A Diet of Treacle Read Online Free PDF Page A

to hold on to it for a while. Next morning would be time enough. He would wake up and reach for the little cylinder of pot and blow off the top of his head before he opened his eyes-that would be nice. Instead of the joint he fished a regular cigarette from his other pocket and lit it.
    He drew smoke into his lungs, thinking it would be much more satisfying to draw another kind of smoke into his lungs, and wondering how long it would be before he started playing interesting games with a needle. Not that pot led you to the hard stuff, it didn’t. It was just that eventually you yourself would wind up trying the hard stuff even if most pot smokers never did. You, Joe Milani, would, because it was there for you and it was a new kick and there were not nearly enough kicks in the world.
    He blew out the smoke and took another drag on the cigarette, a longer drag that burned up maybe a third of the cigarette in one long pull, and he coughed on the cloud of smoke.
    Joe closed his eyes.
    Anita Carbone. Right now he couldn’t be sure if he hated the world, or Joe Milani, or both; but one thing he was relatively certain of: if it weren’t for the fundamental inadequacies in Joe Milani, or the world, or both, Joe Milani and Anita Carbone might have a future of some sort. Maybe not a white-gown-and-wedding-bells-and-rice type of scene, but a future one way or the other.
    Because Anita, by all the rules, answered to the perfect girl. She was a good girl, Joe knew, an Italian girl, and a virgin who obviously didn’t owe her virginity to the fact nobody had bothered to ask her. A bright girl, too, her intelligence compounded of Harlem intuition and Hunter education. She was damned attractive physically, he told himself, and damned pleasant company. Clean and fresh without being so square the two of you couldn’t talk to each other. Although he had been high when he had picked her up, and had been deeply attracted to her then, he had liked her even more, later, as a low had started to come on. It was a shame he would never see her again.
    The part of him that hated Joe Milani said: What does a chick like that need with a bastard like you? What are you going to do for her: turn her on? take her to bed? drive her as nutty as you are?
    The part of Joe Milani that hated the world said: She’s just not your type of chick, man. She’s just not for you, and she’s never gonna be, no matter what you try to do about it. The two of you are living in different worlds, and if you think it was a long way from Japan to the States, it’s miles more from Hip to Square.
    And Joe Milani listened to both voices, listened to them with both ears, and decided that both voices were entirely correct.
    So why see her again, he asked himself. And why make a pass at her when the result had to be one of two things—either she would throw the pass right back in your face, or the pair of you would wind up in bed. Both eventualities, in the final analysis, would be equally unpleasant.
    Damn, it was wrong! Joe cursed silently. You were supposed to go to high school and then college, the army cutting in before or after. Then you married a good Italian girl and settled down and bought one of those new houses in the suburbs and snagged a job with your old man or sold insurance or found something else you didn’t have to kill yourself doing and at which you could make a fairly decent living. That was what you were supposed to do.
    But what you were supposed to do was also impossible, inconceivable, and couldn’t work out no matter how much grass you smoked. You couldn’t go back again, that was the hell of it. Squares could turn Hip if they were sick enough, but Hips like you, Joe Milani, couldn’t seem to return to Squaresville.
    It would be so nice to be square, Joe thought. That was something the squares never got into their heads, that their world was a far more attractive one when you were sitting on the other side of the fence. Was the grass always