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.He had given them to Mrs.Knudson, who remarked that they were lovely.Bob hadpicked them out.After the funeral, at the fancy restaurant where the waitress had moved the three of them out ofview, Fat asked Bob what Gloria had been doing at Synanon, since she was supposed to be getting herpossessions together and driving back up to Marin County to live with him he had thought. Carmina talked her into going to Synanon, Bob said.That was Mrs.Knudson. Because of herhistory of drug involvement. Timothy, the friend Fat didn t know, said, They sure didn t help her very much. What had happened was that Gloria walked in the front door of Synanon and they had gamed herright off.Someone, on purpose, had walked past her as she sat waiting to be interviewed and hadremarked on how ugly she was.The next person to parade past her informed her that her hair lookedlike something a rat slept in.Gloria had always been sensitive about her curly hair.She wished it waslong like all the other hair in the world.What the third Synanon member would have said was moot,because by then Gloria had gone upstairs to the tenth floor. Is that how Synanon works? Fat asked.Bob said, It s a technique to break down the personality.It s a fascist therapy that makes theperson totally outer-directed and dependent on the group.Then they can build up a new personalitythat isn t drug-oriented. Didn t they realize she was suicidal? Timothy asked. Of course, Bob said. She phoned in and talked to them; they knew her name and why she wasthere. Did you talk to them after her death? Fat asked.Bob said, I phoned them up and asked to talk to someone high up and told him they had killed mywife, and the man said that they wanted me to come down there and teach them how to handle suicidalpeople.He was super upset.I felt sorry for him. At that, hearing that, Fat decided that Bob himself was not right in the head.Bob felt sorry forSynanon.Bob was all fucked up.Everyone was fucked up, including Carmina Knudson.There wasn ta sane person left in Northern California.It was time to move somewhere else.He sat eating his saladand wondering where he could go.Out of the country.Flee to Canada, like the draft protesters.Hepersonally knew ten guys who had slipped across into Canada rather than fight in Vietnam.Probablyin Vancouver he would run into half a dozen people he knew.Vancouver was supposed to be one ofthe most beautiful cities in the world.Like San Francisco, it was a major port.He could start life allover and forget the past.It entered his head as he sat fooling with his salad that when Bob phoned he hadn t said, Gloriakilled herself but rather, Gloria killed herself today, as if it had been inevitable that she would do itone day or another.Perhaps this had done it, this assumption.Gloria had been timed, as if she weretaking a math test.Who really was the insane one? Gloria or himself (probably himself ) or her ex-husband or all of them, the Bay Area, not insane in the loose sense of the term but in the stricttechnical sense? Let it be said that one of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feelsperhaps he is becoming psychotic.It is another Chinese finger trap.You cannot think about it withoutbecoming part of it.By thinking about madness, Horselover Fat slipped by degrees into madness.I wish I could have helped him. Chapter Twofrom VALISAlthough there was nothing I could do to help Horselover Fat, he did escape death.The first thing thatcame along to save him took the form of an eighteen-year-old high school girl living down the streetfrom him and the second was God.Of the two of them the girl did better.I m not sure God did anything at all for him; in fact in some ways God made him sicker.This was asubject on which Fat and I could not agree.Fat was certain that God had healed him completely.Thatis not possible.There is a line in the I Ching reading, Always ill but never dies. That fits my friend.Stephanie entered Fat s life as a dope dealer.After Gloria s death he did so much dope that he hadto buy from every source available to him.Buying dope from high school kids is not a smart move.Ithas nothing to do with dope itself but with the law and morality.Once you begin to buy dope fromkids you are a marked man.I m sure it s obvious why.But the thing I knew which the authorities didnot is this: Horselover Fat really wasn t interested in the dope that Stephanie had for sale.She dealthash and grass but never uppers.She did not approve of uppers.Stephanie never sold anything she didnot approve of.She never sold psychedelics no matter what pressure was put on her.Now and then shesold cocaine.Nobody could quite figure out her reasoning, but it was a form of reasoning.In thenormal sense, Stephanie did not think at all.But she did arrive at decisions, and once she arrived atthem no one could budge her.Fat liked her.There lay the gist of it; he liked her and not the dope, but to maintain a relationship with her he hadto be a buyer, which meant he had to do hash.For Stephanie, hash was the beginning and end of lifelife worth living, anyhow.If God came in a poor second, at least he wasn t doing anything illegal, as Stephanie was.Fat wasconvinced that Stephanie would wind up in jail; he expected her to be arrested any day.All Fat sfriends expected him to be arrested any day.We worried about that and about his slow decline intodepression and psychosis and isolation.Fat worried about Stephanie.Stephanie worried about theprice of hash.More so, she worried about the price of cocaine.We used to imagine her suddenlysitting bolt upright in the middle of the night and exclaiming, Coke has gone up to a hundred dollarsa gram! She worried about the price of dope the way normal women worry about the price of coffee.We used to argue that Stephanie could not have existed before the sixties.Dope had brought herinto being, summoned her out of the very ground.She was a coefficient of dope, part of an equation.And yet it was through her that Fat made his way eventually to God.Not through her dope; it hasnothing to do with dope.There is no door to God through dope; that is a lie peddled by theunscrupulous
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