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

Power was something else. A natural talent, it might be called, an inborn skill. He had been an attentive student at Dreyer Country Day, but he was later dismissed from Kent for what the headmaster, without being specific, had implied was a question of drug abuse. It might have had something to do with John’s consumption of the Mexican narcotic Cannabis sativa during Saturday football games. John had then spoken to the Headmaster in private, and a week later it was announced that John was not being dismissed, but rather had taken a leave of absence because of overwork and stress. No one ever found out what was discussed in the meeting, but John was fond of noting that even such people as Headmasters of distinguished prep schools had soft underbellies.

As a Fine Arts undergraduate at Harvard, a field he had chosen for its casual academic demands and its pretty girls, he had further opportunity to refine his techniques. There was, for example, his nervous breakdown at the end of his sophomore year—a six-week stay at Mass. Mental Health, which brought his parents around to a much more sympathetic stance toward him.

Not perhaps the nicest person, John, but successful in his way.

John lit up and inhaled. “Far out,” he said. “Count on Musty.” And he passed the joint to Sandra, and she passed it to me, and I waved it away.

“What’s happening?” he said.

“I’ve got to work. Hour exam tomorrow.”

“Come on,” John said. “Get serious.”

“Really.”

“You’re not going to do anything tonight,” John said, and he held the joint out to me. I knew it was true, took a hit, and sat back. Stoned again.

Only this time it was jangly and not very pleasant, because I was just back from the Coast, and as soon as I was stoned I felt distinctly rootless, lost somewhere between, and I began to flash on all the times I had felt that way before.

Usually it came from getting stoned with people you didn’t know and couldn’t get to know, for one reason or another—it was a sudden sensation of being completely alone, but not completely the master of your own ship; the sudden sensation of an immutable gap that separated you from the people you were stoned with. A sense that you were here and they were there; that you were different from them and always would be; that you were locked in yourself and the key was not merely thrown away, but dissolved in organic acid.

A very bothersome feeling.

It was especially bad when it happened with people that you knew, people that you knew too well, in fact. That was horrifying. And I flashed on the time I went home to see my parents.

Well, actually I was ordered down to see them. They threatened a lot of stuff if I didn’t come immediately. Because of these rumors they had heard. So about three in the afternoon I got off the train at the Woodfield Station and walked down Elm Street to the drugstore.

I called home after the druggist, a flatulent Rotarian named Mr. Willis, refused to sell me some Vitamin B12. He wouldn’t sell it to me because, he said, I needed a prescription, which was a lot of horseshit. I could remember the days when he’d told me I needed a prescription to buy prophylactics. Mr. Willis was the type of solid burgher who felt that the responsibilities vested in him by the community went beyond the purely medicinal. Anyway it was a pain in the ass not to be able to drop a few B12s, because if you’re really stoned on heavy dope B12 smooths things out a lot. And I was going to need all the smoothing out I could get.

The telephone conversation was short. My mother picked up the phone and said “Hello?” in the sugar-frosted voice that she reserves for those who aren’t in the family.

“Hello, mother, this is Peter.”

“Oh.” Danger, live wires. “Peter, where are you?”

“In Willis’s drugstore.”

“Where is that?”

“In town, mother.”

She got angry then. “In what town, young man?”

“In Woodfield, mother.”

“Oh.” She paused to consider that one. “Well, you’d better come on out here.”

“How?” I said.

“Take a taxi.”

“I haven’t got any money.”

“Oh, you don’t?” Very sarcastic. “I thought you’d just be rolling in money, from all your drug deals.”

So there it was, out in the open: they had found out I was dealing. What a bummer.

“Yeah, well, mother, I don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Have any money.”

“Then hitch a ride out,” she said. “Your father and I will be waiting.”

Click!

Very nice. A very nice and warm person, my mother. I went back outside onto Elm Street and lit up a joint. After three or four hits I felt better, and then I started laughing. Because it occurred to me how ridiculous it was for me to worry about seeing them. They were the ones who were shitting in their pants, just dying to lay into me, nervous as actors before they go on stage. It was their trip, not mine. I already knew by heart what they’d say to me, and once that was over with it didn’t much matter what I answered. It didn’t matter because my parents didn’t have the slightest interest in what I was really up to—in fact, they preferred to remain in the dark. No, the whole point of this scene was to give my parents the opportunity to feel that they were doing their job, fulfilling their obligations to me and to society. In a way they did care what I did; but they cared a hell of a lot more that I knew how they felt about what I did. Groovy. Off to the wars.

I wandered down to the train station and got a taxi, and told the guy my parents would pay him when we got there. Staring out at the Connecticut landscape on the way to the house, I decided I ought to relax a bit. I really wasn’t being fair to the parents. I mean, there was no sense in going out there to have a big fight, anybody could do that. I figured that I’d surprise them and be really nice and sympathetic to their trip, and then after things got rolling, and everything was cool, then maybe I could really start talking to them. What the hell, it was worth a try. And I had to be the guy to try, because they sure weren’t going to. I laughed when I realized that I was thinking the way a magazine article in Redbook would read. Christ, I could see it now. Noted Young Freak Says: Generation Gap the Kids’ Fault! Rock star Lucifer Harkness bemoans his lack of sympathy and understanding for his parents in his adolescence, and takes all the blame for his rupture with them himself! Amen.

“Which way now, bud?” said the driver.

“Right here, the last house on the left. You can’t miss it.”

“Pay the what?” my father said.

“Taxi,” I said.

“What the hell for?”

“He’s waiting outside,” I said.

“Pay him yourself.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“You never have any money,” my father said. “Rich son of poor parents.” That’s one of his favorite lines. I don’t know where he learned it.

“Well, Dad, someone has to pay him.”

“You go out and pay him.”

“I don’t have any money.”

We often have conversations like this. Merry-go-round conversations. You go around the circle once, and it doesn’t work, so you go around again.

“Well then,” he said, “go out and tell him you can’t pay him.”

“Shit, Dad.”

“I might have thought college would teach you more original expression—”

“Shit, Dad. Just pay the guy, will you?”

My father sucked on his pipe and snorted. “Wait here,” he said, and went out to pay the taxi driver. When he came back, his face was tight and creased at the corners of his mouth. He was chewing furiously on his pipe. “Your mother,” he said, “is very upset. You’ve made her very upset. So try and be civil when you talk to her, and remember that she loves you very much.”