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come out and treat you.”
    “You got a warrant?” George tried to sound defiant.
    “Oh, you think you have cojones.” The fat man’s breath stank of bourbon and cheap cigars. “Rabbit cojones. I have terrified you unto death, boy, and you know it and I know it, yet you find it in your heart to speak of warrants. Next you’ll want to see the American Civil Liberties Union.” He pulled aside the jacket of an irridescent gray summer suit that might have been new when
Heartbreak Hotel
was the top of the hit parade. A silver five-pointed star decorated his pink shirt pocket and a .45 automatic stuck in his pants-top dented the fat of his belly. “That is all the law I need when dealing with your type in Mad Dog. Walk careful with me, son, or youwon’t have nothing to grab onto next time one of us pigs, as you choose to call us in your little articles, busts in on you. Which is not likely to happen in the next forty years, while you rot and grow old in our state prison.” He seemed immensely pleased with his own oratorical style, like one of Faulkner’s characters. George thought:
    It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them;
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.
    He said, “You can’t hit me with forty years for possession. And grass is legal in most other states. This law is archaic and absurd.”
    “Shit and onions, boy, you got too much of the killer weed there to call it mere possession. I call it possession with intent to sell. And the laws of this state are stern, and they are just and they are our laws. We know what that weed can do. We remember the Alamo and Santa Anna’s troops losing all fear because they were high on Rosa Maria, as they called it in those days. Get on your feet. And don’t ask to talk to a lawyer, neither.”
    “Can I ask who you are?”
    “I am Sheriff Jim Cartwright, nemesis of all evil in Mad Dog and Mad Dog County.”
    “And I’m Tiny Tim,” said George, immediately saying to himself, Shut the fuck up, you’re too goddamn high. And he went right on and said, “Maybe your side would have won if Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie got stoned, too. And, by the way, Sheriff, how did you know you could catch me with pot? Usually an underground journalist would make it a point to be clean when he comes into this godforsaken part of the country. It wasn’t telepathy that told you I had pot on me.”
    Sheriff Cartwright slapped his thigh. “Oh, but it was. It
was
telepathy. Now just what made you think it wasn’t telepathy brung me here?” He laughed, seized George’s arm in a grip of iron, and pushed him toward the hotel-room door. George felt a bottomless terror as if the pit of hell were opening beneath his feet and Sheriff Jim Cartwright were about to pitchfork him into the bubbling sulfur. And I must admit that was more or less the case;there are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven’t noticed already.
    (“Keep on hanging out with those wild boys from Passaic and you’ll end up in jail,” George’s mother said. “You mark my words, George.” And, another time, at Columbia, after a very late meeting, Mark Rudd said so berly, “A lot of us are going to spend some time in the Man’s jails before this shit-storm is over;” and George, together with the others, nodded glumly but bravely
. The marijuana he had been smoking was raised in Cuernavaca by a farmer named Arturo Jesus Maria Ybarra y Mendez, who had sold it in bulk to a young
Yanqui
named Jim Riley, the son of a Dayton, Ohio, police officer, who in turn smuggled it through Mad Dog after paying a suitable bribe to Sheriff Jim Cartwright. After that it was resold to a Times Square dealer called Rosetta the Stoned and a Miss Walsh from
Confrontation’s
research department bought ten ounces from