Deadeye Dick Page 0,60

the front door, so it’s the first thing you see when you come in. It’s green. It’s about the size of a barn door. It has one vertical orange stripe, and it’s called ‘The Temptation of Saint Anthony.’ Mother wrote a letter to the paper, saying the picture was an insult to the memory of Father, and to the memory of every serious artist who ever lived.”

The telephone went dead. I will never know why. It was nothing I did on my end. It could have been caused by something the mouse on my end did. The mouse had gone away. It could have been fooling with the telephone wires in the wall. Or maybe, in the basement of my brother’s building in New York City, somebody was putting a tap on his line. Maybe a private detective, working for his wife, wanted to get the goods on him—to be used in a divorce action later on. Anything is possible.

Then the telephone came alive again. Felix was talking about coming home to Midland City to rediscover his roots. He said the exact opposite of what Bunny Hoover had said to me. He said that everybody in New York City was phony, and that it was the people of Midland City who were real. He named a lot of friends from high school. He was going to drink beer with them and go hunting with them.

He mentioned some girls, too. It wasn’t quite clear what he could do with them, since they were all married, and had children, or had left town. But he didn’t mention Celia Hoover, and I didn’t remind him of her—didn’t tell him that she had become a crazy old bat, and that she had just taken the drugstore apart.

It’s interesting that he didn’t mention Celia for this reason: He would later declare, under the influence of drugs a doctor had prescribed for him, that she was the only woman he had ever loved, and that he should have married her.

Celia was dead by then.

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I WOULD BE GLAD to attempt a detailed analysis of Celia Hoover’s character, if I thought her character had much of anything to do with her suicide by Drno. As a pharmacist, though, I see no reason not to give full credit to amphetamine.

Here is the warning which the law requires as a companion now for each shipment of amphetamine as it leaves the factory:

“Amphetamine has been extensively abused. Tolerance, extreme psychological dependence, and severe social disability have occurred. There are reports of patients who have increased dosages to many times that recommended. Abrupt cessation following prolonged high dosage results in extreme fatigue and mental depression; changes are also noted in the sleep EEG.

“Manifestations of chronic intoxication with amphetamine include severe dermatoses, marked insomnia, irritability, hyperactivity, and personality changes. The most severe manifestation of chronic intoxication is psychosis, often indistinguishable from schizophrenia.”

Want some?

• • •

The late twentieth century will go down in history, I’m sure, as an era of pharmaceutical buffoonery. My own brother came home from New York City—bombed on Darvon and Ritalin and methaqualone and Valium, and God only knows what all. He had prescriptions for every bit of it. He said he was home to discover his roots, but, after I heard about all the pills he was taking, I thought he would be lucky to find his own behind with both hands. I thought it was a miracle that he had even found the right exit off the Interstate.

As it was, he had an accident on his way home—in a brand new white Rolls-Royce convertible. The car itself was drug-inspired madness. The day after he was fired and his fourth wife walked out on him, he bought a seventy-thousand-dollar motorcar.

He loaded it up like a truck with his buttonless wardrobe, and took off for Midland City. And when he first got home, his conversation, if you could call it that, was repetitious, obsessed. There were only two things he wanted to do: One was to find his roots, and the other was to find some woman who would sew all his buttons back on. The only buttons he had were on the clothes on his back. He had been particularly vulnerable to an attack on his buttons, too, since his suits and coats were made in London, with buttons instead of zippers on their flies, and with buttons at the wrists which actually buttoned and unbuttoned. He put on one of his buttonless coats for Mother and me, and