Michael Crichton - Dealing or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues

“Hey, lookit dat, buddy. Nice pussy.”

I politely looked over a ham-sized forearm to see a thin, wasted-looking chick with a shaved twat lying guilelessly across the centerfold page of Suburban Jaybird.

“Nice,” I said. Nice, my ass. The chick was about as ugly as they come, especially without her hair. Hair was mystery, it was sex, it was funky and greasy and it got tangled when you made love.

“How’dja like to fuck her?” he said, holding up another picture.

I shrugged. The woman behind us on the MTA car was doing her best to let us know that she was faint with indignation. She was making small coughing sounds. Out the window, gray and rainy, was the Boston skyline.

“I like ’em with hair,” I said. Behind me I heard the sharp intake of breath from the woman.

My companion turned around and shot her a cold look, then turned back to his magazine. “Holy Jeez,” he said in a reverential tone. “Lookit, there’s one you’d like.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Now there’s a nice bush.”

“Christ, you’re not shittin’,” he said.

He got off at Park Street, leaving me alone with Mrs. Snorts behind me. She got off at Charles Street, the Beacon Hill exit. I took the subway all the way to the end of the line.

SHOOTING OUT INTO HARVARD SQUARE from the bowels of the MTA was about as much fun as having a tooth pulled without Novocain. I always felt that way when I got back from the Coast, but somehow I was never prepared for it. Because, as much of a drag as I knew it would be to return, I always figured that it would be nothing more than that—a return. And so the ensuing culture shock, the numbing of mind and body which was only later understood to be Boston’s charming way of saying Welcome Back, always caught me by surprise.

And what a surprise. A surprise wrapped in thick, heavy air, dimly opaque light, trimmed with an ineffable, oppressive sense of guilt. The air in the square reeked of guilt. Nobody was ever going to be naive enough to mention it, but it was there just the same, and readily assented to by all on the street.

The street. White pasty bodies and zitty faces shuffled past me, eyes on the ground, clutching cigarettes like drowning men, moving only when the sign commanded them to WALK. Old ladies sneered at passersby and cabbies looked hot and sullen. Three-pieced professors sneaked across the street, clutching their top-heavy wives like illicit Government secrets, and paranoid pristine fags marched poodles past shattered winos bumming dimes. Truck drivers whistled at towny cunts and sad, stooped teaching fellows picked their noses and read the Daily Flash in twenty-three languages.

I went across the street to Nini’s to get some cigarettes, and cut my way through the prepubescent mob outside. The guys slouched against the walls, sucking on toothpicks or nicotine sticks, scratching their crotches stealthily and yelling at the chicks. The chicks were all over the place, big flowsy broads topped by bleached, ironed hair, chewing the life out of huge wads of gum and swinging their pocketbooks at the more adventurous guys. All the time shrieking like cats in heat, shrieking and laughing and again swinging their pocketbooks. It was too much.

Inside Nini’s the adults-only version of the same movie was going on, featuring fat, powdered women, engrossed in multicolored tabloids (“I had a change-of-life baby by another man!”), and the usual mob of skinny, haunted men in the back of the store, tirelessly leafing through the skin mags. Jesus, what all these poor bastards needed was a good lay. And a good lay they’d never get—not in Boston, anyway.

I went down Dunster Street, past Holyoke Center, and over toward the Houses. It was quieter there, and there wasn’t any traffic, and the trees had tiny flecks of green at the tips. Spring was getting its foot in the door and it suddenly didn’t seem so bad.

Once in the House I stopped to talk to Jerry, who wanted to know all about my vacation. Jerry is the superintendent, a cheerful, sly Irishman who will talk your ear off, given half a chance, and is a stickler for rules, especially those concerning women in the rooms. But Jerry understands those who understand him, and so for a few hours of conversation a term, and a couple of bottles of rye on the Savior’s birthday, Jerry is the most amenable and considerate super in the college. Hello, Jerry.

Then up to E entry, and John’s room on the first floor. John has a sign on the door which reads:

John finds this amusing, since his chicks think he means The Truth, while he means the chicks. The door opened to reveal Sandra’s lovely form. “How’d it go?” she asked.

I was tempted to ask her the same thing, seeing as how she was decked out in one of John’s bathrobes. But all I said was “Fine,” and went in and sat down.

John called from the bedroom, “That you, Pete?”

“Yeah.”

“Just a minute.”

Sandra was looking very chic and wealthily whorish as she put a record on the turntable and sat down across from me. She crossed her legs in the extraordinary way she has of crossing her legs, languidly, with a lazy shot of the bush in the process. Nothing offered, of course, but if she knew you and liked you, she didn’t mind letting you know her snatch was all still there.

“How’d it go?” she said again.

“Fine,” I said again.

“You look bushed.”

“I am,” I said.

Then John came out, wearing his other bathrobe. He has two Brooks foulard-print bathrobes. One is several sizes too small for him, and he tells the girls it was a present to him from his grandmother. But it’s handy for the girls. John is well-organized about that sort of thing.

“Thanks for meeting me at the airport,” I said.

“Hey,” he said, “what’s this I heard about—”

“A bust?”

John lit a cigarette. “Yeah.”

I shrugged. “It happened. I got busted.”

“And?”

“They dropped charges,” I said. “They couldn’t make it stick. It was this other guy’s dope in the car and they couldn’t make anything stick to me.”

John nodded. He didn’t seem terribly interested. He pointed to the suitcase. “You get it all?”

“Ten bricks,” I said.

“Far out,” he said. “Let’s have a look.” And as I opened the suitcase he said, in a very casual voice, “Was it Murphy who busted you?”

Typical John. The casual fuck with your head. I looked up. “Why?”

“It was Murphy who busted Ernie, you know.”

Thanks for the good news. “Yeah,” I said. “It was Murphy who busted me and I got off by agreeing to set you up. All you have to do is go down to Central Square tomorrow at ten, carrying these bricks—”

John managed a pretty realistic, hearty laugh. “You getting paranoid?”

“Me?” I said. “Paranoid? Why should I be? My deal’s firm.” John laughed again, even more convincingly. Then he cut open the brick and I could sit back and relax while he toked up.

The trouble with John is that he had an acid trip last fall and he dropped about two thousand mics with some people he didn’t know. The whole thing bent his head around the telephone pole. He never talked about the trip, but from the little he said you could tell he’d gotten very stoned and then very afraid, and decided that the only way he could handle it would be to control it. So he became a controller. Power trips with everyone, crappy little freak games and manipulations and adrenalin spurts passed out at the door, gratis. I had thought he didn’t play those games with me, but he did, of course. He played them with everyone.

Which is why John Thayer Hartnup III, of Eliot House and Cohasset, Mass., was into dealing at all. It was the only way it made sense. The son of the Right Reverend Mr. Walker Wingate Hartnup and the former Miss Ellie Winston (of South Carolina) hardly needed the bread. Even if the tobacco money went up in smoke and the Reverend’s investments died, Grandmother Wingate could be counted on to call down the First National bankers to her Plymouth home and transfer a few goodies. It was all very far from a question of bread.