The wolf was still scrounging around the square with his friends looking for some raw meat, though, and his trustful scent brought him to the frenetic source of his curiosity. PCP was the freshman craze in certain Harvard Yard circles, and lots of it was being eaten. This was the stuff that high school health classes warn you about nowadays, but only three years ago it was an unknown frontier. Animal tranquilizer. The stuff they feed to sick and maimed horses before they are put out of their misery.
Little pink or purple pills, we ate them after mid-year exams with all the snow collecting dirt around the Square, between the jaws of pressure and frightening independence, pent-up wildness careening off the inner walls of confused, lateadolescent minds.
We played ping-pong after the chemical lunch. We were just getting off. The ground slipped lower and lower, until I was standing on ten-foot legs. The ball darted about leaving traces of its circular form, and when I went to hit the circular form, the ball slipped by me. I told my arms--commanded them--to hit the fucking ball, but they just laid numb by my side, dead. My legs went limp, and I quit the ping-pong game.
When the old wolves know they are about to die, they sneak back into the woods and find their territory, the land that is especially theirs. To find my bed, I coped with an elevator wall, and the carpeted interior of my dormitory which made loud noises when I walked upon it. The walls of my room swirled around and around, dilating and breathing, their bright colors and strange poster faces lulling my consciousness--the face of Jim Morrison peered in on me from an album cover, still and refracted, inviting me to his morbid dance with a grim smile and doll's eyes.
I wrote my will. Left everything to my little brother, and told him not to be so stupid. Mother was right. These drugs were kicking in my brains, and they had won. All those queer movies, they must have been right. I was dying. I looked out the window and saw that it was night. When I looked again, it was day. I called the phone company, and they said it was day. Then I looked a little closer and noticed a construction crew working out on the street. With mean jackhammers and hard, old faces, they penetrated concrete and dredged up sludge. Scrubby, spotless students passed them by with remarkable direction and oblivious, vacant expressions. They continued like a stream of mosaic colors, and the noise became louder; orange cement mixers whirling and turning and the tools spitting out their dense, metallic noises; they got louder and louder, so loud that I blocked my ears and worried that my neighbor might come to complain about the stereo again. But it was real.
ENTER TO GROW in wisdom. Never take your steps for granted, young man. Look too far ahead of you and you'll walk off a cliff and break your ass. Hard. So you take it a step at a time, and don't look back until you finished the trail and it's time to digest some food. Look over your shoulder too early and you'll see a great gray blur and you'll git too dizzy too quick and fall 300 feet to the icy ground.
"When he starts to see beyond the pages of his books, he's likely to walk into walls and lose his directional capacities for a while," I overheard Dr. God mumble. "But we've discovered