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

AS A STANDBY YOU GET the seat right behind the jets. Sit down, tuck the special suitcase under the seat in front of you, buckle up, and look out the window at the Boston rain. Then look over and smile at the two Marines sitting next to you, and wait for the goddamned thing to take off.

Once in the air, you get your choice of chicken, sword-fish, or roast beef; Life, Vogue, or Sports Afield. Life features an article on the growing menace to our children, the Marijuana Habit. A follow-up on how one Illinois town rallied to the challenge and pulled itself out of the dope gutter. A quote from a kid at the University of Illinois who says reality is the best trip of all.

When you can’t stand any more, you up and amble back to the can and flip on the OCCUPIED sign. Once safely locked in, you fumble around with the air whooshing up out of the john; you try not to spill your whole stash on the floor as you roll a neat little joint in your clammy dope-fiend hands. And then you blow it.

After that, things slow down a bit and you amble back and stumble across the two Marines and get your earphones on just in time to catch the flick. Last time it wasn’t too bad, some Nazis torturing a prostitute, but no such luck on these daytime ventures—it’s Andy Griffith as an iconoclastic but truly lovable parish priest. For the next two hours you are part of Andy’s G-for-General-Audiences struggle to refurnish the church, and it’s all pretty wonderful. But toward the end of the movie, high-altitude dehydration sets in, and you find yourself feeling pretty miserable. So you amble back toward the can again, with numerous eyes flicking up at you suspiciously as you walk down the aisle—since everybody smelled dope the last time—but you fool them all and get a cup of water.

While you’re in the galley you pocket a few of those absurd little booze bottles that they hustle for a buck apiece before the meal, have a few more cups of water, turning occasionally to face the cabin, and smile innocently at anyone who is looking. Then return to your seat, with some ice in the cup, to get thoroughly and quietly juiced.

This doesn’t help the dehydration any but it makes the time go a lot faster. Toward the end of the trip you even join the Marines in molesting the stewardesses. The stewardesses are very good-natured about them, because they’re in uniform, poor fellows, and so young, too. The stewardesses are less good-natured about you.

Finally the captain comes on to announce that San Francisco airport is still there, and that we may be landing soon. The seat belt sign comes on, the Muzak returns, and everyone frantically puffs away, trying to get that last little hit of nicotine before the NO SMOKING sign flashes on. Behind you in the next seat the middle-aged lady searches her purse for the tranquilizer she always drops before the landing.

And then the plane comes down. It’s 3:55 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, seventy-two degrees, the sun is shining on both sides of the street, and it’s all before you.

IWAS EXPECTING TO BE met at the airport, but nobody showed. I couldn’t believe John hadn’t called my friends to let them know I was coming, so I shuffled up and down the arrivals platform waiting for a familiar face. Everyone was waiting. There were servicemen waiting for the bus, businessmen waiting for the fat wife and the dog, porters waiting for tips; all of us waiting to see what would happen and waiting then to see what would come next.

After an hour I knew John hadn’t called. It pissed me off that he could be so casual. He could afford to be, that was the heart of the matter. John had enough bread to buy himself out of anything that he got into—and into anything he felt out of. He simply assumed things were the same for other people—and if they didn’t measure up to the assumption, then what the hell were they doing hanging around with him? But I was still angry, because I couldn’t take a bus across the Bay, not with twenty-five hundred in twenties bulging in my coat pocket. The only alternative was a rented car, and he knew that I didn’t have the bread to waste on a rented car. But then, he did…

So I went over to the Hertz counter, where a sleazy blonde in a zebra suit was smiling into space. She could be easily replaced by a machine that smiled, I thought as I stepped into view. But then a machine would have known that my license was a phony. And anyway it was all part of the game: I gave her the license and she smiled. I pretended the smile was real, and she pretended the license was real. A reasonable bargain, all things considered.

The car was a green ’69 Mustang. First thing I did when I got in was to check the ashtray. A ridiculous gesture, but the kind of thing I always find myself doing, just to make sure that the ads are really up front. Yeah. Well, the ashtray was clean but the ignition was burned out and the car wouldn’t start, so I exchanged it for an identical green Mustang and rolled out to Berkeley.

Back on the Bay Shore Freeway. It felt good to be ripping along at sixty-five miles an hour, a cool salty breeze blowing in off the water and the blue-green hills of the city up ahead. It was almost five, and the outbound lanes were mobbed, sweaty tangles of bumper-to-bumper frustration. But there was barely another car on my side of the road. I suddenly thought of Boston, and I laughed. It would be raining there, still, and the streets would be filled with the long, dour faces of people trying to convince themselves that spring really was on its way—or at least would be once exams were over.

Boston seemed so far away, and so ridiculous. Just then I rounded a corner and the whole side of a hill bade me WELCOME TO SAN FRANCISCO.

I realized that I shouldn’t let myself get too carried away, that I should stay cool for the work ahead. But I felt so good about being back in California that I just couldn’t feel anything else. I couldn’t get uptight about meeting Musty, and I couldn’t feel all the small, sobering, paranoiac things that I should’ve been feeling, that I was supposed to be feeling. Just before I’d left Boston, John had given me the rundown on Musty, so that I could get good and paranoid about doing business with him. Being paranoid was supposed to make me cautious, discreet, cool about the whole riff. But what John told me just made me more confident than ever.

Because Musty was big. At twenty-three he was one of the biggest and most successful dealers in the country.

Which meant that his scene was a lot different from most other dealers’. Most of them, when they’re doing lots of ten or fifteen or twenty bricks at a time, think they’re moving a lot of dope. They figure they’ve got a good hustle going, and for the most part, they do. But they’ve got one hang-up, and that is their dependence on a supplier. In that respect they’re as helpless as the little guy who picks up a street lid now and then on his way home from work. And they can get burned and ripped off and hustled in a thousand different ways, just like that little guy.