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crossed the shadow line which separated our floating world from the uncompromising grid of straight society, and were none too happy about this transition. Monday through Friday they had to be up at seven, showered and shaved, suited and wide-tied, and get out there and move stock. Their servitude was thrown into sharp relief by our anarchistic lifestyle, and they tended to react particularly badly when we staggered back in from an all-night party just as they were leaving for work, or decided to play The Who Live at Leeds at the appropriate volume around three in the morning.
    But what brought things to a crisis was the question of drugs. We had a fairly large stash of these on hand at any given time, mostly pot and hash, but also more exotic treats. This gave the car salesmen the jitters. If the house got busted, their careers would be over before they’d started. At first they came on heavy and tried to enforce a ban, but there were three of us and only two of them, plus we had the advantage of being able to drop some uppers to improve our attitude, or toke up and mellow out if the vibes got too heavy. It must have been a bitch. They finally gave up and moved out to a squeaky-clean high-rise near the dealership, leaving us to find replacements quickly to make up the next month’s rent. Larry turned up on the first trawl—he’d been to school with Sam and they used to shoot pool together once in a while—along with another guy who didn’t last, and the following month Vince materialized from somewhere, I still don’t know how or why, and stuck.
    Such a casual, disparate grouping seems pretty unlikely now, yet at the time none of us thought twice about it. Later, looking back nostalgically from the far side of my own shadow line at that lost world of ease and excitement, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out just what it was that made the whole thing work. I can’t speak for the others, but I think I know what drew me to them: a passion for the tawdry and the transient, a weakness for the power not just of cheap music but of cheap emotion, cheap ideas and cheap thrills of every kind.
    To Greg and Larry, all this came naturally. It was where they had grown up, a language they had spoken all their lives. With Vince it was a little more forced. He never talked about his parents, but one or two comments he let drop in unguarded moments suggested that he’d been raised in the kind of small-town home where they subscribed to the New Yorker and listened to the live broadcast from the Met every Saturday morning. He had to work his catechism of popular culture, but did so with all the zeal of a recent convert. For Sam, the journey had been even longer. His parents had permitted only one book in the house, the family Bible, and regarded television and popular music as works of the Devil. Even the radio was only turned on for farm bulletins and religious broadcasts on Sunday.
    But despite their differences, the other four were merely expressing or reappropriating a culture native to them. They were Americans. So was I, on paper. I had been born in Maine and carried an American passport, but none of this made me an American, in my own eyes at least. My father had been European marketing director for a Boston-based company, and from the age of six to eighteen I lived and went to school in Holland, Switzerland and France. Despite summer vacations back in the States, when I enrolled at the University of Minnesota, I felt a foreigner in my own country.
    So my association with Sam, Vince, Greg and Larry meant more than just a good time. At the risk of sounding pompous, it was a rediscovery of my roots, an affirmation of my identity. I was discovering for the first time the unique experience of American low taste, the authentic, unexportable cultural product. I reveled in its shameless excess, its triumphant vulgarity, and looked to the others as my guides through a heritage I possessed in name only. They were naturally flattered