The Gold Coast

24

—RRKK!—“Slightly radioactive still. On the foreign front the score is still in our favor in Burma—as for Belgium, I don’t want to talk about it, all right? Now let’s put an ear to the new hit by our favorite group The Pudknockers, ‘Why My Java Is Red White and Green’—”

Sandy Chapman turns off the radio. Groan, moan. Stiffness in the joints, he feels like an old man. Sunlight streams into the plant-filled, glass-walled bedroom; it’s warm, humid, smells like a greenhouse. Sandy manages to lever himself into a seated position. Angela is long gone, off to work in the physical therapy rooms at St. Joseph’s Hospital.

All the glossy green leaves blur. Bit of fuzz vision, too much eyedropping yesterday as usual, leads to a sort of eyeball hangover, as if he’d been teargassed or had his corneas sandblasted or something. He’s used to it. He gets up, pads off to the bathroom. The face in the mirror looks wasted. Dark circles under bright red eyes, stubble, mouth caked white, long red hair broken out of ponytail, looking electrocuted. Yes, it’s morning time. Ick.

In the kitchen he starts the coffee machine, sits staring out at the San Diego Freeway until it’s ready. Back to the bedroom, where he sits on the floor among the plants. Eyedrop a little Apprehension of Beauty… ah. That’s better. Just the lubrication feels good. He sips coffee, relaxes, thinking nothing: no worries, no plans. Odors of coffee, hot plants, wet soil. “Hey this is why my Java is red white and green,” he sings, “the blood in the jungle, the smoke white machine.…” This is the sole moment of peace in his day, waxy leaves around him glowing translucent green in the mote-filled sunny air, everything visible, a world of light and color.…

Need another cup of coffee. Fifteen minutes later the thought occurs to him again, and he stands. Oops got up too fast. Through warm patches to the kitchen. Ah, feeling much better now. Sensuousness of feet on warm tile, taste of coffee cutting through fuzz in mouth, video of Angela getting undressed last night, running on the kitchen screens. Ready to get a start on the day’s business. A day in the life, sure enough.

But first he stops to call his father, down at the experimental clinic in Miami Beach. They talk on the video link for twenty minutes or so: George seems good today, hearty and cheerful despite the pallor and the IV lines. Sandy finds it reassuring, sort of.

Then he’s dressed, alert, out the door to work like any other businessman.

Sandy begins his day on time. And while he’s only depending on himself, he stays on schedule. He tracks to a rundown area of the underlevel of Santa Ana, a mile or so north of South Coast Plaza, and unlocks the door to the warehouse he rents, after turning off all the alarms. Inside is his laboratory.

Today he starts with cytotoxicity assays, one of the most crucial parts of his work. Anyone can make drugs, after all; the trick is finding out if they’ll kill you or not without testing them personally. Or giving them to rats. Sandy doesn’t like killing rats. So he likes these assays.

Since the cornea’s epithelium will be the first place the drugs hit, epithelial cells get the first tests. A couple of days ago Sandy joined the crowd of biochem techs at the slaughterhouse and bought a package of cow eyeballs; now he takes them from the fridge and uses a device called a rubber policeman to scrape the epithelial cells off the basement membrane. Tapped into a petri dish with some growth medium, and a carefully measured dose of the drug in question—a new one, a variant of 3,4,5 trimethoxyamphetamine that he’s calling the Visionary—these cells will either proliferate or die or struggle somewhere in between, and staining them at the end of a week will tell the tale.

That assay set up, Sandy moves on to trickier stuff. The new drug’s effect on lymphocytes has to be checked as well, because blood will be carrying it a lot of the time. So Sandy begins a chromium release assay, injecting chromium 51 into lymphocytes, then centrifuging them so only the cells remain. At that point all the chromium in the mix is within the cells. Then the Visionary is added—in doses ranging from femptomolars up through picomolars, nanomolars, micromolars—and it all goes into a growth medium that should keep lymphocytes happy. But with the drug in there who knows. In any case dying or dead cells will release the chromium, and after another centrifuging, the free chromium found will be a good measure of the drug’s toxicity.

Later more tests of stationary cells and organ cells, particularly bone marrow cells, will be necessary. And eventually, after a lot of hours in the lab, Sandy will have a good idea of the Visionary’s toxicity. Neat. As for long-term negative effects of the new drug, well, that’s not so clear. That’s not in the guarantee. That’s not something he likes to think about, and neither does anybody else. None of these new drugs are well understood on the long-term level. But if there are problems down the road, they will no doubt come up with something, like they did for the various viral killers. Make the body into a micro-battlefield and win it all: the brain can finally prove it is smarter than viruses. Who knows what demon will fall next?

So, not to worry about long-term physical effects. As for the new drugs’ effects on the mind, well, it isn’t so cut and dried, but he does have a collection of cross spiders, building their webs under the influence of the new products. The particular nature of the altered state induced by the drug can be partially predicted by the computer’s Witt analysis of the webs. Amazing but true. More precise knowledge in this area will come after some extensive field testing; he has a lot of volunteers.

The fact is, he buys his drugs in an advanced state, so the molecular engineering he does to make his new products is nothing really supercomplex, though he has a reputation for genius that he does nothing to try to dispel. Actually, he has got a talent for pharmacometrics—taking the basic drugs from the companies and then guessing, with the aid of a structure/activity relationships program pirated from Upjohn, which alterations in chemical structure will shift the psychoactive properties of the drugs in an interesting way. Pharmacometrics is really quite an art, still, even with the program’s indispensable aid: structure/activity relationships is a big and complex field, and no one knows it all. So to that extent he is a kind of artist.

Into the second hour of work. Sandy moves among the various endomorphins and alkaloids and solutions on the shelves in their bottles and flasks, and the reference texts and papers that spill over one big bookcase, and the bulks of the secondhand centrifuges, refrigerators, the g.c./mass spec… It would be easy to impress any visitors allowed to drop by. For a few minutes he attacks again the problem of the synergistic self-assembly effects of La Morpholide 15 and an enkephalin introduced into the brain at the same time—a sophisticated problem in pharmacokinetics, sure, and interesting as hell, but a little bit much for this morning. Easier to return to the final plans for fitting 5-HIAA to the serotoninergic neurons, which he’s already almost mastered. Should be a nice hallucinogen, that.

So it’s a fascinating couple of hours in the lab, as always. But he’s supposed to meet one of his suppliers, Charles, at noon, and looking up at the clock he finds he’d better hurry. Sure enough, he shows up at Charles’s place in Santa Ana at 12:05. Nothing to complain about, right?

However, the inevitable process of getting behind schedule begins immediately, with Charles inviting him in to share an eyedropper, followed by a close discussion of Charles’s difficulties in life. So the simple pickup of a liter of Sandoz DMT takes him until 1:30.

He then heads to the first of his distributors, in Garden Grove, and discovers no one home. Twenty minutes of waiting and they show up, and it’s the same program there; only really need to lay twenty eyedroppers on them and collect the money for them, could take five minutes, right? But no. Got to blink another eyedropper of Social Affability, light up a Sandy spliff, and socialize for a bit. That’s sales for you, it’s a social job and you can’t escape that. Not many people realize how full Sandy’s schedule of deliveries actually is, and of course he doesn’t want to make too big a point of saying so. It’s a test of his diplomacy to get out in under an hour; so now it’s almost three. He hurries up to Stanton to make a drop at June’s, then tracks at street level to La Palma to meet Sidney, hits the freeway to get back to Tustin and the Tunaville drug retailers’ weekly meeting, down to Costa Mesa to see Arnie Kalish, on to Garden Grove to see those Vietnamese guys in Little Saigon… until he’s over three hours behind schedule and losing ground fast, with a dozen more people who want to see him before dinner. Whew.

Luckily this happens every day, and so everyone expects Sandy to be late. It’s an OC legend; stories abound of Sandy showing up for lunches at dinner, for dinners at midnight, for parties the next day… By this time it would no doubt actually shock people if he showed up on time. But, he thinks, it’s never my fault!

So he works his way along, tracking like a maniac to sit through one glacial transaction after another. It’s a bit of an effort, when he’s tired or depressed, living up to the task of being Sandy Chapman; he’s expected to show up at a friend/client’s house and galvanize the day, burst in with manic energy and his crazy man’s grin, discuss all the latest developments in music, movies, sports, whatever, shifting registers from full-blown culturevulturehood to astonishing mallworld ignorance… pull out yet another eye-dropper, of Affability or Funny Bone or California Mello or the Buzz, whatever seems to be called for at the moment, eyes bugging out with manic glee as he holds up the dropper and pulls his face under it.… He’s used to operating rationally under the weight of monumental highs; in fact it’s just everyday reality for him, stonedness, it’s a handicap he barely notices anymore. His tolerance level is so high that he only really notices the effect of that first drip of Apprehension of Beauty at the beginning of each day. So he lids with whatever household he has reoriented to party mode, smokes dope with them, inhales capsules of snapper, giggles at them as they exhibit the first signs of brain damage, fills them full of that comic spirit that is surely the main thing he is selling. It’s quite a performance, though he seldom feels it as such. Method acting.

Long after sundown he finishes making his last delivery, some five hours late. On the way home he stops and buys the ten-trillionth Big Mac fries and a Coke, eats while tracking home. Reaches home, but it’s no rest for the weary; the party there is in dormant mode and reflexively he sparkplugs it, gets it ontrack and rolling. Then into his bedroom, to check on phone messages.

The answering machine can barely hold all the messages that have been left, and Sandy sits on the bed buzzing like a vibrator, watching the surfing on the wall screens and listening to them. One catches his wandering attention and he repeats it from the start:

“Hey, Sandy. Tompkins here. We’re having a small party tonight at my place and we’d like to see you, if you can make it. We want to introduce you to a friend from Hawaii who has a proposal, too. It’ll go late so don’t worry about when you arrive. Hope this reaches you in time—later—”

Sandy goes out to the game room. Jim is absorbed in the hanging video screens, and Sandy checks them out. Collage city. “What’s on, Jim Dandy?”

Jim gestures at one flickering black-and-white square. “Best Hamlet ever filmed. Christopher Plummer as the Dane, shot by the BBC at Elsinore years ago.”

“I like the old Russian one, myself. His father’s ghost, ten stories tall—how could you beat it?”

“That’s a nice touch, all right.” Jim seems a bit down. He and Virginia looked to be in a heated discussion when Sandy walked in, and Sandy guesses they have been arguing again. Those two are not exactly the greatest alliance ever made; in fact they both keep saying it’s over, although it seems to be having a long ending. “Do you think you can drag yourself away from the Bard for a jaunt to La Jolla? My big-time friends have invited us to a party at their place.”

“Sure, I’ve got this at home.”

Sandy collects Arthur, Abe, Tashi. “Let’s see if we can get Humphrey to drive,” he says with his wicked grin.

They laugh; Humphrey keeps his electric bill down by driving as little as possible. He’s an almanac of all the shortest distances, he can give you the least expensive route between any two points in OC faster than the carbrains can. They approach him in a gang, Sandy says, “Humphrey, you’ve got a nice big car, give us a ride down to La Jolla and I’ll get you into a party there you won’t forget.”

“Ah, gee, what’s wrong with this one? Can’t ask for more, can you?”

“Of course you can! Come on, Humphrey.…” Sandy waves a fresh eyedropper of the Buzz, Humphrey’s favorite, in front of his eyes.

“Can’t leave your own party,” Humphrey starts to say, but founders in the face of the statement’s absurdity. Sandy steers him to the door, stopping for a quick kiss and an explanation for Angela. Remembering Jim and Virginia, he runs back in and kisses her again. “I love you.” Then they’re out, followed by Arthur, Abe, Tashi and Jim, who elbow each other and snicker as they all clump down the rarely used stairwell. “Think Humph’s got the coin slots installed on his car doors yet?” Abe asks under his breath, and they giggle. “Taxi meter,” Tashi suggests. “Better profit potential.”

“Subtler,” Arthur adds.

Humphrey, next flight down, says to Sandy, “Maybe we can all go shares on the mileage, huh?” The four above them nearly explode holding the laughs in, and when Sandy says, “Sure thing, Humphrey, and maybe we should figure out the wear on the tires, too,” they experience catastrophic failure and burst like balloons. The stairwell echoes with howls. Tashi collapses on the banister, Abe and Arthur and Jim crumple to the landing and take the next flight down on hands and knees. Humphrey and Sandy observe this descent, Humphrey perplexed, Sandy grinning the maniac’s grin. “You men are stoned.” Which lays them out flat. Maybe they are.

They scrape themselves off the floor in the parking lot and get in Humphrey’s car, carefully inspecting the door handles and the car’s interior. “What are you guys looking for?” Humphrey asks.

“Nothing, nothing. Can we go now? Are we gone yet?”

They’re gone. Off to San Diego.