Free The Sea Beach Line by Ben Nadler

gotten all I could from a place like that. When they told me to leave, I said, ‘fine.’” Thinking back on it now, I should have left as soon as I read the Pardes story. That was all they had to give me.
    â€œWas it brawling?” Mendy asked. “You get into some fistfights?”
    â€œNo, nothing like that. It was drugs, actually. I hooked some kids up with some acid and when one of them got in trouble he turned mein.” I was a little surprised to find myself being so open about all this, but Mendy had been honest with me about Al, and I felt I should be honest with him in return.
    â€œLife’s rough like that,” Mendy said. “You try to be a nice guy, and help another guy out. And then that’s what you get in return.”
    â€œThat’s what you get, all right.”
    â€œStill, you’re lucky you’re a free man. A friend of mine got in some trouble like that once . . . they gave him ten years for two sheets of blotter acid. This was back in the ’70s. It was the ’80s by the time they let him out.” Mendy was quiet for a minute. “He was real different then.”
    â€œWell, this wasn’t that much. Just a few tabs. I was just trying to help some guys out, you know? I wasn’t a drug dealer or anything. But I was tripping daily, so I kept a good supply, and people knew I was always sure to have something on hand. Or at least could always get something.”
    I hadn’t been on any one thing in particular. I wasn’t a dope fiend or an addict, just a seeker. Most of the things I was into aren’t even addictive. But I always had to have something to put me in the dream world: acid, mushrooms, morning-glory-seed oil, whatever. At least some Adderall or Benzedrine to elevate things. Some good bud to help me ease away from the physical world’s illusions. It was better to buy in bulk than to run dry, and the only way I could afford to do that was by selling off half of every bulk purchase. People started coming to me, and the bulk purchases got bigger and bigger.
    â€œStill, just for hooking the guy up, I was scared there was going to be some serious police problems. My stepfather got involved and smoothed things over as best he could. I agreed to withdraw from the school voluntarily, to save everyone the headache.”
    The story was slightly more complicated than that, but that was the gist. There had been a couple minor incidents, then the one serious situation where the kid took some stuff he couldn’t handle and freaked out. He had to go to a mental asylum for a couple weeks, where they pumped him full of Risperdal. His father and his father’s lawyers gotinvolved, and made the kid out to be a victim. He gave me up as the “campus source,” even though I was only buying from another guy on campus, who had connections up in Cleveland.
    Campus security searched my dorm room and threatened me, but I wasn’t going to drag anyone else down with me. Besides, all they found were a few pills and residue-covered bags. I was lucky that they didn’t come earlier or later. When I broke the kid off, I had had a whole sheet of blotter acid, but in the interim it had all been sold off or consumed. I’d been making arrangements to buy a vial of liquid LSD the week after the search. One hundred doses for four hundred bucks was a good deal. If the school had found that, they would have called the police. Possession of more than fifty doses is considered a third-degree felony in Ohio; I would not have come away with anything less than nine months of jail time, and I would have done my time rather than snitch on my source.
    The circumstantial evidence wasn’t really enough to get the police involved. It was just the other kid’s story against mine. But the school interviewed a bunch of other students, and then it was all of their stories against mine. I had thought some of them were my friends. Apparently not.