Michael Dibdin: Dark Specter

It’s all part of the general pattern that the guy who originally found the place didn’t go on to become a member of the group at all. He was a dour jock who’d been a wide receiver on the same team as Greg, but had now graduated and was working as a salesman at a Dodge dealership. He and a coworker took the house and invited Greg to share it with them. Greg brought in Sam, who in turn mentioned the place to me. I was living with a girlfriend that year, but I was looking for an excuse to break up so I said I’d give it a try.

The arrangement was doomed from the start, of course. The two car salesmen may have looked and sounded very much the same as us when we met them over a beer one Saturday night, wearing their weekend tie-dyes and faded Levis, but they had in fact crossed the shadow line which separated our floating world from the uncompromising grid of straight society, and were none too happy about this transition. Monday through Friday they had to be up at seven, showered and shaved, suited and wide-tied, and get out there and move stock. Their servitude was thrown into sharp relief by our anarchistic lifestyle, and they tended to react particularly badly when we staggered back in from an all-night party just as they were leaving for work, or decided to play The Who Live at Leeds at the appropriate volume around three in the morning.

But what brought things to a crisis was the question of drugs. We had a fairly large stash of these on hand at any given time, mostly pot and hash, but also more exotic treats. This gave the car salesmen the jitters. If the house got busted, their careers would be over before they’d started. At first they came on heavy and tried to enforce a ban, but there were three of us and only two of them, plus we had the advantage of being able to drop some uppers to improve our attitude, or toke up and mellow out if the vibes got too heavy. It must havebeen a bitch. They finally gave up and moved out to a squeaky-clean high-rise near the dealership, leaving us to find replacements quickly to make up the next month’s rent. Larry turned up on the first trawl-he’d been to school with Sam and they used to shoot pool together once in a while-along with another guy who didn’t last, and the following month Vince materialized from somewhere, I still don’t know how or why, and stuck.

Such a casual, disparate grouping seems pretty unlikely now, yet at the time none of us thought twice about it. Later, looking back nostalgically from the far side of my own shadow line at that lost world of ease and excitement, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out just what it was that made the whole thing work. I can’t speak for the others, but I think I know what drew me to them: a passion for the tawdry and the transient, a weakness for the power not just of cheap music but of cheap emotion, cheap ideas and cheap thrills of every kind.

To Greg and Larry, all this came naturally. It was where they had grown up, a language they had spoken all their lives. With Vince it was a little more forced. He never talked about his parents, but one or two comments he let drop in unguarded moments suggested that he’d been raised in the kind of small-town home where they subscribed to the New Yorker and listened to the live broadcast from the Met every Saturday morning. He had to work his catechism of popular culture, but did so with all the zeal of a recent convert. For Sam, the journey had been even longer. His parents had permitted only one book in the house, the family Bible, and regarded television and popular music as works of the Devil. Even the radio was only turned on for farm bulletins and religious broadcasts on Sunday.

But despite their differences, the other four were merely expressing or reappropriating a culture native to them. They were Americans. So was I, on paper. I had been born in Maine and carried an American passport, but none of this made me an American, in my own eyes at least. My father had been European marketing director for a Boston-based company, and from the age of six to eighteen I lived and went to school in Holland, Switzerland and France. Despite summer vacations back in the States, when I enrolled at the University of Minnesota, I felt a foreigner in my own country.

So my association with Sam, Vince, Greg and Larry meant more than just a good time. At the risk of sounding pompous, it was a rediscovery of my roots, an affirmation of my identity. I was discovering for the first time the unique experience of American low taste, the authentic, unexportable cultural product. I reveled in its shameless excess, its triumphant vulgarity, and looked to the others as my guides through a heritage I possessed in name only. They were naturally flattered by this, and the fact that I embodied various qualities which they aspired to-a classy veneer of sophistication and cosmopolitanism-helped soothe any tensions which might have arisen from our differences in other respects.

That Saturday night at the Commercial was a good example of the way the relationship functioned. As I said, the bar at that hotel was notoriously the roughest and scuzziest in town. The bouncers at the door checked the ID of anyone who looked remotely under age, but that and money were all you needed to get in. You ordered a tableful of beers from one of the hard-faced waitresses, and as long as you drank up and didn’t get too rowdy, no one would bother you. The noise level was pretty high, particularly when the band started up, but the bouncers ensured that there was very little real trouble. Occasionally a pack of frat boys running the trapline would start making assholes of themselves, but that was just local color, like the hookers who trolled the bar between glasses of Seven-and-Seven.

So there we were, that Saturday night, sitting around a table of half-drunk brewskis and discussing what theologians term the Problem of Evil. There was nothing unusual about this. When it came to conversation, we went straight from the trivial to the cosmic without batting an eyelid. We could spend hours discussing what kind of pizza to order, or rehashing the plot lines of old movies, and then move right on to such topics as the meaning of life or the theory of reincarnation. We were equally at home with the sublime or the ridiculous. It was the stuff in between we didn’t have any time for, the earnest middle ground of the straight world with its rules, regulations and responsibilities.

Drugs had a lot to do with this, of course. People who weren’t part of that scene often don’t realize that it was governed by a code of etiquette every bit as rigid as a Long Island dinner party. If a fellow-tripper decided that some object in the room-an ashtray, say-was of intense beauty and significance, it was simply not done to point out that it was just a fucking ashtray, for Christ’s sake. On the other hand, if someone brought up the fact that the toilet kept overflowing, or that the electricity would be turned off if we didn’t pay the bill, he would immediately be told to stop heavying everyone out. It was considered gauche in the extreme to mention practical problems or future arrangements, but absolutely OK to raise the question of the origins of the universe, or to argue for hours about whether the physical world has an existence independent of our perceptions of it.

So there was nothing out of the ordinary about our discussion that evening at the Commercial. It was a television news item which sparked the whole thing off. At home we almost never watched the news, considering it to be a propaganda tool of the military-industrial complex designed no less than its Soviet equivalent to manipulate and suppress the truth. But there was a TV set in the bar to entertain patrons while the band took a break, and this particular report had gotten to us. Sure, it was another repressive preemptive strike at the drug culture of which the power-trippers in Washington were rightly terrified, but it also related to issues which directly concerned us, and we had to talk it out.