Travel Reference
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five or ninety minutes. Yet I remained sated and stoned on the launch pad. I thought I'd eaten
too much spaghetti, smothering the drug in pasta. The snow began falling, little, wet granules
plunking along the windowsills like lunar modules plunking into the sea.
Ater two hours, I thought I'd drawn a dud.
Marcia suggested another hit, underscoring her most admirable strength, which wasn't
her moderation in all things but rather her coherence and ability to speak clearly while trip-
ping madly.
I declined; what if it came on along with the first hit?
Marcia giggled, “So? You took two hits.”
But no. I wasn't willing to risk Mach V. I'd seen those who took multiple hits. Some of
them handled it well.
After three hours I decided to go home. So I got up from the sofa and went to the door
to wrap myself in my rig. In those days it was a full-length overcoat and top hat from Good-
will along with a seven-foot muffler knitted by Old Mom, though she couldn't see the need for
seven feet of it. I explained that I needed to dress for success. Ah, success: now that she un-
derstood. Under the coat were bell-bottom jeans, a ruffled tuxedo shirt and a brown vest with
keyhole piping above and below the buttonholes in gold brocade to match the epaulet fringe
and needlepoint arabesques. I'd bought most of those things at Goodwill, which wasn't hip in
those days, unless you were avant-funk and knew what to look for. I got the vest the previous
summer at a London flea market. I got the boots in Amsterdam for eight bucks, unbelievably
cool boots with round toes instead of club toes like everyone else's Dingos, which set me apart
and helped immensely with identity, because the boots reflected the soul and more, what in
later decades would be called image, and then values. How could a young man walk the earth
without the right boots?
I opened the door to see that the snowflakes had swelled to dreamy proportion—big, fluffy
flakes plummeting softly as paratroopers, and a blanket already a few inches thick covered the
yard, the street and the trees. The flakes zigzagged earthward on no breeze, infusing the still-
ness with a metronomic yet overlapping pulse that strained, nay, insisted on life, even as snow
was a harbinger of Death in D.H. Lawrence's
he Fox
, read only recently for personal edifica-
tion; school was such a waste of time.
But wait.
This was life such as a hatchling might sense on its first stirring within the shell. The air
felt less chilled than at sundown. It looked like the right time for a stroll, given the brisk still-
ness and solitary brilliance of the night. I opened the door and felt refreshed, stepping from
the boisterous indoor atmosphere of friends tripping on rock and roll into a night of lumin-
ous darkness . . .
But then Marcia, the perfect hostess for altered realities, touched me sweetly. I turned to
her smile and could plainly see an original spark of love in her lovely smiling eyes as she asked
