UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TheLOST CONTINENT

...I had intended to drive on to Des Moines, but on an impulse I stopped at Iowa City. It's a college town, the home of the University of Iowa, and I still had a couple of friends living there - people who had gone to college there and then never quite found any reason to move on. It was nearly ten o'clock when I arrived, but the streets were packed with students out carousing. I called myoId friend John Homer from a street corner phone and he told me to meet him in Fitzpatrick's Bar. I stopped a passing student and asked him the way to Fitzpatrick's Bar, but he was so drunk that he had lost the power of speech. He just gazed numbly at me. He looked to be about fourteen years old. I stopped a group of girls, similarly intoxicated, and asked them if they knew the way to the bar. They all said they did and pointed in different directions, and then became so convulsed with giggles that it was all they could do to stand up. They moved around in front of me like passengers on a ship in heavy seas. They looked about fourteen years old too.
"Are you girls always this happy?" I asked.
"Only at homecoming," one of them said.
Ah, that explained it. Homecoming. The big social event of the college year. There are three ritual stages attached to homecoming celebrations at American universities: (1) get grossly intoxicated; (2) throw up in a public place; (3) wake up not knowing where you are or how you got there and with your underpants on backwards. I appeared to have arrived in town somewhere between stages one and two, though in fact a few of the more committed revellers were already engaged in gutter serenades. I picked my way through the weaving throngs in downtown Iowa City asking people at random if they knew the way to Fitzpatrick's Bar. No-0ne seemed to have heard of it - but then many of the people I encountered probably could not have identified themselves in a roomful of mirrors. Eventually I stumbled on the bar myself. Like all bars in Iowa City on a Friday night, it was packed to the rafters. Everybody looked to be fourteen years old, except one person - my friend John Homer, who was standing at the bar looking all of his thirty-five years. There is nothing like a college town to make you feel old before your time. I joined Homer at the bar. He hadn't changed a lot. He was now a pharmacist and a respectable member of the community, though there was still a semi-wild glint in his eye. In his day, he had been one of the most committed drug-takers in the community. Indeed, although he always strenuously denied it, everyone knew that his motive for studying pharmacology was to be able to create a more exotic blend of hallucinogenic drugs. We had been friends almost forever, since first grade at least. We exchanged broad smiles and warm handshakes and tried to talk, but there was so much noise and throbbing music that we were just two men watching each other's mouths move. So we gave up trying to talk and instead had a beer and stood smiling inanely at each other, the way you do with someone you haven't seen for years, and watching the people around us. I couldn't get over how young and fresh-looking they all seemed. Everything about them looked brand new and unused - their clothes ,their faces, their bodies. When we had drained our beer bottles, Homer and I stepped out on to the street and walked to his car. The fresh air felt wonderful. People were leaning against buildings everywhere and puking.
"Have you ever seen so many twerpy little assholes in all your life?" Homer asked me rhetorically.
" And they're all just fourteen years old," I added.
"Physically they are fourteen years old," he corrected me, "but emotionally and intellectually they are still somewhere shy of their eighth birthday."
"Were we like that at their age?"
"I used to wonder that, but I don't think so. I may have been that stupid once, but I was never that shallow. These kids wear button-down collar shirts and penny loafers. They look like they're on their way to an Osmonds concert. And they don't know anything. You talk to them in a bar and they don't even know who's running for President. They've never heard of Nicaragua. It's scary."
We walked along thinking about the scariness of it all. "But there's something even worse," Homer added. We were at his car. I looked at him across the top of it.
"What's that?" I asked. "They don't smoke dope. Can you believe that?"
Well, I couldn't. The idea of students at the University of Iowa not smoking dope is. . . well, simply inconceivable. On any list of reasons for going to the University of Iowa, smoking dope took up at least two of the first five places. "Then what are they here for?"
"They're getting an education," Homer said in a tone of wonder. "Can you believe that? They want to be insurance salesmen and computer programmers. That's their dream in life. They want to make a lot of money so they can go out and buy more penny loafers and Madonna albums. It terrifies me sometimes."
We got in his car and drove through dark streets to his house. Homer explained to me how the world had changed. When I left America for England, Iowa City was full of hippies. Difficult as it may be to believe, out here amid all these cornfields, the University of Iowa was for many years one of the most radical colleges in the country, at its peak exceeded in radicalness only by Berkeley and Columbia. Everybody there was a hippie, the professors as much as the students. It wasn't just that they smoked dope and frequently rioted; they were also open-minded and intellectual. People cared about things like politics and the environment and where the world was going. Now, from what Homer was telling me, it was as if all the people in Iowa City had had their brains laundered at the Ronald McDonald Institute of Mental Readjustment.
"So what happened?" I asked Homer 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!" Homer 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." Homer 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." Homer 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 Homer and went out to the kitchen to get us more beers.

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