The Secret of Life Read online

  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 planning to eat Conrad’s brain.

  “I’m leaving,” announced Conrad. His voice echoed in the quiet room. “I want to get someplace safe before it’s too late.”

  “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 thinned and twisted into devils’ laughter.

  “Calm down down downdowdowdowddddyyyahhahahahahaaauuuuugh! You’re going going goinnnnnng craaaaaaazzyyyyaahahahahahaaaaaah!” It was beyond any horror Conrad had ever imagined. Why had he gotten into this?

  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, tunnel dragon,there , did you feel it, too, the vomit lava? Love. I’m so happy. I was scared I’d kill myself. Dr. Kildare Morgan. Everything a painting with the tooth teeth under it. It sits very ...

  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/Cezanne/Rousseau/Roualt/Bonnard/Vuillard/Monet/Leger/Dufy/Chirico/Nolde/Schwitt ers/Ernst/Braque/Picasso ... the entire history of modern art compressed into one wonderful rush of variations on Chuckie Golem’s face ... ending with what seemed like twenty minutes of pure Cubist flow.

  “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.

  “God, Platter,” said Platter as they walked back to the room. “You look terrible. No wonder they’re making this stuff illegal. The pathetic husk of a once-great mind.”

  Conrad laughed in mechanical bursts. Platter’s voice sounded so thick and convincing. Platter got Conrad into their easy chair and gave him a glass of water. Conrad spilled the water.

  The visions grew stranger. Conrad felt himself and his thoughts as filling a vast balloon, a floppy sphere that floated up miles above the Earth. He was a great transparent balloon with a long neck that stretched down to suck the gray-white December air. He had a terrible feeling that soon the neck would break. He would stop breathing and die. Being dead would feel the same at first ... but then the balloon would melt and the magpie scraps of C. v.R. Bunger’s personality would scatter into bright empty space. He’d get his crystal, and the flame-people would pick him up in their flying saucer. Groovy. Let it happen ...

  “CONRAD!”

  H
e forced his eyes open. The easy chair’s cushion stretched out on every side. His and Platter’s room was the size of a gymnasium. He’d shrunk again. Platter was shouting something, lifting the glass of water ...

  Splat.

  The water. Cold life on cold Earth. Conrad was big again. He was wet all over.

  “Conrad,” Platter was babbling. “I was really worried. You were shrinking! Like you said you did under that truck. What’s going on here, anyway? You were the size of my thumb, Platter, I swear! Don’t take these drugs anymore, it’s madness! I’m going crazy just living with you!”

  : Friday, December 10, 1965 Audrey shared a New York apartment with two other girls, also graduate students. The apartment was a fourth-floor walk-up, between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue.

  The daylong peyote trip had granted Conrad one short revelation.Go see Audrey. As soon as the stuff had worn off enough, Conrad stole a crowbar from the janitor’s closet and pried open the dorm change machine. Fifteen dollars in quarters. A round-trip bus ticket to New York was a prohibitive twelve dollars, so Conrad hitched instead. He made a sign saying NYC and got Chuckie to take him to a big highway. Just before dropping him off, Chuckie gave him some yellow granny-glasses to wear.

  “Take these, Conrad. They’ll help you keep it together.”

  He slipped the glasses on. Everything looked thick and sunny—like the good part of the peyote trip.

  “Do I look cool?”

  “You look like a real blown mind.”

  Conrad didn’t have to wait long before an empty moving van stopped. The truck’s cab was full of Italian movers. Conrad had to ride in back.

  It was weird for Conrad back there, in the rumbling dark, with echoes of the peyote still bouncing around his skull. It took a conscious effort not to startseeing things. Fast-flickering flame-people, mind-rays, and chains of hidden cause-effect,another order of reality ...

  The truck dropped him off somewhere in Manhattan. It was early evening. The store windows were full of Christmas displays. Taking the subway uptown to Audrey’s was the hardest part. The horror-train.

  Conrad was scared to look out the windows or at the other passengers. Instead he looked at his hands.

  They were flaking like wet cardboard. The flesh was crumbling off, and he could see the bones underneath.

  He hadn’t called Audrey, because he was afraid she might say not to come. He had to push the downstairs bell in her building for quite a while before she buzzed the door. And when he finally got upstairs, she was alone there with another guy.

  “This is my friend Richard,” Audrey told Conrad.

  Richard offered Conrad a glass of wine. He’d just brought a bottle over to share with Audrey. She deserved it, said Richard, because she’d let him store his golf clubs here over Thanksgiving break. Flesh was peeling off his head, and Conrad could see sections of his skull.

  “Actually,” explained Conrad, “I have a date with Audrey tonight. We were planning to go out to dinner, weren’t we, Audrey?”

  She paused, thinking, then agreed. Richard took his golf clubs but left the wine. It was Almaden Chablis.

  “Why didn’t you call?” Audrey asked.

  “Is Richard your new boyfriend?”

  “You look terrible, Conrad. What have you been doing to yourself?”

  “I took some peyote. It made me throw up and see visions. I still don’t feel quite normal. I feel like I’m from outer space.” Audrey frowned. “Your drinking is already so bad, and now you have to start with drugs. Is that going to be the new thing with you, Conrad?”

  “It’s better than golf.”

  Audrey looked down at her lap and began picking at a loose thread on her jeans. She didn’t want to meet his eyes. “What if we stopped seeing each other?” she said after a while. “Swarthmore was fun, Conrad, and this summer in Paris was lovely. But couldn’t that be enough? Why should I have to marry the very first person I make love to? Life shouldn’t be so predictable.”

  “Having a predictable life is the least of my worries,” said Conrad with a short laugh. “Things are constantly falling apart. You’re the only solid thing in my world, Audrey, you’re the warm center.” He knelt by her chair and began kissing her. “Don’t drop me, Audrey. I need you so much.”

  She kissed back with some fervor. He got her breasts out, she unzipped his fly, and a few minutes later they were in her bed fucking.

  “Oh, Audrey. This feels so good. Everything’s been skeletons.”

  “It’s all right, Conrad. I do still love you.”

  After sex, they lay in Audrey’s bed, talking and drinking Richard’s wine. “What have you been doing all month?” Audrey asked. “I was wondering why I didn’t hear from you.”

  “I kept calling, but you were never home. And then I was getting drunk. Didn’t your roommates give you the messages?” “I was waiting for you to actually show up. That’s what counts, you know. Being here.”

  “I’ve been broke.”

  “Can’t youfly here from Swarthmore?”

  “I don’t think I can fly anymore, Audrey.” He told how the truck had almost run him over—being careful not to mention that he’d jumped in front of it on purpose. “I needed to fly away from that truck, but I couldn’t. But listen! Instead of flying, Ishrank .”

  “You shrank.” They were still naked, and Audrey was nestled on his shoulder. “Can I have some more wine?” “Sure.” He poured out more wine for both of them. “I shrank to the size of a thumb, and the truck went right over me. When you were a kid, did you ever read the book about the five Chinese brothers?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, there’s these five Chinese brothers who look exactly like each other. One of them can swallow the sea, one can stretch his legs to be as tall as he wants, one has an iron neck, one is fireproof, and one can hold his breath forever. To do a little boy a favor, the first brother sucks up the ocean so the little boy can walk around on the bottom and look for treasure. But then the little boy won’t come back in time, and the brother spits the ocean back up, and the little boy drowns. So the village decides to put the Chinese brother to death.” “They try different ways of killing, and each time a different brother shows up?”

  “Right. They throw the one with stretchable legs into deep water, and he just stands there. The one with the iron neck comes and they can’t chop off his head. The fireproof one comes and they can’t burn him. Finally they decide to smother the Chinese brother in an oven filled with whipped cream, but that day it’s the one who can hold his breath. The judge gives up and they live happily ever after.”

  “Let me see you shrink, Conrad.” She was kissing and caressing him.

  “I have to be in the right frame of mind. Hold on.” He closed his eyes and let the peyote death-fear come welling back up. He was leaving Earth, his breathing was stopping, the saucer was going to pick him back up ... and right now he was dying, yes, fading out of flesh for ...

  Her skin slid against his as he grew smaller. He was the size of a child, a baby ... he was the size of a thumb. Audrey’s body was a magic pleasure-park, and Conrad was her gardener. They began having fun. Before long she came, and Conrad got big again. “Oh, Conrad. That was wonderful.” There was noise out in the living room. One of Audrey’s roommates, a hyperactive vulgarian named Katha Kahane.

  “Audrey?Ya here?” The bedroom door rattled.

  “Don’t come in, Katha.”

  “Who ya got in there tonight?”

  “Fuck you, Kahane!” yelled Conrad.

  Audrey winced, then began to laugh. “I’m sorry, Conrad.”

  “Do you love me best?”

  “Chinese brother.”

  After a while they got dressed and went out. Conrad was still wearing the round glasses Chuckie had given him. The night city was black and yellow; the streets and buildings etched strange perspectives. A gibbous moon hung over the skyline.This is really going on , thought Conrad.I’m really alive.

  “
What were those two rules I used to have, Audrey?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sophomore year. I thought I had it all figured out. Rule 1:Don’t be a phony. And Rule 2:Don’t be a mean bastard. Remember?”

  “You don’t believe that anymore? Now that you’ve expanded your consciousness? Is that what it feels

  like to take peyote, Conrad; is it a feeling ofexpansion ?”

  “I can’t believe you shrank like that.” A blush stole across Audrey’s cheek.

  “Did Kahane think I was Richard?”

  “She knew it was you. She just wanted to make you suffer. She doesn’t like you, Conrad. None of my friends ever have. Liked you. That’s something I like about you the most.”

  “You really do love me?”

  “Yes. But that doesn’t mean I have to marry you. Reading about the French Surrealists and Dadaists, I always think how wonderful it would have been to hang out with them in cafes. And you’re sort of like them. Only now, in America, being avant-garde is so seedy and violent. Sometimes you frighten me, Conrad. What if you’re just a drug-addict-bum your whole life? I wouldn’t want to live with a person like that. It’s too sad.” She glanced at him and looked away. “But you were saying about the two rules. If it’s not them, whatis it? What’s the answer?”

  “Having adventures. Getting out to the edge and jumping off.” They turned the corner onto Broadway.

  “Making it back is important, too. You go way out, further than anyone’s been, and then you come back to tell about it.” The street was full of people, happy-looking people. Conrad squeezed Audrey’s hand.

  “After that peyote, I’m glad not to be dead or crazy. Even though I’m such a Chinese brother that nothing can bust me.”

  “I wonder how you got this way.”

  “It must have been something that happened when I was little. Radiation. Or maybe I’m not human. I keep having this feeling that I come from a flying saucer.”

  “Oh, sure. What about your brother and your parents?”

  “They could have been implanted with false memories. Really, it’s starting to seem like our whole generation is aliens. The geezers are just so ... square nowhere. Roast Beef. Vietnam. Dry Martini.