Also, there was another possibility. Putting aside the question mark as to just how much the catastrophe had been contrived, there might be another reason for Rank to want me out of the way if he was indeed one of the Russky spies. He just might be Ex-Lax, the one I was supposed to rub out, and he just might have gotten wind of the fact that he was up for elimination, Moscow-style. If so, he might have pegged me for my own double, decided I was out to knock him off, and made up his mind to beat me to the punch. Either way the pigeon feathers at the back of my neck began to have that clay-ey feeling.
Still, I figured, if I was going to be a pigeon, I might as well fly the whole route. Rank had brought up my “death” in the presence of the others, and as long as it had come out, I decided that now was a good time to circulate the cover-story Putnam and I had agreed upon back in Washington. If one or two of those present in the car were Commie agents, they’d assume I was my Russian double using his cover story anyway. So I let it come out.
“They sure did bury the wrong guy,” I said in response to Rank’s last remark. “See, I was involved in a little cloak-and-dagger stuff in Washington and the Commies had an agent they’d plasticked up to be a dead image of me. He got knocked off, at the time there were reasons why it was advantageous to let it seem that I was the corpse.”
“Ooh! That sounds exciting!” Misty was impressed. I never would have thought you'd be a spy, Stevie.”
“Well, I’m not any more. I just helped out a little for a very short time. It’s all over now.”
“Still, I just love the idea. All that intrigue and stuff. You’ve got to tell me all about it.” Her eyes were very large, very innocent, very naive. . .
‘I wondered. . . If she was one of them, if any of those in the car was one of them, then from the Russian angle, they’d think it was my double’s cover story. I guessed that was as far as I could go at the moment. I was saved from having to go further with the conversation by the fact that the car barked to a halt just then and we all piled out and into the lobby of the swanky apartment house where Voluptua lived.
It was quite a pad. The lobby was right out of the Versailles Palace in VistaVision and Technicolor. Even the walls of the elevator had fallen victim to a red velvet plague. And the apartment itself—Wow!
It was a penthouse with a terrace. The living room, roughly the size of Penn Station’s upper level, was glassed in on three sides. All three looked out over the Pacific. “I can watch the sunrise and sunset,” Voluptua explained. “And between times I watch the surfers on the beach."
“I didn't know you were a nature girl," I told her.
“With my build,” she answered, drawing herself up to her full six-foot-six and aiming her bosoms like twin missiles in position to be fired at the same time, “I just naturally have to appreciate Nature and be thankful to it."
“Well, honey, you do have a lot to be thankful for,” I granted.
We strolled to the center of the living room, where the group was settling down. Besides Voluptua and Rank, myself and Misty, there was Winthrop Van Ardsdale, Happy Daze, April Wilder and Louis Ching. Voluptua had the maid bring pitchers of martinis and then sent her to bed. She left a bowl of sugar cubes behind her. When she was gone, Rank produced a small vial filled with a clear liquid. Our “trip” was about to begin.
Each of us took a sugar cube. Rank passed among us and measured out a few drops of the LSD fluid with an eye-dropper. He deposited the drops on the first sugar cube and repeated the process with the others. The sugar absorbed the liquid quickly. Then we popped the cubes into our mouths. Some of us sucked on them; others crunched them between their teeth. The crunchers beat the suckers out by a good two or three minutes. Finally the last of the suckers swallowed the last grains of sugar and we all sat back to wait.
From what I knew of LSD, it figured to take about a half-hour before anybody would show any effects of the drug. By that time, the pupils of the eyes of the users would have dilated to about four times their normal size. In this respect, the effect of LSD is similar to the effect of narcotics ranging from marijuana through heroin and cocaine.
But LSD is not a narcotic. It’s a hallucinatory drug, which is something else again. With narcotics, there are predictable patterns, depending upon the stage of use. With LSD, each “trip” may by different, even for the same person. It's a consciousness-expanding agent. It truly releases a submerged portion of one’s mind and emotions. And the effect of that release depends not only upon the person, but upon the person at the specific time of the LSD experience.
Thus LSD may be aphrodisiac, or it may engender great disgust at the very thought of sex. It may release rage, or it may bring on an attack of timidity and fear in which even a kitten looms as ominous and overpowering. It may call forth great creativity—soaring poetry, bold artistic brushwork and color stemming from completely new optic perceptions, music which is truly other-worldly and heart-breakingly beautiful—or it may drown the creative impulse to self-horror-word-streams of guttural profanity, Rorschach splotches by the finger-painting child having a tantrum, cacophony on the keyboard. LSD works by the Law of Opposites, and its results tend to prove out the dichotomy within each of us, the love and hate, the male and female, the good and evil. The problem with its use is that there’s no way of telling in advance just which will be released by the drug. In that sense, it’s like life itself. Did your mother love you so much she could just eat you up-literally? Was your father a disciplinarian-for your own good—or was he a sadist? Did your marriage release love, or hate? Does not war release force of good as well as of evil? May there not be advantages as well as suffering in poverty? Is civilization dependent on squelching hostility? And is mental health reliant on releasing it? Does all unselfishness stem from selfish ego motives? If it’s better to give than to receive, then what is the giver taking? Must one decide? How does one decide? Decisions! Decisions! You pays your money and you takes your sugar cube - or whatever your particular hype happens to be. And if you’re lucky, the sugar coating hides that nasty taste in your gorge, the taste welling up from inside you.
Most people steer clear of the actual sugar-cube, the actual LSD in whatever form. The closest they may have come to it is in the dentist’s chair. There are still a few dentists left in the U.S. who use nitrous oxide—more commonly known as the laughing gas—for extractions. And nitrous oxide was the only hallucinatory drug in use in America before the advent of LSD and the craze which had college kids extracting the substance from morning glory and sunflower seeds. If you’ve ever had it used on you then the effects should give you some slight idea of how you might react to LSD itself.
As to how our particular group would react, the issue was still in question. We were still waiting for the drug to take effect. While we were waiting, Happy Daze was making it his business to entertain us.
Happy—as is the nature of the comic beast—was always “on.” He was “on” now. And that didn't just mean telling a joke, or a story, or an anecdote the way an ordinary person might. No, indeedy! It meant that Happy performed, created a setting and a mood, and set out to amuse with every fiber of his being.