Even the little details show. Like in Boston, if you want to call for the exact time, you dial 637-8687, which in letters spells “nervous.” In Berkeley, the equivalent number spells “popcorn.”
Stevie brought out a couple of joints and a gallon of Red Mountain. He gave me a joint and then a glass, and said again that it was great to see me. Then he said, “How’s Annie doing?”
“Okay,” I said. The hooch was good. “Well, not okay. I don’t know. Shitty, in fact. I haven’t seen her for about a month now.”
“Jeez, I thought you two were really…”
“Yeah, well…” I shrugged. “I still dig her.” I lit the joint. It was even better. “She’s bumming around with some dipshit from the Piggy Club now. I see her every once in a while on Mt. Auburn Street, smashed out of her mind. We exchange pleasantries and that’s about it. You know. How’s Barbara?”
“Cool,” Stevie said. “Great chick. Everything’s cool.” He lit his joint and said, “Came out here to get away from Annie, huh?”
I shook my head. “Not really.” Stevie had introduced me to Annie about a year before, and ever since he’d taken a kind of paternal interest in how we were doing. But hell, I thought, people changed. I’d changed, she’d changed. It had been a good thing but it wasn’t any more, and I didn’t feel like talking about it. “Not really,” I said again.
“You and your parents seeing eye-to-eye these days?” he asked.
I laughed and shook my head. I knew what he was asking. He was asking how I could afford the trip out. “Not exactly,” I said.
“You dealing again?” Stevie asked, pulling a long face. “I thought you quit that.”
“I did,” I said, “but John’s been getting into it lately. Pretty heavily, in fact. He’s turning over about twenty bricks a week.”
“Far out,” Stevie said. “Twenty bricks a week, around Cambridge?”
“Yeah, everyone’s turning on these days. But you know John. He’s not particularly interested in the details, just the wheeling-dealing. So here I am.”
“Just doing bricks this time?”
“Yeah. Just bricks. Ten in the little bag under my seat and away I go. With a free vacation in California in the process.”
“You ought to knock that shit off,” Stevie said. “You’re going to get busted sometime.”
I shrugged. “You drive a car long enough, you’ll have an accident.” I took a long hit off my joint. “Anyway, there wasn’t anything else to do. I mean, this is spring break, right? So I can come out here and dig what’s happening, or I can go back to fucking Westhrop to spend a restful week listening to the old man telling me what I ought to do with my life, while the old lady asks me where they’ve gone wrong.” I laughed. “You know, man, you got a moustache and they want to know where they’ve gone wrong. Fuck that. If I started pushing beds across the country and organizing panty raids they’d be unhappy because I was apathetic and uninvolved. You can’t win. Shit, I don’t even want to win any more. I just want to do the things I want to do.”
“Yeah,” Stevie said, “I’m hip.” He lay back on the couch and stared up at the tinted sky. We were silent for a while, and then he said, “You still buying from Ernie out here?”
I shook my head. “Ernie’s not too cool these days. He got busted with thirty bricks last month and didn’t have the bread to buy himself off.”
“Is that right?” Stevie said, sitting up, suddenly interested. “But I just saw him last week…” He stopped. He thought it over. “Maybe he found somebody to post bail.”
“Maybe.”
He looked vaguely apprehensive. “Well, if he made a deal, he’ll just turn in a couple of smack freaks.” He thought that over, and then added, “He wouldn’t turn in any of his friends. Ernie’s all right.”
“I’ll let somebody else find that out,” I said.
“Ernie’s all right.”
“Yeah, probably he is. But we’ve got another connection now, and there’s no question about whether he’s cool or not. Which reminds me, can I use your phone?”
“Yeah, sure,” Stevie said. He got up, and followed me back into the kitchen. I was asking how to dial information when there was a noise at the back door and a huge freak walked in, holding his head and bleeding.
It was Ross.
8
THERE WAS BLOOD ALL OVER everything, including the little blond chick who was holding him up. As usual, Ross had his sheepskin vest on, and as usual, he was mad. Ross was always mad about something; a good bust in the head just gave him a chance to focus his energy. He slumped down on the couch with the chick, beneath the poster that said SEE AMERICA FIRST. Stevie ran for a rag.
“What happened?” I asked the chick, who was crying and wiping her face and Ross’s with the same bloody handkerchief. There was a hell of a lot of blood, but then Ross was a hell of a big boy. He was big enough to be playing football for Ohio State, except that this was Berkeley, and Ross had hair down to his shoulders and was wearing a huge pair of yellow shades. One frame was shattered and they were lopsided on his nose now as he looked up at me.
“Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”
“What happened?” I said again.
“Up on campus,” the chick said, “the Governor gave the order to the pigs to break up the picket lines.” I tilted my head. “We were keeping people from classes,” she added.
“At seven o’clock at night,” Ross said. “The motherfuckers, keeping people from classes at seven at night.”
“So the pigs broke it up,” the chick said. She had stopped crying and was staring at my clothes. Stevie came back with a rag and started wiping more blood off Ross’s face. “Motherfuckers,” Ross kept saying.
“Quit moving your head,” said Stevie.
“See it now,” Ross said, to no one in particular. Suddenly he tilted his nose in the air and started sniffing. Sniff, sniff. “Goddamn,” he suddenly said. “Goddamn morons. You been smoking again.”
“Relax,” Stevie said.
“Goddamn,” Ross said, “now of all times.”
Stevie and the chick were working on him. Stevie said to her, “Sukie, this is Peter. Peter, Sukie.”
“Hello,” Sukie said. Her back was to me. She was bent over Ross, putting merthiolate on his head. Her long legs were stretched taut, and they were very brown. Hello, hello.
“You guys are going to screw everything,” Ross said. “You’re going to get us all busted for sure. Jesus, I think if you have too much of this, it begins to affect your brains. I think—”
“Quit moving your head,” Stevie said again. He glanced over at me and we exchanged looks. Old Ross. He’d never change.
He sat patiently until they had patched up his head, then stumbled off to the bathroom, with the chick still supporting him. When they’d gone, Stevie said, “He bought another one.”