Steve's closet

That crash pad I was writing about in the last posting was financed by Big Sue,  Her family had money or property or something and when they died she got it and she spent freely.  I was a friend of her boyfriend and when she moved him and her into that apartment/crash pad, I was brought around to amuse him, which chiefly amounted to drinking with him which I could do just fine.

Steve came back from Vietnam right about the time we were getting booted out of that place.  He had a lot of dough from the army and after two years away he wanted to get back into the Champaign-Urbana social scene and boy did I have a deal for him. 

We had discovered this ranch house in the land of curvy streets southwest of the campus, a big place with four bedrooms, an ideal nest for six hippies.  But who would rent to six hippies?  But we had an ingenious plan, we posed as two couples, Steve was married to Big Sue, and I was married to Cindy, and to make it a little more acceptable, Cindy and Sue were sisters.  I wonder how the realtor kept a straight face long enough to have us sign the lease.

Sue had her money, Steve had his, I was tending bar, Cindy was a temp secretary, there were a few others who lived there from time to time and chipped in a bit.  Life was good.  There was a group of high school kids who flew to San Francisco and bought LSD cheap and came back and sold it for ten times what they paid which financed the whole trip and left them with cash and LSD for themselves.  They arrived back on Saturday nights at a coffee house  where we met them and bought enough for our whole house, and we had LSD Sundays. 

Steve's room was actually two small rooms with a partition between them which was taken down so that he had two doors into the hallway. On LSD Sundays that second door to the hallway became Steve's closet.  "Let me show you my closet," he would say and lo and behold Steve's closet contained a hallway, and that hallway led into the interior of a house exactly like the one we were living in.  And not only that it was filled with people who looked just like us but lived there whole lives in Steve's closet, Closet Steve, Closet Cindy, Closet Big Sue, everybody except yourself who appeared to have no closet doppleganger. 

And not only that but if you went into the closet inside Steve's closet the exact same thing happened and now you had Closet Closet Big Sue etc.  You could do this as often as you liked but you had to be careful to go out as many times as you went in because otherwise you could spend your whole life in Steve's closet.  LSD was a lot of fun.

LSD never really wears out until you go to bed and get up in the morning, but it does weaken considerably and late at night Steve and I would get together and talk about the trip because you couldn't always express yourself clearly when you were flying high.  We called this the post-game recap.

And then one day, I remember it explicitly, we were playing poker and Big Sue lost a big pot and all her money on the table.  I expected that she would go back to her room and get more from her hoard, but instead she started pulling shy.  She was out of money.  It was the beginning of the end of our happy home.