Crossroads

For yet a while longer, all had been righter than right, but by the time Bear delivered his judgment of speed, Perry was ready to hear it. What had seemed in the moment of purchase an all but inexhaustible number of pills had dwindled unexpectedly fast, and although their function was somatic he was experiencing less than salubrious mental side effects. Jay in particular was intolerably impatient-making, their sharing of a room a misery. Likewise his mother’s tender touchings. Likewise any Crossroads activity requiring physical contact. The world’s slowness had become more infuriating than capacitating, and meanwhile his body kept saying, “More, please.” His body had created a problem. He hated it for its inroads on his dwindling supplies, hated its drag on the flight of his mind. In a state of towering crankiness, when he ran out of pills, he returned to the guy’s little house on Felix Street, and this time no dog was there to howl at him. The front stoop was littered with rain-eaten advertising folios. Pasted to the door was a bright-yellow sheriff’s notice that he didn’t dare step close enough to read.

“I’m not surprised,” Bear said. “That shit is pure evil.”

That Perry liked Bear was irrelevant. That Bear liked Perry, and allowed him to make house calls, was a blessing portending a new phase of rightness. Bear, who’d also sold to Ansel Roder, had zero personal attributes in common with the guy on Felix Street. He was burly and mellow, seemingly unafraid of the law, and reassuringly acquainted with several such Crossroads alumni as Laura Dobrinsky. His house, a trek of thirty minutes from the Crappier Parsonage, belonged to a grandmother who now dwelt in a nursing home. Perry had never had a grandmother, but he recognized the grandmaternal smell in the walls, the grandmaternal hand in the embroidered sheer curtains in the living room, where Bear, of an afternoon, drank Löwenbräu and read the many magazines he subscribed to. Clearly, the key to longevity as a dealer was to be like Bear. He dealt exclusively in naturally derived substances, mostly pot and hash but also, as Perry learned after explaining his energy requirements, the odd gram of cocaine, to oblige some of the musicians among his clientele.

On his first visit, Perry left with a forty-dollar sample. Did someone say love at first snort? He was back two days later. This time, Bear had company, a comely personage in a leather miniskirt, drinking her own Löwenbräu, and Perry feared that his arrival was unwelcome. But Bear was mellow, and his lady friend, on learning what Perry was about, brightened as though she’d remembered that today was a holiday. Already, after only two days, Perry wondered how a person even casually acquainted with cocaine could ever, for a moment, not be wondering if some of it might be close at hand; how the thought had managed to absent itself from her head. Further speeding his heart, as Bear convivially treated them, was the thrill of his singularity (if anyone else at New Prospect High had used the fabled drug of Casey Jones, Perry was unaware of it) and his inclusion by two sophisticated people in their twenties. Among their topics of lively discussion were the most interesting drug they’d ever taken, the drug they were keenest to try (“Peyote,” Bear declared), the lucky star that Perry could thank for not having been robbed by a needle-using freak, the contrasting benignancy of a plant-based alkaloid that didn’t turn its users into paranoid maniacs, the experiments of Dr. Sigmund Freud, the hypocritical distinction between prescription drugs and street drugs, and the rumors of the Beatles reuniting, the grating self-importance of Grand Funk Railroad. Perry was very merry, and his very merriness served the ends of his unsleeping rationality. His first-order need was that Bear like him and trust him. His second-order need was to deflect attention from a glaring difference between himself and Bear, namely, that Bear was mellow. One snort made Bear an even happier Bear and was enough. Perry, who was the nth degree of the opposite of mellow, struggled fiercely to control his eyeballs, which wanted only to follow the coke.

Bear’s mellowness, it emerged, concealed a stubborn will. His coke sales were a sideline, subject to constraints of availability at the wholesale level, and his other buyers, though few and irregular, were loyal to him. Perry, as a newcomer, was eligible for only half a gram. When he offered to pay a premium for more, Bear pretended not to hear him. Bear was being irrational—it was tiresome and risky to make Perry come a-scoring so often—but Perry, guided by rationality, gave their relationship some weeks to grow before he made his proposition.