The Secret of Life

“Smell what?”

“All the meat had spoiled. Ned had a big walk-in freezer with three months’ worth of meat in there. The motor had blown out maybe Saturday night, and all day the sun had been shining. It was like five thousand dollars’ worth of meat—hot dogs, hamburger, steaks, and chickens—all stinking and rotting there, while some prick was driving off with Ned’s pregnant daughter. It was like the summary of his life.”

“What did Ned do? What did he say?”

“He always called me Westy. ‘Westy,’ he said, ‘you’ve only got one life. Make the most of it.’ ”

Chapter 14:

Thursday, December 9, 1965 Conrad gave up schoolwork again and spent a week getting drunk with Ace. Audrey seemed more and more distant. Finally all sources of money dried up. It was a gray winter morning, and Conrad was walking around with nothing to do.

Some ugly girls had asked Ace and Conrad up to their apartment; the girls had even paid for beer. Some wild scene late at night ... Ace humping a girl in the bathroom ... the landlady coming up ... Conrad scribbling gibberish in a notebook ... forget it.

Conrad wandered into one of the dorms and took a shower. Better. There was a crazy guy who lived here—Freddy Whitman. People said he took drugs. Check it out. These days it seemed like every issue ofLife had LSD on the cover.

Whitman’s door was open, and Conrad walked right in. Surf music on the box. Whitman was at his desk, blond and mad-eyed, his shirtsleeves rolled all the way up to his armpits. He was measuring some thick red liquid into gelatin capsules.

“What are you doing, Freddy?”

“... Bunger. I knew you’d come by sooner or later. This is mescaline. I boiled a lot of cactus for three days to get it.”

“Cactus?”

“Look.” Freddy pulled a big cardboard box out of his closet. It was filled with flat green cactus buds.

“Peyote. I order it from Texas. Wild Zag Garden Supply. It’s still legal. Have you ever tripped?”

“I’ve never even smoked marijuana, Freddy. How do you know about all this stuff?”

“It’s in the comics.” Laughing and twitching his elbows, Freddy handed Conrad a Marvel comic. “This is about atrip , man.”

Conrad flipped through the pages. It was aWeird Adventure about a man who gets on a subway at a stop that’s boarded up. The train is full of beige snout-monsters and leads to another dimension.

“Freddy, I don’t see what ...”

“And look at this. It’s my letter to the FBI.” Freddy handed Conrad a closely written piece of paper titled “STOP PERSECUTING FREDRIC Q. WHITMAN.” Whitman was strange for sure. He’d been away from college last year, but now he was supposed to be making a fresh start. “Do you want some peyote?”

“Uh, what does it feel like?”

“The best trip is if you shoot up acid.” TheS -sound inacid came out sweet and sibilant. Freddy sounded like a kid talking about candy. “I did that last week, and after a while I noticed thisbig jewel stuck to my forearm. It was the syringe.”

“But what about peyote? Will I see God?”

“It’s a good solid trip. Colors. Lots of physical stuff. Here, eat these. Eat three.” Conrad took the peyote buds and looked at them. They were fresh and moist, with small soft spines. He broke off a piece. It was spongy and white inside.

Conrad started chewing. Very bitter. A definite feeling of crossing a frontier. This was something he’d wanted to do for a long time.

“Be careful not to eat those hairs in the middle of the buds,” cautioned Freddy. “They have strychnine.”

Conrad chewed and swallowed, swallowed and chewed. It was hard to avoid the hairs. He picked some of them out from between his teeth. “Give me two more buds. I want to be sure it works.”

There was silence, there was noise. Freddy was sitting across the room, watching closely. His teeth seemed so white. He was pla

“I’m leaving,” a

“You have to stay. I want to watch you freak out.”

“A phone call.” Any sign of panic could be fatal. “I just have to make a phone call, Freddy. I’ll come right back up.”

Conrad went down to the dorm lobby and sat in the phone booth. He wanted to call Audrey, up at Columbia. The receiver was soft and melting. None of the numbers would stay still. You could see the operator inside the handset. It rang and rang. Conrad staggered to a couch and the full trip hit him like a ton of bricks.

The subway. Conrad was in the first car of a subway train, staring out into the darkness ahead. He was the driver and his stomach was the engine, pushing the vision forward with wave after wave of peristaltic agony. Ropy tooth-monsters loomed ahead, huge pink and beige maws. Conrad tumbled forward, ever faster, swallowed by mouth after mouth. It was like a terrifying ghost-house ride, and he wanted to scream; but his mouth was full, full of sour stinking lumpy lava—the faces leered and gibbered, the train swayed and crashed, endless strobing horror visions; and Conrad was too weak to even die.

At some point he realized he’d been throwing up. Puking into a green metal wastepaper basket, and thinking the vomit patterns were faces. Freddy Whitman still waiting upstairs, dig,I want to watch you freak out . Help!

Conrad shuffled out to the street. The bare trees’ black branches were monsters’ claws. Reaching, reaching, reaching, reaching. Should he walk in the middle of the street? But the cars! Those stories about people who went crazy and ran into traffic or jumped out windows ...Calm down, Conrad.

“Calm down,” repeated a million voices in his head, voices that thi

“Calm down down downdowdowdowddddyyyahhahahahahaaauuuuugh! You’re going going goi

His dorm room was deserted. Everything looked like a face. The desk, the doorknobs, the bathroom sink. Even the blank walls looked like faces, the nightmare faces you can’t stand to see. “Kill yourself,”

whispered the razor on the sink. “Cut your wrists and end the torture.”

Conrad rushed out of his dorm. Tried to rush—the air was thick as jelly. Chuckie Golem and some other guys were renting a house across the street this year.Go there! Be with people! It took forever. He could barely talk when he found his friends.

For a moment, Conrad fell into the delusion that he was a physics professor, explaining relativity to the four smiling faces at Golem’s kitchen table. The room became a stagelike lecture hall ... but then the refrigerator beckoned, and Conrad hugged its great white smoothness. Food. Sex. Things grew less hectic.

“What do you see, Conrad?” He and Chuckie were sitting face to face.

“It’s like a Renoir. I’ve always wanted to be in a Renoir painting and now I am. Ma. The horrors. I had the horrors. Pinball. I’m in a pinball machine,fzzzt , the light, oh, the colored lights, tu

Conrad had been staring at Golem as he talked, and now the other boy’s face began to undergo a series of high-speed changes.

Renoir/Modigliani/Ceza

“Here’s Platter,” said Chuckie. “We called him to come get you.”

Platter took Conrad back to their dorm room but not before Chuckie took him aside to give a thousand cautions. Chuckie knew about drugs; he had friends in the Village.