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“It’s Sunday afternoon. I’m going to bring some of that oily dark hash and get really loaded. They won’t know the difference; there’ll be thousands of heads there.” She glanced at him, critically. “But you’ve got to wear something neat, not those funky clothes you sometimes put on. I mean—” Her voice softened. “I want you to look foxy because you are foxy.”
“Okay,” he said, charmed.
“I’m taking us to my place,” Do
“Oh wow,” he said, with sincerity.
“What I really genuinely want to do tonight,” Do
He examined his watch. “Then we’ve missed—”
“No, we could still see most of it.” She shot him a warm smile as she stopped the car and shut off the engine. “It’s all the Planet of the Apes pictures, all eleven of them; they run from 7:30 P.M. all the way through to 8 A.M. tomorrow morning. I’ll go to work directly from the drive-in, so I’ll have to change now. We’ll sit there at the movie loaded and drinking Southern Comfort all night. Wow, can you dig it?” She peered at him hopefully.
“All right,” he echoed.
“Yeah yeah yeah.” Do
“It is not good policy to burn you, Do
“Don’t step on the shag carpet,” Do
“Where’ll I step, then?”
“Stand still, or on the newspapers.”
“Do
“Now don’t give me a lot of heavy shit about having to walk on the newspapers. Do you know how much it cost me to get my carpet shampooed?” She stood unbuttoning her jacket.
“Thrift,” he said, taking off his own coat. “French peasant thrift. Do you ever throw anything away? Do you keep pieces of string too short for any—”
“Someday,” Do
“How much of what you’ve got put away did you buy,” he asked, “and how much did you steal?”
“Buy?” She studied his face uncertainly. “What do you mean by buy?”
“Like when you buy dope,” he said. “A dope deal. Like now.” He got out his wallet. “I give you money, right?”
Do
“And then you hand me a bunch of dope for it,” he said, holding out the bills. “What I mean by buy is an extension into the greater world of human business transactions of what we have present now, with us, as dope deals.”
“I think I see,” she said, her large dark eyes placid but alert. She was willing to learn.
“How many—like when you ripped off that Coca-Cola truck you were tailgating that day—how many bottles of Coke did you rip off? How many crates?”
“A month’s worth,” Do
He glared at her reprovingly.
“It’s a form of barter,” she said.
“What do—” He started to laugh. “What do you give back?”
“I give of myself.”
Now he laughed out loud. “To who? To the driver of the truck, who probably had to make good—”
“The Coca-Cola Company is a capitalist monopoly. No one else can make Coke but them, like the phone company does when you want to phone someone. They’re all capitalist monopolies. Do you know”—her dark eyes flashed—”that the formula for Coca-Cola is a carefully guarded secret handed down through the ages, known only to a few persons all in the same family, and when the last of them dies that’s memorized the formula, there will be no more Coke? So there’s a backup written formula in a safe somewhere,” she added meditatively. “I wonder where,” she ruminated to herself, her eyes flickering.
“You and your rip-off friends will never find the Coca-Cola formula, not in a million years.”
“WHO THE FUCK WANTS TO MANUFACTURE COKE ANYHOW WHEN YOU CAN RIP IT OFF THEIR TRUCKS? They’ve got a lot of trucks. You see them driving constantly, real slow. I tailgate them every chance I get; it makes them mad.” She smiled a secret, cu
She had turned the empties back in at different stores for the deposits.
“What’d you do with the bottle caps?” he once asked her. “Wrap them in muslin and store them away in your cedar chest?”
“I threw them away,” Do
“It’s okay,” he said. He accepted the bags and she accepted the money and he thought, Do
“Could I have ten?” she asked.
“Ten? Ten tabs back? Sure.” He opened one of the bags—it was hard to untie, but he had the skill—and counted her out precisely ten. And then ten for himself. And retied the bag. And then carried all the bags to his coat in the closet.