2.

Later that evening Marty was in a little better mood. He’d led two punk teens from the suburbs to a marijuana dealer and got a ten-buck commission on it (from the teens, which he’d demanded from the start), and now he and Alex were splitting a pint of cheap tequila. He liked the cheap stuff anyway since it was harder to sip and so took you longer to finish it off.

“You know what we need,” Marty was saying now. “We need some acid. Fuck yes. Remember back in the day?--I mean high school, we didn’t know each other then, but--don’t you remember tripping downtown here? Staring up at the square windows of the towers here, seeing the Cash Register shimmer and shake, watching the whole sky and streets mutate, creating anarchy? At least what we thought was anarchy. Those were some times!”

“I don’t know, Marty,” said Alex.

“What?”

“I don’t know.” Alex was the sullen one now. “Where in hell would we get it?” It was true: acid was getting rarer these days, especially among the bum culture. Now the teens were taking ecstasy, acid was forgotten; and bums and junkies liked the crack, the heroin, the speed--shit that numbed you, anesthetics for the disaster that was their lives.

“I know a guy,” said Marty.

“A guy? What guy? Why don’t I know him?”

“You do,” said Marty. “You do know him.”

But Alex didn’t ask for his name. “I don’t know,” he repeated. They were sitting on benches in the Sixteenth Street Mall--a bad place to drink, with the cops how they were--but it was late, and they were more likely to be told to move on away instead of getting ticketed or arrested. The air was balmy and dry; and most of the shops were closed, just a few passersby, businessmen and bankers in clean black clothes exiting the offices after working late, here and there another bum like them.

“Come on,” said Marty. He was excited about the idea. It seemed to him the solution of what in hell he would do all day now that 10,000 PSI could not be added to, the disk already holding every character it could. He would become an acidhead; maybe he would scrawl bizarre graffiti all over Denver, see things you can’t buy with a million dollars, become a psychotic mystic, find God and see angels only to forget what it all was and meant. He’d burn out at the end; he knew it and he didn’t care; he’d seen old acid burnouts and they looked somehow at peace to him, unable to contemplate any complex thought--brain blasted but at peace. But the things he’d see till then! All humans decline in the end, he thought; all life is a process of spending what we have, to end up with nothing and finally die; why not spend one’s mind away just a little quicker than one’s body? “I don’t know,” Alex was saying again.

They saw a cop car mosey across the pedestrian mall at the next block, and Alex smoothly moved the bottle in his hand under his coat, seeming to simply be dangling his hand there at leisure, with no obvious movement to hide something. They glanced at the car and it kept going by till it was around the corner completely. He’s becoming a virtuoso at shit like that--like hiding that bottle--thought Marty. Men become virtuosos at about anything necessary for them to live.

“Acid,” said Alex, who sipped the tequila once the cop was gone--“acid, it’s fucking cool when you got a place to trip--a TV to stare at, a couch to vege on all night. This--this fucking city--there’s nowhere to go. It’s like--it’s like going home and never getting there--it’s--” but he couldn’t quite explain what he meant. Marty thought he got it. The city for the homeless was as much a cage as an open space. When people with apartments are on the street they are always going somewhere. When you have nowhere to go, you’re going somewhere forever and never getting there.

Marty held out his hand and Alex passed him the bottle. He took a swig. Maybe Alex was right. He’d be fucking stupid to fuck up his head on acid like that anyway. He’d probably see nothing but nightmares, suspect every passerby of evil intentions . . . no, acid wasn’t a good idea when you’ve got as much godawful shit to dwell on as he had.