My Bad Influence Friend

The '70s, quaaludes, Chivas, and Pot.

In the summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school, I went with my new friend Peter, a senior, to a teen dance at the Westchester Country Club. Peter, his other friends, and I made our way to an alcove away from the music and the dance floor.

Peter produced a joint, took a long hit, and passed it around. I had never smoked and was worried about what I would do when it came around to me.

I was saved when a security guard told us to leave immediately or he’d call the cops. That was a badge of honor–––being kicked out of a country club for smoking pot––earned legitimately but without having to either draw the smoke or inhale.

Or having to place my lips around the saliva-soaked rolling paper.  The once and future germaphobe that I was and am salutes my near miss and good fortune.

Peter was two grades above me, a huge gap at that age. Long, stringy blond hair, wire-frame glasses, thin, and tall, he went to a different private school. I met him through my older sister (who has requested I not mention her, ever, in my posts, so already I feel the return of Peter’s bad boy influence.)

Peter was my first and last truly “bad influence” friend. Someone who would inevitably lead you astray if you spent enough time with them.

I was mystified as to why Peter wanted to hang out with me, but he did.

That night, after being evicted from the country club, we drove to the house of a family friend of Peter’s. The father of the house invited us into his den. He sat in a baronial arm chair. Peter and I perched on a couch.

The father must have had sideburns, an ascot, a charming smile. He must have been going later that night to a “key party.” It was suburbia in the ‘70s, and when I try to summon the father from my mind’s shadows, the person who emerges is Kevin Kline from the movie The Ice Storm.

“Kevin” was amused to learn about our removal from the club. He asked me if I wanted a drink. I had good reason to believe that by a drink he didn’t mean a Coke or a Yoo-hoo. My mind flicked through the ads I’d seen for alcohol, and I came up with the drink request I thought was the most sophisticated.

“I’ll have a Chivas Regal.”

Kevin smiled at me. “Chivas! Rocks?” If there was any mockery I missed it.

I nodded and had my first-ever drink. It tasted awful.

On a night soon thereafter, Peter invited me to a poker game with some of his friends. It was in a small apartment to the east of Park Avenue. A half-dozen boys cloistered in a back room perfumed with the scent of Doritos and adolescent sweat.

I don’t remember playing but I remember well the banter, far more vitriolic and obscene than I’d ever heard before.

One unfortunate kid––I think he lived in that apartment–– was the object of most of the insults, which were based on the shape of his head and his spools of dark, curly hair. The theme was his resemblance to an upside-down penis.

The banter was repetitive but relentless. I felt sorry for him but he seemed to take it as his usual lot. Perhaps his hazing was a ritual or the price for being included.

A few nights after that, the terms of Peter’s friendship became clear. Peter laid out to me a can’t-miss deal. Put up a thousand bucks to make three.

Peter knew a guy who would sell him quaaludes. I knew quaaludes were illegal drugs. As to their potency or whether they were a stimulant or depressant, I had no idea. Peter would mark up the price of the pills many times over and sell them through the private high schools.  All I had to do was give Peter the money, and he’d take care of the rest.

And then we could do it again and again.

I didn’t immediately dismiss the idea. It was flattering to be asked, it was flattering to be trusted, to be on the inside with such a “cool” older kid. My miser’s mind multiplied the money I might make financing bigger and bigger quantities. Take a thousand dollars and triple it many times and you end up with a fortune.

But I said no. I was a good boy and good boys didn’t do such things. And I was scared. That was the last I heard from Peter. A “friendship” that had lasted three or four weeks.

In the teeth of our best judgment

That phrase above comes from Edgar Allen Poe’s great short story, The Black Cat. The story’s narrator tortures and then kills his once beloved pet cat, an act that is the precursor to the murder of his wife.

Here’s the alcoholic narrator, self-aware of his monstrous tendencies:

“Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself -- to offer violence to its own nature -- to do wrong for the wrong's sake only -- that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute.” 

I’m sixty-two years old and have surrounded myself with well-meaning people with good inclinations. I am the same. I constantly measure and weigh my actions on unforgiving scales of justice and prudence. I’m quick to reject anyone or anything that is lawless, reckless, even harsh.

My consideration of financing Peter’s quaalude deal is the closest I’ve come to doing something truly dark and evil. I’m a strait-laced person. Yet I have an enduring fascination with scoundrels and rogues, mobsters and tyrants.

There is something seductive to me about a person unbound by strictures. At times I want to be that heedless person. At times, there rises within me a desire toward perversity, to act contrary to what polite society demands, contrary to what I demand from myself, even if such action would come at great and irreparable cost.

I don’t act upon those desires. I have too much invested in my own self-image, in my reputation, above all in my love for my family. I have created a super-structure of life in which I am one of the indispensable links. Should I fall, I would inflict grievous harm on those closest to me.

It is a lovely trap that leaves no room for me “to vex” myself.

So I extinguish those vexatious desires, what Poe called “the spirit of perverseness” through the vicarious attractions of evil fictional characters. From Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost who’d “rather reign in hell than serve in heaven” to the cold-blooded, iron-willed Michael Corleone of the Godfather to the brilliant, cultured serial killer Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs.

Or, when vicarious satisfaction is unavailable and I feel the sap of rude life rise in me, I release it with a run in the park or a trip to nowhere on my elliptical machine going round and round.

After, I feel better.

But my god, goodness can sometimes seem boring as fuck.

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Question For The Comments: Who has been your “bad influence” friend? Or have you served in that role for another?

The ultimate bad influence friend: Worm (Ed Norton) to Mikey (Matt Damon) in Rounders