by Mark Salzman
When it was done I called Lenny up and we put the engine back in. When I told Lenny how I had “rebuilt” the engine, he didn’t make any comment, but just grinned. When the time came for me to start the engine, though, I noticed that he stood well back from the car.
“What, did I do something wrong?” I asked, beginning to worry.
He shrugged innocently, but didn’t step any closer.
I turned the key in the ignition, and—it started. It sounded beautiful! I revved it up a few times and glanced at Lenny, looking forward to the expression of astonishment on his face. Instead I saw an even bigger grin where the astonishment should have been. I looked behind me and saw, through the yellowed and cracked plastic convertible-top window, a cloud of black-and-blue smoke that threatened to block out the sun for our whole neighborhood. Apparently, I hadn’t fixed the oil-leak problem.
When Lenny told me what was really involved in rebuilding an engine, I calculated that it would take five hundred dollars in parts, a thousand dollars in tools and about two years’ worth of auto-shop courses before I could actually drive the car. Before he left that day, Lenny helped me push it into the weeds at the end of our driveway. “If you’re not going to be using them or anything,” he asked, “could I have those tires?”
The fifty bucks I hadn’t wasted on the Triumph I spent on jazz records, and through Lenny I met someone who played the synthesizer and who had been looking for a bass player for some time. His name was Scott and, besides jazz, he was pretty seriously involved in Zen, Taoism, cabalistic theosophy, Carlos Castaneda and something called Magick, which involved warlocks, incantations and elves. We got together, improvised for a few hours and decided to meet a couple of times a week to practice. After each session we ended up talking about philosophy and religion, and before long the subject of drugs came up. I confessed that I’d never even smoked pot, and to my surprise he thought that was cool—I’d been into “a purity thing” with the kung fu, he observed, and purity was definitely powerful—but now that I’d been through that, he thought I might consider trying pot, but not as entertainment. He said it was amazing how it helped meditation, and how it made philosophical texts that had previously made no sense at all suddenly as transparent as spring water. Pot didn’t have to be just something to do on a Saturday night; it could be a powerful psychological tool.
I was interested but hesitant. Frankly, I was afraid. My dad had told me that when he was in the air force he saw a guy smoke a joint and lose his mind, and the thought of losing mine and then having to explain to my dad that it was because I had done exactly what that foolish soldier had done was too awful to even think about. I told all of this to Scott, and he said, “That’s cool. But listen, if you ever change your mind, do me a favor, will you? Don’t decide to give it a try when you’re at a party and somebody passes you a joint. That would spoil it for you; it would be so lowlife that I guarantee you’d be disappointed. If you want to try it sometime, call me up and we’ll go out to one of the lakes and do it right. If you’re out in a relaxing place with somebody who’s into the kind of thinking you’re into, you’ll be fine. After all, you don’t have to be high to freak out in the army—I’d freak out stone-cold sober if I had to march around all day with a crew cut and call people ‘sir,’ wouldn’t you?” He had a point.
Scott and I got along well, and before long we were playing several times a week. He introduced me to another friend, a talented jazz guitarist who had already been accepted at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and the three of us got a few songs into working shape, but we couldn’t perform because I didn’t have an amplifier for my cello. For the time being, however, we were satisfied to play quietly in Scott’s room, then make tea and talk late into the night. Besides, I wasn’t ready to make my move with jazz yet—I needed time to develop a wider repertoire of licks. So it was just as well that I didn’t have an amp because I might have been tempted to rush into a gig, only to be disappointed with the results.
The Miracle occurred on a Wednesday afternoon late in the spring. On my way home from school I opened the mailbox and there was a letter in it from Yale. I took a deep breath, opened it and learned that I had been accepted for the class of 1980. I wandered into the house in a daze. My mother was teaching a piano lesson. I stood in the living room staring at her while her student, a plump little boy who always carried a briefcase, groped his way through a Chopin waltz. My mother noticed me staring and gave me a disapproving glance, but nothing reached me in my fog. At last the waltz ended. “What is it, Mark? I’m teaching, you know.”
I held up the letter. “You won’t believe this! Remember that application I filled out a few months ago? Well, it worked! I just got into Yale!”
Now it was her turn to look as if she’d been knocked on the head. “Whaaat?”
When I told her the news again, her jaw dropped and she covered her mouth with her hand, dumbfounded. “Better call your father,” she finally said.
I had never had occasion to call Dad at work before. I reached a secretary at the school where he worked and she said she would page him. After a few minutes he got on the line and I could tell he thought it was the highway patrol calling to say that I, along with my mother and brother and sister, had been wiped out in an accident.
“I’m fine, Dad. You won’t believe this, but I got into Yale.”
“Whaaat?”
So I told him again. There was a long pause. “OK, let’s not get excited yet. Would you do me a favor? Call the admissions office and check. They might have stapled your application to somebody else’s or something. Make sure about it, Mark. Then call me right back.”
I called the admissions office, and they assured me that my application had not been stapled or glued to anyone else’s. When I called Dad back and told him, he was speechless. When I pressed him for a quote, he said, “Well, some dean in New Haven is breathing a little easier now, because I held on to a copy of that parking ticket just in case. I really was going to stuff it up somebody’s ass if you didn’t get in.”
Everybody was in a good mood that night, but only I knew that we were celebrating for different reasons. My parents were happy because they could go to sleep knowing I was going to attend an Ivy League college, whereas I was glad because I would be finished with school forever in about four weeks. Soon, if I liked, I could realistically attain my earlier goal of forgetting, rather than learning, something every day. I had no intention of going to Yale; I saw the acceptance letter as a means of distracting my parents long enough to get my jazz career going. Once I was making good money, they’d be fine. The only problem was how I was going to explain to them that I wouldn’t be going to New Haven in the fall. I decided to hold off on that for a while until I had a watertight strategy and a damn good speech worked out.
I spent those last few weeks of high school struggling to keep the grin off my face. It was the least I could do for my classmates, who had another long year to go. Michael’s mother, who still worked in the cafeteria, heard the news through the faculty grapevine, and one day, as I bought a Popsicle from her, she said, “Michael’s over there. Why don’t you tell him the good news? He’ll be so proud of you.”
I didn’t see how Michael would enjoy hearing about it—we hadn’t spoken in almost a year—but I couldn’t avoid the encounter now that his mother had suggested it. I went over, sat down next to him and said, “Can I tell you something?”
“What?” It was just what I had expected; he didn’t even look up from the magazine he was reading.
“I, uh … I got into Yale.” Boy, did I not think this was a good idea.
“Great.”
That was it. I waved at Michael’s mother so she would know I’d done it, she waved back, and then I left the cafeteria.
When the last day finally came, it was, as most long-awaited events are, anticlimactic. I handed in a history paper, picked up a few final exams, cleaned out my locker and said good-bye to my favorite teachers. When I visited Mr. Leig
hton in the faculty lounge, he leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and put his palm against his forehead in the manner of a fortune-teller. He opened one eye and said, “This, by the way, is a strictly unofficial prediction. Strictly unofficial, do you understand? We never had this conversation.” Then he closed his eyes and started to sway back and forth like Johnny Carson doing his swami routine. “What do I see? What do I see?” he murmured, but his voice was so resonant that even sotto voce it echoed down the hallways.
“Aha!” he yelled, lurching forward. “I see brain cells! Many brain cells! And look—no, how can it be? Yes, it is! They’re dying! Many brain cells, dying over the long, hot summer! Now I’m pulling back out of the brain and I see … Mr. Salzman, and he is … enjoying himself in the company of other happy teens! Disgusting! I can’t stand it any longer.…” Then he frowned, as if concentrating harder. “Ah, now I see farther ahead—he is studying in the library at a prestigious university. It is late at night; he is applying himself again, as we all know he should. All is well. Excellent, excellent.” He pretended to shake himself out of his trance. “Good luck, Mr. Salzman,” he said, shaking my hand so vigorously that I could feel it in my ankles, “and remember, that was a strictly unofficial prediction. I don’t want any calls from concerned parents, if you know what I mean.” Then he winked (it was 1976, before winking became uncool).
Right around this time all the matriculation forms for college started arriving, including the financial papers. My parents had to submit copies of several years of income-tax reports, and that’s when my father began to realize that he somehow had to come up with the money to pay for the Miracle. A letter came announcing that the financial-aid office had awarded me an extremely generous scholarship, but even so, and even with the money I had saved from the restaurant (minus the amount wasted on the Triumph), I knew we didn’t have enough to cover the rest.
One evening just before dark I was sitting out in the dead body of the Triumph remembering what it felt like to drive it that one time when Dad came out to join me. He looked terrible; I could tell right away he was feeling guilty about something. I could almost see his hair turning from jet-black to white in front of me.
“Mark, I don’t know how to tell you this …” he began. It was awful for him.
In a flash I saw the opportunity in its gloriously unselfish disguise. “Dad,” I interrupted, “I think I know what you’re going to say, but before you do I want to tell you something. I’ve been thinking. Maybe it would be a good idea for me to postpone going for a year and work in the meantime to save up the money for school. The reason I think that would be a good idea is that I’m only sixteen years old, and all of the other freshmen are going to be seventeen or eighteen. I’ve already had to suffer through public school being the youngest and shortest kid in the class, so why should I make college the same? I mean, there’s no huge hurry, is there? Even if I postpone a year, I’ll still be a year ahead of everybody else. Then I can spend more time playing the cello and seeing how it goes. What do you think?”
He sighed. “Have you really been thinking this, or are you just saying it to make me feel better? I really feel like I’ve let you down.”
“I swear,” I said, and it was the truth and nothing but the truth but just not quite the whole truth, “that I’ve been thinking about postponing from the day this whole thing started. I didn’t mention it because I was afraid you and Mom would hit the ceiling.”
“Well, I’d rather you went right away because I think you’ll love college and I don’t think the age thing would be a problem for you—that matters less and less as you get older. But things being the way they are, I guess that’s how we’ll have to do it. I’m sure glad you’re not disappointed, though.”
“To be honest, Dad, I couldn’t be happier.”
With that out of the way, at last I could do what I wanted all day long. What I wanted turned out to be waking up at almost noon, playing along to records in the afternoon and then either going out with Annette or practicing with Scott at night. Within a month I was bored and restless beyond my wildest dreams. I needed something more, something that challenged me intellectually and spiritually, something exciting that would … lead me through the doors of perception to a brave new world, perhaps? Everybody except Annette and Michael was stoned all the time that summer. In fact, sometimes it seemed that everybody had been stoned since the ninth grade except me. I was the only guy in my industrial-arts class who wasn’t making a water pipe out of plumbing fixtures; I was always trying to make incense burners or kung fu throwing stars. I listened to the right music, I’d read the right books (in junior high I took Abbie Hoffman’s advice and stole his book titled Steal This Book), I was the right generation (I’d watched Woodstock live on television when I was nine, only to be ridiculed by Erich, who danced around me for years afterward singing, “Mark wants to be a hippie, for that’s the way he was born!”).
Clearly, I had been avoiding my destiny all those years. As Scott had said, purity was a phase I had gone through, but like all phases it had to give way to exploration and growth. Sooner or later destiny must be faced squarely. One night at a garage party, with the stereo blasting Aerosmith and somebody’s drunk mother dancing like Salome while two guys pointed flashlights at her boobs, someone passed me a joint. I couldn’t even count the number of joints I’d held; I was even quite good at rolling them. I’d spent many parties seated in a strange kitchen under fake Tiffany lamps rolling joints for everybody else—I just never smoked them. This time I brought the crooked white stick to my lips and nearly puffed at it, but then I remembered what Scott had said: If you change your mind, don’t smoke a joint at a party. It would be too lowlife—call me first. I looked at the party and saw that the mother was peeling off her blouse while her husband, who was too drunk to stand up and stop her, cursed helplessly from a La-Z-Boy chair held together with duct tape. Yes, I could imagine reacting like my dad’s air force buddy under these circumstances. Call me first. I passed the joint along and asked to use the host’s phone.
13
Scott closed his eyes for a moment and appeared to be concentrating on something just before lighting his carved wooden pipe.
“What’s that for?” I asked. My heart was beating wildly. I was afraid that I might have a bad high, and also nervous that we might be caught. The latter scenario was unlikely, however. We were sitting in front of a little campfire we had lit on the beach of the lake, only a few yards from where I used to practice with Michael. No cars could reach there, and it was a quiet, moonlit night—we would easily have heard or seen anyone coming.
“I’m asking the spirit of the lake to show us a good time,” Scott answered, grinning. “Every time I smoke, I consider it a lesson. I learn things when I’m stoned, and nature is the teacher. If you’re good to nature and pay attention to it, it will be good to you and show you amazing things.”
He lit the pipe and inhaled deeply, then handed it to me. The moment of truth. Was I really going to do it? All those drug films we’d had to watch in elementary school were playing out in my head like a videotape on fast-forward. A puff of marijuana and the next thing you know, bam! you’re popping pills, shooting heroin, snorting coke and then selling it. Then clang! that’s the sound of the jail-cell door closing behind you, and after five years you get out and realize that your life’s over, it’s finished, you’ll never be the way you were, so you go back to the drugs and die from an overdose in a slimy alley in New York City. What if those films were right? They made it sound as if that was what would happen to you if you smoked a joint, but no kid is stupid enough to believe that this happens to everybody, or even to the majority. It’s probably more like one in a thousand. But what if I’m the one out of a thousand? There’s no way of knowing beforehand. What if I freak out tonight and jump in front of a car because I think I’m Superman? Somebody had done this, I’d heard. I imagined my parents getting the call, I pictured their stricken faces. It was horrible.
&n
bsp; Then I inhaled. I have no idea how the decision was made. One minute I was forcing myself to watch an imaginary movie about my own self-destruction, and the next I was puffing on that pipe for all I was worth. Just one more unexplained mystery of the human mind, I guess.
I never finished taking in that first lungful because halfway there I coughed so hard and so suddenly that I blew the whole bowl of pot out of the pipe and into the lake. I had a coughing fit that lasted half a minute, and I realized that it was just like the first scene of all the drug movies.
That didn’t stop me from trying again as soon as I could. I took a tiny puff this time, and managed to hold some of it in before giving in to the irresistible coughing.
After four or five shallow puffs I waited, but nothing happened. Scott had his eyes closed and was smiling. “Has it hit you yet?” he asked.
“No. I don’t feel anything.”
“It’s coming, it’s coming, don’t worry.”
Five minutes passed, then ten, then fifteen, then half an hour. I was extremely disappointed. Having gone through the exhausting exercise of visualizing my arraignment on drug charges, followed by my grisly death in the South Bronx, I wanted my drug experience, by God!
“Anything yet?” Scott asked, still grinning. He’d been grinning for the whole half hour. Didn’t his face get tired?
