along the coast and painted, you know, and he took us home with him and gave us dinner and we talked to him about what we were doing in school, you know. It was me and this other guy I must have told you about, we’d been doing crystal meth all through finals and we’d gone off to the beach to recover afterwards, we’d both been up for a week and all we did was sleep and lie in the sun, this guy was really a genius, he was going to be a molecular biologist. He was my best friend.”
He pauses. The sharp direct look. He inhales again upon his Pall Mall.
“He was my best friend. He cut his throat, not long after that. With a razor. From ear to ear. He bled to death. In the dormitory, in the bathroom, on the shower floor. I walked in and found him there. I screamed for help. There was nothing I could do. I watched his blood run down the shower drain, and there was nothing I could do.”
So innocent they seem, Barbie and Ken. They sun themselves, like seals upon the rocks at mating season. The war is over now. What should they care.
It doesn’t matter whether the tale is true or not. It may as well be. I turn away, so that he will not see the tears that start from the corners of my eyes.
