The revelation had occurred on Maple Avenue, minutes after he’d withdrawn $2,825.00 from his brother’s passbook account at Cook County Savings Bank. The teller had counted the bills and then counted them again out loud, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty, and five, and tucked them into a nifty brown envelope. The rush of success was so titanic, he imagined an ejaculation blotting out the heavens. Knowledge so perfect could only have been God’s, and if he, Perry, possessed it, then what did this make him? In his earlier lunch-hour casings of the bank, he’d ascertained that the older, gray-haired teller, with whom he’d had dealings, was nowhere to be seen at 12:15. Behind the window, instead, was a frizzy-haired mademoiselle still sporting orthodontia, thus undoubtedly （beyond all question!） too new at the bank to know Clem. The scarlet-nailed hand that had taken his passbook was marvelously inexpert.
“That’s a lot of cash. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have a cashier’s check?”
“I’m buying a sailboat.”
“Wow. That’s exciting.”
“It’s a beauty. I’ve been saving for three years.”
“Do you have some ID?”
She couldn’t have asked a question more perfectly foreseen. Everything had been foreseen: withdrawing an innocently precise number of dollars; wearing a nerdy cardigan and the disguise of his new eyeglasses; not only replicating and laminating a University of Illinois student ID card but meticulously abrading and soiling it with an emery board and charcoal, labors performed within feet of his soundly sleeping little brother and underwritten by his powder, which was also a focuser of attention, an enhancer of manual precision. He’d invested rather a lot of little boosts in his project, but the investment would be dwarfed by the avalanche of dividends he perfectly foresaw. When the metal-mouthed teller returned the ID card, having scarcely glanced at it, the investment had already paid off handsomely. Counting time spent manufacturing the card and practicing Clem’s signature, minus incidental drug expenses, he’d made $236.25 an hour. Not bad. But still far less than he stood to make—even factoring in the additional hours of labor in Arizona and the return of Clem’s money—after his transactions had unfolded as foreseen.
There was no peyote, not one button, in Chicagoland.
Thousands of Chicagoland hippies were desperate to try it.
Only one person in the world had identified the demand and positioned himself to meet it.
He owed the development of this logic to an earlier realization: for three years, he’d been treating the wrong disorder. He’d believed his mind to be diseased, in want of chemical palliation, when in fact the problem was somatic. It was his body, its exhaustible muscles, its irritable nerves, not his mind, that needed support. As soon as his guy had introduced him to Dexedrine and he’d learned the proper function of a Quaalude, which was to let his body rest, he’d entered a phase unprecedented in its excellence and serenity. Each day, the world was like pinball played in slow motion. His timing with the flippers was precise to the millisecond; he could run up the score arbitrarily high. He also knew exactly when to stop, allow the ball to drain, and eat his ’ludes. Everything he did in early January had a rightness so complete that it controlled the world around him. Example: the very day he exhausted his Dexies, the very day, three thousand dollars appeared in his savings passbook, courtesy of his sister. Example: his bank did not require parental countersignatures. Example: his guy was not only at home and not only compos mentis, more or less, but willing to part with the entire remaining contents of his Planters Peanuts jar. The thought did cross Perry’s mind that he was overpaying, but the agreed-upon price was a minor fraction of three thousand dollars, and the guy fell upon his twenty-dollar bills with poignant greediness, suggestive of an individual who’d seriously hit the skids. As Perry fled down Felix Street, chewing pills, the world seemed even righter. His money had brought great happiness to both him and the guy. Their transaction, in theory zero-sum, had somehow doubled the money’s value.
For yet a while longer, all had been righter than right, but by the time Bear delivered his judgment of speed, Perry was ready to hear it. What had seemed in the moment of purchase an all but inexhaustible number of pills had dwindled unexpectedly fast, and although their function was somatic he was experiencing less than salubrious mental side effects. Jay in particular was intolerably impatient-making, their sharing of a room a misery. Likewise his mother’s tender touchings. Likewise any Crossroads activity requiring physical contact. The world’s slowness had become more infuriating than capacitating, and meanwhile his body kept saying, “More, please.” His body had created a problem. He hated it for its inroads on his dwindling supplies, hated its drag on the flight of his mind. In a state of towering crankiness, when he ran out of pills, he returned to the guy’s little house on Felix Street, and this time no dog was there to howl at him. The front stoop was littered with rain-eaten advertising folios. Pasted to the door was a bright-yellow sheriff’s notice that he didn’t dare step close enough to read.