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cheated out of all the love Emmett could have been giving her, because of some white powder and the pinning of his eyes. But she was one of the few still willing to stand by him, so she came when he phoned and drove him back into the city where he scored a fix at the Ellis Hotel in the Fillmore district, paying for two twenty-dollar balloons with a batch of James Brown stamps that Natural Suzanne had been saving.

Emmett knew he would never be able to satisfy the hunger of his addiction with more and more dope, and the quantity of methadone he needed to detoxify himself wasn't available on the streets of California at the time. There seemed to be no way out, when Emmett got a flash. He went to the pharmacology section of the main public library and copied exactly what he wanted out of a book. Then he drove to Berkeley and the house of a doctor of chemistry who made LSD and methedrine in a laboratory in his basement. They were casual friends, and Emmett talked to him for a while, testing his water, before telling him what he came there to ask him to do, and giving him the piece of paper with this written on it: Dolophine, a synthetic opiate invented by German scientists at the insistence of morphine addict Herman Goering and named after Adolf Hitler and usually known as methadone.

Methadone (dl4,4-diphenyl-6-dimethylamine-3-heptanone)

[diagram of Methadone molecular structure]

The doctor of chemistry said it would take awhile, but he could make it, and would, and as much as he could, for "free." The cat even had a machine that would turn the product out in pill form-- the same tab-making machine he regularly used to stamp his acid out. After a while, Emmett returned to Berkeley and picked up thousands of methadone pills. He kept enough himself and stashed the rest for distribution later among the junk population of San Francisco.

Then he went out to a ranch near Point Reyes, California, where [end page 467]