I walked up to the little cafeteria at one end of the building, ordered two sausage sandwiches and a coffee. Too dark, too small, to be attractive as a place to eat. I took my food outside, and ate it sitting on a loading dock at 4:15 a.m., looking at the moon, thinking of nothing in particular.
This summer wouldn’t much resemble the one before. There was all the difference in the world between living on your own and living in your father’s house. Also between working in a congressman’s office – no matter how trivial the work – and working in a glass factory. Between nights spent slinging the bull on the steps of the fraternity house and nights spent throwing boxes. Between being in a city with all its opportunities, and being nowhere doing nothing.
volunteer congressional assistant !
I looked around at the lamplit stone and asphalt, and remembered the night at Dave Segal’s apartment, the first (and, as it turned out, the only) time he had invited me over . “I’ve got a new Beatles album you have got to hear,” he had said, with great emphasis. I hadn’t been a big Beatles fan. I had loathed their early teeny-bopper music, and had been quite surprised to find that most people in college were crazy about them. Also, I couldn’t remember ever talking about music to Dave. Why did he choose me?
The album was “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” not yet a cultural sensation. (Leave it to Seagal to get in on the ground floor.) Dave had lit up a couple of candles and a stick of incense, and we sat in the darkened room and drank his wine and listened. As he had forewarned, one cut faded directly into the next without the customary pause. We listened to the entire side, and Dave got up to flip the record and we listened to the other side. An hour, call it. Not much time.
Break time was over. I walked back into the building, stuffing the coffee container and the papers form the sandwich into a trash can. As usual, all the lines were backed up, and it took several minutes to clear them.
“To tell the truth, Dave, a lot of it I couldn’t understand. I liked it, pretty much, but some of it was pretty strange.”
Segal had smiled. “That’s because you don’t have the key.” (And that was Segal, always ready to demonstrate how much of a man of the world he was. Well, compared to me, to what I knew of the world, it was easy enough.) I said, “So what’s the key? It isn’t in the liner notes.”
He had laughed his slightly mocking (and self-mocking) laugh. “No, it isn’t in the liner notes.” After I waited him out, he said, “Acid. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, get it? LSD. ‘I’d love to turn you on.’ It’s as plain as anything, once you have the key.”
And, as soon as he said it, it was clear. And then he had leaned forward earnestly. “The point is, I’ve got some, and it’s dynamite. Want to try it?”
I shook my head, remembering, and moved on to another lehr. I remember being unsurprised that Dave used drugs. It fit with his somewhat self-consciously bohemian lifestyle. And I suppose I was flattered that he thought I might an interesting person to get high with. But then, maybe he merely thought my reactions would be amusing. In any case, I told him, I didn’t think it was for me.
Segal, all energy and sweet reason, was sitting forward now. The candles made little highlights on his eyeglasses. “But if you haven’t tried it, how can you know? Frank, I’m telling you, this stuff is tremendous.”
“It’s also illegal.”
He brushed that aside. “So is off-track betting. So is speeding. So was drinking, during prohibition. So what?” I wasn’t about to say I didn’t want to risk getting arrested. And anyway, that wasn’t it. The fact was, the stuff scared me. I told Segal that doing drugs “wasn’t my thing,” and doing one’s own thing was as close to a universal commandment as college kids recognized. But it didn’t stop Segal, or even slow him down. He was always different, even in his non-conformity. “Frank, you don’t believe the stuff you read, do you? Believe me, if I didn’t think it was safe, I wouldn’t fool with it.”
I was getting tired now. Maybe the sausage was slowing me down, but more likely it was the time of night. The hour before dawn was always hard. The boundaries between world blurred. I knew full well where I was, but the inner stage was a little more brightly lit, the outer a little less so. I saw boxes and strapping tape and the day’s first pale light coming through the distant windows. But mentally, I saw Segal and me in his apartment, discussing the pros and cons of drugs in general and acid in particular. And how much separated the two scenes? A few weeks, a few hours on the road, and certain incommunicable differences in background, income, prospects, outlooks, desires….
Maybe if I had understood that when I first went to college, I would have gotten along better.