by Erik Storlie
“You can spare the bread, man. It’s not that much. What’s really important here?”
“Well,” I say, “I don’t have that much money, as I still prefer to call it. My folks send me a hundred dollars a month and you get thirty. I’m not too flush.”
“Don’t argue. I’ll bring it home after work tonight. We’ll test it out. But don’t worry, it’ll be fine weed, mighty fine. We’ll read Ginsberg and Auden—and before dawn we’ll write one epic poem apiece!”
That night we don’t write any epic poems. Rosenfeld and Samantha get the kids to bed, then holler at me to come downstairs. They sit on the living room couch and I sit opposite in an old overstuffed armchair. Rosenfeld fills his briar with the green tobacco. He fires it up and passes it to me. I puff tentatively.
“No, man, no. Pull it in your lungs. Deep.” I inhale—and choke on the thick, spicy smoke. “No, man, easy. Just a thin stream. Let a little air come in on the sides of your lips along with the toke.”
In half an hour the old armchair is a magic carpet. I curl up luxuriously and lean back into the cushions. Rosenfeld and Samantha, smiling broadly, float across from me on the couch. Samantha picks up a towel from the laundry basket on the floor next to her and wraps it around her head. “I’m a Gypsy. Sir, would you like your fortune told today?”
“Yeah, sure,” I murmur.
“Soon you will write all your papers. You will become full professor. You will not go into the marines. And your destiny is riches. Even now, a wealthy and beautiful blonde awaits you outside in her sports car. Her mansion is on Knob Hill. She will drive you to classes every morning.”
Rosenfeld and I can’t stop laughing. Then Samantha can’t stop. We laugh until our sides and cheeks ache so badly we avoid each other’s gaze.
Hesitant, amazed, I reach down for the tin containing this dry, green, crumbly plant and bring it to my nose. I inhale slowly, deeply, and my eyes close as the pungent smell carries me into fields of summer grass unrolling endlessly toward a horizon.
Rosenfeld puts Coltrane on the record player. My eyes won’t stay open now, yet I’m pure attention. Every note hangs in space, a silver bell, shimmering. My mind moves with the melody, a crystal receptor. Note after note, instant after instant flows by, dissolving in a stream of time. The record stops. All I can say to Rosenfeld and Samantha is, “Wow, too much. This stuff is beautiful. The music—and the grass.”
Rosenfeld and Samantha lean back on the couch holding hands. They nod and smile like happy children.
And now, with a shudder of infinite relief, I hear a voice deep in my head saying, “Thank God! There really is another way. Another way out of middle-American drabness and despair. Another path to truth and beauty.
“We’ve been doing it all wrong. A whole generation of poets, artists, and professors. An avant-garde that worshiped alcohol.
“Now I can tell them that you don’t have to drink all night and puke your guts out. You don’t have to spend three days sick and shaking. Here in this humble plant lie sweet ecstasy and the meaning of life.”
It’s four months later, the end of January, the beginning of spring semester, a sunny, cool day—but it feels balmy after three weeks back in subzero Minnesota for Christmas break.
As I walk by Ludwig’s Fountain, someone in tattered jeans, a work shirt, and a wispy beard rants about socialist reform. A smell of grilling hamburgers wafts from the hole-in-the-wall fast food joint on Telegraph Avenue just across Bancroft. Then I’m in Professor Herling’s office in the English Department.
“Terribly sorry, Mr. Storlie, but your grade in the Renaissance class did suffer when your annotated bibliography omitted Hubble’s recent article. The Hubble article is, at the moment anyway, definitive. There are other lapses as well, but that was perhaps the most serious. Hubble holds the Renaissance Chair at Yale, as you know.”
I don’t, but nod in agreement.
“Your examination of this year’s bibliography volume of Current English Studies was clearly inadequate—the article is cited there.”
“I guess I did look through it rather too quickly,” I reply. Actually, I neglected Current English Studies altogether—though I stared at it balefully one night at closing time in the Humanities Reading Room, then went drinking with some other grad students at Robbie’s on Telegraph.
“Yes,” says Herling, “Dick Hubble’s article was overlooked by PMLA this year. Unusual, but these things happen. That’s precisely the kind of thing that keeps us sharp.”
“Well,” I say, “I know I should have found the Hubble article. And I know it’s not an excuse, but I was under tremendous pressure in my Jonson course and the Gawain seminar. And, really, in view of the A on my term paper, and considering how damaging a B is in the program, are you sure that’s all you can give me?”
“Very sure, Mr. Storlie. Or I wouldn’t have assigned the B. We demand thorough, independent scholarship. That’s the gauntlet we throw down here—and, I might add, the one you chose to pick up! You’re here, after all, Mr. Storlie, for scholarship! You’re here to train!”
Walking out of the building and down along the path leading to the eucalyptus grove, I snarl to myself, “Fuck, yes, I’m here for scholarship. And I picked up the gauntlet. Stupid me—an idiot midwesterner.”
Then, more reasonably, I think, “Well, face it, it was no help that the weekend before the project was due you and Lisa were drunk two nights with Miscorski and his girl in Jack London Square. And then, after the bars closed Saturday night, you just had to jump out of Miscorski’s VW and hop a slow freight rolling toward downtown Oakland. Great way to end a date. Lisa hasn’t spoken to you since.
“But Professor Herling says I’ve got to get serious. Herling’s training at Duke led him to exhaustive researches into Milton’s attitude toward virginity. What are you training me for, Dr. Herling? Is the Herling training better than a late-night train ride through the Oakland switchyards—or seafood and wine in North Beach with Lisa and Miscorski and his girl?
“Do you train me for graduate colloquiums? Like the one where you read from your article ‘The Virgin, the Lamp, the Chalice Broken: Miltonic Truth or Consequences in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and the Three “Disputed” Poems’?”
And the term paper assignment! I couldn’t believe it:
Write a 5,000-word essay that fulfills this pattern:
X Milton + Y
where X = an aspect of Milton’s thought or a particular Miltonic work
and Y = an aspect of the seventeenth century.
O shriveled Herling, O desiccated Herling, O exoskeleton of a Renaissance man! Did I come here to convert poetry into logical positivism or some phony fractured mathematical formula?
Later, I write home that I’m going to quit school and join the army or become a math major, like Miscorski! My father, who himself taught college English for years, reasons with me by letter.
Dear Erik,
I wonder if your Mr. Herling’s specification is necessarily as dreary as you assume. He may be in his cross-eyed way trying to get the fact- and form-grubbing graduate students to use their brains to discover something new. Teachers sometimes become pretty desperate. It looks to me as though he is merely saying to take something of Milton that is important and to set that alongside something of importance in seventeenth-century literature and discover a meaning that is interesting or significant. He may have a forlorn hope that something creative may come of his formula. The “X Milton + Y” is a figure of speech, and could be an opening for the imagination.
I think I understand your problem. It is built into the choice you made. I do not have a solution. If you choose English literature as your field of study, all English literature is your burden, even what Mr. Herling includes in his course. But there must be more to the department than you have yet seen. Give yourself time to explore.
We want you to have every chance to do top-rank work. It is not only necessary to you professionally, but now, with the war thr
eat, top-rank work is necessary to give you the chance to stay in school. So we have to make provision.
Dad
So I stick with it. I make last-ditch, last-minute efforts to survive classes. I don’t want to lose my draft deferment or shame my parents.
But after each night in the library, I walk home along a Telegraph Avenue that day by day becomes more bizarre, fascinating, alive, hopping—a sea change happening to America right here before my eyes.
It’s an evening in late February. Rain has poured down for a week, gushing down streets, geysers of water popping manhole covers lower down in the hills. Rosenfeld’s friend Sammy drops by. Sammy’s a slight, blond, easygoing kid from somewhere out east, an undergraduate at San Francisco State College. Sammy smokes a lot of grass, hangs around the bookstore with Rosenfeld. I’m up in my room struggling to write a paper on Walden. It’s almost midnight when Rosenfeld shouts up the stairs, “Get your ass down here, Storlie. We’re in the kitchen.” I set my work aside and walk down the stairs.
“What’s up? Hi, Sammy,” I say.
“What’s up,” says Rosenfeld, “is cactus. Sammy’s got cactus. And he thinks you need it bad.”
I look curiously at Sammy, who shakes his head deprecatingly, smiles broadly, and opens a brown paper bag, dumping out a heap of shriveled, brown disks onto the Formica top of the kitchen table. Each disk has a fuzzy center.
“Cactus,” I say. “What’s cactus?”
“Peyote, man. Peyote,” says Rosenfeld. “Think of Aldous Huxley. Think of Havelock Ellis. Don’t you read real books? The Indians use it to get high and talk to the spirits. We can talk to the spirits. It’s something else. True, Sammy?”
“It is something else,” Sammy says. “The whole world gets these incredible glowing, pulsing colors. I took it last week and spent an hour just hanging out in the supermarket, digging the fruits and vegetables. The Chinese lady couldn’t figure me, but she knows I’m weird anyway.”
“Well,” I ask, “what do we do with this stuff?”
“Oh, you can just chew it up. But it’ll be easier if we cut it into little pieces, get rid of the fuzz, and rinse it down with something.”
“Okay, sounds cool,” I say, thinking that there’s no way I’ll get the Walden paper done tonight anyway.
Rosenfeld produces his briar and we solemnly smoke a preliminary bowl of dope together, the seeds occasionally snapping and producing greasy smoke.
“Jeez,” says Sammy, “you could at least clean the stuff.”
“Wasteful,” says Rosenfeld. “Waste not, want not. Poor Richard’s Almanac. That’s Ben Franklin, in case you didn’t know.”
Rosenfeld gives us knives and we get to work dressing out the peyote. He makes up some frozen pineapple juice. We wash down small palmfuls of bitter, pill-sized chunks.
After an hour nothing has happened. In two hours we’re giddy and silly, but it’s 2:30 A.M. and there’s still not much effect.
By four in the morning I’m tired and go up to bed.
I lie down and shut my eyes and find myself in high space orbit, looking lazily down at a distant planet. Then I’m falling, caught by gravity, falling faster and faster toward the surface. I’m about to hit—I clench my teeth, ball my hands into fists, and squeeze my eyes shut waiting for the impact—but the planet is a round, yellow-gray peyote button. Its wrinkly surface gracefully opens like a flower—and now I’m falling endlessly into the center of the peyote planet.
My eyes pop open in the darkened room. “Wow,” I whisper to myself. I get up and go downstairs to find Rosenfeld and Sammy lying stretched out on the living room rug.
“This is something else,” I say, gingerly letting myself down onto the couch. “What’s going on with you guys?”
“It’s really very, very hard to say,” says Rosenfeld. “But it has something to do with colors when you close your eyes. Sammy just said he was seeing rainbows.”
“I was,” says Sammy. “But that’s gone. Now I’m seeing—well, I can’t really explain. But it’s ugly. You don’t even want to know.”
Sammy gets up slowly, walks around the living room, peeks out a window past the curtain. Rosenfeld and I remain silent, absorbed.
Sammy turns from the window. “Hey, I really need to get out of the house. A drive over the Bay Bridge to North Beach would be cool—we can wake up Joy and Elton.”
“Now, screw it, Sammy,” says Rosenfeld, sitting up and loading his briar. “We’re here, it’s five in the morning. Everything’s cool. Here, take a hit.”
“No, man, really, I just want to take a drive. It’s already almost light.”
“No way,” says Rosenfeld, “I’m tired and I’ve got to be at the bookstore at noon. Besides, Samantha’ll get up and wonder where the hell we’ve gone.”
Sammy sits down on a chair across from me and stares down at the rug, silent. Then abruptly he gets up, pulls on his shoes, and starts methodically tightening and tying the laces.
“Hey, man, it’s cool,” I say. “We can just hang out here for another few hours, then maybe take a drive over the Bay Bridge and groove on North Beach.”
Sammy won’t look at us. His shoes are on and he’s hunting for his jacket.
“Okay, okay,” says Rosenfeld. “Jesus Christ, a ride across the bridge’ll be cool. Far out. Let’s go.”
Once in the car—an old Chevrolet convertible Rosenfeld and I bought together for sixty dollars—Sammy relaxes. As we soar along the freeway, coasting the bay on our right, we start to giggle at the various abstract driftwood sculptures erected by artist freaks in the mud flats at the edge of the bay.
“Look at that one,” shouts Sammy. “Must be Dr. Freud’s dick.” We dissolve in giggles.
“Or yours,” roars Rosenfeld. “No, way too big for that!”
“Think so?” smirks Sammy. “It’s always the big fat kids in the locker room who’ve got little eensey weensey ones.”
“Ha!” says Rosenfeld cheerfully. “Don’t get personal or I’ll show you what a little one can do.”
“Fat chance,” says Sammy. “Samantha tells me the equipment works maybe once a month, if she’s lucky.”
“Hey,” I shout, waving a finger out the open window at a vaguely vulvular, ten-foot-high structure made from driftwood, lumber, and old tires. “That one’s Lisa’s pussy. Big enough for a truck. She’s been modeling on the beach again.”
As we approach the toll plaza, Rosenfeld suddenly shifts his weight in his seat, then sits up straight, both hands gripping the wheel. He commands, “Okay, you guys, stop smiling. Unless this son of a bitch is a hip spade, he’ll see these smiles at five in the morning and turn us in. Everyone knows a head. Cool it, please.”
Rosenfeld slows the car, and Sammy and I subside into smirks. Rosenfeld hands out quarters, and we’re off again.
In North Beach, we park the car and swagger up and down the early morning streets like sailors on leave. Only a few Chinese shopkeepers are out, readying shops for the day.
As we walk by the silent, darkened Old Spaghetti Factory, Rosenfeld shouts, “God, the Old Spaghetti Factory. They actually call it that. They actually manufacture spaghetti in there. Spaghetti like pale, underground worms. Too much—too much—I just can’t take it, man. Oodles and noodles of spaghetti factory with even a truck in front named after their very own name.”
Rosenfeld doubles up in laughter, stamping each foot on the sidewalk. We join him, helplessly, looking into each other’s joyful, silly faces—then become embarrassed as a solemn middle-aged Chinese man in a suit and briefcase walks by, eyeing us balefully. Then once again, staring at his receding gray back, we dissolve into helpless giggles.
It’s fall of 1963. Not willing to stay in my cramped room at Rosenfeld’s another year, I’ve moved to a studio apartment in East Oakland. It means a long walk to classes or taking the bus. But maybe away from the scene at Rosenfeld’s I’ll be better able to concentrate on my studies.
It’s late morning and I’m still in bed
. The alarm went off at 7:30, but somehow—again—I couldn’t force myself into the routine of getting up. I’ve been missing all my classes for weeks. Unable to sleep longer, doubts pry into and disturb my mind. “Maybe, after all, there is a price for smoking grass every day. Maybe this magical plant is not, finally, what it seems?”
Footsteps crunch on the gravel sidewalk outside. There’s a hammering on the door. Then Rosenfeld’s voice.
“Storlie, open the door. Kennedy’s been shot.”
Depressed, uncomprehending, I say nothing.
“I know you’re in there. It’s no bullshit. Let me in and we’ll turn on the radio.”
Again, I say nothing. It doesn’t matter to me if Kennedy’s been shot. Nothing matters to me. I just want to be left alone, to sleep.
“Come on, Storlie, it’s really true.”
There’s a long pause, then Rosenfeld’s voice, “Oh, fuck you.”
The footsteps crunch slowly back up the sidewalk and fade away.
It’s late February, the middle of the 1964 spring semester. It’s eight in the evening. I’m in the apartment trying to pull together useful quotations for a paper on Caxton. My mind resists, refusing to focus. I write and rewrite the same page over and over again.
I hear footsteps outside my window. There’s a knock on the door, then Rosenfeld sings out, “Storlie, open the door. Joel’s got a little present for you.”
Joel is a new friend of Rosenfeld’s from North Beach. Joel came into the bookstore a few months ago looking for a used copy of Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus. Rosenfeld and I are awed by his rebellion. He refuses to work and lives on some frantic beatnik edge, stealing food from supermarkets, cadging drinks at the bars, crashing with different people in different pads in Berkeley and North Beach. Short, slight, stooped, with bedraggled hair and a navy pea jacket, he cultivates the Jean-Paul Sartre look with round, steel-rimmed glasses—haunted, furtive, all-knowing, chain-smoking.
