Man, I come from the days when drugs were drugs. We had dope where one toke would turn your hair long and your folks into raving maniacs at the dinner table. Some of that stuff, why, a single hit could transform a Catholic schoolgirl into Gomorrah on all fours, snuff your ego like a light, rotate the tires on the Great Wheel of Being, and make your eyes lay eggs. See God? Shit, you could get Him down in the hot tub and wash His mouth out with herbal soap. And that was if you split the blotter paper four ways. As for insights, try yage and psilocybin mushrooms mixed with mescaline and Anchor Steam beer. Gautama Buddha his own bad self comes over to your house and writes out the Eightfold Path in lipstick on your bathroom mirror. We had drugs that would give you immortal life for up to thirty-six hours. And what about the time the nine-assed peyote demon peeled the top of my head like an orange and vomited the Encyclopaedia Britannica into my empty skull? That’s what we meant when we said high in the old days.
This Ecstasy is a lap-dog drug. “St. Joseph’s Baby Acid,” said the Texan journalist. There’s just enough psychic twinge to make you think you’ve done something besides a double scotch on the rocks. And all that stuff about openness and mutual trust and deepening of affections is pretty silly. That’s why it would be wrong for me to encourage you readers to try it. You’re like a family to me. There’s a link, a reciprocal union of loyalty and interdependence between writers and readers. I couldn’t do anything to injure that basic human connection. I guess I’ve never had the nerve to say it before, but I love you. All of you. It’s a feeling I need to communicate personally. I’m going to get in my car and drive around the country and give each of you a great big hug—just as soon as I call my Manhattan businessman friend and see if he’s got any more of this dumb Ecstasy shit.
A Long,
Thoughtful Look
Back at the Last
Fifteen Minutes
This was an important fifteen minutes for America. It was a fifteen minutes of consolidation, of reflection, and of self-realization. I, myself, realized how hungover I was and that I had to go to the bathroom. Some have called it the “Me” fifteen minutes. “Give me fifteen minutes,” I called, when it was pointed out I should be at the typewriter making a living. But it’s an oversimplification to view this quarter of an hour solely as a period of self-involvement. I cannot speak for the entire nation, but I was involved with the electric razor, which was all gummed up from someone, not me, shaving legs with it. And I was involved for quite a while with the childproof top on the aspirin bottle, even though I have no children of my own. In some ways this epitomizes the sort of caring with which America was imbued during this nine hundred seconds of history. Many childless Americans have allowed that if the government wishes to require these push-squeeze-turn-dangle-yank sort of devices on the top of aspirin bottles for the sake of the well-being of the children of others, then it’s all right with them. They don’t care. But I care a great deal and will continue to care as long as those things are also hungover-adult-proof and I have to break the top of the bottle on the edge of the sink to get any aspirin out. I care so much, in fact, that I’d like to do the same thing to the other end of the dirt-nibbler who invented them. And throughout all these minutes many Americans, myself included, were deeply involved with others. With chirpy girlfriends, for instance, who’d already been awake for an hour and were spilling coffeecake crumbs in the bed, and by mysterious emissaries from the apartment building’s maintenance staff, nattering in Spanish about shutting off the water. Beyond this it was also the fifteen minutes of the American woman. It was time for the American woman to be heard. “I don’t have my diaphragm in.” I heard that. “Stop it. You’ll muss my hair.” I heard that twice.
Yet it has not been a fifteen minutes without problems and difficulties. In certain areas it was a quarter hour of stagnation. Blacks have made very little economic progress since 8:45 this morning. Many of them don’t have jobs, and the rest are going to be late to work if they don’t hurry up. Also, since various authorities contend that we are losing military might and international prestige by the minute, we have doubtless lost fifteen minutes’ worth of military might and international prestige. And what of cultural development? What about progress in literature and the arts? What do we have to show for this last fifteen minutes? Nothing, in my opinion, except one blaringly loud recording of the new Police album, which a certain young lady put on the record player about thirty seconds ago and which I told her I was going to break across her coccyx if she didn’t shut it off because my head feels like a Palestinian terrorist attack. It’s also been a period of unusual weather. Either that or the people in 19E are throwing things off the terrace again. Perhaps it’s too soon to have an overview, a proper perspective, on this extraordinary time. Perhaps we should wait until it’s 9:30 and we’ve had another cup of coffee. Except that’s when the cleaning lady comes and tells me to get out of here because I’m getting crumpled-up typing paper all over the desk. Maybe I’ll go to a movie. Is there anything more depressing than going to the movies alone in the daytime? I wonder why that is. It’s even more depressing than drinking in the morning. At least drinking in the morning has a little thrill of misbehavior about it, and I think I’ll have a small picker-upper right now. It’s something new I invented. I call it a Chicken Shot. It’s like a Bull Shot, but you make it with vodka and Campbell’s chicken-noodle soup. Just kidding. Me for a Bloody Mary. It’s almost 9:00 now and the sun’s over the yardarm. Actually the sun is someplace over Queens, kind of over La Guardia Airport, it looks like from here. In fact, right over the short-term parking lot where, it has just occurred to me, I’ve had the car sitting for two weeks at about $16.50 a day. Shit. Anyway, you get my drift. There’s something sweet/sad about the end of an era. Little angelcakes has left for work. Think I’ll just freshen this up. You look back and you think of all the things you could have done, the things you should have said and didn’t, like “Where the hell’s breakfast, huh?” or “Those guinea jeans make your thighs look like the Alaska pipeline.” But what’s the use of regretting the past? Let’s look forward to what the next fifteen minutes will bring. Probably the mail. I hope not. My tab at Elaine’s has cracked five K. Oh, God, it’s the Spanish maintenance guy again. What do you mean, the water’s off until next Wednesday? Fuck. But it’s important to get the big picture. Thirty minutes from now all this will seem like half an hour ago.