The Lone Pilgrim (20 page)

I was quite a sight. I was twenty-three and I wore little pink glasses. I wore blue jeans, polished boots, and men's shirts. For evening wear I wore extremely short skirts, anticipating the fashion by two or three years. I drove the car too fast, was not pregnant, and liked to listen to the Top 40. Faculty wives looked at me with fear—the fear that I knew something they did not know. When they had been my age they had already produced little Amanda or Jonathan and were about to start little Jeremy or Rachel. They wore what grown-up women wore, and they gave bridge and tea parties. These women lived a life in which drugs were what you gave your child in the form of orange-flavored aspirin so they did not, for example, go rooting around the campus looking for someone off of whom to score.

The older wives said to Thorne, whom they adored: “Gracious, Thorne, don't Ann's legs get cold in those little skirts? Goodness, Thorne, I saw Ann
racing
around in the car with the radio on
so
loud.” These women hadn't seen anyone like me before, but years later after a few campus riots they would see a much more virulent and hostile form of me in large numbers. From my vantage point between the world of students and the world of faculty it was plain to see how much professors hated students who, since they had not yet passed through the heavy gates of adulthood, were considered feckless, stupid, with no right to anything.

It was assumed that Thorne was married to a hot ticket, but no one was sure what sort. This pleased Thorne—he did not mind having a flashy wife, and since I never misbehaved I caused him no pain, but I looked as if I were the sort to misbehave and this secretly pleased him. My image on campus however was not my overriding concern. I was mostly looking for decent grass.

Connecting on the college campus of the day was troublesome. Everyone was paranoid. I was lucky that I did not have to add money to my worries—I had a tiny bit of inheritance, just enough to keep me happy. I was a good customer when I could find a supplier, mostly some volelike and furtive-looking boy. Those blithe young things who spent their high school days blowing dope in suburban movie houses had not yet appeared on campus—how happy we would all be to see them! One's connection was apt to flunk out or drop out, and once in a while they would graduate. As a result, I was passed hand to hand by a number of unsavory boys. For example, the disgusting Steve, who whined and sniffled and sold very inferior dope. Eventually Steve was thrown out of school and I was taken over by another unpleasant boy by the name of Lester Katz. He carried for Lionel Browning, and Lionel Browning was the real thing.

Lionel, who allowed himself to be called Linnie by those close to him, had laid low for his first three years at college. In his senior year he expanded from a self-supplier to a purveyor of the finest grass to only the finest heads—by that time there were enough to make such a sideline profitable. Lionel's daddy was an executive in a large company that had branches abroad. Lionel had grown up in Colombia, Hong Kong, and Barbados, three places known for fine cannabis. He was a shadowy figure at college. He lived off campus and was not often seen except by my husband Thorne, whose favorite student he was. I had never seen him—he sent Lester to bring me my dope, with messages such as: “Mr. Browning hopes you will enjoy this sampling.” It killed Lester that he called Lionel “Mr. Browning.” He said it killed Lionel that Professor Speizer's wife was such a head. When he said that, I looked into his beady little eyes and it seemed a very good idea for me to go and check out this Lionel Browning who very well might have it in mind to blackmail me. Or maybe he was the uncool sort—the sort who might sidle up to his favorite professor and say: “That dope I laid on your wife sure is choice.”

Lionel lived off campus in a frame house. Only very advanced students lived off campus. On campus rooms were very plush—suites with fireplaces and leaded glass windows. But the off campus fellows considered themselves above the ordinary muck of college life. These boys were either taking drugs or getting laid or were serious scholars who could not stand the sight of their fellow boy in such quantities.

Lionel lived on the top floor and as I mounted the stairs—I had, of course, made an appointment—I expected that he would be a slightly superior edition of the runty, unattractive boys who sold dope. This was not the case at all. He looked, in fact, rather like me. He was blond, tall but small boned, and he wore blue jeans, loafers with tassels, a white shirt, and a blue sweater—almost the replica of what I was wearing. He smiled a nice, crooked smile, offered me a joint, and I knew at once that I had found what I was looking for.

Lionel did not fool around. He got bricks—big
Survey of English Literature—size
bricks of marijuana that came wrapped in black plastic and taped with black tape. Underneath this wrapping was a rectangular cake of moist, golden greenish brown grass—a beautiful sight. It was always a pleasure to help Linnie clean this attractive stuff. We spread newspapers on the floor and strained it through a coarse sieve. The dregs of this Linnie would sell to what he called the lower forms of life.

The lower forms included almost everyone on campus. The higher forms included people he liked. His own family, he said, was a species of mineral-like vegetation that grew on lunar soil. There were four children, all blond, each with a nickname: Leopold (Leafy), Lionel (Linnie), Mary Louise (Mally), and Barbara (Bumpy or Bumps). His family drove Linnie crazy, and the thought of their jolly family outings and jolly family traditions caused him to stay high as often as possible, which was pretty often.

In matters of dope, it depends on who gets to you first. I was gotten to in Paris, the summer before I went off to college. I looked up the nice sons of some friends of my parents, and they turned me on. I had been sent to practice French and to have a broadening cultural experience. I learned to say, among other things: “Yes, this African kif is quite heavenly. Do you have more? How much more? How much will you charge me per matchbox?”

The nice boys I looked up had just come back from Spain. They were giant heads and they had giant quantities. These boys were happy to get their mitts on such a receptive blank slate as me. Pot, they told me, was one of the great aids to mental entertainment. It produced unusual thoughts and brilliant insights. It freed the mind to be natural—the natural mind being totally open to the hilarious absurdities of things. It mixed the senses and gave flavor to music. All in all, well worth getting into. We would get stoned and go to the movies or listen to jazz or hang around talking for what may have been minutes and may have been hours. This was more fun than I ever imagined, so my shock when I went off to college and discovered my fellow head was profound. My fellow head was sullen, alienated, mute when high, inexpressive, and no fun at all. Until I met Lionel, I smoked alone.

Lionel was my natural other. Stoned we were four eyes and one mind. We were simply made to get high together—we felt exactly the same way about dope. We liked to light up and perambulate around the mental landscape seeing what we could see. We often liked to glom onto the
Jill
and Bill Show
—that was what we called one of the campus's married couples, Jill and Bill Benson. Jill and Bill lived off campus, baked their own bread, made their own jam and candles, and knitted sweaters for each other. Both of them were extremely rich and were fond of giving parties at which dreadful homemade hors d'oeuvres and cheap wine were served. Linnie and I made up a Broadway musical for them to star in. It was called
Simple on My Trust Fund.
We worked mostly on the opening scene. Jill and Bill are in the kitchen of their horrid apartment. Jill is knitting. Bill is stirring a pot of jam. A group of ordinary students walks by the open window. “Jill and Bill,” they say. “How is it that you two live such a groovy, cool, and close-to-the-earth life?”

Jill and Bill walk to center stage, holding hands. “Simple,” each coos. “On my trust fund.” And the chorus breaks into the lovely refrain. Once in the coffee shop Jill confessed to Linnie that she only had “a tiny little trust fund.” This phrase was easily worked into the
Jill
and Bill Show.

Jill and Bill, however, appeared to be having something of a hard time. They were seen squabbling. Jill was seen in tears at the Shop-Up. They looked unhappy. Jill went off skiing by herself. I had very little patience with Jill and Bill. I felt that with all that money they ought to buy some machine-made sweaters and serve store-bought jam. Furthermore, I felt it was slumming of them to live in such a crummy apartment when the countryside was teeming with enchanting rural properties. The idea of a country house became a rallying cry—the answer to all of Jill and Bill's trouble.

Linnie mused on Jill and Bill. What could be their problem, he wondered, rolling a colossal joint.

“They're both small and dark,” I said. Linnie lit up and passed the joint to me. I took a life-affirming hit. “Maybe at night they realize what they look like and in the morning they're too depressed to relate to each other. What do you think?”

“I think Jill and Bill are a form of matted plant fiber,” said Linnie. “I think they get into bed and realize that more than any other single thing, they resemble that stuff those braided doormats are made of. This clearly has a debilitating effect on them. This must be what's wrong. What do you think, Mrs. Ann?”

“A country house,” I said. “They must buy a lovely country house before it's too late.”

That was the beginning of
Ask Mrs. Ann
, a routine in which Linnie and I would invent some horrible circumstance for Jill and Bill. Either of us could be Mrs. Ann. It didn't matter which. One of us would say, for instance: “Answer this one, Mrs. Ann. Jill and Bill have just had a baby. This baby is a Negro baby, which is odd since neither Jill nor Bill is Negro. Naturally, this causes a bit of confusion. They simply cannot fathom how it happened. At any rate, this baby has webbed feet and tiny flippers. Jill finds this attractive. Bill less so. Meanwhile Jill has bought a sheep and a loom. It is her girlish dream to spin wool from her own sheep, but the sheep has gone berserk and bitten Bill. In the ensuing melee the loom has collapsed, dislocating Jill's shoulder. Meanwhile, Bill, who has had to have forty stitches in his thigh as the result of violent sheep bite, has gone into the hospital for a simple tonsillectomy and finds to his amazement that his left arm has been amputated—he is left-handed as you recall. Jill feels they ought to sue, but to Bill's shock, he finds that he has signed a consent to an amputation. How can this have happened? He simply can't fathom it. But there is relief in all this, if only for Jill. Jill, whose maiden name is Michaelson, suffers from a rare disorder called ‘Michaelson's Syndrome,' which affects all members of her family. This syndrome causes the brain to turn very slowly into something resembling pureed spinach. By the time she is thirty she will remember nothing of these unhappy events, for she will have devolved to a rather primitive, excrement-throwing stage. Whatever should they do?”

All that was required of Mrs. Ann was the rallying cry: a country house! Many hours were spent trying to find new awful tidings for Jill and Bill, and as those familiar with the effects of marijuana know, even the punctual are carried away on a stream of warped time perceptions. One rock-and-roll song takes about an hour to play, whereas a movement of a symphony is over in fifteen seconds. I felt that time had a form—the form of a chiffon scarf floating aimlessly down a large water slide; or that it was oblong but slippery, like an oiled football. I got home late, having forgotten to do the shopping. Since I had freely opted to be Thorne's housewife, he was perfectly justified in getting angry with me. My problem was, he thought I was having an affair.

It is one thing to tell your husband that you are sleeping with another man, and it is quite another to tell him that from the very instant of your meeting you have been under the influence of a mind-altering substance, no matter how mild. An astonishing confession next to which the admission of an afternoon or two in the arms of another man is nothing. Nothing!

What was I to do? My only real talent in life appeared to be getting high, and I was wonderful at it. Ostensibly I was supposed to be nurturing a talent for drawing—everyone had a skill, it was assumed. Every day I went upstairs to our attic room, lit a joint, and drew tiny, incoherent, and highly detailed black and white pictures. This was not my idea of an occupation. It was hardly my idea of a hobby. Of course it is a well-known fact that drawing while high is always fun which only made it more clear to me that my true vocation lay in getting stoned.

And so when dinner was late, when I was late, when I had forgotten to do something I had said I would do, Thorne liked to get into a snit, but he was terrified of getting furious with me. After all, my role was to look sort of dangerous. In some ways, Thorne treated me with the respectful and careful handling you might give to something you suspect is a pipe bomb: he didn't want to tempt fate because the poor thing was in some ways enraptured with me and he was afraid that if he got mad enough, I might disappear. That was the way the scales of our marriage were balanced. When he looked as if he were about to shout, I would either get a very dangerous look in my eyes, or I would make him laugh, which was one of my prime functions in his life. The other was to behave in public.

Since I was stoned all the time, I tried in all ways to behave like Queen Victoria. Thus I probably appeared to be a little cracked. At public functions I smiled and was mute—no one knew that at home I was quite a little chatterbox. The main form of socializing on campus was the dinner party. I found these pretty funny—of course I was high and didn't know the difference. Thorne found them pretty dull, so I tried to liven them up for him. If we were seated together at dinner, I would smile at the person opposite and then do something to Thorne under the table. I tended, at these parties, to smile a great deal. This unnerved Thorne. He wore, under his party expression, a grimace that might have been caused by constant prayer, the prayer that I would not say something I had said at home. That I would not talk about how a black transvestite hooker should be sent as a present to the president of the college for his birthday. He prayed that I would not say about this gift: “With my little inheritance and Thorne's salary I think we could certainly afford it.” Or I would not discuss the ways in which I felt the chairman of the history department looked like an anteater, or, on the subject of ants, how I felt his wife would react to being rolled in honey and set upon by South American fire ants. I did think that Professor X stole women's clothing out of the townie laundromat and went through the streets late at night in a flowered housecoat. I knew why Professor Y should not be left alone with his own infant son, and so on. But I behaved like a perfect angel and from time to time sent Thorne a look that made him shake, just to keep him on his toes.