“Did you score?” Shank said.
Joe shook his head.
“What happened?”
Joe thought for a minute. Then he shrugged. “I picked her up is all. Picked her up and won the bet.”
“How come you didn’t ball her?”
“I don’t know.”
Shank said nothing. The guy never pried, Joe thought. He was a clever son of a bitch—he just sat there waiting and pretty soon you told him whatever it was he was waiting to hear. Non-directive as all hell.
“I don’t know,” Joe said again.
Shank remained silent.
There were so many things you didn’t know, Joe thought, and it was such a general pain to bother trying to think things out, especially when there was no point-thinking them out to begin with.
“Name’s Anita Carbone,” Joe said. “Lives up in wop Harlem with her grandmother.”
Shank shrugged.
“College chick,” Joe continued. “Psych major at Hunter, comes downtown once every third blue moon.”
“Pretty chick.”
“Yeah.”
More silence.
“Look, I didn’t even try to make it with her,” Joe said. “I don’t think I could have if I tried, and it’s like there’s no future in it anyway. She’s a nice square little thing with a good head and a good body and that’s all.”
“Where did you take her?”
“Around. We walked around for a while and sort of talked at each other. After a while I let her buy me a hamburger at Riker’s. Then I put her on a subway and she zipped off to Harlem and I came down here. That’s all.”
“You gonna see her again?”
“No.”
“No?”
Joe frowned. “What for, man? Like I told you—she’s a nice square little chick and all and we have nothing to talk about and nothing to do. So what for?”
Shank let it drop. “I worked a deal while you were walking around with her,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“I sold some cut-down stuff to a Madison Avenue type for more than it was worth.”
“What did you get?”
“Twenty cents for twelve.”
A cent was a dollar in hip parlance. Twenty cents was twenty dollars, twenty dollars for maybe four or five dollars worth of pot. Joe whistled.
“He’s happy,” Shank said. “Now he can throw a party for a dozen people who want to feel hip and they can all blow off the tops of their heads. He’ll get high for the first or second time in his life and he’ll turn some square little chick on for the first time and she’ll come across, also for the first time. He’s getting his twenty’s worth out of the bit.”
“Sure.”
“Everybody’s smoking now,” Shank said. “A guy like this one thought he was pretty far out a few years ago when he had a martini on an empty stomach. Now he starts reading and talking to people and he decides that juice isn’t far out at all. So he has to reach a little farther.”
Joe nodded.
“He’ll dig it,” Shank went on. “It’s a bigger kick than juice. Besides, it’s illegal. He can get a year and a day just for holding and he knows it. That makes it more of a kick. He can feel like all the hippies he reads about.”
“The gospel according to Saint Jack.”
“I’m hip, man. He reads Kerouac and he decides to get remote. You shoulda been there, man. You would’ve got a kick out of the way he came on. Like it was all something out of a spy movie, you know? Sitting down next to me and talking out of the side of his mouth and all. And he fell over when he saw the pad, like we were living on the other side of the moon and it was heaven on wheels.”
“Everybody’s smoking it,” Joe said. “A year or two and they’ll make it legal.”
“You kidding.”
“Why? They’ll have to, with everybody turning on right and left. By the time everybody knows it’s harmless and non-habit-forming they won’t be able to keep the law on the books. It—”
“You’re nuts, man.”
Joe looked at him, and Shank went on.
“Things get legal because somebody wants them legal, man. Things don’t get legal because somebody doesn’t want them legal. You think anybody wants pot legal? You think the Mob wants it legal when they can sell it? You think the liquor lobby wants it legal when nobody would drink juice any more if it was? Hell, you think I want it legal? I pull in close to a bill a week selling it, a hundred pennies per keeping squares high. If it’s legal they’ll sell it in the drugstores, man. Won’t that be a bitch?”
Joe nodded, and Shank hauled himself to his feet.
“Gotta go,” he announced. “You got any idea what time it is?”
“Few minutes after eight.”
“That late?”
“Around there.”
“Then I better jump.”
“What’s happening?”
“I got a few things going.”
Joe leaned back on the bed and watched Shank go out the door and slam it behind him. The younger boy’s footsteps sounded on the stairway, then stopped. The front door banged.
Joe stretched out on the bed, rested his head on the pillow and stared up at the ceiling whose cracked plaster had fallen away in jagged patches. The floor was bare and dirty and the furniture was quietly falling into ruin, the stuffing leaking from the one chair, and broken bedsprings digging down at crazy angles. Joe alternated between feeling sorry for himself and despising himself, usually was in one mood or the other except for the times a fix lifted him into another mental sphere. In a straight sense, without the realization of marijuana or the stimulation of benzedrine or the sogginess of alcohol or the diffusion of mescalin to eliminate moodiness, he either hated Joe Milani or loathed the world so unnecessarily cruel to him.
You had always been a good enough kid, Joe would tell himself on occasion. Your folks had loved you and you had loved your folks and Rochester hadn’t been a bad place to live in. You had run around with a decent bunch of kids and you had done okay in high school and had never gotten into any trouble. Everybody had liked you then. What in the hell had happened to you?
Two years in Korea had happened to you, Joe would answer—two years in Korea shooting at people and having the bastards shoot back at you. You had stumbled around, freezing, mud up to your neck and bullets all over the damned place. And then you had had a year in college on the GI bill, the professors throwing things at you that had neither made sense nor mattered a hell of a lot, and there had been nothing to do and no place to go and nobody to be with.
That’s what happened to you, Joe would decide. You had been a good kid and they had sent you to Korea to make the world safe for Syngman Rhee, who had been nothing but a fascist bastard to begin with and who was finished now anyway and the Koreans behind half-a-dozen eight balls. They had sent you over there and when they had brought you back there had been nothing stateside for you. Nothing had mattered any more, nothing had fit any more, and when you had gone home to Rochester there had been nobody to talk to. The same people had been there, the same guys—even if they had aged a year or two they had only gotten deader from the neck up. Your folks had been there but it hadn’t been the same with them, and the girls had been there and it hadn’t been the same with them, either, and all in all Rochester hadn’t been worth a damn and New York University had been worth less of a damn and the whole world had gotten dead set on driving you out of your alleged mind.
Sure, Joe thought.
Or, his mood alternating, he would accuse himself: You’re just a no-good bastard and you’ve screwed up everything you’ve ever touched. Yeah, you had been a happy enough guy in high school. You had never had a thought in your life and you had never done anything except swing bats at baseballs and bang silly little girls in back seats. So you had gone through basic training and had started shaking when they sent live ammo ten feet over your head. So you had shipped to Korea and had aimed your gun at the sky most of the time because you had been too scared to kill anybody. You hadn’t had enough guts to have been a conscientious objector or enough guts to have been a soldier—but you had had an anonymous enough body to have been stuck in the middle, a gun in your hand and a hole in your head.