If you think of your mind as an animal act (as good a metaphor as any, since b.u.g.g.e.r-all is known about how psychoactive drugs work in the brain), Ecstasy gets right in the cage and bangs the anxiety bear on the head with a lead pipe. It has the big cats up on their footstools making like stuffed carnival prizes. And it brings on the adorable fox terriers in party hats who walk around on their hind legs, ride on ponies, and jump through hoops for about four hours.

Then it gradually slips away, and so did my party guests.

I slept fretfully, getting up every single hour to go to the bathroom. The next day the drug was still in my system. A shower felt wonderful. I felt okay. I was a little disoriented, like I was in the next room and couldn't quite hear me.

It's not an aphrodisiac, at least not for men. But when you're crowding forty, what is? I called the young woman and asked, for strictly scientific reasons (sort of), "Did you want to make love?"

"I wouldn't have minded," she said.

On the second day all effects were gone, but I was tired and depressed. X-lag is pretty substantial for such a toy flip-out. A long run for a short slide. "Tune in. Turn on. Go to the office late on Monday."

Man, I come from the days when drugs were drugs. We had dope where one toke would turn your hair long and your folks into raving maniacs at the dinner table. Some of that stuff, why, a single hit could transform a Catholic schoolgirl into Gomorrah on all fours, snuff your ego like a light, rotate the tires on the Great Wheel of Being, and make your eyes lay eggs. See G.o.d? s.h.i.t, you could get Him down in the hot tub and wash His mouth out with herbal soap. And that was if you split the blotter paper four ways. As for insights, try yage and psilocybin mushrooms mixed with mescaline and Anchor Steam beer. Gautama Buddha his own bad self comes over to your house and writes out the Eightfold Path in lipstick on your bathroom mirror. We had drugs that would give you immortal life for up to thirty-six hours. And what about the time the nine-a.s.sed peyote demon peeled the top of my head like an orange and vomited the Encyclopaedia Britannica into my empty skull? That's what we meant when we said high in the old days.

This Ecstasy is a lap-dog drug. "St. Joseph's Baby Acid," said the Texan journalist. There's just enough psychic twinge to make you think you've done something besides a double scotch on the rocks. And all that stuff about openness and mutual trust and deepening of affections is pretty silly. That's why it would be wrong for me to encourage you readers to try it. You're like a family to me. There's a link, a reciprocal union of loyalty and interdependence between writers and readers. I couldn't do anything to injure that basic human connection. I guess I've never had the nerve to say it before, but I love you. All of you. It's a feeling I need to communicate personally. I'm going to get in my car and drive around the country and give each of you a great big hug-just as soon as I call my Manhattan businessman friend and see if he's got any more of this dumb Ecstasy s.h.i.t.

A Long,

Thoughtful Look

Back at the Last

Fifteen Minutes

This was an important fifteen minutes for America. It was a fifteen minutes of consolidation, of reflection, and of self-realization. I, myself, realized how hungover I was and that I had to go to the bathroom. Some have called it the "Me" fifteen minutes. "Give me fifteen minutes," I called, when it was pointed out I should be at the typewriter making a living. But it's an oversimplification to view this quarter of an hour solely as a period of self-involvement. I cannot speak for the entire nation, but I was involved with the electric razor, which was all gummed up from someone, not me, shaving legs with it. And I was involved for quite a while with the childproof top on the aspirin bottle, even though I have no children of my own. In some ways this epitomizes the sort of caring with which America was imbued during this nine hundred seconds of history. Many childless Americans have allowed that if the government wishes to require these push-squeeze-turn-dangle-yank sort of devices on the top of aspirin bottles for the sake of the well-being of the children of others, then it's all right with them. They don't care. But I care a great deal and will continue to care as long as those things are also hungover-adult-proof and I have to break the top of the bottle on the edge of the sink to get any aspirin out. I care so much, in fact, that I'd like to do the same thing to the other end of the dirt-nibbler who invented them. And throughout all these minutes many Americans, myself included, were deeply involved with others. With chirpy girlfriends, for instance, who'd already been awake for an hour and were spilling coffeecake crumbs in the bed, and by mysterious emissaries from the apartment building's maintenance staff, nattering in Spanish about shutting off the water. Beyond this it was also the fifteen minutes of the American woman. It was time for the American woman to be heard. "I don't have my diaphragm in." I heard that. "Stop it. You'll muss my hair." I heard that twice.

Yet it has not been a fifteen minutes without problems and difficulties. In certain areas it was a quarter hour of stagnation. Blacks have made very little economic progress since 8:45 this morning. Many of them don't have jobs, and the rest are going to be late to work if they don't hurry up. Also, since various authorities contend that we are losing military might and international prestige by the minute, we have doubtless lost fifteen minutes' worth of military might and international prestige. And what of cultural development? What about progress in literature and the arts? What do we have to show for this last fifteen minutes? Nothing, in my opinion, except one blaringly loud recording of the new Police alb.u.m, which a certain young lady put on the record player about thirty seconds ago and which I told her I was going to break across her coccyx if she didn't shut it off because my head feels like a Palestinian terrorist attack. It's also been a period of unusual weather. Either that or the people in 19E are throwing things off the terrace again. Perhaps it's too soon to have an overview, a proper perspective, on this extraordinary time. Perhaps we should wait until it's 9:30 and we've had another cup of coffee. Except that's when the cleaning lady comes and tells me to get out of here because I'm getting crumpled-up typing paper all over the desk. Maybe I'll go to a movie. Is there anything more depressing than going to the movies alone in the daytime? I wonder why that is. It's even more depressing than drinking in the morning. At least drinking in the morning has a little thrill of misbehavior about it, and I think I'll have a small picker-upper right now. It's something new I invented. I call it a Chicken Shot. It's like a Bull Shot, but you make it with vodka and Campbell's chicken-noodle soup. Just kidding. Me for a b.l.o.o.d.y Mary. It's almost 9:00 now and the sun's over the yardarm. Actually the sun is someplace over Queens, kind of over La Guardia Airport, it looks like from here. In fact, right over the short-term parking lot where, it has just occurred to me, I've had the car sitting for two weeks at about $16.50 a day. s.h.i.t. Anyway, you get my drift. There's something sweet/sad about the end of an era. Little angelcakes has left for work. Think I'll just freshen this up. You look back and you think of all the things you could have done, the things you should have said and didn't, like "Where the h.e.l.l's breakfast, huh?" or "Those guinea jeans make your thighs look like the Alaska pipeline." But what's the use of regretting the past? Let's look forward to what the next fifteen minutes will bring. Probably the mail. I hope not. My tab at Elaine's has cracked five K. Oh, G.o.d, it's the Spanish maintenance guy again. What do you mean, the water's off until next Wednesday? f.u.c.k. But it's important to get the big picture. Thirty minutes from now all this will seem like half an hour ago.

World Politics

Safety n.a.z.is

President Reagan has grappled with myriad threats to the American way and tossed no few of them. The pork and dove barrel in Congress has been silenced. Libya has had an emetic. The air controllers have been sent to bed without their or anyone in their family's supper. And something has even been done about that tired observation "The poor are always with us"-what with the end of busing and affirmative action the poor will be, I presume, mostly with each other.

But there is one menace to western civilization, one a.s.sault on the free world, one threat to everything we value which the President has yet to confront. I speak of the childproof bottle top. Now a childproof bottle top is a fine thing for a child who has no job or other weighty responsibilities in life and can spend all day mastering the technique of opening bleach and cleaning-fluid containers (a leisure pursuit much resorted to by children-as anyone can attest who has watched a three-year-old tackle the cap on a pint of bug poison with the agility of a pre-Seiko Swiss watchmaker). But an aspirin bottle equipped with such a device is a Gordian knot to an adult who drinks. Consequently our nation is weakened.

Life is filled with pain and sorrow, which facts cannot fail to touch the heart of any perceptive American. Therefore no U.S. citizen with an IQ over 110 is sober after 6:00 in the evening. Yet we have allowed our country's most effective headache cures to be sealed like the tomb of Amenhotep IV. How can our elite confront Soviet hegemony, lower interest rates without fueling inflation, and draft a viable Law of the Sea treaty when their skulls are throbbing to the tune of the sound track for Zulu Dawn? Allen Ginsberg said he saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. I have seen the best minds of my generation go at a bottle of Anacin with a ball-peen hammer.

There's an easy solution to this. Place all dangerous household substances out of reach in a crib or playpen and put the children under the sink. But childproof bottle tops are, in fact, only one aspect of a much larger problem. I was depressed the other week and did not know why. My finances were in no more than normal disarray. The girlfriend and I weren't getting along any worse than usual. I was not under indictment for any felony I could think of. Still, I was blue. Days pa.s.sed before I realized what was the matter: My car was nagging me. I don't like seat belts. They make me feel like a nineteenth-century sea captain. If the car is going to have a wreck, that's its business. I will not be compelled to stay aboard. Yet each time I demur to fastening this contrivance, the car lets out a horrid electronic scold. And this sound is as nothing compared to the shriek when I open a door with the key left in the ignition. And other rude noises and annoying blinkers are rigged to let me know if I do anything else potentially detrimental to my well-being. Some newer-model automobiles have actual recorded voices which speak about one's f.e.c.kless habits in the tone used by wives during NFL play-offs. I'm told this is the wave of the future. I predict mayhem. All the pent-up hatreds of those households where husbands driven mad by continuous domestic friction murder spouse and offspring and hold police at bay for hours will now be directed at the family car. Once too often the Malibu Cla.s.sic will inform a drunken gun nut that his trunk lid is ajar, and pow! This is a serious matter. A new family can be had free through various charitable organizations, but a car costs $10,000.

On the subject of automobiles, something worse has happened to them than their newfound disposition to whine and b.i.t.c.h. They have become boring and abstruse-rounded about with lumpy b.u.mpers and Targa bars and looking under the hood like the back of an Atari game. For those readers too young to remember, a car used to be a simple piece of machinery, something like a very fast rider mower but better because you couldn't mow the lawn with it. You started this up, drove off at pretty much any speed you desired, and then exercised a variety of const.i.tutionally guaranteed liberties, usually by having s.e.x and accidents. No more-nowadays if a car cannot survive a drop from the Gateway Arch and emits any vapors more noxious than Evening in Paris, the federal government won't let you own it, and what they will let you own you can't really drive, because fifty-five miles an hour is the speed at which a spirited person parallel-parks, not motors to Chicago.

Medicines which come practically locked in a Brink's truck, electronically admonishing automobiles, speed limits prudent to the point of cowardice-there is a pattern to these annoyances. I purchased a wood-splitting maul not long ago. Pasted on the head was a lurid sticker instructing me to cover my eyes when doing anything with it and attached to the handle was a pair of nasty plastic goggles, painfully uncomfortable to wear and producing that view of the world called "fish-eyed" (though if fish really did have eyes like that we would be able to go after them with ball bats instead of expensive fly rods). A box of shotgun sh.e.l.ls now devotes three full flaps to caveats and counsels advising against almost every conceivable kind of shooting activity and stopping just short of warning you not to own a gun at all. And the daily newspaper, once replete with tales of exciting fire and police department actions, political scandals, and international donnybrooks, is now filled with items about untidiness at toxic chemical dumps, hazardous-toaster product recalls, and the cancer-causing properties of everything good on earth.

Something is happening to America, not something dangerous but something all too safe. I see it in my lifelong friends. I am a child of the "baby boom," a generation not known for its sane or cautious approach to things. Yet suddenly my peers are giving up drinking, giving up smoking, cutting down on coffee, sugar, and salt. They will not eat red meat and go now to restaurants whose menus have caused me to stand on a chair yelling, "Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, dinner is served!" This from the generation of LSD, Weather Underground, and Altamont Rock Festival! And all in the name of safety! Our nation has withstood many divisions-North and South, black and white, labor and management-but I do not know if the country can survive division into smoking and nonsmoking sections.

As once anything was excusable in the name of patriotism, now anything is excusable in the name of safety. We will kiss some low place on every dishtowel-head in the Levant rather than have a single breeder reactor on our sh.o.r.es. We will make every lube artist in America learn j.a.panese rather than produce an enjoyable automobile. And we will all be eating Communist bananas rather than risk a Kent State over Nicaragua. (Unless, of course, bananas are found to cause cancer too.) This is treason. America was founded on danger. How many lifeboat drills were held on the Mayflower? Where were the smoke detectors in the Lincoln family cabin? Who checked to see whether Indian war paint was made with Red Dye No. 2?,It was the thrilling, vast, wonderful danger of America which drew people here from all over the world-s.p.a.cious skies filled with blizzards and tornadoes, purpled mountain majesties to fall off, and fruited plains full of snarling animals and armed aborigines. America is a dangerous country. Safety has no place here.

In fact, safety has no place anywhere. Everything that's fun in life is dangerous. Horse races, for instance, are very dangerous. But attempt to design a safe horse and the result is a cow (an appalling animal to watch at the trotters). And everything that isn't fun is dangerous too. It is impossible to be alive and safe. It's very safe to be an inanimate object, but the carbon molecules who were our ancestors chose otherwise, and having once set upon a course of devouring things, we must submit to having other things occasionally attempt to devour us. This is painful, but pain is an important part of existence. No amount of hazard warnings on the back of our hand would keep us from thrusting it into a lion's mouth if that didn't hurt. Lions are in admitted short supply, but the same holds true for whirling Cuisinart blades and oil-burning s.p.a.ce heaters. Pain is the body's way of showing us we're bone-heads. A child growing up in an excessively safe environment may never learn that he is one-not until he gets married and has a wife to tell him so. Nor can death be avoided. Death is even more important that pain. Death was invented so we could have evolution. The process of Darwinian selection does not work on things that don't die. If it weren't for death we would all still be amoebas and would have to eat by surrounding things with our b.u.t.ts. Also, a lack of death would result in an extraordinary number of old people and the Social Security system is already overextended.

Therefore it is the duty of every patriotic, moral, and humanistic person among us to smoke, drink, drive like h.e.l.l, shoot guns, own Corvairs, take saccharin, leave unmarked medicine bottles open all over the house, get in fistfights, start barbecue fires with gasoline, put dry-cleaner bags over our heads, and run around barefoot without getting a teta.n.u.s shot.

But I don't know how long we will be able to continue like this. The forces of safety are afoot in the land. I, for one, believe it is a conspiracy-a conspiracy of Safety n.a.z.is shouting "Sieg Health" and seeking to trammel freedom, liberty, and large noisy parties. The Safety n.a.z.is advocate gun control, vigorous exercise, and health foods. The result can only be a disarmed, exhausted, and half-starved population ready to acquiesce to dictatorship of some kind. I do not know what the ultimate aims of the Safety n.a.z.is are, but the prevalence of flameproof infant sleepwear argues that a totalitarian force is looking to someday use my children as fireplace tongs. Other than that, however, it will probably be a very safe dictatorship without the dive-bombers, tanks, and huge artillery pieces which are the only fun things about totalitarianism.

President Reagan has shown some promise of standing up to the Safety n.a.z.is. James Watt was as dangerous a Secretary of the Interior as we've had in a long time. And a few of the safetyist regulatory excesses of the Carter years have been revoked-the requirement that all full-sized sedans carry a blimp under the dashboard, for instance. But as yet there is little indication that the President perceives the true lack of danger our country faces. Maybe this is because he got shot not long ago. That's fine for him. His life is plenty dangerous. But what about the rest of us, the common people crying out for hazard and risk? I hope President Reagan keeps us in mind as he trims the federal budget. The MX missile system looks like a perilous thing, but if that proves too expensive, give us a small increase in Amtrak funding and perhaps we could all die in a horrible train wreck.

Ship of Fools

I never did get it, what this trip was all about. I stood at the rail of the cruise ship Alexander Pushkin staring out at the vast rolling sh.o.r.e of the Volga. Here or there was a patch of grain, not high enough even in late July to conceal the line of furrows plowed straight downhill in the most erosion-producing way possible. And here or there was a skinny cow in an untidy hectare of pasture. But most of the land looked empty, unsown, ungrazed, uncultivated. And all around me were minds just as fallow.

I was on something called the Volga Peace Cruise, a sixteen-day trip to the USSR featuring a nine-day boat ride from Rostov north up the Don, through the Don-Volga ca.n.a.l, and on up the Volga River to Kazan. The 160 pa.s.sengers were all Americans. Most were antinuke activists and peace-group organizers with sixties leftover looks. Others were products of the Old Left. The peaceniks talked about peace, mostly in terms of atomic holocaust. The leftists talked about peace, mostly in terms of Soviet-American relations. The entire program of the "peace cruise" consisted in the bunch of us talking about peace. And the Soviet government had provided five Russian "peace experts" to talk about peace too.

I asked some of my fellow pa.s.sengers what the point was.

"Atomic holocaust is the most important issue facing mankind," said the peaceniks.

"Atomic holocaust and Soviet-American relations," said the leftists.

What about dissident Russian peace activists? Was anyone interested in talking to them?

"There is no need for dissident peace organizations in the Soviet Union," said the leftists. "The Soviet Union already has the largest peace organizations in the world. In America dissident peace organizations are important because American foreign policy is prowar. But the Soviet Union is propeace because twenty million Soviets died in World War II."

"Well, if we see any . . ." said the peaceniks.

Did anyone expect the Soviet "experts" to say anything everyone hadn't heard Soviet experts say already?

"Soviet-American relations are very important," said the leftists.

Were we going to convince those experts that their government ought to pull its troops out of Afghanistan?

"Huh?" said everyone.

Or maybe the leftists would convince the peace activists to take a more political view of things?

"What leftists?" said the leftists.

FRIDAY, JULY 16, 1982.

I was attracted to the Volga Peace Cruise by a half-page advertis.e.m.e.nt in the February 27, 1982, issue of The Nation magazine. It read, in part, "Find out for yourself what's going on in the Soviet Union capital and heartland as you join The Nation this summer on an exciting, affordable Soviet excursion."

I have a sneaking love of the old-time left and that compendium of their snits and quarrels, The Nation. Mind you, I'm a registered Republican and consider socialism a violation of the American principle that you shouldn't stick your nose in other people's business except to make a buck. Still, Wobblies, Spanish Civil War veterans, the Hollywood Ten touch the heart somehow.

But, to tell the truth, I'd never met any Old Leftists. I expected them to be admirable and nasty, like Lillian h.e.l.lman, or brilliant, mysterious, denying everything, like Alger Hiss, or-best of all-hard-bitten and cynical but still willing to battle oppression, like Rick in Casablanca. I did not expect them to be the pack of thirty fussing geriatrics I met at Kennedy Airport, misplacing their hand luggage, losing their way to the ladies' room, barking at the airline personnel, and asking two hundred times which gate we'd have to be at in three and a half hours.

They were leftists all right. In between palsies of fretting, they'd tell you how wonderful the Soviet Union was: Pensions were huge, housing was cheap, and they practically paid you to get medical care. Believe me, you haven't been bored until you've been b.u.t.tonholed by a seventy-year-old woman who holds forth all afternoon on the perfidity of American foreign policy and shows you pictures of her grandchildren. These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.

SAt.u.r.dAY, JULY 17.

The ad had promised excitement, and surely entering the Soviet Union would be exciting. The Russians are famous for making border crossing an exciting event. But we just stood in line for four hours. "You can understand the delay," said a lady who had complained all night about everything on the flight to Moscow. "So many reactionary forces are trying to destroy the Soviet Union." If reactionary forces are vulnerable to understaffing and inept baggage handling, they don't stand a chance at the Moscow airport.

There was only one faint thrill when we handed in our pa.s.sports to the officer in the little gla.s.s pa.s.sport-control booth. He was maybe seventeen with a tunic too large around the neck and a hat too big by half. He made an awful face and shouted, "Num? Fuss num? Plas oaf burf? Dat oaf burf?"

One of my tour group members had been born in Kiev. She said her "plas oaf burf" was Russia.

"Dat oaf burf?"

"1915," she said.

"When leaf?" hollered the pa.s.sport officer.

"1920."

"Reason leaf?" he yelled.

I swear she sounded embarra.s.sed. "I don't know. My parents did it."

Then we got on a smoky, gear-stripped bus and rode past blocks of huge, clumsy apartment buildings and blocks of huge, clumsy apartment buildings and blocks of huge, clumsy apartment buildings; through the smoggy Moscow twilight, through half-deserted streets. No neon lights, no billboards, no commotion, not much traffic, everything dusty-looking and slightly askew, and everything the same for an hour and a half.

"Some people," said a leftist lady with orange hair and earrings the size of soup tureens, "say the Soviet Union's depressing. I don't know how they can say that."

We pulled up in front of an immense gla.s.s-curtain-walled modern hotel, a perfect Grand Hyatt knockoff, and I headed for the bar. It was pretty much like any bar in a Grand Hyatt. There was a big drunk man there, red-faced and bloated. He seemed to speak English. At least he was yelling at the bartender in it. "A gla.s.s of schnapps," he said. He got vodka.

"How long you been here?" I said.

"Hahahahahahaha," he said, "I'm from Frankfurt!"

"Scotch," I said to the bartender. "Where've you been?" I asked the drunk. The bartender gave me vodka.

"f.u.c.king Afghanistan!" said the drunk. Afghanistan? Here was some excitement.

"Afghanistan?" I said, but he fell off his stool.

SUNDAY, JULY 18.

My tour group of leftists met with another three or four groups in the Moscow hotel. The others were mostly peaceniks. I don't know how my group got involved in the peace cruise or how I got put in with them. They certainly weren't from The Nation. "The Nation prints too much anti-Soviet propaganda," said a potbellied man smoking a pipe with a stupid bend in the stem.