“You want to light it?” he asked Pete.
Pete lit it. The smell was pungent, almost tart, and very pleasant. He drew it deep, held the smoke, and passed the j on to Joe, who coughed most of it out.
Jerry turned back to me. “You ever heard the Clinch Mountain Boys?”
I shook my head. “Heard of them, though.”
“You gotta listen to this,” he said. “Boy, is it horny.” He put an LP with a weird label on the stereo. The j came around to me. “You smoke cigarettes?” Jerry asked me paternally.
I shook my head.
“Then draw slow, or you’ll lose it.”
I drew slow. The smoke was sweet, rather heavy, acrid, dry. I held my breath and passed the j on to Jerry. The Clinch Mountain Boys started in on “Blue Ridge Breakdown.”
Half an hour later we had progressed through two more joints and were listening to Flatt and Scruggs charge through a little number called “Russian Around.” I was about ready to ask when I should start feeling stoned when I realized I could actually visualize the banjo chords in my mind. They were bright, like long.steel threads, and shuttling back and forth like looms. They were moving rapidly, but I could follow them if I concentrated deeply. I tried to tell Joe about it, but he only looked at me in a puzzled, fuzzy way. We both laughed. Pete was looking at a picture of Niagara Falls on the wall very closely.
We ended up sticking around until almost five o’clock, and when we left, I was wrecked out of my mind. Pete bought an ounce of grass from Jerry, and we took off for Schoodic. Jerry stood in the doorway of his apartment and waved good-bye and yelled for me to come back and bring some of my records.
That’s the last really happy time I can remember.
It was a long drive down to the coast. All three of us were still very high, and although Pete had no trouble driving, none of us could seem to talk without getting the giggles. I remember asking Pete once what this Dana Collette who was throwing the party looked like, and he just leered. That made me laugh until I thought my stomach was going to explode. I could still hear bluegrass playing in my head.
Pete had been to a party out there in the spring, and we only took one wrong turn finding it. It was at the end of a narrow mile of gravel marked PRIVATE ROAD. You could hear the heavy bass signature of the music a quarter-mile from the cabin. There were so many cars stacked up that we had to walk from just about that point.
Pete parked and we got out. I was starting to feel unsure of myself and self-conscious again (partly the residue of the pot and partly just me), worried about how young and stupid I would probably look to all these college people. Jerry Mueller had to be one in a hundred. I decided I would just stick close to Joe and keep my mouth closed.
As it turned out, I could have saved the worry. The place was packed to the rafters with what seemed like a million people, every one of them drunk, stoned, or both. The smell of marijuana hung on the air like a heavy mist, along with wine and hot hods. The place was a babble of conversation, loud rock music, and laughter. There were two lights dangling from the ceiling, one red, one blue. That rounds off the first impression the place gave me-it was like the funhouse at Old Orchard Beach.
Scragg waved at us from across the room.
“Pete!” someone squealed, almost in my ear. I jerked and almost swallowed my tongue.
It was a short, almost pretty girl with bleached hair and the shortest dress I have ever seen-it was a bright fluorescent orange that looked almost alive in the weird lighting.
“Hi, Dana!” Pete shouted over the noise. “This is my brother, Joe, and one of his buddies, Charlie Decker.”
She said hi to both of us. “Isn’t it a great party?” she asked me. When she moved, the hem of her dress swirled around the lace bottoms of her panties.
I said it was a great party.
“Did you bring any goodies, Pete?” Pete grinned and held up his Baggie of weed. Her eyes sparkled. She was standing next to me, her hip pressed casually against mine. I could feel her bare thigh. I began to get as horny as a bull moose.
“Bring it over here,” she said.
We found a relatively unoccupied corner behind one of the stereo speakers, and Dana produced a huge scrolled water pipe from a low bookshelf that was fairly groaning with Hesse, Tolkien, and Reader’s Digest condensed books. The latter belonged to the parents, I assumed. We toked up. The grass was much smoother in the water pipe, and I could hold the smoke better. I began to get very high indeed. My head was filling up with helium. People came and went. Introductions, which I promptly forgot, were made. The thing that I liked best about the introductions was that, every time a stray wandered by, Dana would bounce up to grab him or her. And when she did, I could look straight up her dress to where the Heavenly Home was sheathed in the gauziest of blue nylon. People changed records. I watched them come and go (some of them undoubtedly talking of Michelangelo, or Ted Kennedy or Kurt Vonnegut). A woman asked me if I had read Susan Brownmiller’s Women Rapists. I said no. She told me it was very tight. She crossed her fingers in front of her eyes to show me how tight it was and then wandered off. I watched the fluorescent poster on the far wall, which showed a guy in a T-shirt sitting in front of a TV. The guy’s eyeballs were slowly dripping down his cheeks, and there was a big cheese-eating grin on his face. The poster said: SHEEEIT! FRIDAY NIGHT AND I’M STONED AGAIN
I watched Dana cross and uncross her legs. A few filaments of pubic hair, nine shades darker than the bleach job, had strayed out of the lacy leg bands. I don’t think I have ever been that horny. I doubt if I will ever be that horny again. I had an organ which felt large enough and long enough to pole-vault on. I began to wonder if the male sex organ can explode.
She turned to mg and suddenly whispered in my ear. My stomach heated up twenty degrees instantly, as if I had been eating chili. A moment before, she had been talking to Pete and to some joker I remembered being non-introduced to. Then she was whispering in my ear, her breath tickling the dark channel. “Go on out the back door,” she said. “There.” She pointed.
It was hard to comprehend, so I just followed her finger. Yes, there was the door. The door was real and the door was earnest. It had one hell of a knob on it. I chuckled, convinced that I had just thought a particularly witty thought. She laughed lightly in my ear and said, “You’ve been looking up my dress all night. What does that mean?” And before I could say anything, she kissed my cheek softly and gave me a little shove to get me going.
I looked around for Joe, but I didn’t see him anyplace. Sorry, Joe. I got up and heard both my knees pop. My legs were stiff from sitting in the same position so long. I had an urge to un-tuck my shirt and cover up the huge bulge in my jeans. I had an urge to tiptoe across the room. I had an urge to cackle wildly and announce to the general attendance that Charles Everett Decker earnestly believed that he was about to get screwed; that-to drop a bad pun-Charles Everett Decker was about to rip off his maiden piece.
I didn’t do any of those things.
I went out the back door.
I was so stoned and so horny that I almost fell twenty feet to the tiny white shingle of beach that was down below. The back of the cabin overlooked a sudden rocky drop to a postage-stamp inlet. A flight of weather-washed steps led down. I walked carefully, holding on to the railing. My feet felt a thousand miles away. The music sounded distant on this side, blending and almost being covered by the rhythmic sound of the waves.