on the traffic island, with tall red Reggie firing up our Luckies again, bending down the row of us with his lighter like a mother bird loaded with worm purée. And as we eyed that swanky Dunhill, inlaid with pearls and engraved not RB but lm c l , obviously cadged from some female ex-patient for favors large or small, we thought uneasily of all the ways Reggie wasn’t like a mother to us, for, all things being equal, he would rather please you than thwart you, but he had his price. Now he let us smoke, backs to the wind, while he turned up his own collar, and when we were through he delivered us safely back to Rohring Rohring, sixth floor, east end, the Adolescent Wing, and, wherever we had left it, our mission.
Even when you live in the bughouse, life needs a mission. Especially when you live in the bughouse. After all, here you’ve got no field hockey team, no terrarium for your reptile collection, no Broncos Marching Band, no Future Lawyers of America. We called ourselves the Bug Motels because we were a rock band, but we hadn’t gotten around to learning instruments yet. Junk food couldn’t be a project here. This wasn’t Camp Chunkagunk where you got a candy bar every two weeks when you turned in your laundry. We Bug Motels had pocket money and charge accounts, two restaurants, a snack bar and a gift shopwith a six-foot-long candy counter in the basement. We rolled in malted milk balls, canned potato sticks, cheese and peanut butter crackers, pretzel rods, you name it. For a while we had the use of the doctors’ tennis courts in the afternoons and huffed around the sunless courtyard in parkas and gloves, but then it got too cold even for us. We needed a doper to refine and complicate our appetites and godzilla gave us Bertie Stein, not only an experienced dope fiend but a mastermind. Bertie funneled us into the Manhattan Project, the H Bottle, the Big Blue Bomb.
You know that quaint sort of old bomb that falls, like it’s raining lipsticks, out of bulky white airplanes in
The World at War
? Under the main hospital next door were a huge pharmacy and the fabulously rumored morgue, but Rohring Rohring’s eight stories sat on a warehouse, an underground dump for big stuff, distillation urns and sterilizer boilers and hundred-pound drums of industrial cleanser, and royal blue size H cylinders of laughing gas that looked just like those bombs. It was one of them, fixed nicely next to its twin H of oxygen in Robinhood green on a cart like you’d use to bus a cafeteria, that souled our mission.
Bertie Stein was featherweight and restless and sifted about the corridors of Rohring Rohring all day long in roachlike silence, slipping through cracked doors if he found any, trying every lock and tuning his junkie’s x-ray eyes on blank walls and dead-end corridors. One day he saw a silver cart loaded with nitrous oxide roll off the third floor elevator and take its place in a row of rolling bins of soiled linens, waiting for some dutiful flunky to wheel them over the catwalk to the laundry chute in the main hospital. Bertie crawled on his hands and knees between laundry bins and from the moment he goosenecked up for a closer look at that cart with its copper tubes and gauges and mixers and regulators, the funny gray enema bag of a gasreservoir dangling down and the dear little red clown’s nose of a mask with two horny valves sticking out of it, he had to have one for his own. For our own. And pretty soon that was our mission.
He reported to the Bug Motels: “The nature of this gas,” drawling it out farcically,
gazzz
, “is a cartoon with the picture gone. You know, like, Tom the Cat falls through the roof of the opera house and bounces around the orchestra on his rubber stamp head. He gets spitted on a cello bow, sucked up a flute, digested by a bassoon, ha ha ha, tenderized by a marimba mallet, hee hee hee, and finally he gargles the tenor’s high C by swinging from his tonsil. Ho ho ho, except there’s no
Even when you live in the bughouse, life needs a mission. Especially when you live in the bughouse. After all, here you’ve got no field hockey team, no terrarium for your reptile collection, no Broncos Marching Band, no Future Lawyers of America. We called ourselves the Bug Motels because we were a rock band, but we hadn’t gotten around to learning instruments yet. Junk food couldn’t be a project here. This wasn’t Camp Chunkagunk where you got a candy bar every two weeks when you turned in your laundry. We Bug Motels had pocket money and charge accounts, two restaurants, a snack bar and a gift shopwith a six-foot-long candy counter in the basement. We rolled in malted milk balls, canned potato sticks, cheese and peanut butter crackers, pretzel rods, you name it. For a while we had the use of the doctors’ tennis courts in the afternoons and huffed around the sunless courtyard in parkas and gloves, but then it got too cold even for us. We needed a doper to refine and complicate our appetites and godzilla gave us Bertie Stein, not only an experienced dope fiend but a mastermind. Bertie funneled us into the Manhattan Project, the H Bottle, the Big Blue Bomb.
You know that quaint sort of old bomb that falls, like it’s raining lipsticks, out of bulky white airplanes in
The World at War
? Under the main hospital next door were a huge pharmacy and the fabulously rumored morgue, but Rohring Rohring’s eight stories sat on a warehouse, an underground dump for big stuff, distillation urns and sterilizer boilers and hundred-pound drums of industrial cleanser, and royal blue size H cylinders of laughing gas that looked just like those bombs. It was one of them, fixed nicely next to its twin H of oxygen in Robinhood green on a cart like you’d use to bus a cafeteria, that souled our mission.
Bertie Stein was featherweight and restless and sifted about the corridors of Rohring Rohring all day long in roachlike silence, slipping through cracked doors if he found any, trying every lock and tuning his junkie’s x-ray eyes on blank walls and dead-end corridors. One day he saw a silver cart loaded with nitrous oxide roll off the third floor elevator and take its place in a row of rolling bins of soiled linens, waiting for some dutiful flunky to wheel them over the catwalk to the laundry chute in the main hospital. Bertie crawled on his hands and knees between laundry bins and from the moment he goosenecked up for a closer look at that cart with its copper tubes and gauges and mixers and regulators, the funny gray enema bag of a gasreservoir dangling down and the dear little red clown’s nose of a mask with two horny valves sticking out of it, he had to have one for his own. For our own. And pretty soon that was our mission.
He reported to the Bug Motels: “The nature of this gas,” drawling it out farcically,
gazzz
, “is a cartoon with the picture gone. You know, like, Tom the Cat falls through the roof of the opera house and bounces around the orchestra on his rubber stamp head. He gets spitted on a cello bow, sucked up a flute, digested by a bassoon, ha ha ha, tenderized by a marimba mallet, hee hee hee, and finally he gargles the tenor’s high C by swinging from his tonsil. Ho ho ho, except there’s no
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