drank a Jack D. and listened to Ray Charles sing about crying

epub or mobi, with thanks to the original sharer

John carried Red Birds, Yellow Jackets, Purple Hearts, and Blue Heavens in quantity. They were the genuine pops that everybody had heard of. If you wanted, he could get some depressants, or ‘downs,’ but black people don’t dig that too tough. That stuff was for the hippie poets and folk singers who liked to go around singing the blues and talking about the total destruction of mankind and all that wild shit. They liked to feel like they carried the weight of the world on their shoulders. They convinced themselves when they got high that the message in their poems and flimsy melodies were the true salvation of civilization. It was always that nobody would listen to them. I guess that’s why they wore their hair long and had freak-out sessions with psychedelic music. They felt that they might as well cram as much of life as possible into their few remaining days on this doomed planet. You could always hear them ranting and screaming when you got out of the subway at West 4th Street. I figured it was a lot of bullshit and another excuse for lazy cats and chicks to get down without getting married, and stay high all the time without ever getting a job.