Page 30 IT/133
WILL BE TO
CURE
CANCER."
"What about him? That's his fuckin'
name, man, 'The World.' "
You mean, like 'The Snake?'
"Now you're cookin'."
Vou mean people actually call him 'The
World'to his face?
"You think people called Carmine Persico
The Snake' to his face?"
Okay, I see what you mean. Anyway. ..
¦ -. "Anyway, this legendary dude known as
*Xhe World', the reason they call him that is in
¦'iet Nam, they call America, 'the world', lifte
:3y say, man I can't wait to get back to the
world. Well this cat is supposed to have been
the biggest smack pusher in Southeast Asia. I'm
¦not talking about the smuggling trade as it
relates to Laotian smach bejng imported to the
U.S. I'm talking about in-country military
smack-freaks and their sources of supply within
Laos, Viet Nam, Cambodia and Thailand. Appa-
rently, 'The World' is supposed to have gotten
really fucked up by a land mine, and they had
to keep him so doped up on Morphine that
when he got out of the hospital in Hawaii he
had a habit and next thing you know he's
shooting smack and next thing you know he
turns up in Bangkok running the biggest smack
wholesale-retail operation there ever was."
You mean lie was still in the Army?
"Never was in the Army. The Marines, but
he was mustered out, man, that mine really
mangled him. Well, Bangkok is where all the
hustlers and whatever that are parasiting the
var in Viet Nam hang out, right? And this cat
manages to put a lock on all the smack scams
by buying into a ring of sergeants who are
raking off the PXVarid enlisted men's clubs
and using their people as couriers and coming
in under their umbrella for protection."
But wasn't Marshal Ky . . .
"No, that was strictly international scams.
I'm. talking about shall we say the domestic
franchise. Anyway, "The World' was in on the
ground floor of smack as far as the U.S. armed
forces in Southeast Asia were concerned. He was
there when morale really broke in '68 and he
stepped in with his freeze-dried albino monkey
shit and really made a pseudonym for himself,
the fucker. I mean, I don't relate to smack.
Heavy Karma, snot rot, double-tracking, feh,
man, smack pushers kiss my ass. But this
brother, this one's something else, a horse, if I
may, of a different colour. I mean, any man
who more-or-less turns the American genocide
squad into a bunch of nodding, scratching,
hepatitic zomboids can't be all bad.
"They called him 'The World' cause when
they got there,they thought what they wanted
most was to go back stateside but after runnin'
into the sergeants hangin' around the school-
yard and sayin' what-the-hell-one-gonna-vurn-
me-into-a-fuckin'=DRUG-ADDICT, well it
begins to seem to a lot of these pathetic
wretches that they'd trade 'the world' for a hit
of heroin. 'The U.S. ain't the world, man, that
dude there's The World. He controls everything.'
"For example, toward the end, 'The
'orld' is supposed to have begun throwing his
weight around a little too much to suit the
leople who were supplying him— how's where
¦ou come to your intercontinental scam-
longers, the Kuomintang, the CIA, etcetera,
^etcetera, etcetera. 'The World' began to see
that by putting the squeeze on the flow of
mack to our boys he could determine how
iffective they'd be as a fighting force during
iny particular period of time. So he started
auctioning off the U.S. troops' morale to the
highest bidder. The N.L.F. and North Viets
said fuck you, but he had tf?e fuckin' CIA and
the Army bidding against each other. His
attitude was, 'All I want is an income of
SI,000,000 a week in Swiss franc deposits;
frankly, I don't give two mouse turds whether
I get it by putting the squeeze on on my level
or jacking up prices in the field or by shaking
hands with Green Beret colonels.' He was
pretty bitter, there were rumours that he wasn
much fun to look at and had to piss and shit
into a baggie."
Did you get to meet him in Boulder Creek?
"Yeah, well, no, I didn't. You see, the
word was 'The World' had been elbowed out
of the Bangkok smack picture by some
pretty nasty people and that we was nosing
around the West Coast seeing whether he
could go legit, so to speak—become an acid
distributor. But when I got down to Boulder
Creek, there was about thirty people there,
. of whom I'd say I didn't recognize a third,
but none of that third looked like he'd
been creamed by a land mine."
Weren't you introduced to each other?
"No, what point would there have been
in that? We either knew each other or
didn't, and if you were there it was assumed
you were on the up and up, 'cause you were
invited by a brother and besides, like I'm
trying to convey to you, if he were there
and you were introduced to him he would-
n't say, 'Hi, my name's Randy,' but my
friends call me "The World".' Besides,
nobody there gave off vibes that heavy. I'd
say the heaviest vibes on the premises were
on the order of, '8100,000 a week and I
don't have to know the name of the name of
the name of the name of the person who
signed for the railroad carload of shit goin'
East, and vice versa. Pardon me, but I gotta
split 'cause one of my horses is running in
Florida tomorrow and I gotta get to the air-
port.' Heavy but not heavy, if you can dig
it."
So what happened at this meeting?
"Party."
What happened at this party?
"Nothing, we're just sitting around
getting ripped and listening to records, until
finally one of the dudes I don't know says,
'Come on outside, I got a new toy I want
to sjhow you.' And I'm thinking, what.does
this whole fucking overwork! have to be
mere so this motherfucker can show off his
newtoy?
' "Well, we go out and walk across this
bridge that crosses a stream, then a path
mat leads to a ridge, and we walk along the
ridge—stumbling around stoned in the
moonlight, mind you—until we come to a
clearing and lo and behold, there in the
middle of it is the brother's newtoy. And I
say to myself, shit, I must really be ston-d,
because if I.m not, and that's really a
fucking flying saucer, I'm going to have to
bring my head in for a tune-up ..."
A flying saucer?
"Well, it sure looked like a flying saucer,
I'll tell you—you know, funny noises, and
portholes and shiny metal, what would you
think it was?"
A flying saucer.
"Well, allreet.' But our eyes get adjusted
to the light and it's not a saucer at all but a ,
helicopter, a Cheyenne type mother, real '.
big with no markings. So I say to the brother,
well, it looks like you've really scored, What
did you do, carry it off an aircraft carrier
under your coat? And he says, 'No, it doesn't
belong to me, it belongs to some friends of
mine, and we're going for a ride. '
"You can imagine he
Like on the one hand, wr____________
on the other, if you were offered a night
ride in a super-huge helicopter to you-knew-
not-where, how could you refuse?"
Didn 't you think it might be some sort
of a setup for a bust?
' "A bust for what, man? Except for the
dope we were smokin', we were clean, and
the man doesn't need a helicopter in a
hidden landing zone in the Santa Cruz
mountains just to bust a bunch of dope
dealers. No, it was apparent to everybody
that this was something . . . exceptional. I
mean, there are cats with helicopters, but
strictly up to and including the Bell Jet
Ranger level. I mean this toy had two
fucking rotors, man. This was not a
refugee from the rush-hour traffic report.
This was a regular flying boxcar.
"So we climb aboard and there's a crew
walking around with clipboards and they're
not paying any attention to us at all, just
going about their business."
What'd they look like?
"Looked like bank tellers and office
copier salesmen, I don't know. Well, we
strap in and a few minutes later, we're up
in the air a few thousand feet and I'm saying
to myself, I hope I'm very stoned and that
this whole thing isn't a ploy to give some-
body time to rip off the stereo from my
Jensen. I mean, one hubcap alone . . ."
Where did you go?
"Well, don't hold me to it, 'cause it's
pretty hard to figure out where you're
going in the dark, and we were sorta ripped
but we ended at what I'm pretty sure was
an airstrip at Lockheed Sunnyvale. I'm not
exactly sure."
Then what happened?
"Then we get out and there's a plane on
the runway, like a small airliner, a business-
type jet. At that point some of the guys
start saying, this is where I check out, I ain't
goin' on any magical mystery tours, besides
I got people to see. Well, that seems to be
cool, and those people get back on the
Cheyenne and the Cheyenne takes off and
disappears in the direction we came. Now
there's about 25 of us, and we get on the
plane. By now I'm getting curious what is
this, some kind of practical joke by Hugh
Hefner? Only there's no bunny on the side
of the plane, no nbthin'. Midway through the
flight, they bring around food, not airline
food, take-out Chinese food, in soggy
cardboard containers, but still warm, right?
"We land at a regular airport, flashing
blue lights, the whole bit,but only none of
us has the slightest idea where we are, all we
know is we must be a good 1000 miles
from 'Frisco, 'cause we been in the air
thr.ee hours and change. And we're in
mountains. We taxi over to where six
other planes similar to ours are parked.
"We get out and are met by, he looks
like an insurance management trainee, okay?
And he says, 'Good morning, please follow
me, and if any of you need anything just
ask.' So we follow him and he leads us out
of the airport area and then a fifteen min-
ute walk into a sort of, I'd describe it as,
college campus area. At no point do we see
another soul besides the insurance man.
Finally, we arrive at this two-story building,
sort of looks like an annexe to a suburban
high-school, all the lights off, only he
takes us down an outside stairwell to a
basement door and through a corridor to a
IT/133 Page 31
on the other side of
which is what looks like a small college
lecture hall that's half-filled with freaks, about
60 to 75 people. And all of a sudden it's like
freshman week at Fungo Tech—hi, where are
you guys from? 'Philadelphia,' 'Lawrence,'
'Vermont,' 'Laguna,' 'Jamaica,' 'Culican,'
'Michoacan,' 'Zacatecas,' 'Tucson'—shit, I'm
saying to myself, where am I, at the fucking
convention of the fucking International
Cannabis Sativa Association?
"When all of a sudden—I swear this is just
like there's going to be a University Lecture
number with F.R. Leavis or somebody—in
from stage left file half a dozen older people
and one young freak, only instead of going
up on the lecture stage the insurance man
sets up folding steel chairs in front of the
rostrum and they sit down there. And that's
where I notice that the freak—he can't sit
down alone. Two of the men have to help
him sit down. Funny, he walks perfectly nor-
mally but getting him into the seat must have
taken nearly a minute, and he was biting his
lip the whole time."
'The World.'
"Yeah, I'll get to that. Something funny
about his face, too. He's wearing very dark
glasses and you couldn't see his eyes at all.
Underneath, it looks like one half his face is
made of like a different material from the
other—sort of the same texture as silly
putty after it's been sitting for a while. Not a
bad colour but the consistency's sorta yucky.
Next to him are these two guys in golf-type
knit shirts and they just pay total attention
to the freak. For example, every once in a
while, the one on the right holds up a hand-
kerchief to the freak's mouth and the freak
clears his throat—awful gagging sound—and
spits into the hanky. Or the guy on the left
gets up from his chair and steps behind the
freak's chair and reaches down and starts
massaging the freak's neck from back to
front—real professional masseur moves."
What did the freak look like?
"Sort of medium biker-length hair, clean,
white shirt and black chinos. Looked like he was
trying to make a court date. But let me tell
you about the guy directly to the left of 'The
World's' masseur. He's sort of beefy, reddish
wavy hah, and is wearing a turtleneck sweater
in sort of a shiny, synthetic tan and Daks-
type slacks, you know, with a waistband? And
I'm looking at this guy for a full minute before
it registers and I get goose bumps on the soles
of my feet, man. Reminded me of the time I
was tripping and I met the Exterminating
Angel, and he said the only way you can avoid
death is to be Death. Here I was afraid of
falling into that hole, and there He was telling
me the only way I could keep from falling
into the hole was to be the hole. So, for a
second I felt relieved, that I say to myself,
Christ, if it's bad to fall into the unknown,
it's gotta be worse to be the unknown and I
really freaked and got goose bumps on the
soles of my fucking feet, man. Until I realised
that I was the unknown already, and death
would simply mean accepting what I was."
So who was sitting in that folding chair,
the Exterminating Angel?
"No, man, Henry Kissinger was sitting in
that chair."
The Exterminating Angel.
"Whatever, man, I swear sitting right there
in his Daks slacks, as bkj as life."
Are you sure?
"Well, at no point did he ever say, Hi gang,
I'm Heinzie. But it looked like every photo-
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