The girl put a cigarette in his mouth, struck a match for him. Without opening his eyes he accepted the cigarette and took the light. He inhaled, then blew out the smoke without removing the cigarette from his mouth. He left it there while he spoke.
“Consider the verb make. It will reveal unto us, boys and girls, the constructive illusion in a destructive subculture. Make. The universal verb, the inevitable. I can’t make it, baby. Let us make another scene. Let us make it. Make, make, make. It means everything, anything. A universal. A perfect universal. The unfortunate fact is that it also means nothing at all. Because, boys and girls, nothing is made, created, constructed, built. Make all day and make all night and make nothing. Lord, we fished all night and caught nothing. Lord, we made it all night and we didn’t make a mother-loving thing.”
The cigarette burned down to his lips while he went on talking and smoking. The girl took the cigarette from him and put it out. She replaced it with a fresh cigarette.
“Then there is the nomenclature of Hip,” Lee Revzin said. “Man first, then Baby. Call everybody man and remember no names. Then call everybody baby. Strangers and afraid in a world we just can’t make. Where are you, Housman? Where is everybody?”
He coughed and the girl took the cigarette away from him. He smiled gratefully.
“I will recite a poem,” he said. “A poem to the world. A panegyrical paean for the poor peons. A poem, for the love of the lord, a poem.”
He said:
Never is a naughty word
Summer is a winter crutch
Lovers in a cinder block
Make a scene of nothing much.
Captains of the somewhere fleet
Say their prayers and go their ways
Lovers on a vacant roof
Sing the song of sometimes praise.
When the world is upside down
Inside out and also ran
See the prairie horses rush
Sifting gold in frying pan.
Halt the horses of the mind
Still the voice of autumn snakes
When somebody drops the clutch
That’s the time to hit the brakes.
The girl applauded wildly. “There’s more,” he said. “Then you may applaud. Beat your hands together with passion. The ego needs it. Also the id. We will of course omit the super-ego. We will always omit the super-ego.”
He went on in an Epicene and passionless frog-croak:
Slit the skins of silver eggs
Splash the ground that summer sings
Music mourns dead birds
Breath is sweet in broken things.
The girl applauded still more wildly.
“I wish I knew what in the world it means,” Lee Revzin said, more to himself than to the world. “It has to mean something. It really has to.”
The girl said nothing. She was busy unzipping him, stimulated beyond imagination by the force of his poetry.
Shank, meanwhile, was bored.
That was surprising. Judy Obershain’s parties had never bored him in the past. The people had interested him and the activities had appealed.
Now, however, he was bored.
The boredom, he decided, had a number of causes. For one thing, the thrill of smoking marijuana by way of being part of a group function no longer served to send him into the stratosphere. Pot was a part of his daily life—he bought it, he sold it, he smoked it. He found it no more delightful to smoke in public than in private. And the spectacle of twenty or more idiots blowing their brains out so thoroughly that they lost control of themselves was humorous no longer.
Another factor was his discovery that, although he was one of the youngest present at the party, the others seemed incredibly immature to him. He attributed this feeling partly to a change in his status. He was selling hard goods now; in fact he had made his first sale just a few hours ago. Basil could talk his head off about the similarity on the legal plane of marijuana and heroin. But Shank’s eyes were not those of the law, and for him a radical difference existed between the two drugs, so that he felt immeasurably superior to the idiots balling all over Judy Obershain’s apartment. Pot was fine, you could take it or leave it, Shank thought; smoke it on Madison Avenue or the Upper East Side or the Village. But junk was serious business—and pot was for kiddies. Now he was a businessman. You didn’t sell junk for the hell of it, Shank ruminated. You sold it for a profit, a good profit. Moreover, the stuff had a quick turnover and, as Basil had described it, a captive audience. You could make three, four, five bills a week if you were cool about it. And this potential for enormous profits further contributed to raising him above the level of the rest of the party-goers.
Even the sex was dull. Shank gave a mental shrug. He just plain wasn’t in the mood and there was no way to force it. The party was dragging him, the people were dragging him, the whole aura of child-play, love-play, sex-play was dragging him.
So he got up, carrying a good load from the pot he had smoked but carrying it easily, understanding it, able to master it with ease. Unlike Anita, who had just tried it for the first time and now was fornicating like a rabbit in the middle of the living-room floor. Shank walked to the door after stepping over a pair of errant lovers, and left the apartment.
The building elevator was the self-service type. But instead of pushing the button for the ground floor, he pressed for the floor below, the third, and headed for the apartment directly below that of Judy Obershain’s. He rang the bell. Rang it once, waited, then leaned on it.
The people were not home.
He opened the door with a key that fitted a surprising number of doors. He walked in, shut the door and began looking around for something to steal. Then, all at once, he decided there was no point to burglarizing the place. He was making enough money. He didn’t need any more.
Instead, he used the phone to call Bradley Galton, his stepfather, long distance. When Brad Galton answered, Shank waited for a second or two and then unleashed a stream of the wildest profanity he could think of. He did not pause for breath until the line went dead.
Then, smiling, Shank replaced the receiver and quit the apartment. He hoped the phone call to the coast would come as a great surprise to the people who would be billed for it.
He caught the elevator again, rode it to the first floor, ambled out into the night and hunted for a bar where he ordered a glass of draft beer and drank it down. He walked all the way home, looking around for anybody he might know. He saw a few people but nobody he wanted to talk to. So he wound up going straight back to the apartment on Saint Marks Place. But he felt too alert to sleep. He checked the cache of heroin, of which fourteen capsules remained. He checked the marijuana. He had sold Judy Obershain an ounce and had taken one hundred dollars for it, which meant he had two ounces of marijuana left and fourteen caps of horse and was already ahead by more than fifty dollars. A profitable day, he congratulated himself.
His mind returned to Anita.