by Mark Salzman
The summer of ’76 was all Whoa! Bummer. Then fall. That first week when Erich and Rachel went off to school but I stayed at home, I felt strange. I had expected it to be a joyous occasion, but instead, whenever I drove by the high school on my way to town to meet Scott for a pizza lunch, I felt slightly anxious. Did I really know what I was doing? Meanwhile, every day my brother would come home and tell me that at the end of the morning announcements, a crisp female voice would say, “And will Mark Salzman please report to the main office immediately. Mark Salzman.” Ah, bureaucracy.
I was still practicing jazz in the afternoons, but was getting stoned every night. Worries that I might be getting addicted troubled me every now and then, but were easily silenced by the argument that once I had figured out the essential psychological ingredients of Whoaness and learned to invoke them without smoking pot, I would be glad I had not surrendered to fear and given up. And I was trying, too; I set aside a certain part of every afternoon to take a walk and try to think myself into that state of mind, but without success. As to precautions against getting caught, I didn’t take many. At first I took my pipe out to the backyard and smoked it there, but after a while I smoked right in the basement and burned lots of incense to mask it.
One day Lenny called me up to say that he’d bought a Triumph Spitfire but had totaled it after only two weeks. But he had an idea: we could take what was left of his car and what was left of mine and pool the parts, building one composite car that ran. We could share it; one week it would be his, the next week mine. Great idea! We towed my car over to his front yard and got things started on the right foot by setting up his eight-track tape player out on the grass, blasting some Pink Floyd and lighting up a bowl of Colombian.
Nine days later we had one car, but three pails of nuts and bolts that should somehow have gone into the car but hadn’t. What the fuck! (That was our project motto.) We started up the car and decided to take it out to a nearby stretch of flat road built over a shallow swamp where we could test it out. When we reached the road Lenny stopped. “Let’s see how fast it goes from zero to sixty,” he suggested. He revved the engine, popped the clutch, and in less than a second we discovered where some of those nuts and bolts should have gone. We had forgotten to bolt the steering column (which on a Spitfire is just a thin metal pole) to the wheel apparatus, and we had forgotten to bolt the seats down; the acceleration threw us both back, the steering wheel pulled right back with us and the car roared right into the swamp. Luckily it was a convertible. As we lay on our backs and felt the car sink, Lenny said, “What the fuck?”
A friend helped us pull the car out and tow it back to his place. Within a week we had it together again, but on his first night out solo with it Lenny wrapped it around a tree. A few days later we were working on it again when, just as I was switching the tape from the Eagles to the Who, a nondescript car stopped in front of Lenny’s house and two men in suits walked up to us. One of them asked if either of us was Lenny.
“Yeah,” Lenny said.
Flashing a badge, the man identified himself as a detective and read Lenny his rights. Neither of the men looked at me or asked me anything.
“You’re kidding me,” Lenny finally said.
“You know we don’t kid around,” the detective answered. They put Lenny into the car and drove away with him, and that was the end of our Triumph repair project. I never did find out what the arrest was about.
Lenny’s problem should have been a warning to me that I was headed for trouble. Here I was, accepted by Yale but hanging around all day getting stoned, listening to bands like Ten Years After and tinkering with shitty British sports cars. I didn’t read the signs, though. I was under the impression that I was getting dramatically better as a jazz cellist every day, but in fact I was still playing the same three songs with Scott, and we rarely played for longer than an hour at a time before going out to the woods to do our really important work, which was smoking dope and being Amazed by Everything.
In time I solved the bummer problem by being constantly high. I ate, drank, talked, slept, hung out with Annette, played the cello, bussed tables and looked through the telescope just as I had done in my previous life; only now all of my experiences seemed part of a vast, profound, mysterious but slightly blurry adventure.
As far as saving money for college went, I wasn’t building up much of a nest egg. I got fed up with the Sri Chinmoy people; they were always smiling, but that was probably because they were paying me well below minimum wage. I quit that job and got hired by the wife of a wealthy executive to paint Chinese-landscape paintings directly on several of the interior walls of their house. They had two French exchange students staying with them, both girls, but I never got to see their faces because they spent every day upstairs in their room listening to the Beatles’ song “Michelle” and singing along to the French lyrics.
When I finished that job I got a check for five hundred dollars. I took it to my bank to cash it so I could buy another car—this time one that would run—but the check bounced. I was furious. When I called the family from the bank, there was no answer. Seeing that there was a problem, the manager of the bank came over and when he saw who had written the check, said, “Oh, yeah, I talked to them this morning. They’re on their way to the Caribbean.” He authorized the check and handed me the money, but only after first calling me “miss” (older guys loved pulling the “I thought you were a girl” routine on me when my hair was long), then giving me a frowning lecture about being impatient. I, who was completely broke, got written a bad check for a month’s work by a couple of millionaires on their way to the beach, and I get a lecture about being impatient. That’s teenage life.
That afternoon I went out to buy the car I’d chosen. This time it was a Triumph TR4, and the man who sold it to me swore it ran great. “Burns a little oil,” he said, “but nothing to worry about.” This time my father drove behind me in the Volkswagen to make sure I got home OK. Halfway home smoke started pouring out of the engine. We pulled over to the side of the Merritt Parkway for a quick conference.
“I don’t care what you do with this thing, Mark, but we’d better get it off the parkway quick,” Dad said; we didn’t have temporary plates on it and he didn’t want to get fined or arrested.
I hopped back in but the car wouldn’t start. Dad stuck his head out the window and said, “Put it in gear. Let’s get the hell out of here.” I did so and he drove up to my rear bumper and pushed until the damn thing started.
It was the longest half-hour drive of my life. Smoke was pouring out so thick I thought the whole thing might catch on fire at any moment. When we got it home I shut the engine off but the smoke didn’t stop; it was on fire! By the time I got the flames out the engine was ruined.
I called the man who’d sold it to me and he said he didn’t know anything about it; it was his son’s car and his son was in the marines, and anyhow, if I ruined the engine, it was my problem. So my second car ended up just like the first one—in the weeds at the end of the driveway.
Later that year Lenny resurfaced and called to say he was trying to put together a field trip to New York City to go see Laserium, the music-and-light show in the old Hayden Planetarium building. He had another car now, a tiny four-door Datsun, that he said he’d modified just for this trip. I was up for it; I didn’t have to get up early for anything the next day.
As the car came up my street the first thing I noticed was the music; Lenny had put his eight-track in there and Dark Side of the Moon was on full blast. The next thing I noticed as he pulled into the driveway was that I couldn’t see him, or for that matter anyone in the car; it looked as if the windows had all been sprayed with dull white paint. When the car stopped, the driver’s-side door opened, Lenny stepped out and billows of smoke poured out after him. “Hop in!” he cried, grinning like the Cheshire cat.
I climbed into the passenger side and took a whiff. It was dope, of course. He’d put a huge water pipe in the glove compartment and rig
ged four tubes along the inside of the roof so the driver and each passenger had his own private mouthpiece. I turned around and waved the smoke a bit to have a look at the passengers in the backseat. There were Scott and Michael.
I was mighty surprised to see Michael in there, and he looked surprised to see me. We didn’t say a thing to each other. There was a certain tension in the air when Lenny told us to get the water pipe going because neither Michael nor I wanted to be the one seen by the other smoking pot. Finally he shrugged, took a drag off the pipe and the tension was broken.
Someone ought to do a survey someday to find out if the Laserium show has ever actually been witnessed by a sober person. You wouldn’t think so from the look, sound and smell of the audience I saw it with. Halfway through the show one guy started bellowing out, “I SEE GOD! I SEE HIM! THERE HE IS! THERE HE IS!” and had to be led out by two ushers. I wasn’t impressed by the show, to be honest. A couple of little dots going in circles to lame songs like “Dreamweaver”—Scott and I had done that with penlights in his room a hundred times already, and we used better music. All four of us were disappointed. We started walking back to the car, then stopped at a coffee shop for a snack before the long drive back to Connecticut. Michael and I still hadn’t said anything to each other.
Full of doughnuts and coffee, we went back out to find our car, but after going up and down streets for half an hour, we realized that not one of us had been paying attention when we parked it. We had no idea where it was, and within a short amount of time we had no idea where Laserium had been either. We wandered for a long time. Michael complained that he had to go to the bathroom. After a fruitless search for a public bathroom he unzipped his pants in front of a fire hydrant and let loose. It was the longest piss I’ve ever heard; I was sure the NYPD would catch us.
By the time we found the car all of us had come down and were in a terrible mood. We lit up the pipe once we got onto the interstate and started to feel better when all of a sudden the car started to slow down, then stopped.
“This is so fucked up,” Lenny said. “I forgot to put gas in it this morning.”
We were on a dark stretch of I-95 just outside of Rye, New York.
“We’ll have to push it,” Michael said, even though we were at least thirty miles from home.
“Oh, man, this is so fucked up,” Lenny kept saying.
Scott pushed on the passenger-side door while Michael and I put our shoulders against the trunk and dug in for the long haul. It was a light car, three of us were pushing, and we must have been on a slight downward slope, because in no time at all we were really moving.
“Push harder, candy-ass!” Michael yelled at me, starting to laugh. “You’re not pushing at all!”
“What are you talking about? You’re the one not pushing! I see you resting your head on the trunk!”
“Resting, my ass! I’m having to make up for the fact that you’ve got nothing in your legs anymore! Look at you! You’re already out of breath!”
“And you’re not breathing hard at all, no!”
We were talking at last. As badly as I wanted to get home and get to bed, I was glad we were friends again.
“Look! An exit!” Scott yelled. We pushed the car off the ramp, then all jumped on top of it as it picked up speed and coasted to the bottom, where an all-night Exxon station was waiting for us. The car rolled right up to the pump.
We filled the tank, but when the time came to pay we all started fumbling around in our pockets and realized that none of us had a cent. We’d spent it all on that stupid laser show and doughnuts.
“This is so fucked up,” Lenny kept saying.
“What are we gonna do now?” Scott asked.
Michael smiled and said, “You can all relax. I’ve been in a situation like this once before, and let me tell you that we are lucky men tonight because we have in our midst the perfect man to get us on our way. Gentlemen,” he said, gesturing toward me with a vaguely Arabian, spiral flourish of his hand, “meet Barabbas, the Christian Thief.”
“How am I gonna get us out of this?” I asked.
“Remember the drive-in movie? You go in there and do your magic. Confess, and free us all!”
I walked into the station, where an unhappy guy in his late thirties was shivering and watching a portable black-and-white television set. It was 4:00 A.M.
“You guys better have money,” he said.
“Um … here’s what happened. We went down to New York to see Laserium, we lost our car, and it’s been the worst night of any of our lives. If I give you my driver’s license, can I come back in a couple of hours and pay you back?”
He squinted at me and then at the car. “Did you say Laserium?” he asked.
“Yeah, have you seen it?”
“Yep. You guys got any dope?”
I hesitated.
“You give me a couple joints, I’ll take care of the gas.”
When I came back to the car the guys were looking at me expectantly. I simply smiled, got into the car and said, “We’re cool. Let’s go.”
Michael gave me a friendly slap across the back. “What’d I tell you guys?” he roared. “We weren’t the judo-jitsi brothers for nothing.”
I was glad to have seen Michael that night, but couldn’t bring myself to call him after that, and he didn’t call me. I wasn’t all that comfortable with the sight of him, once so pure but now smoking pot and pissing on fire hydrants in Manhattan, and I’m sure he felt the same way about me. We didn’t renew our friendship.
Not long after Laserium I made a truly glaring error of judgment—the sort of error that only someone stoned most of the day could make, and that everyone who is stoned most of the day eventually does make—and that was deciding to grow my own dope in my parents’ house. I started a dozen seedlings in an egg carton on the windowsill of my room, but then I thought, Sooner or later, Mom or Dad is going to wonder what these plants are. So I decided that, since my dad enjoyed houseplants and had them growing all over the house, I would put one seedling in each of his pots and that way, spread around like that, my plants would blend in and no one would notice them. This would also save me the trouble of remembering to water them; given my permanent citizenship in the State of Whoa, remembering anything was a real challenge.
The plants got about six inches high when one evening after dinner but before dessert, my brother, Erich, wandered up to the table with the World Book—Volume “M”—under his arm. He plunked it down on the table and opened it to “Marijuana.” Innocently pointing to the large photo of a typical cannabis leaf, he said, “Isn’t this weird? This picture looks just like the little plants that have been coming up in a bunch of Dad’s pots.”
Mom was in the kitchen, out of earshot. Dad looked at the photo, then got up quietly and examined his little pots. I sat paralyzed with horror at the dinner table. It had honestly never occurred to me that he might recognize them, or that any of the parents of Mom’s thirty music students who sat next to the plants for half an hour at a time each week might recognize them. Now that this had happened, I felt as if my entire soul were imploding. I felt really, really stupid.
Dad didn’t say a word. Part of his self-control, I believe, came from the fact that my mother had an important concert to give the next day and he didn’t want her to know about this until after her concert. He came back to the table and looked at me in a way that said, “You are not the person I thought you were. I’m not sure I even know you. All I know is, I want those plants out of my house right now.”
I got the message. I got up and one by one pulled my plants up and threw them out into the woods. I didn’t dare go back into the house until after nightfall, and even then I slinked down to my room without talking to anyone.
The next day my father and I had to move the harpsichord to the concert hall together. It was a heavy and somewhat delicate job, and took lots of teamwork; usually I enjoyed doing it with him, but this time it was hell. I felt nauseated and had a splitting headache,
both from being tense and having not slept at all the night before. Neither of us said a word.
We delivered the harpsichord and Mom gave her concert. Dad didn’t sit in the hall. He stayed outside, and I wasn’t about to go looking for him. After the concert we dismantled the harpsichord and carried it into the van. He was ashen-faced and never once looked me in the eye. Halfway home Dad said the only thing he was ever to say about The Incident: “I hope you don’t ruin your life.” Something about the way he said the words “your life” made me think, He doesn’t just mean my life this week or this month—he means my whole life, forever, eternity, until I die. Until I die in that damp alley in New York City, just like the elementary school drug film said I would.
When we got home I went out to the woods behind the house and threw up. That was when I began to lose interest in smoking dope.
15
Two days after The Incident I sneaked out to the woods where I had thrown the little marijuana seedlings and tried to recover them in case they were good for smoking. As I crawled around miserably in the bushes it occurred to me how pathetic I must look, and that was when I hit my low point. Just as the policeman who visited our sixth-grade class had warned us after letting us all touch his pistol, I had let myself slip—a tiny bit at first, but sure enough, I had set the wheels of self-destruction in motion. I had started down that infamous road to ruin as sure as if I had set fire to the Town Hall, thrown a rock through the plate-glass window at Woolworth’s or stuffed rags up the sheriff’s exhaust pipe. I had become a Bad Kid. I had ruined my relationship with my parents forever. I had wasted half a year celebrating banal insights and playing the same stolen electric-bass riffs over and over without actually learning any of the essentials of real improvisation, and I couldn’t even do full splits anymore. After all the opportunities I’d been handed, what had I made of it all? Where had I ended up? Scrounging around in the woods for a couple of limp hallucinogenic twigs. I was ashamed of myself, and convinced that my dad needn’t have bothered to worry; I had already ruined my life.
