Dhalgren

Thirteen’s cheeks hollowed; the jar filled with smoke.

“You got any speed?” Tom asked.

“Oh, man—” Thirteen coughed and handed Red the jar. “You can’t keep anything like that around here more’n five minutes. We don’t get much anyway. Once somebody brought in a whole pillowcase full, man! A whole pillow case with a plastic lining full of all sorts of speed. This Mexican guy.”

“Was he Mexican?” Smokey asked. “He was thick-set, blond…”

“He talked like a Mexican,” Thirteen said. “I mean that was a Mexican accent he was speaking. It wasn’t no Spanish-from-Spain accent. Or Puerto Rican. They sound different.”

I nodded.

“Anyway,” Thirteen said, “it was gone like that!” He gri

“You must have every kind of—Oh, thanks.” Mak took the pipe from Red, sucked, and said: “It’s out.”

“Here, just a minute.” Thirteen struck another match.

“You must have every kind of junkie in this city,” Mak said.

Smokey, with the jar now, was handing it to Copperhead, who said: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a skaghead in Bellona, you know?”

“I have,” I said.

Glass laughed.

Tak said: “We don’t have much dope here. No money, no dope. To speak of, I mean.”

“I think—” Thirteen said. “Wouldn’t you say, Kid? I mean, you could say this about most of your guys, huh? Most people here have taken a lot of dope. But we don’t got too many people here who need it. If you know what I mean.”

“That sounds pretty good,” Mak said.

“I mean if you need it,” Thirteen said, “there just ain’t no place to get it. I’ve put everything in my arm, or up my nose, or down my belly I could, just about, one time or another. Liked all of it, too. But I don’t need anything, you know? Of course—” he reached over and took the jar from me—“I do enjoy my toke.”

Everybody laughed.

Me too.

And all the smoke loosed out my nose and stung.

“Now did you ever think what a specialized city Bellona is?” Tak was saying. He had come in front of the bed, fists in his scuffed pockets, holding the leather off his hairy stomach. The red quilt lining was torn in two places. “I mean Bellona’s got a lot of some things and none of a lot of others. I used to know a guy who could not go to sleep unless he had a radio playing. He can’t live in Bellona. There are people who have to have movies to go to; or they get twitchy. They can’t live in Bellona. Some people must have chewing gum to survive. I’ve found stale candy bars, Life-Savers, Tums; but all the chewing gum is gone from all the candy-stores’ racks. Gum chewers can’t live in Bellona. Not to mention cigarettes, cigars, pipes: the tobacco in the vending machines went stale a couple of weeks after we got cut off and I guess the cartons and packaged shag was the first thing the scavengers cleared out. You never see a smoker in Bellona.”

“Some people need sun, clear nights, cool breezes, warm days—” I said.

“They can’t live in Bellona,” Tak went on. “In Helmsford, I knew people who never walked further than from the front door to the car. They can’t live in Bellona. Oh, we have a pretty complicated social structure: aristocrats, beggars—”

“Bourgeoisie,” I said.

“—and Bohemians. But we have no economy. The illusion of an ordered social matrix is complete, but it’s spitted through on all these cross-cultural attelets. It is a vulnerable city. It is a saprophytic city—It’s about the pleasantest place I’ve ever lived.” He gri

The jar circled Tak for the third time; he swayed at the center.

“Here.” Tom, still leaning on the sill, held it out. “You didn’t get any.”

“Never touch the stuff.” Tak waved the sides of his jacket. “No, I’m a poor, anti-social juice-head. Not a man of my times at all. Gets me in trouble, too.”

Somebody suggested we go back to the nest. Tak, his three discoveries pretty well parked at Thirteen’s curb, decided to drift—after Thirteen, in a flurry of patriarchal politesse, broke out his jug (same as ours; he must be rifling the same busted plate glass window on the street sometimes marked Lafayette, sometimes marked Jessie). The late afternoon got lost in the day’s momentum.

“Why don’t we go back to the nest,” somebody suggested again. Which, again, everybody thought was a good idea.

Where Lady of Spain, with Raven, I guess it was, had gotten a big fire going in the yard and all sorts of ca

We stood around, listening to the fire. Red, still barefoot and shirtless, squatted, staring at the coals, the back of his jeans tugged way the hell down his ass. Circling his hips three times—he wore it down below the waist of his jeans so you couldn’t see it normally—was the optic chain.

Just then he glanced back at me over his shoulder, surprised; maybe he thought I was staring at his crack.

“God damn, I burned fuckin’ hell out of myself—!” Jack the Ripper shook his hand furiously on the other side of the fire, hopped and whirled. Fire glistened in his mud and sputum eyes.

I looked down at the beads across my chest, my stomach, around my arm; could feel them around my leg. I looked up and saw Red was looking too; then his eyes went down to the place below his hip’s blade pushing above the beltless loops. And up at me again. His hands, out for balance, were bloated the way some winos get. He started to speak.

I said: “I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to know where you got it. I don’t want you to ask me where I got mine. Fuck you, man. I just don’t want to hear—” catching my voice lowering and a fury rising neither he nor I understood.

Black Mak watched me, frowning.

White Tom dug in a can of beans (hot on one side and cold on the other?) with his fingers.

Red swallowed.

“Sure I eat pussy!” California shouts and shoves Tarzan backward.

“Hey, man, hey—” D-t moves along with them.

“You God-damn right I eat pussy!” and shoves again.

“Come on, now, man, what you—”

“I’d eat your fucking pussy if you had one!” and Tarzan crashes back into the fence.

“Now come on!” D-t, a hand on either of California’s shoulders, moves him away, and Tarzan, abandoned, suddenly starts to—

—but Gladis’s laugh turned shriek, letting me hear (remember?) a second crash’s echo. Among all the concerned “What’s…” and “Who’s…” and unconcerned laughter (mostly Dollar’s, bright and insistent), it got figured out that somebody had hurled a hot can at Gladis, which tipped her shoulder and splattered on the steps.

Red wasn’t at the fire anymore. And a moment past the rage, I felt that surge of good feeling to rival those acid moments of unbearable friendship when the gates will not shut. Later, I went up behind Dollar and caught him across the back of the head, hard.

“What’d you do that for…?” he whined, lids crimped around eyes gone under the fire.

“For throwing that God-damn can.”

His eyes crimped more and his mouth opened on that slate-chip laughter (clear, a little shrill, like a boy’s on the short side of puberty) and he said: “Oh, man, did you see the way she hollered? I bet she was scared enough to drop it right here,” and wheeled away, laughing, while D-t shook his head, watching, and said, gravely, “Shit, man.”

Tom and Thruppence were arguing about geography which took us from the yard to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the front steps, from the front steps to the yard. Everybody was staggering and bending and belly-clutching with laughter.