Suzanne lookalike
Because of our growing local fame I was sleeping with many girls at the time, most ‘one-night stands’, at a rate of about one a week. There was one I was particularly interested in, Suzanne, the Swedish girl with a cute accent who we saw and greeted nearly every day at the veggie stand, working alongside Amira. She came to most of our parties and loved speed, so she was so to speak ‘marked prey’. She started coming to our late-night soirees after she closed shop to do lines with us. Bones had her first. I remember that first night after everyone else had left, perhaps four a.m. She was sitting on the couch between us, very high and drunk, and each of us groping inside her shirt at her small tits, one for each of us, she not seeming to mind, as we made very drunken conversation, all of us about to pass out. He carried her to his loft like a caveman with his prize. But a few days later she invited me to her pad, a room in the dilapidated Victorian house full of illegal Swedish travelers, all having long overstayed their visas but happy and fairly safe in Berkeley. We stayed up till dawn doing many lines, talked much at first but getting too high she began to scribble pictures for hours while I pulled out my pocket Seneca, a paperback of his letters to his younger friend Lucilius and must have read eighty pages with great insight and pleasure, lying beside her while listening to Bob Dylan records.
And here I’ll note a thing I experienced many times on speed, always late at night after tens of lines. Others fray and do the most meaningless repetitive tasks like scribbling lines on a sheet of paper till it’s black, or clean house to a neurotic, unnecessary degree, while I pull out a scholarly, hard to understand Latin text and dig in with clear focus. I’d already read about ten of his letters in school, so it was not unfamiliar, but by the end of that night I had a much fuller understanding of him along with a fluid ability to read his terse prose. I wasn’t always this lucid. Some nights, tired and frazzled I would fret over an unfinished poem for hours, trying to make out a few lines but getting nowhere. Around dawn we went to bed and made love, both of us again on the same wavelength and happy in each other’s arms.
It so happened that Kim paid her the same nocturnal visit with his birthday gift the very next night and when I found out the next morning, (as he came home and announced it) I was a little bit peeved at him for following so swiftly in my footsteps. I remember thinking about it that day as I set out to my coffee shops and libraries for solitary reading. But by evening, before I returned, I decided to hold no grudges against either one, that friendship was more important than transient love. Such was the simplicity of our innocent natures at that happy period. I told him what I thought and we were better friends than ever. And for those of you who look down on methedrine as a vice of selfish pleasure, try reading eighty pages of Seneca without interruption, with delight and instruction, laying on a hardwood floor, elbows hurting.
February rolled into March. We had fewer parties at our place but were invited, (with our speed) to others, several at Will Scarlet’s, based on our model. He had a large old house and many friends. My money ran out but not our stash. Sometimes we sold small amounts for food and beer money. Our spirits were still high but our health was wearing thin. Every night we went downstairs to the bar or to other parties, then continued on back home with a few friends, till the wee hours.
Some rare days we went very lightly, close to abstaining. This would be after four or five nights of four or five hours of sleep. On those days we ate better and sent everyone home by midnight, to catch up with a good ten hour sleep. But while it lasted we used it to excess and our health declined, which showed in our looks.
One night towards the end of March we were sitting around the coffee table, six of us, burnt out and vaguely discussing our future. Bones suggested we should pull the plug and go home for a rest. We were out of money and almost out of speed. I said I didn’t want to. Bones suggested we take a vote on it. All around the table, one by one, each declared that I should go home until the last to vote, Kim, sided with me. He always sided with me even in the face of four others, including his friend John, siding against.
So Bones and I sublet the apartment for a month to keep it. I borrowed money from a recent girlfriend, Pat, and we boarded a Greyhound bus together heading East, he to his hometown in Washington, Iowa (in the middle of nowhere, a tiny farming town in southern Iowa, flat farm country and nothing else) and I to Erie, Pennsylvania, the closest spot on the bus route to New York for my destination. The tickets those days were seventy dollars. We packed our backpacks and with just a few dollars in our pockets and our last two grams of speed we set off. We sat in the very back of the bus for two days and nights, talking most of the way, making brief acquaintances, Bones playing his guitar now and then. We both got off at Iowa city. Bones wanted to show me his small hometown and friends and family. So we hitch-hiked there and I spent a week, crashing on his friend Jonesy’s floor and having a good time.
But now my money was all gone. I had my ticket and it was time to head home. I had just enough change for a loaf of ‘Wonder bread’ with a dime left over, by lucky fate, in my pocket.
The bread had to last me the day long ride to Erie and the hitch-hike home. The dime, providentially, was the price of the toll I didn’t know about to cross the Rainbow bridge on foot into Canada. I still had a little stuff left and wrapped it in paper and tucked it into the center binding of one of my dog-eared Latin pocketbooks, a volume of Livy, and stashed it among the ten others like it in the bottom of my backpack.
I remember at the customs counter, being scraggly looking, long haired, unshaven and unbathed for several days, the agent searched my belongings with added thoroughness and by chance picked out the one book my stash was in, opened it, curiously staring at the Latin, leafing pages and wondering how old it must be. As it was opened the binding spread and the paper could have fallen out at any moment. After a minute of this I nonchalantly said: “be careful of the binding, it’s brittle and might break”. He handed it back and home I went.
I finished it off the first night I was home in my mother’s house in Niagara Falls, staying up till 3 A.M. in the living room reading some book. The next days for me were perfectly normal. There were no ill effects of quitting the drug after four months of daily use. That’s why I mentioned that it was in no way physically addictive (as opposed to common myth), no more than drinking coffee. When you quit you don’t notice any change.
Whenever I think of how many close calls I’ve had in my life, with the law and with near accidents or disasters, I begin to wonder about superlunary agents.
