54.

Jean-Claude Killy, Paris, and Dansk.

The Good Life. The Dreams-Coming-True Part. It’s happening, yes: we get a wonderful apartment in the small village of Ladenburg on the Neckar River. It has a balcony and hip-looking gray carpeting. We sign up for a Learn-To-Ski Week at the army’s resort in Berchtesgaden. We go to Paris for four days. We order our Dansk dishes from the PX, and Jenny gets a job at a base library and brings home stacks of books to read. We lie around on Saturdays listening to an Armed Forces Radio show called Weekend World, which is usually about the current music scene. I put on my green sport coat and go to work in the Volvo, often stopping on the way home in the evening to buy some gourmet cheese or wine or chocolate or other treat. We buy skis; we buy European clothes. Jenny gets her guitar fixed and starts playing folk tunes in the evenings. We take weekend trips to Rothenburg and Munich. On my longer leaves, we drive the Volvo to catch the ferry to England.

It’s a great life, punctuated by these police episodes. Maybe an arrest a week keeps us out of trouble with headquarters.

Meanwhile, I run into DuWayne Leonard. I knew him in Fayetteville. He’s now evidence custodian for the army’s Criminal Investigation Division, which is the army’s version of the FBI.

“I want to show you something,” he says late one afternoon. I’ve stopped by his office to pick him up. He’s coming over to our apartment in Ladenburg for dinner. Afterward we’ll listen to the new Santana album: “Abraxas.”

“Here,” he says as he opens the door of a tall green safe with a crinkled metal finish. “What’s your pleasure?”

Inside the safe are shelves holding four- or five-inch balls, some brown, some tar black, some with both colors like a vanilla and chocolate cake.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

DuWayne laughs.

“I’ll choose,” he says and slices off a small piece from one of the balls and wraps it in white paper like a piece of cheese.

After dinner, he produces a small brass pipe, and Jenny and I have our first taste of drugs—of, in fact, opiated hash.

Let me take you down, and down the lane we skipping go, bouncing around in the landscape of our heads, rainbows connecting everything. What other word is there but, you guessed it: Wow. Yes, wow and wow and wow.

DuWayne sleeps on our couch, and, after breakfast the next morning, we take a couple of more puffs on the hash and walk to a nearby park. My footsteps seem to have springs in them, and I make a tinkling sound as I walk. The ground is covered with vibrant blue and green patterns that look as though Peter Max designed them. Yellow birds fly out from under my feet as I walk.

Cool, I think. This is so cool.

Do I also think about the fact that I’m smoking evidence that sent someone to jail? Do I think about my hypocrisy?

Boom. Boom. Snare.

Boom. Boom. Snare.