Lost In Place (21 page)

14
 

T
he next day I woke up around one in the afternoon. I went upstairs, made some toast and sat in the living room. I felt kind of crappy. My mother passed by me without looking at me. Oh my God, could she tell? Did she know? I told myself not to panic, that she was just annoyed that I’d gotten up so late. Our rule since I’d turned sixteen was that on weekends, because I stayed up much later than she did, she had to wait until I’d gotten up on my own before going down to practice.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked her. I had all sorts of new theories about the origins of the universe that I wanted to run past him. He didn’t have to know exactly how the theories had been inspired.

“Joe is uptown getting oil. First he had to go to the dump, then he has to change the oil in both cars, then he has to mow the lawn.”

The subtext, communicated via the tension in her voice,
was that Dad had been working all morning while I was sleeping. If I didn’t get up off my ass and start doing something helpful fast, I was going to be in the doghouse all weekend. In spite of having passed from the ordinary sad world into the Incomparable State of Whoa only a few hours before, I was feeling strangely grouchy. Instead of taking her cue and offering to do some chore, or at least reassuring her by practicing some classical music for a change instead of spending
all
my time doodling in G major, I stomped out of the house and sat in the dead Triumph.

Wait a minute, I thought, this is ridiculous. Didn’t I leave this bullshit behind me? What happened to the State of Whoa? I closed my eyes and tried to bring it back, but failed. I was back in the State of Joe, except that it was a bit worse than usual because my head ached. As I sat there in the rusting car, marveling at how difficult it was to concentrate on anything, my dad pulled into the driveway. I felt happy to see him; I was looking forward to an afternoon of metaphysical discussion. Maybe then I would slip back into the proper frame of mind.

But as soon as he climbed out of the bus I could see he wasn’t in any mood for metaphysics. He hated driving uptown, he hated changing the oil and he hated mowing the lawn. Maybe I should offer to mow the lawn for him, I thought. But then I remembered how fatigued and headachy I felt and decided, no, I think I’ll go down to the lake.

I found the ashes of our campfire from the night before. It was hard to believe this was the same spot that had been so magical; everything looked so disappointingly ordinary. I tried wading into the water, but my feet were unusually sensitive to the sharp sand, the slimy algae and the beer-bottle caps. And the water was cold and kind of
dirty. I tried to retrace the steps of my insights, beginning with the fish experience, but instead of tapping into my genetically encoded memories, I felt cold and self-conscious.

I walked around the neighborhood and everything bothered me in the same way. The sounds of lawn mowers, the bits of discarded paper, plastic and metal along the side of the road, the muggy weather, the mosquitoes, the flies, the smell of asphalt and even the trees. The trees all looked so … so bland. Why couldn’t we have anything really unusual like palm trees or Monterey pines? Why did I have to spend my whole life in
Connecticut?

Bummer. I never really knew the meaning of that word until now. It wasn’t worth it; this was too depressing. I vowed never to mess with dope again.

The next day I felt better and went back to my routine of playing along to the stereo in the afternoon and going out at night. As the days passed, my memories of “the day after” began to fade, whereas my curiosity about Whoaness increased. After two weeks it was all I could think about. I couldn’t see any reason why the intellectual perspective couldn’t be transferred into one’s normal, sober life. Maybe if I got stoned and made that the subject of my mental explorations, I could use my superior powers of insight to figure out how to make the transfer. Good idea! Once more couldn’t hurt, and as Mr. Leighton implied in the conversation we’d never had in the faculty lounge, teenagers almost have to sacrifice a few brain cells on their path to adulthood—it’s been a universal rite of passage since the dawn of mankind, hasn’t it? The wise Native Americans, after all, made their youths fast for days, sit in overheated saunas, hang themselves from
bloody hooks passed through their chests or chew mescal buttons in order to have the kind of hallucinations deemed necessary for the passage to adulthood. You can bet those noble braves lost a few neurons along the way, boy.

I spoke to Scott about it and asked if he could give me enough pot for just one more lesson. He obliged, so I stopped by Ye Olde Head Shoppe, picked up a little pipe and some matches, and drove straight out to the lake to get things right.

WHOA! HOW COULD I HAVE FORGOTTEN
THIS?
IT’S SO SIMPLE, SO OBVIOUS, SO UNDENIABLE, SO PERMANENT!

Bummer. I’ll never do this again.

But I did, and then a fourth time, and then I decided that it must be like medication for depression; you had to do it steadily over a certain period of time before it really sank in. Whoa! Bummer. Whoa! Bummer. Whoa! Bummer.

The summer of ’76 was all Whoa! Bummer. Then fall. That first week when Erich and Rachel went off to school but I stayed at home, I felt strange. I had expected it to be a joyous occasion, but instead, whenever I drove by the high school on my way to town to meet Scott for a pizza lunch, I felt slightly anxious. Did I really know what I was doing? Meanwhile, every day my brother would come home and tell me that at the end of the morning announcements, a crisp female voice would say, “And will Mark Salzman please report to the main office immediately. Mark Salzman.” Ah, bureaucracy.

I was still practicing jazz in the afternoons, but was getting stoned every night. Worries that I might be getting addicted troubled me every now and then, but were easily
silenced by the argument that once I had figured out the essential psychological ingredients of Whoaness and learned to invoke them without smoking pot, I would be glad I had not surrendered to fear and given up. And I
was
trying, too; I set aside a certain part of every afternoon to take a walk and try to think myself into that state of mind, but without success. As to precautions against getting caught, I didn’t take many. At first I took my pipe out to the backyard and smoked it there, but after a while I smoked right in the basement and burned lots of incense to mask it.

One day Lenny called me up to say that he’d bought a Triumph Spitfire but had totaled it after only two weeks. But he had an idea: we could take what was left of his car and what was left of mine and pool the parts, building one composite car that ran. We could share it; one week it would be his, the next week mine. Great idea! We towed my car over to his front yard and got things started on the right foot by setting up his eight-track tape player out on the grass, blasting some Pink Floyd and lighting up a bowl of Colombian.

Nine days later we had one car, but three pails of nuts and bolts that should somehow have gone into the car but hadn’t. What the fuck! (That was our project motto.) We started up the car and decided to take it out to a nearby stretch of flat road built over a shallow swamp where we could test it out. When we reached the road Lenny stopped. “Let’s see how fast it goes from zero to sixty,” he suggested. He revved the engine, popped the clutch, and in less than a second we discovered where some of those nuts and bolts should have gone. We had forgotten to bolt the steering column (which on a Spitfire is just a thin metal pole) to the wheel apparatus, and we had forgotten
to bolt the seats down; the acceleration threw us both back, the steering wheel pulled right back with us and the car roared right into the swamp. Luckily it was a convertible. As we lay on our backs and felt the car sink, Lenny said, “What the fuck?”

A friend helped us pull the car out and tow it back to his place. Within a week we had it together again, but on his first night out solo with it Lenny wrapped it around a tree. A few days later we were working on it again when, just as I was switching the tape from the Eagles to the Who, a nondescript car stopped in front of Lenny’s house and two men in suits walked up to us. One of them asked if either of us was Lenny.

“Yeah,” Lenny said.

Flashing a badge, the man identified himself as a detective and read Lenny his rights. Neither of the men looked at me or asked me anything.

“You’re kidding me,” Lenny finally said.

“You know we don’t kid around,” the detective answered. They put Lenny into the car and drove away with him, and that was the end of our Triumph repair project. I never did find out what the arrest was about.

Lenny’s problem should have been a warning to me that I was headed for trouble. Here I was, accepted by Yale but hanging around all day getting stoned, listening to bands like Ten Years After and tinkering with shitty British sports cars. I didn’t read the signs, though. I was under the impression that I was getting dramatically better as a jazz cellist every day, but in fact I was still playing the same three songs with Scott, and we rarely played for longer than an hour at a time before going out to the woods to do our really important work, which was smoking dope and being Amazed by Everything.

In time I solved the bummer problem by being constantly high. I ate, drank, talked, slept, hung out with Annette, played the cello, bussed tables and looked through the telescope just as I had done in my previous life; only now all of my experiences seemed part of a vast, profound, mysterious but slightly blurry adventure.

As far as saving money for college went, I wasn’t building up much of a nest egg. I got fed up with the Sri Chinmoy people; they were always smiling, but that was probably because they were paying me well below minimum wage. I quit that job and got hired by the wife of a wealthy executive to paint Chinese-landscape paintings directly on several of the interior walls of their house. They had two French exchange students staying with them, both girls, but I never got to see their faces because they spent every day upstairs in their room listening to the Beatles’ song “Michelle” and singing along to the French lyrics.

When I finished that job I got a check for five hundred dollars. I took it to my bank to cash it so I could buy another car—this time one that would run—but the check bounced. I was furious. When I called the family from the bank, there was no answer. Seeing that there was a problem, the manager of the bank came over and when he saw who had written the check, said, “Oh, yeah, I talked to them this morning. They’re on their way to the Caribbean.” He authorized the check and handed me the money, but only after first calling me “miss” (older guys loved pulling the “I thought you were a girl” routine on me when my hair was long), then giving me a frowning lecture about being impatient. I, who was completely broke, got written a bad check for a month’s work by a
couple of millionaires on their way to the beach, and
I
get a lecture about being impatient. That’s teenage life.

That afternoon I went out to buy the car I’d chosen. This time it was a Triumph TR4, and the man who sold it to me swore it ran great. “Burns a little oil,” he said, “but nothing to worry about.” This time my father drove behind me in the Volkswagen to make sure I got home OK. Halfway home smoke started pouring out of the engine. We pulled over to the side of the Merritt Parkway for a quick conference.

“I don’t care what you do with this thing, Mark, but we’d better get it off the parkway quick,” Dad said; we didn’t have temporary plates on it and he didn’t want to get fined or arrested.

I hopped back in but the car wouldn’t start. Dad stuck his head out the window and said, “Put it in gear. Let’s get the hell out of here.” I did so and he drove up to my rear bumper and pushed until the damn thing started.

It was the longest half-hour drive of my life. Smoke was pouring out so thick I thought the whole thing might catch on fire at any moment. When we got it home I shut the engine off but the smoke didn’t stop; it
was
on fire! By the time I got the flames out the engine was ruined.

I called the man who’d sold it to me and he said he didn’t know anything about it; it was his son’s car and his son was in the marines, and anyhow, if I ruined the engine, it was my problem. So my second car ended up just like the first one—in the weeds at the end of the driveway.

Later that year Lenny resurfaced and called to say he was trying to put together a field trip to New York City to go see Laserium, the music-and-light show in the old Hayden
Planetarium building. He had another car now, a tiny four-door Datsun, that he said he’d modified just for this trip. I was up for it; I didn’t have to get up early for anything the next day.

As the car came up my street the first thing I noticed was the music; Lenny had put his eight-track in there and Dark Side of the Moon was on full blast. The next thing I noticed as he pulled into the driveway was that I couldn’t see him, or for that matter anyone in the car; it looked as if the windows had all been sprayed with dull white paint. When the car stopped, the driver’s-side door opened, Lenny stepped out and billows of smoke poured out after him. “Hop in!” he cried, grinning like the Cheshire cat.