Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [8]
I first experimented with pot, hash, mescaline, peyote, and other hallucinogens during the sixties and continued to indulge throughout my major-league career. Guess that means the experimental phase is over. Drugs erased my shyness, made me more sociable. They wiped the mind clear of extraneous thoughts, so I could listen intently to what other people said without judgment or expectation.
A philosophy teacher once told me that all conversation represents a form of persuasion. On pot, I never tried persuading anyone of anything. My weed-wacky friends and I stopped confusing discussions with competitions. I became convinced that if everyone took drugs, we could put aside our egos and differences to improve the planet. There would be no quarrels, no borders, no governments. Instinct and telepathy would render language superfluous. Love would guide our actions, armed conflicts would become passé, the loaves would inherit the fishes, and the lambs would sleep with the dinosaurs.
Don’t ask me what those last few sentences mean. I smoked several joints just before writing this.
I might not have gotten stoned so regularly had someone made me pay for the privilege. But when you win even the smallest fame as a pro ballplayer, fans give you drugs gratis just for the chance to hang with you. In Boston, a jock-sniffing doctor regularly supplied me and several Red Sox—I’m not naming any names, but there were a half dozen of us—with pharmaceutical-grade cocaine. One hit of that powder and my body instantly fell into suspended animation. I would sit on a stool for hours in some Inman Square bar unable to move anything except the top joint of my pinky while my mind floated to Rio de Janeiro and rumbaed at Carnival.
We often participated in coke relay races during the wee hours. Fans would pour two white parallel lines down the length of the bar. Two teams of three Red Sox each would line up on either side of those powdery trails and stand about three feet apart. The first player would snort as much coke as his nose could hold in one inhalation before passing the straw to his partner. Whichever team finished the line first won the prize: its members got to sit down.
In Montreal, fans rained hashish on me in the Expos bullpen and pressed joints in my hand as I left the ballpark. Go to the Cul de Sac, the 1234 Club, or Grumpy’s and you could always tell when the coke had arrived; the line outside the men’s room stretched longer than the one outside the ladies’ room. Several Expos and I snorted blow off twenty-dollar bills in the bathroom stalls free of charge. Most fans insisted that we keep the twenties. Or they presented us with a bullet shooter, a Vicks VapoRub tube packed with coke guaranteed to clear your sinuses by drilling a hole through them. We also frequented a club called the Longest Yard, a name that described the amount of coke the average patron snorted there in a night.
I rented my basement to a drug dealer, a mysterious gentleman who called himself Alex. His last name changed from week to week. I strictly enforced one rule during his stay: he could not deal inside the house. So he set up shop on our stoop. Alex would sprinkle several lines of coke on a dish the first of every month and send it up to my bedroom via the dumbwaiter. His rent. It was the closest I ever came to paying for drugs, but the arrangement suited me. I’ve always supported the barter system.
During the regular baseball season, I tried staying straight on game days and generally succeeded. Once the Expos let me go, though, I had plenty of time to fall into trouble. A typical day started with a joint. Then a friend might drop in and lay some hash on me. We’d smoke; he’d throw me four joints for later. I would trade two of them for four tabs of mescaline. That evening I would exchange two hits of mesc for a gram of cocaine and head to a local restaurant where the head chef and I smoked his hookah—a Middle Eastern water pipe filled with hash. After that, I started partying.
My friends and I snorted coke to stay up, smoked pot to come down,