David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

‘Fear of disks. Fear of drains. Fear of pretty much all spiral movements in liquid, across the board.’

The psychiatrist’s eyebrows were extraordinarily thin and sparse, and when she raised them it meant she didn’t quite follow—

‘Whirlpools, maelstroms, bathtubs draining,’ Cusk illustrated. He had a fine sheen of sweat on his upper lip, but could tell by feel that the forehead was staying dry, hanging in there. ‘Briskly stirred beverages. Flushing toilets.’

‘You sent Cardwell to get him?’

‘What’s the problem?’

‘He’s demented, Charlie, that’s what’s the problem.’

‘He’s a good driver. He’s dependable.’

‘He’ll rant at the guy the whole way here; the guy’ll think it’s a post of evangelist goons. This is Lehrl’s aide, Charlie. Jesus.’

There were long silences between periods of attention.

‘Shit I got one for you. This was a while ago, though, when I was in school in St. Louis, when we were the Reserve Rangers.’

‘I’ll bite.’

‘You won’t get some of it. You had to be alive in the late sixties.’

‘We weren’t alive?’

‘I don’t mean playing-with-your-toes alive or squeezing-the-pores-of-your-nose alive. I mean of age, aware. I mean culturally.’

‘Counterculturally you mean.’

‘I could say to eat shit off a thick wooden stick, Gaines. But I don’t. Instead I say if there’s something cool with this unmistakable quality and I say the thing’s quality is just so Beatles, you don’t get it.’

‘You had to be there.’

‘It’s not the same thing as just owning Beatles records, you’re saying. You had to be there, in it.’

‘Grooving. Being groovy.’

‘That’s just it. Nobody really said groovy. People that said groovy or called you man were just playing out some fantasy they’d seen on CBS reports. I’m saying if I say Baxter-Bathing or Owsley or mention Janis’s one dress she wore you think in terms of data. There’s none of the feeling attached to it — this was a feeling. It’s impossible to describe.’

‘Except as saying it’s so very Beatles.’

‘And some of it not even data. What if I say Lord Buckley? What if I say the Texas tower or Sin Killer Griffin on tape from jail or Jackson going on Today and sitting across from that J. Fred chimp in a shirt that’s still got Martin’s blood and brain matter on it and nobody says anything even though Today ’s in New York which means fucking Jackson flew all the way in from Memphis in that shirt so he could wear blood on TV — do you feel anything if I say that? Or Bonanza or I Am Curious parenthesis Yellow ? J. Fred Muggs? Jesus, The Fugitive— if I say the one-armed man, what interior state does it provoke?’

‘You mean nostalgia.’

‘I mean methamphetamine hydrochloride. Say December’s Children or Dharma Bums or Big Daddy Cole at the House of Blues in Dearborn or crew cuts and horn-rims or even let me think of rolled-up Levi’s showing three inches of white cotton over penny loafers and I taste the hydrochloride from the days at Wash U when we were the Reserve Rangers. How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.’

‘We have our own little cultural signposts and cathexes and things that make us feel nostalgia.’

‘It’s not nostalgia. It’s a whole set of references you don’t even know you don’t have. Suppose I say Sweater Puppies — you feel nothing. Christ, Sweater Puppies.’

‘Not acid?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Why methamphetamine and not acid? LSD? Weren’t grass and LSD the era’s like defining drugs?’

‘That’s what I mean. None of the nuance or complexity introduces into your field. Acid was the West Coast and a small cell around Boston. Acid wasn’t even in Greenwich Village until Kesey and Leary’s thing upstate in ’67. By ’67 the sixties were over. The Midwest was meth and designer hallucinogens. We had a small sort of inner set at Wash U who were in with the Dogtown crowd; one reason I’m here instead of private is I don’t think one of us cracked a book in two years, then I had to move because of the Rescue Rangers and this older guy named, perversely, McCool, who wanted in with us, hung around, but desperately uncool, from hunger we’d say but to you this means nothing. McCool was a district rep for Welch Lambeth. I presume Welch Lambeth is part of your cultural index.’

‘Chemicals. Now part of Lilly. University City, Miz, heavily diversified, chemical and largely industrial solvents, medical supplies, adhesive, polymers, chassis molds.’

‘Medical supplies at this time including for instance sometimes he’d bring stuff in, we’d be at the usual table at Jaegerschnitzel, a rathskeller for WU’s most countercultural and antiestablishment but not mod or groovy crowd, and one night in the midst of some bull session in comes McCool, who had a larcenous heart, with a half-pound insulated box he’d got from some sample room and said, “I know some of you fellows like this, so when I saw it I said, Holy Smokes I gotta liberate this for the fellows” and like that. From hunger, but plucky in that Eisenhower way. He’s in his thirties and already bald with a blinky hunger for acceptance; you can only imagine what must have happened to him as a kid. The sort of guy who comes to your party and you get him drunk enough to pass out by nine and put him in the Rescue Rangers minibus and strip off everything but his shoes and socks and leave him propped up on a bus stop bench in East St. Louis and he’ll not only survive somehow but the next night he’ll be back at the Jaegerschnitzel punching you in the shoulder and saying Good One like you’d just given him a hotfoot, desperate to be one of the guys.’

‘My brothers taught me that desperation is the chief, like, bar to being accepted as one of the guys. I learned this the hard way I can tell you. One time because as a kid I was scared of the water and they let me come with them on a camping trip and my oldest brother said this was my one big chance to be one of the guys and instead of camping it turned out it was a fishing trip and when I tried to climb in the boat it turned out they—’

‘And we’re like right, great, but then Eddie Boyce opens it up and inside are these long insulated corrugated-cardboard tubes, and inside each tube is a little three-inch double-stoppered test tube with… pharmaceutical-grade methamphetamine hydrochloride, three-point-something grams each. We’re all sitting there looking at each other and Boyce’s eyebrows are about on top of his head. McCool trying to play it casual but saying “See? What do you think?” Do you know what this means? There were 224 grams of pure pharmaceutical meth in that box. Do you know what even crummy adulterated garage-lab meth can do to a twenty-year-old nervous system?’

‘I would have sold it off and used the net to establish a position in silver and then gone to my professors and pulled their beards, tell them I could buy and sell them now and they could put that in their pipes and smoke it.’

‘We didn’t sell enough of it, I’ll tell you. But what we did wreaked havoc. Classes were a zoo. Carbuncular kids who’d sat in the back row and never made a peep were grabbing their profs by the lapels and citing the surplus theory of value in the voice of SS interrogators. Newman Club mainstays were copulating with abandon on the library steps. The infirmary was besieged by philosophy grad students begging someone to shut their heads off. Dining halls were empty. The entire Wash U defensive backfield was jailed for assault on the Kansas State water boy. Coeds whose hymens could be used for a vault door were giving it up in the bushes outside Lambda Pi. Most of the next two months we spent as the Reserve Rangers, in the van, answering distress calls from boys who had gotten hold of a tenth of a gram of this stuff and now found their girlfriends hanging off the ceiling by their nails grinding their perfect little white teeth into nubbins. Reserve Rangers!