You're Married to Her? by Ira Wood

me, of course. I could make out very little at the time. I could see Marge trying to avoid her mother’s eyes and then submitting to a stronger will, looking deeply into them with the same skeptical skew of her lips that must have punctuated decades of mother daughter disagreements. What passed between them was as inexplicable to me as the bond
between a mother with a tenth-grade education and a daughter who was to write forty-five books, as improbable as a middle child in an immigrant family of nine children instructing her own daughter how to perform an abortion on herself and the terrified college freshman who had the strength to do it.
    â€œI know he’s a good man,” her mother insisted.
    â€œEnough.” Marge kissed her mother’s cheek. “Good bye. I’ll call you.”
    â€œMarry him,” were the last words her mother was to say to Marge in person.
    And in spite of everything Marge knew about me, and everything she was about to discover, she did.

THE SYLLOGISM
    A syllogism, you may recall from Logic 101, is an argument containing three propositions, two of which are premises and the third a conclusion, to wit: Drugs make you stupid. You do drugs all the time. Therefore, you are too stupid to know how stupid you are. I grasped this in my sophomore year of college, not in the classroom but on the day I sought out the secret address of a place to buy acid. Passed on to me in a whisper, the place was impossible to miss. Indeed, if I happened upon a complete stranger to the neighborhood and asked, “Where can I buy LSD?” he would probably shrug, “How am I supposed to know? Try that dump with the purple door.”
    The purple door was never locked. If this didn’t strike you as stupid enough, in lieu of a curtain in the front bay window there was a big red flag with a stencil cut of a marijuana plant. Entering for the first time I was blown back with the odor of cat urine so strong my eyes
swelled shut. The front room was dark, lit only by a bare blue light bulb swinging on a wire. A naked man, hairy and thin, stood in the middle of the floor on a mat of outspread newspapers. He was surrounded by an admiring circle of young women wearing long beaded earrings and gauze-thin halter tops. He turned in slow circles, arms pressed to his sides like the wings of a trussed turkey, and smiled beatifically as the women cooed encouragement. “Let it go,” their soft voices whispered. “Let it all go and be free.”
    Cast in blue light his shriveled cock and balls were like robin eggs in a wire nest. His tongue flicked at his coarse black beard. “Let it go,” the chanting went on. Over and over the soft voices chanted, “Let it go, be free. . . .” The man squeezed his eyes in fierce concentration. One woman exhorted him, “There is no past. There is only now. Be here now... ,” she rocked forward and back as if in a trance, “. . . and be free.”
    I couldn’t see it from where I stood, but heard it hit the newspapers, like the smack of two cupped palms. The odor crossed the room as chanting gave way to applause. He raised his arms in victory each time he squeezed out another turd and shouted “Freedom! Freedom!” while turning in box steps on the sticky newspaper.
    At the time I was smoking a lot of marijuana. I was paranoid about everything, perennially tired, late with my class work, depressed, anxious, and forgetful. One day at breakfast, my first joint of the day in one hand, a coffee cup in the other, I was complaining to a roommate
about the sorry state of my inexplicably miserable life. She said, “Maybe you should stop smoking dope.” This struck me as a revelation. In all the times I had pondered my problems, all the while smoking dope, I had never come to this conclusion. Remember the syllogism.
    But there was one drug that seemed to make you smart. Cocaine made you smart. Cocaine was the opposite of