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

DEALING IS FUNNY, AS A game. It is very external and controlled and it follows patterns of protocol and consequences as rigid as any ever encountered by Nine-to-Five Man. More rigid, perhaps, since not everyone is playing the dealing game on the same scale, or with the same intensity, or with the same degree of knowledge.

But everyone in the park is playing, whether he’s on the grass or in the bleachers drinking beer, because everyone figures he’s got something to lose. Essentially, that is what makes dealing so dangerous and so thrilling—the simple fact that everyone is convinced he’s got something to lose. Because not everyone is going to admit it.

That’s the difference between the dealer and Nine-to-Five Man, who is forced to admit it, whether he likes it or not. He has to wear a suit to work, and he has to keep his shoes shined, and he has to get haircuts and watch out for tell-tale underarm stains. These rules are accepted by J. P. Nine-to-Five, by Mrs. Ruth Wanamaker Nine-to-Five, and by all the little Nine-to-Fives. It’s accepted by them and before they know it, it is them, for which they receive the Consolation Prize of Knowing Who They Are. And everybody’s happy so long as the supply of glycerin suppositories holds out.

But that’s not what’s happening on the street, because all the people who are playing there aren’t sure they’re playing, and sometimes they’re most definitely not playing but only trying to play, or thinking they want to play, or some variation thereof. That’s what makes dealing so interesting.

It doesn’t start that way, of course, with the fully developed patterns and responses and the paranoia and the inimitable thrills and chills. It usually starts as an act of love and only later turns into a game.

You start with John Joseph Straight, single, on his way through life with one finger cocked piously up his ass and another thumbing through the Yellow Pages. To this sturdy fellow add two Pernicious Influences, one Psychedelic Experience, a taste of rock ’n’ roll music, and some form or another of Idle Mind (which is widely accepted as the Devil’s Playground). Beat Pernicious Influences and Psychedelic Experience until fluffy, add rock ’n’ roll, season with Idle Mind, and lick the gummed side. Hold a match to one end, insert in mouth. You are now smoking a joint and wondering why you never thought to do this before, while the little man in the back of your head who holds the keys to your future is rolling around on the medulla in a fit of epilepsy. He is shouting that you will never be the same again, that you have permanently damaged your chromosomes and your taste buds, and that you have generally corrupted your body and fulfilled your parents’ Worst Expectations. That is, that’s what he would be saying if you could hear him. But right now you are thinking you have never in your whole life ever noticed how perfidiously intricate the sun looks coming through a half-filled cut-glass decanter of wine, or how amusing it is that your belly button should be stopped shut, while your nose has two holes instead of one.

After a few experiences of this sort, the dastardly weed becomes a fond and coveted friend, and it attracts others. That is to say, in the spirit of brotherhood and togetherness which is the mark of the Aquarian Age, you and your friends blow grass together; and those of your friends who don’t aren’t around much any more. This isn’t any fault of yours—you’re still digging them as much as you did before—but you just can’t stand those soon-to-be-behind-bars looks they give you when you get your shit out and ask them if they want a smoke; or the way they ask you if you’re high on “that stuff” before they’ll tell you how ugly their date was last night.

So you and your dope friends blow dope together, and have a lot of good times together, and watch the sun go down every night together, and go to Baskin-Robbins to taste ice cream together. And after a while it gets so that you’re blowing a lot of dope together.

And that’s cool, contrary to the local witch doctor’s medicinal meditations or the Surgeon General’s latest case of the blahs. Because you know—having violated the number-one principle of Western science and entered into self-experimentation—you know that dope doesn’t make your eyes bug out, or make your head split open and grow asparagus. And you know that you don’t wake up the morning after with the cold-turkey, liver-lidded, hungry, frenzied, glassy-eyed, pure need look of dope in your eyes, because you’re eating better and sleeping more than you ever have before. And you know that grass doesn’t zap your brain into the fourth dimension only to drop it off in the second, leaving you with three eyes and a dork the size of a pineapple and the insistent, insane, uncontrollable need to kill, rape, pillage, and plunder (which a stint in the army would at least teach you how to do)—because in that sense grass is very uneducational.

On the contrary, you find that it is vocational. You change your name to Phineas Phreak or Seymour Stone, and wear bellbottoms and dirty BVDs and grow your hair down to your ass and try to keep from passing Go while still collecting your two hundred bucks for tuition every month. You cancel your subscription to The New York Times and read the L.A. Free Press and don’t brush your teeth and look sullen as much as possible. You hang up when old girl friends call and lead a mysteriously quiet life, enjoying the knowledge that your straight friends are worrying about your health and the “deterioration of his nervous system.”

But most of all you become conscious of the extent to which you were hoaxed by people you once believed in: dope doesn’t drive you to needles or crime, and you still laugh at your father’s dull jokes.

So you try to create your own mechanism, and struggle to survive within it. You do what you think is right, and you say not what you’re supposed to say, usually not even what you want to say, but what you have to say. And then one morning you wake up and it’s you they’re describing in the editorials, and they’re talking about you like you’re a piece of shit that won’t flush. You’ve dropped out, it seems. You’re alienated and God knows what else.

By this time, however, your evil habit is consuming a bit more of your lunch money than it properly should, and you and your friends decide to start buying in quantity. This makes for cheaper dope and, quite often, for better dope, because you’re getting a solid chunk of a brick, and not a lid bag half full of oregano. So you find a big dealer and buy stuff for your friends, and they love you for being so wise in the ways of the street and so kind to their pockets and throats.

Which continues until you finally realize, one day, that you don’t have to pay for any of your smoking dope if you buy in quantity with your friends and then sell a few ounces at street prices to anybody who’s interested. And probably by this time your parents have seen a picture of you in the papers with long hair, hanging out of the occupied administration building, and they have told you to come home to Flat Top Community College or be damned—which is to say, you have been cut off.

So that’s the way it begins, with a few lids to friends to keep the bookstore off your back, or the landlord or the used-car salesman or whoever else has it in for you at the time, and from there it grows like a weed. And soon enough you’re dealing quite a bit of dope and you aren’t seeing many friends, since you’re either buying or selling or smoking with buyers or sellers, and you spend a lot of time hustling and being far out and saying, “Oh, wow! Hey man, did you dig that?” And it goes on that way for as long as you can stand it—forever, if you can stand it that long. But the chances are good that the game will grow either too bold or too old, and the routines too sadly and forlornly familiar, and you will retire from street life and go back to where you came from. Which is where you are.