The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [98]
‘So what happened?’ I asked Horner when we were settled at his house with a beer. ‘What made everyone change?’
‘I don’t know exactly,’ he said. ‘The main thing, I guess, is that the Reagan Administration has this obsession with drugs. And they don’t distinguish between hard drugs and soft drugs. If you’re a dealer and you’re caught with pot, you get sent away for just as long as if it were heroin. So now nobody sells pot. All the people who used to sell it have moved on to crack and heroin because the risk is no worse and the profits are a lot better.’
‘Sounds crazy,’ I said.
‘Of course it’s crazy!’ Horner answered, a little hotly. Then he calmed down. ‘Actually a lot of people just stopped dealing in pot altogether. Do you remember Frank Dortmeier?’
Frank Dortmeier was a guy who used to ingest drugs by the sackful. He would snort coke through a garden hose given half a chance. ‘Yeah, sure,’ I said.
‘I used to get my pot from him. Then they brought in this law that if you are caught selling dope within a thousand yards of a public school they put you in jail for ever. It doesn’t matter that you may only be selling one little reefer to your own mother, they still put you away for eternity just as if you were standing on the school steps shoving it down the throats of every snivelling little kid who passed by. Well, when they brought this law in, Dortmeier started to get worried because there was a school up the street from him. So one night under cover of darkness, he goes out with a hundred-foot tape measure and measures the distance from his house to the school and damn me but it’s 997 yards. So he just stops selling dope, just like that.’ Horner drank his beer sadly. ‘It’s really frustrating. I mean, have you ever tried to watch American TV without dope?’
‘It must be tough,’ I agreed.
‘Dortmeier gave me the name of his supplier so I could go and get some myself. Well, this guy was in Kansas City. I had no idea. So I drove all the way down there, just to buy a couple of ounces of pot, and it was crazy. The house was full of guns. The guy kept looking out the window like he was expecting the police to tell him to come out with his hands up. He was half convinced that I was an undercover narcotics officer. I mean here I am, a thirty-five-year-old family man, with a college education and a respectable job, I’m 180 miles from home and I’m wondering if I’m going to get blown away, and all so that I can just have a little something to help me get through Love Boat reruns on TV. It was too crazy for me. You need somebody like Dortmeier for a situation like that – somebody with a lust for drugs and no brain.’ Horner shook the beer can by his ear to confirm that it was empty and then looked at me. ‘You wouldn’t by any wild chance have any dope with you?’ he asked.
‘I’m sorry, John,’ I said.
‘Shame,’ said Horner and went out to the kitchen to get us more beers.
I spent the night in Horner’s spare room and in the morning stood with him and his pleasant wife in the kitchen drinking coffee and chatting while small children swirled about our legs. Life is odd, I thought. It seemed so strange for Horner to have a wife and children and a paunch and a mortgage and to be, like me, approaching the cliff-face of middle age. We had been boys for so long together that I suppose I had thought the condition was permanent. I realized with a sense of dread that the next time we met we would probably talk about gallstone operations and the relative merits of different brands of storm windows. It put me in a melancholy mood and kept me there as I reclaimed my car from its parking space downtown and returned to the highway.
I drove along old Route 6, which used to be the main highway to Chicago, but now, with Interstate 80 just three miles to the south, it is all but forgotten, and I hardly saw a soul along its length.