The Alternative Detective (Hob Draconian) Read Online Free PDF Page B

hadn’t.
     
     

 
    MILLIE
    8
     
     
    i went over to Millie’s loft on Water Street so she could arrange the air fares. Millie’s an old friend from Ibiza. I let myself in with my key. Millie was in bed asleep, lying on her back and snoring noisily, resembling a pink baby whale in a blue nightie. One of the things she brought back from Ibiza, aside from a big floppy Formentera hat and two pairs of sandals from the Sandal Shop at the beginning of the Dalt Vila, was a nasty habit with Quaaludes.
     
    I try to put all my friends into the Alternative Detective Agency. My international organization is made up mostly of friends from various periods of my life. Some of them are former hippies. A lot of them were a lot of other things. Our paths crossed in Ibiza, one of the main stops on the exile’s circuit.
    One advantage of living abroad is that you end up with friends everywhere. The only difficulty is trying to figure out how to use them. I figured I was performing a social service, opening up trade to people who usually don’t get it. Down with the big grifters; let the small ones get into the action. Don’t go Hertz or Avis; try out our very own Nosedive Motors. Let our Haitian Brigade paint your house.
    We need the work, we exiles. We are the third-worlders of western civilization. Believe me, you don’t have to be black or Hispanic to feel disinherited and disenfranchised in America in the closing years of the twentieth century.
    It hasn’t anything to do with politics, race or religion. There are a lot of bright, personable people who are being hammered into the ground because they don’t fit, because they aren’t a part of the growing obsolescence of everything that was ever worth having.
    That is the reasoning behind the Alternative Detective Agency. It’s sort of a commune. We don’t call it that; of course. “Commune” for most people calls up an image of pretty, longhaired girls performing loathsome sex with skinheaded freaks with crankcase grease impacted under their fingernails. Whereas my organization tries to exude an image of normal Americans engaged in the national pastime, Making Money Any Which Way You Can.
    The Alternative Detective Agency is the holding company for me and my people. We’ve got branches all over the world, wherever one of my old Ibiza friends happens to be living. They help me solve my cases and I cut them in on the profits, if any. If there aren’t any, we get high and talk about old times.
    They are my people, and they inhabit my real country, the exile’s misty kingdom of memories and displacements. They are wanderers and vagrants, artists and would-be artists, con men and remittance men, students of the university of perpetual reeducation, a floating English-speaking society that travels south to San Tropez and Ibiza in the summer and north to Paris, London and Amsterdam in the winter, like herds of delicate reindeer crossing Ice-Age Europe.
     
    Everybody has heard of ludes, those little white pills that make you feel very good unless they kill you. Not everyone knows what Quaaludin does. First of all, you have to take it on an empty stomach, so the little white pill can dissolve quickly and get through the stomach wall into your bloodstream. If you put a lot of food in its way you can’t expect a good hit.
    And of course the lude doesn’t always come on. Usually it’ll work, but sometimes something goes wrong, something to do with body chemistry, maybe, and the lude just doesn’t take. And that’s a tough one, because that’s when you start getting strung out.
    I’d had the habit for a while myself. The first thing you notice is that your face has turned to rubber. After that, it really gets good. The price, unfortunately, is that the junk stays in your system a long time, twenty-four hours at least, so you don’t function so good the next day after a pill. And if you take one or more every night, like I used to do, you end up not functioning well any of the