How could she say that? But there was nothing in the faces that I saw to echo that thought. There would have been in Philbrick’s face. In good old Tom’s face. Probably not in Don Grace’s, but he would have been thinking it. Secretly, all the evening news shows notwithstanding, I’d held the belief that things change but people don’t. It was something of a horror to begin realizing that all those years I’d been playing baseball on a soccer field. Pig Pen was still studying the bitter lines of his pencil. Susan Brooks only looked sweetly sympathetic. Dick Keene had a half-interested, half-lustful expression on his face. Corky’s head was furrowed and frowning as he wrestled with it. Gracie looked slightly surprised, but that was all. Irma Bates merely looked vapid. I don’t think she had recovered from seeing me shot. Were the lives of all our elders so plain that Sandy’s story would have made lurid reading for them? Or were all of theirs so strange and full of terrifying mental foliage that their classmate’s sexual adventure was on a level with winning a pinball replay? I didn’t want to think about it. I was in no position to be reviewing moral implications.
Only Ted looked sick and horrified, and he no longer counted.
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“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Carol Granger said, mildly worried. She looked around. “I’m afraid all of this changes things. I don’t like it.” She looked at me accusingly. “I liked the way things were going, Charlie. I don’t want things to change after this is over. ”
“Heh,” I said.
But that kind of comment had no power over the situation. Things had gotten out of control. There was no real way that could be denied anymore. I had a sudden urge to laugh at all of them, to point out that I had started out as the main attraction and had ended up as the sideshow.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Irma Bates said suddenly.
“Hold it,” I said. Sylvia laughed.
“Turnabout is fair play,” I said. “I promised to tell you about my sex life. In all actuality, there isn’t very much to tell about, unless you read palms. However, there is one little story which you might find interesting.”
Sarah Pasterne yawned, and I felt a sudden, excruciating urge to blow her head off.
But number two must try harder, as they say in the rent-a-car ads. Some cats drive faster, but Decker vacuums all the psychic cigarette butts from the ashtrays of your mind.
I was suddenly reminded of that Beatles song that starts off: “I read the news today, oh boy . . . ”
I told them:
Chapter 26
In the summer before my junior year at Placerville, Joe and I drove up to Bangor to spend a weekend with Joe’s brother, who had a summer job working for the Bangor Sanitation Department. Pete McKennedy was twenty-one (a fantastic age, it seemed to me; I was struggling through the open sewer that is seventeen) and going to the University of Maine, where he was majoring in English.
It looked like it was going to be a great weekend. On Friday night I got drunk for the first time in my life, along with Pete and Joe and one or two of Pete’s friends, and I wasn’t even very hungover the next day. Pete didn’t work Saturdays, so he took us up to the campus and showed us around. It’s really very pretty up there in summer, although on a Saturday in July there weren’t many pretty coeds to look at. Pete told us that most of the summer students took off for Bar Harbor or Clear Lake on weekends.
We were just getting ready to go back to Pete’s place when he saw a guy he knew slouching down toward the steam-plant parking lot.
“Scragg!” He yelled. “Hey, Scragg!”
Scragg was a big guy wearing paint-splattered, faded jeans and a blue workshirt. He 91
had a drooping sand-colored mustache and was smoking an evil-looking little black cigar that he later identified as the Original Smoky Perote. It smelled like slowly burning underwear.
“How’s it hanging?” He asked.
“Up a foot,” Pete said. “This is my brother, Joe, and his buddy Charlie Decker,” he introduced. “Scragg Simpson. ”
“Howdy-doody,” Scragg said, shaking hands and dismissing us. “What you doing tonight, Peter?”
“Thought the three of us might go to a movie. ”
“Doan do that, Pete,” Scragg said with a grin. “Doan do that, baby.”
“What’s better?” Pete asked, also grinning.
“Dana Collette’s throwing a party at this camp her folks own out near Schoodic Point.
There’s gonna be about forty million unattached ladies there. Bring dope. ”
“Does Larry Moeller have any grass?” Pete asked.
“Last I knew, he had a shitload. Foreign, domestic, local . . . everything but filter tips.
”
Pete nodded. “We’ll be there, unless the creek rises.”
Scragg nodded and waved a hand as he prepared to resume his version of that ever-popular form of campus locomotion, the Undergraduate Slouch. “Meetcha,” he said to Joe and me.
We went down to see Jerry Mueller, who Pete said was the biggest dope dealer in the Orono-Oldtown-Stillwater triangle. I kept my cool about it, as if I were one of the original Placerville Jones men, but privately I was excited and pretty apprehensive. As I remember it, I sort of expected to see Jerry sitting naked on the john with a piece of rubber flex tied off below his elbow and a hypo dangling from the big forearm vein. And watching the rise and fall of ancient Atlantis in his navel.
He had a small apartment in Oldtown, which borders the campus on one side.
Oldtown is a small city with three distinctions: its paper mill; its canoe factory; and twelve of the roughest honky-tonks in this great smiling country. It also has an encampment of real reservation Indians, and most of them look at you as if wondering how much hair you might have growing out of your asshole and whether or not it would be worth scalping.
Jerry turned out to be not an ominous Jones-man type holding court amid the reek of incense and Ravi Shankar music, but a small guy with a constant wedge-of-lemon grin.
He was fully clothed and in his right mind. His only ornament was a bright yellow button which bore the message GOLDILOCKS LOVED IT. Instead of Ravi and His Incredible Boinging Sitar, he had a large collection of bluegrass music. When I saw his Greenbriar Boys albums, I asked him if he’d ever heard the Tarr Brothers-I’ve always been a country-and-bluegrass nut. After that, we were off. Pete and Joe just sat around looking bored until Jerry produced what looked like a small cigarette wrapped in brown paper.
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“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.