Read Online Blow by Bruce Porter - Free Book Online Page A

the other guys and their girlfriends to moonshots under the stars. In chemistry class his junior year, George not only tortured the nerdy kid with the thick glasses next to him, violating his experiment with alien chemicals while the boy had gone to the bathroom, but also went after the teacher himself, a little old man with a cheap set of false teeth, whose jacket George would burn with acid and whose examinations he’d get a girlfriend in the mimeograph office to run off for him and his friends. To be sure, the teacher sensed that something was amiss when the class screw-ups all scored A’s on the test, so he arbitrarily issued them D’s in the course.
    For date purposes, George had access to his father’s 1956 Mercury Phaeton. White on top with aqua-blue on the sides, it was one of the sharper cars in the group, and George washed it so often the paint almost came off. He also had sophisticated taste where music was concerned, which made him stand out in sharp relief from his contemporaries. He liked rock and roll okay, but his real penchant ran to Cole Porter, a taste he acquired from his mother. He also raved to his friends about Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, and Ella Fitzgerald, about Tommy Dorsey and other bands of the 1940s, along with Ahmad Jamal and the other progressive jazz artists. He went in to Boston to listen to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in the late 1950s, before they’d even started producing records. “George was years ahead of everyone else in Weymouth,” recalls one of his girlfriends. “I’ll never forget it, we were juniors in high school, and he took me in to see Erroll Garner at Storyville in Boston—George loved him; he played his records all the time—and here we are having cocktails, seventeen years old, doing the things that people did when they were twenty-three or twenty-four.”
    Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was published in 1957, to little fanfare in Weymouth, but George read it as soon as he heard about it, along with The Dharma Bums. He talked endlessly to his best friend, Malcolm MacGregor, about Dean Moriarty and the adventures he and his bunch had stumbling around the country, drinking wine out of jugs, always seeming to be passing through Denver. George and Malcolm and Jack Leahy read Ernest Hemingway and idolized Jack London, the oyster pirate, the gold rusher, the master of the Snark. They talked of riding freight trains, hitchhiking around America, going to Alaska and Spain. He and Malcolm sat up nights plotting about the trimaran they were going to build and sail around the world on. “George had this thing about him that made people just want to be around him; they liked to tell their friends they’d been with George,” says Malcolm. “George was always bolder than anyone, always doing things that were out of the ordinary. He’d do just about anything if it would make him different from everybody else.”
    Ever since his early teenage years George had exhibited a preference for playing it close to the edge, sometimes literally. At age thirteen, he and his friends swam regularly in a quarry not far from his house, where a forty-foot cliff loomed above two jagged rocks sticking out of the water, one close to the cliff face, the other about ten feet out toward the middle of the quarry. To do the jump you had to land exactly between the rocks; a little too short or too far and you had a hard landing. Not many boys besides George tried that one very often.
    When George got his driver’s license at age sixteen, he began treating the town as his own personal raceway. In one of his more spectacular accidents, George was motoring along in his father’s Mercury with Barry Damon during his senior year when a car pulled up close behind him on the twisting two-lane road that ran by the football stadium at Legion Field. “I could hear his engine revving, and he starts to make a move for the outside,” says