Your Day In The Barrel Read online

  When I went to college, I lived in a dormitory. Here were all these people from Ohio and Missouri and Illinois, and the first week a guy asks me if I want to smoke some Marri-wanna. Hmmmmm. When I went back to Long Island at Thanksgiving, I saw a friend of mine, a couple of years older than me, named John Accardo. I put up three thou, my allowance for the year, and went back to college via United holding all kinds of pills and weed. By Christmas I had 6,500 bucks, and bought my parents a copper lamp in Bloomingdale’s. I left college two years later. By then, John was retired, living with his old lady and kids in a little house in the mainly French suburbs of Casablanca, where cash is king and nobody asks. Bogart was right on—that’s a good place to sit out any war and I assume you know what I mean.

  So for 20 thou I bought his old dealership, payable in five fours though he hoped sooner. It included fourteen colleges in Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio and looked to gross 100 G’s a year. The net is lower, way lower, ’cause you got weird expenses (like Genelle’s rent) but it’s about seven years bust your ass and all the paranoia and then retire. At IBM or the public school system it’s life and no parole, so it’s chancy but appealing. As for sources, John introduced me to his.

  I know what you’re thinking and I say Mafia-Schmafia. The grass farm in Mexico or the acid lab in California are trips for people who like to be on that end, and fix it so it’s cool. Maybe it takes international organization to get smack into the country, but for the rest it’s just folks, entrepreneurial farmers, airline pilots, FBI agents (yeah), corporate types, longhairs, peace people, and even, so help me, a little old lady I once met who owned a horse-boarding stable in Kentucky and gathered about a ton of Psilocybin mushrooms every year with the help of, hang on, her nephews.

  I think you begin to get the idea: it’s a business.

  The guy in the Piper Apache I don’t know. I have a single-point contact with a wholesale distributor in Philadelphia, he’s in the dope-buying business and he owns a trucking company and working for him are cousins, uncles, grandfathers, maiden aunts, you name it. His name, to me, is Essegian. He isn’t Italian (maybe Lebanese, I’m not sure), isn’t the Mafia. The newspapers and the federal crime people just about invented the Mafia, because if this wasn’t organized crime, was instead just a guy into private venture capitalism, they wouldn’t have a straw man to keep knocking over. They wanna say “Six Sinister Sivuccio Brothers Captured in Brooklyn!” They sure as hell don’t want to say “Harry the plumber from Toledo caught holding ten kilos.”

  I wake up at six with a wig hair on the end of my tongue. Genelle is up and doing with Robbie in the van; she kind of keeps him out of the way without making him feel that he’s kept out of the way. She’s into tricks like that.

  I’ve got a heavy black beard and so I shave with the latest fission-honed titanium blade, or whatever they’re selling this month, and it’s back into the glasses and green shirt. Genelle’s got her costume on and Robbie’s got his machine gun and after two helpings of Grape Nuts with medium cream ail around, away we go.

  It’s Saturday and the state heat are out in force but with my California plates and tourist trip they don’t even give me a second look. We stare straight ahead on the highway with semi-cretin grins on, just happy to be driving our motor home through the great scenic state of Penn’s Woods and what the hell, folks, if we happen to be holding 800 keys of grass—tonight your children will laugh at the TV shows.

  First stop is Lewisburg, home of the federal pen where they kept Hoffa and assorted war resisters, but, more important, Bucknell College. I pull the Yacht into the center of town and drop Genelle off, then drive back to the state park and squeeze in among a bunch of other trailers, campers, mobile homes, what have you. As Mrs. Walter Knauch, she rents a Dodge Polara and heads out to a pay-phone and calls the local person we are dealing with. This one happens to be a two-year relationship so there isn’t a whole lot of paranoia. Still, she drives around for about two hours with an eye on the rear-view mirror and even passes my spot a couple of times so I can check what’s coming along behind her. Robbie and I watch a little TV, he plays by himself, is generally a good kid to have along.

  When I see on the third pass that she’s cool I give her a sign and she pulls into the picnic area. Back in the Yacht it’s off with the wig and back into jeans and T-shirts that say “Jefferson Airplane” on the front. Local people like to think they’re dealing with somebody like them so that it’s a little more than “I sell—You buy,” and we change costumes to oblige them. I pack up a suitcase with 35 kilos of grass and 1,000 hits of the acid. Away we go in the Dodge, taking Robbie and locking up the Yacht.

  It’s one of those days in Pennsylvania when it’s hotter than hell and the sky is dead white, like a fishbelly. All along the little roads, corn is pouring up out of the ground. I suppose it’s all full of chemicals but it still is great to look at. I used to think about buying a farm, but I’m no farmer; my great grandfather tried that in Russia a hundred years ago and got a sickle in the neck for his trouble.

  Pretty soon we turn down a tiny dirt road with berry bushes and trees pressed right up against the sides, cross a little stream, wind through some old second-growth trees and into a weedy front yard. There’s folks hangin’ all over that porch and I freak a little, but when I get to countin’ there’s just four, like it’s supposed to be. They are nonchalanter ’n hell, but they are waiting for the candyman with a good little bit of anticipation that I’ve learned to recognize.

  We pull in next to a VW van with a splotchy impressionist cow painted on the side, there’s a goat tethered just beyond and a whole army of cats peering around the comer of the house. These folks are living the good life. We stroll on up to the porch and say “Howdy.” “How are y’all doin’?” says the tall guy with long blond hair and muttonchops. He works in the Admissions Office as some kind of counselor and calls himself The Dean of Dreams.

  Genelle says “Pretty good, how’s it goin’?”

  “Good. Been lookin’ forward to seein’ ya.”

  All this mock-tough semi-country talk confines itself to dealers and clients, as far as I can tell. You wouldn’t talk to your dentist that way. But this is one of them thar highly stylized relationships.

  “You want some iced tea? Made fresh.” That’s the willow hanging on the porch railing. Closer looks reveal a young woman, sexy in a modelish sort of way. Boobs like fried eggs. But I prefer my talent like Genelle, built a little closer to the ground, wide-tracking. From the mists inside my head emerges a name: Joyce Quarterly. She does something or other in the English department, from the name anyhow. God only knows what her real name is, Ethel Grumple probably, or some such. Shit, I’d rather be Joyce Quarterly if I didn’t feel like an Ethel Grumple.

  We’re all silent for a space. People assume that all dealers are californiated, silent and a wee bit mystic on the inside, and that the last thing they want in the world is a good schmoose. It takes both girls to get the iced tea. The other one is called Sister Mary Metaphor and writes poems, or so they tell me, because she doesn’t speak to strangers.

  Through the oldtimey sounding screen door comes a sweating pitcher of iced tea; you can hear the ice and see the lemons and, what’s that, a stray frond of mint swimming around in there unless my eyes deceive me. Sister Mary Metaphor is smiling gently and in both hands is holding a bowl of, yes, now I can see, (ugh!) granola cookies—hippie food, nutritious grains and nuts. They’ll have us all into being stoned chipmunks with big, white, grinding teeth eventually. I smile, fey as anyone from Great Neck can manage, and take one.

  Aaaaarrgggghhhh, I can taste the grains in my teeth, this thing is loaded with hash, and I’ve got all kinds of dollars to count, all kinds of miles to drive, all kinds of produce to get dealt yet today, as well as keeping my tender Joosh ass out of jail. I give Genelle a look, meaning “Dope in the food, hang onto Robbie,” and with a smile as good as Sister Mary’s she’s got him interested in patting the goat. I follow on over, look
back over my shoulder and say “Y’mind?” and the Dean smiles “No we don’t” and I feed the cookie to the goat. He’s been there before in this household, I can tell, ’cause he looks me right in the eye with his spacey yellow slices of pupil to say: Thanx Mack. When you’re tied up in the yard, getting ripped on Granola/hash cookies is the next best thing.

  Laying back, feet up on the porch railing and not saying anything, is the honcho dealer in the crew: Professor Plum. You remember him from the CLUE game, “I accuse Professor Plum, with the rope, in the conservatory.” And you opened the envelope and a cute little miniature murder weapon fell out. Professor Plum isjust watching this whole scene going down and smiling away, just a hit nasty maybe, ’cause he knows the whole game. He’s on the faculty somewhere, and dealing to him is just another outrageous trip to lay on his head, and somehow I suppose he manages to prove this, is valuable enough to the whatever department that he’s able to justify lifestyle of choice. Surely he deals to the hip faculty, to students and local parasities at what I expect are Nova Scotia Salmon prices. “How’s it going, Professor Plum” I say.

  “Stayin’ high” he smiles.

  “Good thing. How was the last load?”

  “Fine. Turned every last little seed.”

  “I oughta put you on television, with a dog.”

  “I oughta go on television, with a dog.”

  “It would surely stimulate business.”

  “Hi there friends, this is Professor Plum of Professor Plum’s Used Dope Lot right out here on the Miracle Mile in the friendly city of Lewisburg. Right now we’ve got to clear out our inventory to make room for the 1971 harvest and I assure you that no legitimate offer will be refused. Here’s a 1970 lid previously owned by an old lady who only got stoned for church on Sunday. This lid is extremely clean and there’s miles of good smokin’ left in there. We can now offer you this previously owned, executive lid, for $14.98, that’s right I said $14.98 plus your old roach, dealer rolling and state taxes extra in some areas.”

  We all laugh, and Professor Plum leans back in his chair and smiles. “Anytime you’re ready,” I say, “I’ll buy the air time.”

  “Well,” he says, “maybe it’s not so far off.”

  “Hey man, this is one business I wouldn’t mind being out of.”

  “Bullshit. You love it, friend. You’re the main bearing of counterculture.”

  “No man, I’m a salesman, and this gets to be biz pretty fast.”

  “So does anything. Had me a friend in Pittsburgh one time, big tall fucker with blue eyes, perfect vision, blond hair. This guy was making two yards a week as a sperm bank contributor, went in and jerked off into a test tube every morning. By the second month, he was tired of it, took to reading dirty magazines and finally couldn’t get it up for the test tube anymore. He asked them for a pretty nurse or something and they just about told him he was a pervert. Everything gets to be biz, even the professor biz.”

  “I imagine it does. I do like being self-employed.” “Are you self-employed?”

  My eyebrow goes up a little on that one—we’re back to the old Schmafia number. “My name ends with a consonant, baby.”

  “Aw c’mon, I’m just playing.”

  “That’s all right, everybody works over private enterprise. I’m just a little guy, tryin’ to make a buck.” “Waaal, let’s have us a look at the merchandise.” “Gosh, I thought you’d never ask.”

  By now Genelle is yacking with Joyce Quarterly and the Dean of Dreams, Robbie is still playing with the goat, whose eyes have narrowed up a good bit more since that hash cookie hit home (goats not only digest a lot, they digest fast). I can hear typewriter keys clacking on the second story of the house, so Sister Mary Metaphor probably got a poem out of our visit. Plum and I stroll over to the Polara and open up the trunk. I see him getting an eyefull of the license plate; that’s why we rent. Everybody loves a good dealer story and if they knew we had that Yacht the story would be all over town and into the narcs’ ears in no time at all. I throw open the trunk with a big motion and haul the suitcase onto the porch. It’s a big bugger of an old leather suitcase—almost a wardrobe trunk—’cause I’ve got 35 kilo compressed bricks in there. I fiddle with the straps and by now everybody has gathered around and, hocus-pocus diplidocus, there it is, all nestled in its shiny baggies, packed in tight. One brick at the end has a big dead grasshopper stuck in on top, and that little accident is just fine, ’cause it means that this grass is or-fuckin’-ganic, brother, righteous.

  “Wow,” says the Dean. “All that smoke.” “Abracadabra,” I answer and like a magician whip the thousand hits of acid out of the toilet articles section of the suitcase. It’s packed side by side in two big sheets of tinfoil, and it’s still cold from sitting in my icebox. I peel back a comer of the tinfoil and there are the vitamin C tabs.

  “How many mikes?” Joyce asks.

  “Figure about 250 Sandoz mikes or what’s called 600 in street acid. If you take one alone, it’s gonna get you somewhere pretty cosmic. Split one with a friend and it’ll be a nice laid-back afternoon. There’s just a tiny little bit of speed in there to help you get off.”

  “And the grass?” asks the professor, one eyebrow up just a touch. He wants the story. All dope has a story. If you aren’t told one, well, you just have to make one up. Nobody wants anything that doesn’t have a pedigree. He knows all about this but he likes the whole thing, the deal, the dope, the high, so he wants the story.

  “It’s from Guatemala.”

  “Un-hunh.”

  I don’t know where the damn grass is from. I haven’t smoked any of this batch anyhow. But I’ve done a considerable amount of it in the last year, and I’d say that Essegian gets his grass south of Texas somewhere, probably Central America and South America and Mexico. One time completely by accident, I met another guy who deals through him, and the guy told me he heard from one of the pilots that Essegian has a plantation in British Honduras. In the end, it’s just like growing any other money crop—either you always want it to rain or you’re afraid that it will, so what’s new.

  “And what about the acid?” asks the Dean. I look him in the eye: “I don’t really know, maybe California.” Ah, that magic doper’s name, in the east, anyhow. Out west, you say “made in New York, by crazed Rabbis in a basement in Brooklyn” and they all look wasted with that news. For all I know one of the chemical companies made it and the sales manager gave it to his wife’s Uncle Hymie to sell. It’ll get you high, whether it’s made by monks in Tibet or teenagers in Omaha— it’s a chemical.

  Professor Plum knows how to lighten up. He says “Waiter, the bill please.”

  “For you, 4,500 bucks.”

  “Do you take Diners Club?” asks Joyce Quarterly and everybody laughs.

  “ ’ Fraid not,” I say. But as a matter of fact I have done business with a credit card. I got myself certified as a restaurant when I was in college and people bought a whole lot of fifteen dollar meals. Made me nervous after a month to have it all on paper and someone burned the hell out of me with a bad card, so I went out of the restaurant business. My parents still get a letter for me every now and then from the Diners Club.

  Professor Plum goes in the house and comes back with a fistful of money, a few hundreds, mostly twenties, and even about 100 singles. We sit on the porch steps and count it out together. Actually, it turns out to be 22 dollars over 4,500 and that he gets back. They’ll make out on this deal; I sell them a kilo for 100 bucks, they can turn it over for $200. Or they can lid it up, about four-fifths of an ounce to an honest lid, not clean but with all the real big sticks taken out, and sell that for $15 or $20 depending on the market and the time of the year. The acid costs them a dollar a hit, in quanities of 1,000, and they can sell that for two bucks and sometimes even five, again depending on who they’re selling to. Of course, just like me, they have to discount for quantity. The cops always figure the biggest way when they say “street value” in the papers, so that 35 kilos
comes out to be 77 pounds times 16 ounces equals 1,232 ounces, four-fifths of an ounce to a lid makes it 1,478 lids times $20 or somewhere over $29,000 bucks but that has never happened as far as I know. Just like my 2,250 turned into their 4,500, they should score out about ten grand—minus expenses in both cases.

  And that, folks, is alternate culture.

  “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what it can do to you.”

  Tom Lieberman

  It used to be said that the people you took acid with the first time were imprinted on you and you on them—just like a baby animal is imprinted with the first thing it sees—if it’s you, you become mother, father, friend. A lot of these folks have stayed together, taken on new names and personalities, seeing their lives as histories all wound up together, become a kind of family, or nation. I suppose that all depends on who you took your first acid with. I took mine with a very dark, Sephardic Jewish kid who was called Spanish Murray, and Warren Accardo, John’s younger brother.

  We were fifteen and hid out tripping all night under the football stands at Great Neck High. We listened to Spanish Murray’s little portable, the Fresh Cream album I remember, especially “I’m so Glad,” and The Doors, who did some tremendously good shit before Morrison got all fucked up behind being a juicer. We peaked about five in the morning, and it was beautiful at dawn under those stands. But Spanish Murray spent all night saying he was different animals, one minute a bear, and he’d walk around like a bear, the next minute a snake (a garter snake, I thought that was original in a half-assed way), and he oozed along the grass for us, then a giraffe and he’d lope along the cinder track. But he wasn’t on my trip and frankly he was sort of a pain. I can’t imagine being holed up in a farmhouse in Pennsylvania with Spanish Murray for a very long time. Warren Accardo and I always were good friends after that. He was a nice, quiet kid, less out front than his brother John, who was half hood, half early hippie. I’d call Warren when I got to Long Island every once in a while, and we’d get high and watch a little TV and eat some Pork Lo Mein at the Canton Inn. Warren was killed in Nam about two years ago.