A Diet of Treacle Read Online Free Page A

pot. Joe whistled.
    “He’s happy,” Shank said. “Now he can throw a party for a dozen people who want to feel hip and they can all blow off the tops of their heads. He’ll get high for the first or second time in his life and he’ll turn some square little chick on for the first time and she’ll come across, also for the first time. He’s getting his twenty’s worth out of the bit.”
    “Sure.”
    “Everybody’s smoking now,” Shank said. “A guy like this one thought he was pretty far out a few years ago when he had a martini on an empty stomach. Now he starts reading and talking to people and he decides that juice isn’t far out at all. So he has to reach a little farther.”
    Joe nodded.
    “He’ll dig it,” Shank went on. “It’s a bigger kick than juice. Besides, it’s illegal. He can get a year and a day just for holding and he knows it. That makes it more of a kick. He can feel like all the hippies he reads about.”
    “The gospel according to Saint Jack.”
    “I’m hip, man. He reads Kerouac and he decides to get remote. You shoulda been there, man. You would’ve got a kick out of the way he came on. Like it was all something out of a spy movie, you know? Sitting down next to me and talking out of the side of his mouth and all. And he fell over when he saw the pad, like we were living on the other side of the moon and it was heaven on wheels.”
    “Everybody’s smoking it,” Joe said. “A year or two and they’ll make it legal.”
    “You kidding.”
    “Why? They’ll have to, with everybody turning on right and left. By the time everybody knows it’s harmless and non-habit-forming they won’t be able to keep the law on the books. It—”
    “You’re nuts, man.”
    Joe looked at him, and Shank went on.
    “Things get legal because somebody wants them legal, man. Things don’t get legal because somebody doesn’t want them legal. You think anybody wants pot legal? You think the Mob wants it legal when they can sell it? You think the liquor lobby wants it legal when nobody would drink juice any more if it was? Hell, you think I want it legal? I pull in close to a bill a week selling it, a hundred pennies per keeping squares high. If it’s legal they’ll sell it in the drugstores, man. Won’t that be a bitch?”
    Joe nodded, and Shank hauled himself to his feet.
    “Gotta go,” he announced. “You got any idea what time it is?”
    “Few minutes after eight.”
    “That late?”
    “Around there.”
    “Then I better jump.”
    “What’s happening?”
    “I got a few things going.”
    Joe leaned back on the bed and watched Shank go out the door and slam it behind him. The younger boy’s footsteps sounded on the stairway, then stopped. The front door banged.
    Joe stretched out on the bed, rested his head on the pillow and stared up at the ceiling whose cracked plaster had fallen away in jagged patches. The floor was bare and dirty and the furniture was quietly falling into ruin, the stuffing leaking from the one chair, and broken bedsprings digging down at crazy angles. Joe alternated between feeling sorry for himself and despising himself, usually was in one mood or the other except for the times a fix lifted him into another mental sphere. In a straight sense, without the realization of marijuana or the stimulation of benzedrine or the sogginess of alcohol or the diffusion of mescalin to eliminate moodiness, he either hated Joe Milani or loathed the world so unnecessarily cruel to him.
    You had always been a good enough kid, Joe would tell himself on occasion. Your folks had loved you and you had loved your folks and Rochester hadn’t been a bad place to live in. You had run around with a decent bunch of kids and you had done okay in high school and had never gotten into any trouble. Everybody had liked you then. What in the hell had happened to you?
    Two years in Korea had happened to you, Joe would answer—two years in Korea shooting at people and having the bastards shoot