“Dexedrine,” she said. “Fantastic.”
“You want one? Here, take a dozen.”
“Cool.” She swallowed three.
“You won’t want any lunch,” I said.
“Crazy.” She shuddered.
That amused me. Handing out these reducing tablets won me the girl friends I had hoped to get by being thin. Briefly, I was happy. But happiness is a blurred memory of sensational lightness; fear and boredom leave me with a remembrance of particular details. I recall the discomfort: squatting or sitting cross-legged on the floor, listening to long poems by nineteen-year-olds beginning, I have seen… — getting cramps behind my knees, my back aching—And I have seen… I made myself sick on that sweet wine (“Look out, John’s barfing!”) and they talked about Zen, rejection slips from quarterlies with names like The Goatsfoot, ban-the-bomb, Ezra P. I would be dying for a hot bath. I admired their resilience; they could stay up all night gabbing, eating nothing but Dexedrines and cough syrup; I’d say, “Hell, I hate to be a party-pooper, but—” and crawl off to bed, hearing And I have seen—all the way to my room. The next morning I’d see them stretched out on the floor, paired up but still chastely in their clothes, and all of them sleeping in their shoes.
They invented a past for me. I deserved it; I had not told them a thing about myself. They intended flattery, but the stories were truly monstrous: “You’ve got a wife and kids somewhere, haven’t you?” a girl whispered to me in my attic, candid in the dark after love. Another, rolling over, said, “Do anything you want to me — I know you’re a switch hitter.” I was a genius; I was a deserter; I was shell-shocked; I was a refugee; I sometimes took a knife to bed; the Germans tortured me. The stories were too ridiculous to deny, the truth too boring to repeat. I had grown to like the kids; I did not want to disappoint them. I used to make the eyes of those lovely girls bright by saying, “If I laid you once I’d turn you into a whore.”
It ended badly. The coffee shop was in a residential area, and the late nights the kids spent discussing music and poetry were interpreted by the neighbors as sex orgies. We got strange phone calls, and visits at odd hours from well-dressed men. The police raided us. I say “raided.” Two cops opened the door and said, “We’ve had a complaint about you.”
“Let’s see your search warrant,” I said. It seemed a good gambit, but they weren’t buying it.
“Out of the way, fatso,” they said, pushing past me. They went upstairs, rousing people and saying, “Nothing here,” and “Okay in here.” Soon they were back in the hall, surrounded by angry poets and pretty girls.
One cop showed me his white glove. The palm was filled with Dexedrines. “Whose are these?”
They weren’t mine. I had stopped taking them, though I still passed them around. I said, “Mine.”
“No, they’re not,” said a girl named Rita. “Those are mine.”
“They’re his,” said the cop, “so shut up.”
“Anyway, what’s the problem?” I said. “I take these things to kill my appetite. I got a weight problem.”
“You got a problem, fella,” the cop said, “but it ain’t no weight problem. Better come along with us.”
Rita screamed at him.
In the squad car the cop driving said, “We know all about you and those kids. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
I was charged with possessing drugs without a prescription, procuring drugs for a minor, and on hearsay, on charges of fornication, bigamy, homosexuality, and petty theft. My trial would be in three weeks. Bail was steep, but the coffee shop fellers and some sympathetic faculty members started a fund and bailed me out; they told me I was being victimized.
Jumping bail was easy; the only loss was the money. I took a Greyhound bus to Los Angeles, and leaving everything including my name, flew to Hong Kong and signed on the Allegro. It was not despair; it was the convenience of flight, an expensive exit that was possible because it was final. I had no intention of going back. It would have been bad for my heart, and I’m using that word in its older sense.
And: “Flowers,” said the skipper of the Allegro, reading my name from the crew list. He made a mark on the paper. “Age — thirty-eight. Single. No identifying marks or scars.” He looked up. “Your first contract, I see. Know anything about oiling?”
“No,” I said, “but I don’t think it would take me long to learn.”
“What can you do?”
“Anything,” I said. “I suppose you’ve heard this one before, but what I really wanted to do was write.”
“Take that pencil,” the skipper said.
“This one?” I selected one from a pewter mug on his desk.
“And that pad of paper.”
The letterhead said, Four Star Shipping Lines.
“Write,” he said.
“Shoot,” I said.
“Carrots, eighty pounds,” he said. “White flour, two hundred pounds. Fresh eggs—”
5
A YEAR LATER, nimble in my soft white shoes, I was guiding a deeply tanned cruise passenger in his club blazer through the low sidewalk corridors of Singapore back lanes. It was night, dark and smelly in the tunnel-like passageways, and quiet except for the occasional snap of mahjong tiles and the rattling of abacus beads — no voices — coming from the bright cracks in burglar doors on shophouse fronts. Some shops, caged by protective steel grates, showed Chinese families sitting at empty tables under glaring bulbs and the gazes from the walls of old relations with small shoulders and lumpy heads in blurred brown photograph ovals — the lighted barred room like an American museum-case tableau of life-size wax figures depicting Chinese at night, the seated mother and father, ancestral relics, and three children’s little heads in a coconut row at the far edge of the table. Sikh watchmen huddled, hugging themselves in bloomers and undershirts on string beds outside dark shops; we squeezed past them and past the unsleeping Tamil news vendors playing poker in lotus postures next to their shuttered goods cupboards. Here was a Chinese man in his pajamas, crouching on a stool, smoking, clearing his throat, watching the cars pass. Farther along, four children were playing tag, chasing each other and shrieking in the dark; and under a street-corner lamp, a lone child tugged at an odd flying toy, a live beetle, captive on a yard of thread — he flung it at us as we passed and then pulled it away, laughing in a shy little snort.
“Atmosphere,” murmured the feller.
“You said it.” There was a quicker way to Muscat Lane, but that took you over uncovered sidewalks, past new shops, on a well-lighted street. The atmosphere was an easy detour.
“It’s like something out of a myth.”
“Too bad the shops are closed,” I said. “One down this way has bottles filled with dead frogs and snakes — right in the window. Frog syrup. Sort of medicine. The mixture — two spoonfuls three times daily. Hnyeh!”
“You seem to know your way around.”
“Well, I live here, you see.”
“Funny, meeting someone who actually lives in a place like this,” said the feller. “I’m glad I ran into you.”
“Always glad to help out. You looked a bit lost,” I said. I had met him in the Big South Sea, and all I had said — it was my new opening — was “Kinda hot.”
“By the way, it’s not very far from here.”