Jerry nodded. ‘It’s cold as a bastard out here. If we want to get loaded, let’s go someplace where it’s warm.’
They gave me a ride down to the Volvo, then followed me into Breezewood to a giant truckstop.
‘This is terrible shit,’ Lester muttered, handing the joint to Jerry. ‘There’s nothin‘ worth a damn for sale these days. It’s got so the only thing you can get off on is smack.’
Jerry nodded. The waitress appeared with more coffee. ‘You boys are sure laughin’ a lot,’ she said. ‘What’s so funny at this hour of the morning?’
Lester fixed her with a front-toothless smile and two glittering eyes that might have seemed dangerous if he hadn’t been in such a mellow mood. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I used to be a male whore, and I’m laughin’ because I’m so happy that I finally found Jesus.’
The waitress smiled nervously as she filled our cups and then hurried back to her perch behind the counter. We drank off the coffee and traded a few more stories about the horrors of the latterday drug market. Then Jerry said they would have to get moving. ‘We’re heading for Baltimore,’ he said. ‘What about you?’
‘Washington,’ I said.
‘What for?’ Lester asked. ‘Why the fuck would anybody want to go there?’
I shrugged. We were standing in the parking lot while my Doberman pissed on the wheel of a big Hard Brothers poultry truck. ‘Well … it’s a weird sort of trip,’ I said finally. ‘What happened is that I finally got a job, after twelve years.’
‘Jesus!’ said Lester. ‘That’s heavy. Twelve years on the dole! Man, you must of been really strung out!’
I smiled. ‘Yeah … yeah, I guess you could say that.’
‘What kind of a job?’ Jerry asked.
Now the Doberman had the driver of the Hard Brothers truck backed up against his cab, screeching hysterically at the dog and kicking out with his metal-toed Army boots. We watched with vague amusement as the Doberman – puzzled by this crazy outburst – backed off and growled a warning.
‘O God Jesus,’ screamed the trucker. ‘Somebody help me!’ It was clear that he felt he was about to be chewed up and killed, for no reason at all, by some vicious animal that had come out of the darkness to pin him against his own truck.
‘OK, Benjy!’ I shouted. ‘Don’t fool with that man – he’s nervous.’ The trucker shook his fist at me and yelled something about getting my license number.
‘Get out of here, you asshole!’ Lester screamed. ‘It’s pigs like you that give Dobermans a bad name.’
Jerry laughed as the trucker drove off. ‘You won’t last long on the job with a dog like that,’ he said. ‘Seriously – what kind of work do you do?’
‘It’s a political gig,’ I said. ‘I’m going to Washington to cover the ’72 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ Jerry muttered. ‘That’s weird! The Stone is into politics?’
I stared down at the asphalt, not sure of what to say. Was ‘The Stone’ into politics? Or was it just me? I had never really wondered about it … but suddenly on the outskirts of Washington, in the cold grey dawn of this truckstop near Breezewood just north of the Maryland line, it suddenly occurred to me that I couldn’t really say what I was doing there – except heading for D.C. with an orange pig-shaped trailer and a Doberman Pinscher with bad bowels after too many days on the road.
‘It sounds like a stinking goddamn way to get back into work,’ said Lester. ‘Why don’t you hang up that bullshit and we’ll put something together with that car shuttle Jerry told you about?’
I shook my head. ‘No, I want to at least try this trip,’ I said.
Lester stared at me for a moment, then shrugged. ‘God damn!’ he said. ‘What a bummer. Why would anybody want to get hung up in a pile of shit like Politics?’
‘Well …’ I said, wondering if there was any sane answer to a question like that: ‘It’s mainly a personal trip, a very hard thing to explain.’
Jerry smiled. ‘You talk like you’ve tried it,’ he said. ‘Like maybe you got off on it.’
‘Not as far as I meant to,’ I said, ‘but definitely high.’
Lester was watching me now with new interest. ‘I always thought that about politicians,’ he said. ‘Just a gang of goddamn power junkies, gone off on their own strange trips.’
‘Come on now,’ said Jerry. ‘Some of those guys are OK.’
‘Who?’ Lester asked.
‘That’s why I’m going to Washington,’ I said. ‘To check out the people and find out if they’re all swine.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Lester. ‘They are. You might as well go looking for cherries in a Baltimore whorehouse.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you when I make it over to Baltimore.’ I stuck out my hand and Jerry took it in a quick conventional handshake – but Lester had his thumb up, so I had to adjust for the Revolutionary Drug Brothers grip, or whatever that goddamn thing is supposed to mean. When you move across the country these days you have to learn about nineteen different handshakes between Berkeley and Boston.
‘He’s right,’ said Jerry. ‘Those bastards wouldn’t even be there if they weren’t rotten.’ He shook his head without looking at us, staring balefully across the parking lot. The grey light of dawn was getting brighter now; Thursday night was dying and the highway at the other end of the parking lot was humming with cars full of people going to work on Friday morning.
Welcome to Washington, D.C. That’s what the sign says. It’s about twenty feet wide & ten feet tall – a huge stone plaque lit up by spotlights at the head of Sixteenth Street, just in from the Maryland line. The street is five lanes wide, with fat green trees on both sides and about 1,300 out-of-phase stoplights between here and the White House.
It is not considered fashionable to live in ‘The District’ itself unless you can find a place in Georgetown, an aged brick town-house with barred windows, for $700 or so a month. Georgetown is Washington’s lame answer to Greenwich Village. But not really. It’s more like the Old Town section of Chicago, where the leading citizens are half-bright Playboy editors, smoking tailor-made joints. The same people, in Georgetown, are trendy young lawyers, journalists and bureaucrats who frequent a handful of pine-paneled bars and ‘singles only’ discotheques where drinks cost $1.75 and there’s No Cover Charge for girls wearing hotpants.
I live on the ‘black side’ of Rock Creek park, in what my journalistic friends call ‘a marginal neighborhood.’ Almost everybody else I know or have any professional contact with lives either in the green Virginia suburbs or over on the ‘white side’ of the park, towards Chevy Chase and Bethesda, in Maryland.
The Underculture is scattered into various far-flung bastions, and the only thing even approximating a crossroads is the area around Dupont Circle, downtown. The only people I know who live down there are Nicholas Von Hoffman and Jim Flug, Teddy Kennedy’s hyper-active Legislative Assistant. But Von Hoffman seems to have had a belly-full of Washington and now talks about moving out to the Coast, to San Francisco … and Flug, like everybody else even vaguely connected with Kennedy, is gearing down for a very heavy year: like maybe twenty hours a day on the telephone, and the other four on planes.
With December winding down, there is a fast-swelling undercurrent of political angst in the air around Washington, a sense of almost boiling desperation about getting Nixon and his cronies out of power before they can finish the seizure that began three years ago.
Jim