Tune In, Turn On,
Go to the Office
Late on Monday
Every generation finds the drug it needs. The 1950s man, the corporate bevel gear, got silly on his dry martinis. The idiot hippie babbling in his pad had psychedelics to make it all mystic and smart. The wimps of the seventies took cocaine for their climb to the top. And the cold, selfish children of 1985 think Ecstasy will make them loved and loving. It’s all pet food. Drugs are a one-man birthday party. You don’t get any presents you didn’t bring. Personally, I haven’t taken a new drug in fifteen years. The mature adult—balanced, reasonable, facing the world and the self with a steady eye—doesn’t need drugs. Except for one of those martinis every now and then or three or five of them and a line of blow if he’s going out dancing later and some champagne and a joint and a fistful of Tylenol, Bloody Marys, Valium, and . . . what the hell, who’s got the Ecstasy?
Practically everybody, as it turns out. “You have incredible insights,” said a magazine editor. “Everybody you’re with, you just bond,” said a jewelry designer. “Oh, gosh, tee-hee-hee-hee-hee,” said an Off-Broadway actress. “Your defenses melt,” said somebody else. I got mine from a Manhattan businessman. He and I, a young woman of our acquaintance, and a Texan journalist took it together.
Another half-dozen people came by that night, and—here’s a friendly point about the drug—I cannot tell you which if any of them was high. With one exception. My friend L. brought an earnest, twerpy date who was flat uncomfortable seeing WASPy layabouts blasted on drugs in early middle age. He was wearing a dago sport coat with wedges of cheddar cheese in the shoulder pads and a pattern like bad TV reception. I definitely didn’t bond to him and would have needed the aesthetics of epoxy cement to do so. He kept looking like he was trying to remember the poison-control phone number and left early.
Anyway, Ecstasy came in a largish plain pill. It was supposed to be stuff from the pre-illegal days but still looked, to this retired Aquarian, like it had been hand-made on a home tabbing machine. The dosage was ... forget it. I recall long, lying discussions about mgs and mics in the days when I thought I had a Ph.D. in street pharmacology. But dope comes in just two dosages: too much and not enough. What we took fell in that general range—better than staying up late to watch David Letterman alone and not so good the police had to raid us.
But first you sit around for half an hour or forty-five minutes. Then there’s a sort of resigned sigh in the brain. “Yes,” you tell it, “I’ve been tampering with your synapses again. Try to think of it as anger or lust. These, too, cause chemical changes in the cerebral cortex and alter—”
“Oh, shut up,” says Mr. Brain.
Then the Supreme Body Court starts deliberating: “Are we going to love this thing or have cardiac arrest? We need to shit, sleep, throw up, dance. Nope. Just kidding. None of those things, only a big feeling. Not euphoria exactly, not epiphany, just a great big good feeling.”
“Can it,” says Mr. Brain.
“Ahhh,” says the Manhattan businessman.
“Whew,” says the Texan journalist.
“Hmmm,” says the young woman.
I say, “Fuck! This isn’t bad at all.”
I had to be very serious with the door locks, letting people in. These were a pretty complicated set of knobs and chains and other such technical devices but not beyond the abilities of a bright fellow like myself welcoming all these good people into a swell place like mine.
Which is something of a drug-induced exaggeration. I mean, not about the people, they’re perfectly good. But I have this pied à terre in New York, or pied à dirt is more like it. This is a big chunk of raw loft space looking as only New York raw loft space can look—like the planet Neptune decorated by wild hogs. Take LSD in here and all bets are off. You’d wind up in Winter Park, Florida, begging geriatric old Mom and Dad to take you to a Tough Love workshop. But on Ecstasy, the dump turned into party spot central, a big happy room where you could put your cigarettes out right on the floor and set your drink down anywhere and not leave glass rings on the Hepplewhite chiffonier. What a bizarre feeling to be palpably glad that you don’t have a Hepplewhite chiffonier. And I don’t even know what a chiffonier is.
I don’t think much has been written about “Ecstasy taste.” But even the twerp in the sportcoat was looking nice. Surely he was a fine person at heart, just uneasy because his Armani jacket couldn’t get Channel 7. Our LP selections ran to early Ry Cooder and The Best of Joan Baez—piped-in elevator melodies for the hip. Music’s the food of love. But what’s Muzak the food of? Love drugs, I guess. Typical bachelor, I’d laid out a deplorable buffet of loose baloney slices, graham crackers, and jalapeño cheese. We didn’t touch this, so we hadn’t completely lost our senses. (A German pharmaceutical company originally patented Ecstasy as an appetite suppressant, and they had that right.) Still, there was a lot of misplaced admiration for my efforts. Admiration seemed to be running around unfettered generally.