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again. I looked again at the
smallest, the filthy child of two I had noticed earlier. His eyes were
round, and his skin was a smooth shade darker than the dusty gold of
the others. His hair was screwed up into tight rabbinical curls.
Whenever the other children bothered to notice him, they gave him a
blow. I sprinted across the street to another open-fronted shop and
bought Jack Daniels from a bowing skeleton. The children followed me
almost to the gate, where the soldier on duty scattered them with a
wave of his M-16.
    In the shed di Maestro unrolled the cellophane package and inspected
each tight white tube. "Ly Li loves your little educated ass," he said.
    Scoot had produced a bag of ice cubes from the enlisted man's club
and dropped some of them into plastic glasses. Then he cracked open the
first bottle and poured for himself. "Life on the front," he said. He
drank the entire contents of his glass in one swallow. "Outstanding."
He poured himself another glass.
    "Take this slow," di Maestro said to me. "You won't be used to this
stuff. In fact, you might wanna sit down."
    "What do you think we did at Berkeley?" I said, and several of my
colleagues called me a sorry-ass shit.
    "This is a little different," di Maestro said. "It ain't just grass."
    "Give him some and shut him the fuck up," said Attica.
    "What is it?" I asked.
    "You'll like it," di Maestro said. He placed a cigarette in my mouth
and lit it with his Zippo.
    I drew in a mouthful of harsh, perfumed smoke, and Scoot sang, "Hoo-ray and hallelujah, you had it comin'
to ya, Goody for her, goody goody for me, I hope you 're satisfied, you
rascal you."
    Holding the smoke as di Maestro inhaled and passed the long
cigarette to Ratman, I scooped ice cubes into a plastic glass. Di
Maestro winked at me, and Ratman took two deep drags before passing the
cigarette to Scoot. I poured whiskey over the ice and walked away from
the table.
    "Hoo-ray and hallelujah," Scoot rasped, holding the smoke in his lungs.
    My knees felt oddly numb, almost rubbery. Something in the center of
my body felt warm, probably the Jack Daniels. Picklock lit up the
second cigarette, and it came around to me by the time I had taken a
couple of sips of my drink.
    I sat down with my back against the wall.
    "Goody goody for it, goody goody for
shit, goody goody for war,
goody goody for whores…"
    "We oughta have music," Ratman said.
    "We have Scoot," said di Maestro.
    Then the world abruptly went away and I was alone in a black void. A
laughing void lay on either side of me, a world without time or space
or meaning.
    For a moment I was back in the shed, and Scoot was saying, "Damn
right."
    Then I was not in the shed with the body squad and the five units,
but in a familiar world full of noise and color. I saw the peeling
paint on the side of the Idle Hour Tavern. A neon beer sign glowed in
the window. The paint had once been white, but the decay of things was
as beautiful as their birth. Elm leaves heaped up in the gutter brown
and red, and through them cool water sluiced toward the drain.
Experience itself was sacred. Details were sacred. I was a new person
in a world just being made.
    I felt safe and whole—the child within me was also safe and whole.
He set down his rage and his misery and looked at the world with eyes
refreshed. For the second time that day I knew I wanted more of
something: a taste of it was not enough. I knew what I needed.
    This was the beginning of my drug addiction, which lasted, off and
on, for a little more than a decade. I told myself that I wanted more,
more of that bliss, but I think I really wanted to recapture this first
experience and have it back entire, for nothing in that
decade-and-a-bit ever surpassed it.
    During that decade, a Millhaven boy who has much more to do with
this story than I do began his odd divided life. He lost his mother at
the age of five; he had been taught to hate, love, and fear a punishing
deity and a sinful world. The boy's name was Fielding