The Itch of Being

Chapter 1 of Carnival

Carnival

Chapter 1

The Itch of Being

Apologia

There really was a time called The Summer Of Love.

Way back then, when this comic book in prose was first sculpted, it wasn’t yet considered politically incorrect to lampoon creeps, perverts, predators, and proselytizers. Nowadays, of course, this lighthearted fiction will come off as an evil anachronism, even though it deals plainly with behavior that has always plagued we decent folk. The losers herein are interchangeable with almost any other losers, anywhere, at any time.

(Carnival is actually about growing pains, and about prose artistry).

’Nuff said. Observe, analyze, and report. A thinking man can do no more. But, if you’re really all that easily offended by social satire, you just might want to pass on this one. Pick up a Harlequin Romance instead. Just don’t touch yourself or you’ll go blind.

* * *

In the beginning there was a burst of energy.

To the disillusioned it was the sweet flowering of the human spirit, the blossoming of man.

We were shell-shocked: a photogenic young president was in the ground. Smog was in our lungs, mercury in our fish, acid in our rain. And every night the tube laid it out straight: the sky was falling, ghettos were ablaze, drought-stricken countries were somehow pumping out starving children even faster than their desperately concerned parents could frantically copulate. And, forever playing King of the Mountain, the Goliaths were scrapping over some festering wound in Southeast Asia. But that was all just news and nonsense--more emphatically than all these crises combined, The Bomb made it plain.

We were screwed.

* * *

The blossom emerged Underground, with roots in British rock, Mexican hemp, Indian mysticism, American pharmaceuticals.

Suddenly there was a beat in the air. We became light-headed and gender-fuzzy, politically hip and vagabond-chic. Rather than bear arms, we bore daisies. Instead of seeking enlistment, we sought to bedevil our senses. It was our world now, and we were going to fix it; with smiles, with slogans, with symbols and songs. At the very brink of perdition we stood, synchronizing our auras to chant the Devil down.

It would take time. But we were young and strong and many. We had all this energy.

Enough to galvanize even the witless and despondent. Enough to give the staunchest of doomsayers pause. Enough to, for a stutter in time, make a difference.

And that burgeoning energy was Love, flinging its seeds and budding anew, fitting piece by piece each anomalous member of the stubborn human puzzle.

* * *

But to our fathers, the choreographer’s hand was unmistakable. All this business about peace and love could only be the usual commie line, designed to seduce and regiment the usual parade of whining followers. And the parade grated. After Normandy, after Inch’on, after all the lost lives and limbs…that we hairy young hedonists should spew a single syllable concerning policy riled even the most moderate of conservatives. We’d turned their homey Beaver Cleaver streets into psychedelic playgrounds, muddied the mat of every Judeo-Christian ethic--but pacifism under fire was the final straw. They raged and appealed, threatened and condemned, hurled accusations of everything from homosexuality to treason. Almost overnight “peace” became a dirty word, and any mention of spiritual flowering made palms itch for the rough kiss of a trusty scythe.

Eventually the blossom shriveled. We grew bored with it all, became pragmatic, and, to our everlasting and unforgivable shame, adopted typically pedestrian lives of dollar-based drudgery, bald-faced brown-nosing, and soulless confrontation.

* * *

Now the Revolution is little more than a doddering irrelevancy.

Yet there are those who still believe the corpse can be resuscitated, the rush reproduced. They’ll bend your ear if you let them. They’ll hound you with tales of an age gone by, when freedom grew wild in the Pollyanna Spring. Be gentle with them, and never broach that lesson every generation learns way too late: that all that energy--all that optimism, enthusiasm, and potential--was vested in, of course, the impetuous hands of youth.

--For Lucian of Samosata

PART ONE

BLEAK NEWS FROM THE GENE POOL

“Can’t you see that dignity, even though it doesn’t have a price tag on it, is worth more than all the materialistic bullshit in the world put together?”

--Eddie

“It’s practically a law of life that if you, like, accept a given premise as fact, then anything that follows in support of that premise must be fact, too. The premise is everything, Kevin.”

--Eddie again

“Too trippy,” Kevin said, slowly shaking his head, “much too trippy.”

Chapter 1

The Itch of Being

joon 28 1967

jime

man hav i gawt nooz 4 u

i finule tawkd mi old man in2 ltn me rid up 2 frisko with ede an mik

i thenk i wood hav split newa bcuz i kant stumak stommuk stan thu thawt uv hangen urown this dump awl sumr

mi old man wont lt me gt uwa with nethen

newa i lookd in thu fre prs an fown owt thu big goldn g8 prk konsrts stil awn

jfrsun aerplan kand het an thu gr8fl dd 4 shr

2 bad u had 2 go an bus ur lag but il b ritn an il lt u no wuts hapunen ech melo mil uv thu wa

thenk uv it jime

thu hol sumr awf an im awn mi wa 2 hat ashbaere

bi thu tim u gt this ltr il prawble b rapn with hndrix az we pas uh joent

don b srprizd if i nvr cum bak

thaerz nuthen in santu mawniku wrth remmbren

xsp 4 awl mi frnz uv kors

wl i gs thats awl jime so b kool an sta hi

kevn

Kevin ran his eyes down the letter lustily, nodding with savage glee. The thing was a bombshell, all right; just the kind of brutally crafted, carefully polished communication he needed. Something to play cat and mouse with the imagination. Jimmy’s frustration would be calamitous, and this missive would lodge, hopefully, at the very root of the hobbled boy’s misery, remaining to fester all summer long while Kevin, hundreds of miles up the coast, tapped salt in the wound with further letters exaggerating his own good fortune.

Now Kevin dropped the sheet of paper and wrung his hands, visualizing Jimmy, confined to his room in Long Beach, receiving an endless stream of mail postmarked an instant before arrival. This letter would be the first irritation--the first indication of the itch that couldn’t be scratched. Kevin could just picture Jimmy’s face contorting, the paper in the bedridden boy’s trembling hands smoldering with tales of high adventure and lush conquest. Kevin clenched his fists with the image, pounded his big paws together and nodded harder. For the briefest moment--so brief he wasn’t sure it had really occurred--Kevin’s mind went utterly blank, like the switching-off and immediate switching-on of a hall lamp. This instant of blackness was accompanied by a sick pain behind the eyes, of such brief duration it, too, was questionable.

Strange.

That had been happening a lot lately. Or had it? He felt anxiety coil in his chest and pass. Stranger still. There wasn’t any reason to be anxious, was there? Things couldn’t be more bitchen.

Outside his bedroom rose a thundering, heart-stopping bellow of absolutely mindless passion, finally punctuated by a tremendous two-footed stamping that rattled the windows and shook the door. A string of black obscenities, another bellow, and a long groan followed by a truncated curse. Kevin, so accustomed to these outbursts he hardly noticed, folded the letter and slid it into an envelope. Before repetition could sour the image of Jimmy’s frustration, he licked the envelope’s gummed edge and sealed it, trapping the image inside. But while laboriously centering Jimmy’s address in thick block print he felt his enthusiasm slip away, almost as if it were leaking out the pen’s felt tip. It was an old problem, this relentless sinking of spirit, connected, in some way, to the effort expended in concentration.

At least he was pretty sure it was an old problem.

Hadn’t he just, only seconds before, been thrilled, awed, or expectant about some notion, conviction, or gambit related in some way to some plan or other? He wished he could put his finger on it, and wished, too, that he could include in his letter some reference to this problem--if there really was a problem--and maybe get his friend Jimmy’s advice. But it was too late, the envelope was sealed, and besides, Jimmy really wasn’t that close a friend at all, the prick. When he had moved to Long Beach there had been no goodbye for Kevin, no acknowledging the big shy boy as a human being worth remembering. Kevin had procured Jimmy’s new address from an acquaintance in common, and had continued the charade of having a pen pal (even though he’d never received a note in return) only because he so desperately needed friends. His emotional turmoil had not diminished with time--but Jimmy would be sorry now. He sure as hell would. Kevin looked around for some assurance, for some kind of tangible evidence to support his excitement, and saw nothing but the dirty, cracker-thin walls of his bedroom, coldly returning his stare. He tore through the clutter on his desk, found a clipping scissored from the Free Press, held it up to his eyes as if it were pornography:

HAIGHT-ASHBURY--Now that the long-awaited and much-ballyhooed Summer Solstice Festival is history, the Hashbury flower children are clamoring for more. And apparently their very vocal reactions to the Festival, a disappointing assemblage of less than 5,000 on Golden Gate Park’s Speedway Meadows, have inspired several hip organizers to rally freaks statewide for a comeback which, in concert promoter Bill Graham’s opinion, will be a tribal gathering to dwarf even January’s highly-publicized Human Be-in. And so--in effect--this new festival will simply be an extension of the big July 6 concert announced in the Freep’s May 7 issue. Since the date for the festival coincides with what is expected to be the peak of Hashbury’s Summer of Love invasion, San Franciscan officialdom is doing some pretty tough talking. By now, however, it must be obvious even to the hardhearted Civic Council that any effort to halt an enterprise involving such a multitude of freaks would only exacerbate the situation. After endless bullying and cajoling, the Freep was granted an interview with Mayor John Shelley Himself, whose outlook on the festival was something less than positive.

“It’s a disgrace,” the mayor stated. “It’s an outrage! You people think you can exploit the common goodwill…”

(and here Kevin skipped down the column impatiently)

“…latent communists. Swinish habits. Hotbed of drug users and runaways. Haight-Ashbury district…reputation as a haven…rebellious types…indications of this cancer spreading to the park proper…over three hundred men covering the park, and drugs will not, repeat will not be tolerated!”

Then some obviously inflated figures dealing with current Park Station manpower, followed by one of Shelley’s stock got-it-covered speeches. Kevin frowned smugly and read on:

The mayor’s precautions, however, are bound to prove more than mildly embarrassing. Reports from The Berkeley Barb--and rumors substantiated by reliable underground sources--indicate an expected crowd of some 30,000 freaks from Marin, San Mateo, Contra, and Alameda counties, and a possible influx of up to 20,000 from other parts of the state.

Kevin dropped his arm and let the lost smile slowly reform. Although he’d read the clipping a hundred times, the joy he now felt came as something new and refreshing. Oddly, the repeated readings hadn’t improved his spelling and punctuation comprehension a whit. He was one of those essentially lazy individuals who absorb the world selectively. If it required any work, any application that did not result in instant gratification, it was far too abstruse for Kevin. But he carefully folded the clipping and filed it in one of the flimsy plastic windows in his wallet, where he could always reach it and, like a fresh convert riffling Bible pages, search it for those familiar words so vital to his ambition: flower children, Summer of Love, drug users, runaways. A haven. A hotbed. Freaks, underground sources.

It was way too good to be real.

Just emancipated from high school and one week into a promising summer--a summer that had, only two weeks ago, presented all the horrors-to-be of a long and depressing three months divided into neat halves: six weeks of summer classes followed by six weeks of stewing around the house dreading each confrontation with his parents. That this prospect was no less unappealing to the parents had been revealed by the father’s uncharacteristically quick compliance. Big, tough, irascible Joe--who wouldn’t let no goddamn punk kid of his get away with doing any goddamn thing he wanted t’do, and just who the hell d’you think wears the goddamn pants in this goddamn family--big, booming, diehard Joe had, for some obscure reason, readily acquiesced to his son’s desperate request. And Kevin, always forced to remain in the neighborhood, had felt new wind under rusty wings. Unaccustomed to independent thought, his mind was suddenly teeming with plans. And slowly an idea had taken shape, at last solidifying to become The Secret: Kevin had no intention of returning to this zoo--ever. But The Secret had to remain a secret. If Big Joe found out his son had pulled one over on him he would kill the boy, slowly and exquisitely, with his bare hands. Even Eddie, who had initiated Kevin into marijuana smoking and to the vague principles of the youth revolution that cold wet night last November--even loyal revolutionary Eddie could not know The Secret. Not yet.

From the front room came muffled television sounds, a whine from his mother, another bellowed curse from his father. Joe was in a particularly bad mood, and getting out of the house without facing him would be impossible. Still, Kevin wasn’t about to be intimidated by the old man, not today. He tucked the letter into the pocket of his checked Pendleton shirt, stood and crossed the room determinedly. But he made sure to open his bedroom door quietly, and to close it with care.

In the hall the composite blast of television and squabbling parents was overwhelming. Kevin slipped into the bathroom and eased shut the door.

The bathroom (ceiling sagging with the weight of the avocado’s boughs, floor tilted by the tree’s humongous roots) was forever in gloom, the air thick and sour. The ghetto-like clutter and heavy stench had always dispirited Kevin, and today his conviction firmed as he disgustedly looked around.

Nobody deserved this hell.

Paint was peeling from the walls in limp sticky leaves, damp and discolored. On the bathtub’s rusted curtain rod hung a dismal still life: the enormous, billowed balloons of his father’s jockey shorts, the ancient drooping cups of his mother’s brassieres, an old throw rug spotted with blood and grease. This whole side of the room stank the musty stench of broom closets. The sink’s drain was clogged, its basin filled to the brim with dark filmy water for long as Kevin could remember, corpses of cockroaches and flies blemishing the surface like tiny tankers at anchor. Empty and near-empty prescription bottles were scattered behind the faucet handles and atop the commode tank, with labels reading mysolin, chloromycetin, compazine, methotrexate, lasix. The steel-reinforced toilet’s extra large bowl was streaked with black, the throne’s high-impact custom seat veined with cracks.

Now, Kevin had spent a good deal of his young life creating fantasies to blot out the assorted horrors of living in this house, and so it was that, paradoxically, he could at times dredge glamour from unutterable foulness. This bathroom could be a Shanghai back alley or a tenement in Delhi, and he a dark secret agent, or a nameless footsore Hero of the Common People on some unclear mission of goodness and selflessness.

Standing in front of the sink, his back to the mirror, Kevin assumed an expression of coolness and sensitive macho charm. He abruptly whirled to face this tough, virile paladin.

A fat, brooding boy of sixteen blinked back from behind the glass, the eyes dejected, the lips moping. He wore, because his parents insisted he wear, large, conspicuous horn-rimmed spectacles that were forever sagging on his nose. Almost every part of Kevin sagged. He stood just over a ponderous six feet, sulking and hulking, his slumping shoulders burdened by a cumbersome adolescent despondency. His face bore out this slumping; the expression hangdog, the flesh drooping at the cheeks and underchin. Only a great tumbleweed of uncontrollable frizzy brown hair countered this overall collapsed effect, radiating from his scalp like a frayed clump of fine wires. There was nothing you could do with this rowdy growth. You couldn’t part it or style it in any way. Those hairs were tensile as steel wool.

The tough, virile paladin dissolved as Kevin stared, exited sneering at his inquietude. For the thousandth time the boy tugged irritably at random clumps of hair with a huge stubby hand, as though to inspire straighter growth. He could almost hear the clumps scream in protest as they were released to bunch closer to the scalp.

Wagging his head, he stepped aside to confront the commode. All was quiet for a while. With eyes squeezed shut and forehead resting against the wall, Kevin was at last granted a trickling emission. San Francisco, he thought, grunting. Frisco. A whole city commandeered by refugees from the plastic whirlpool, by liberated souls tuning in to life and reality, turning on to faith and love. And the chicks! Free Love. The trill of his waning stream accompanied him now, as he for the thousandth time visualized himself grandly arriving in the legendary city on his derailleur, all his fat turned to lean muscle from the exertion of riding. He saw his torso sun-baked a golden brown, saw his hair streaming down straight with sweat. There would be a virginal covey lined up to greet him, attired in the scantiest of scanties, or (according to some of the juicier rumors) in the altogether.

The excitement welled up again, intense and uncomfortable. He shook his head to clear it. Again that instant of blankness, again that sense of having just been robbed of a second’s thought. He zipped up quickly, remembered to flush the goddamn toilet, snuck back to his bedroom.

This room was Kevin’s sanctum, and the one thing he’d never be able to replace. Within these four stained, ratty walls cowered all the sanity the house could claim: there were posters and colored lights, record albums and comic books, piles of collected junk--all to be abandoned, he reminded himself, as the debris of a former incarnation. Most of the junk was of a psychedelic nature--mind toys and smoking contraptions mass-produced by enterprising young companies making a killing off the hippie phenomenon. Kevin had worried sorely over his property. He knew he couldn’t take it with him, although he’d entertained various ideas and alternatives--even, in one desperate moment, a mad notion of building a trailer to haul it all nearly four hundred miles up the coast. Lacking money and specific destination, he couldn’t have it shipped by air or rail, and he couldn’t trust his parents to ship it after he’d arrived. And there was something about giving it away to his few ungrateful “friends” that caused him to swell with a fierce sense of ownership. Selling it all would somehow be just as bad; like prostituting his personality. In the end the only thing to do was leave it. His parents would hopefully expect him to return if they saw his treasures still piled high. Leave it. That was it. Leave it and let his memory haunt them evermore.

And leaning gracefully against the wall opposite the door was Kevin’s pride and joy: his sleek Peugeot ten-speed derailleur. The bicycle was only half a year old, bought by Joe to keep his son busy and elsewhere, an arrangement which suited them both. The custom paint job was Kevin’s own; an enthusiastic work of smeared greens and oranges, with current “camp” slogans painted in mustard yellow and dayglo purple. The pedals were swathed in pile carpet for barefoot riding, and strategic spokes had been blacked to make huge peace symbols of the wheels. Scrawled on the beige plastic tape covering the handlebars rode the words PEDAL POWER in India ink. Kevin’s khaki-colored double sleeping bag, strapped to the rack behind the bike’s seat, was lined with an authentic American flag.

The boy said his farewells to the room with feelings of regret and relief. He quietly walked his bicycle into the front room, his breath held.

Once again that suffocating depression took him, and Kevin had to slow at the sight of grimy carpet, of piled-up magazines and starved, cringing houseplants. The room was dusty and shaded, ransacked of cheer and the fragile, priceless personal touches that make a house a home. There were no memorabilia nostalgically preserved, no grinning family portraits proudly displayed. A petty neurosis lurked in every corner, ready to pounce the instant the thundering, throbbing television was switched off. Tears were perfunctory here, and laughter, when it came, was a nerve-shredding howl that teetered on the verge of hysteria. Kevin despised the room as he despised the two absurd, self-destructive people responsible for its oppressiveness. The fact that these two rude people just happened to be his parents didn’t dampen his hatred a bit.

His father--seven hundred and ninety-six pounds of ill-tempered, foul-mouthed, intractable Pole--sat stuffed into a split, legless love seat, guzzling beer and muttering obscenities at the picture tube. The man was immense; a harrowing, towering mountain heaped with layer upon layer of drooping glaciers of fat. On even the coolest days he perspired around the clock, wheezing and hollering, verbally abusing anything that would hold still long enough to receive the withering brunt of his wrath, sucking down six-pack after six-pack of Eastside beer in the eye of his own progressively darkening storm. An ex-trucker forced to retire due to gross obesity, frequent roaring tantrums, and an absolutely stupefying flatulence condition, he remained indoors day and night, seldom leaving the terribly distended love seat. Utterly unabashed, he was never to be seen wearing other than discolored jockey shorts and a moth-eaten T-shirt, both marinated in his own sweat and worn like a sticky thin second skin.

Jozef Mikolajczyk was given to flaring, unprovoked fits of murderous fury. He’d proven himself both provider and protector, but in Kevin’s eyes only a malicious Fate would have kept Big Joe from his coffin all these years. By all rights he had it coming; an opinion confirmed frankly by each consulted, insulted, revolted professional. Each had mentally written Joe off, and each had stringently warned him to control his purple rages. It’s said that your heart is about as big as your fist--if that’s so, Joe’s heart was the size of an overripe honeydew.

Footage of January’s Rose Bowl game was being aired for the daily Sports On The Line feature, commentary by one of the receivers blaring from the set’s single, ruptured speaker. The film clip was half a year old, yet Joe had every sense--every pleading, hating, raging bit of his attention--bent on wracking his brain for a winning countermove in a game he already knew had been lost.

“I was lookin’ to be tagged on this one,” the set blasted, rattling the windows, “an’ I figgered he’d be lookin’ fer me.” The explosive roar of a crowd, an avalanche chuckle from the receiver. “But I gotta hand it to that line. They got on him so fast he didn’t know what hit him.”

Kevin watched his father lean forward as the quarterback arced back his arm for a pass. The boy snuck a peek at the set, saw the quarterback get mauled.

His father lurched to his feet. “GODDAMN YOU STUPID SON OF A B***H! Throw the f*****g ball! Don’t hold it, throw it!” He hurled the empty beer can across the room to illustrate. Deeply red in the face, he collapsed with a gravelly gasp on the love seat. Fresh lines of sweat broke out on his cheeks and forehead, his heart bucking almost audibly. “Jesus,” he rumbled, sucking down quarts of dusty air. “Jesus, what a ball team.”

Kevin’s mother, stout, stunted and curlered, waddled in from the kitchen, clucking and feebly reprimanding in her raspy, warbling voice; wearing a limp terrycloth bathrobe, her chipped rhinestone spectacles, and an expression of weary, bewildered hypochondria. She was a wretched creature; squat and chicken-skinned at forty-five, forever cowering indoors. Hair sparse and fried, forehead deeply pinched and wizened. Rotting teeth, dumpy legs intricately marbled by purplish varicose veins. Her eyes were buggy with hyperthyroidism, her nerves shot to pieces by a lifetime of harried ineptitude.

The woman’s list of ailments was staggering: rheumatoid arthritis, bronchial asthma, hyperalgesic whatchamacosis, indigenous culture shock, acute choreatic distress syndrome. Heart failure twice, incontinence, cirrhosis, glaucoma, gout. She suffered the painful swelling of hemorrhoids, the heartbreak of psoriasis, the drip, drip, drip of acid indigestion. Heat prostration in summer, pneumonia come winter. Insomnia year round. Cancer of the uterus, the larynx, the breasts, and, through a freak of either nature or radiology, the prostate. The poor woman had been abducted, analyzed, ridiculed, and released by too many uppity extraterrestrials to remember, lost countless nonexistent relatives in tragedies too horrific to convey, had been cheated of stardom by shortsighted talent agencies, of riches by the Mob, and somehow lost at least three Gothic masterpieces in the mail. Self-pity and overexposure to the corrosive vehemence of Big Joe’s pointless rages had mottled her perception of reality, and now disenchantment was evident in her every move as she bent grotesquely to pick up the can her husband had thrown and, straightening arthritically, froze in a paleoanthropic stoop when she noticed her son standing sheepishly across the room. Her harassed expression quickly changed to one of harsh reproval.

“Kevin! How many times do I have to tell you to carry your bike out? You know your tires dirty the carpet.”

“Don’t shout!” his father shouted. He turned and scowled at his son. “Keep the goddamn tires off the carpet!”

Kevin cleared his throat. “I’m--I’m going now.”

They stared at him with glassy eyes and slack barracuda jaws. From the television came a strafing of cheers.

Joe grunted. “Ellie, turn down the TV.” When she began to object he grimaced and said, “Just turn down the goddamn TV,” gesticulating downward with his huge arm. The room plunged into an eerie, electric silence. Joe looked wetly at Kevin, smiled. “C’m’ere, son.”

Kevin leaned the bicycle on its kickstand. He walked over warily, stood grudgingly before his father, tensed. “Sir?”

Joe beamed over his shoulder. “I like that. My son respects his old man, calls him ‘sir’.” He looked back at Kevin and sighed fondly, gently nodding his small, nearly spherical head. Kevin, intimidated by this sham of paternal pride, wondered what his father was getting at. As Joe seemed reluctant to elaborate, the boy repeated himself.

“Sir?”

“Son,” said his father, “I know you must think your Pa is just a worthless old fart drinking his life away, and that neither one of us gives a good long crap about anybody but ourselves. But the truth is, well, your goddamn mother and me, we care a hell of a lot for you around here, boy.”

Kevin clenched his fists, his palms suddenly moist. “No sir,” he said cautiously. “I don’t think that at all.”

His father chuckled. “Well, the point is, son, we want you to have a good time, but we want you to take care of yourself.” Now the muscles holding the great masses of fat in an insincere sunburst smile collapsed. Big Joe’s expression underwent an instantaneous inversion: from relaxed and chummy to righteously stern. The huge saddlebag jowls trembled. Fat drops of perspiration popped from his pores and rolled ponderously over his cheeks. “Now you listen to your old man. I hear a lot about all them hippies up in San Francisco. You think your Pa don’t know s**t about what’s going on in the world; you dumb kids think you know everything nowadays, but me,” and he poked a thumb the size of a mango at his chest, “I know. I watch the TV. I seen about all them goddamn protesters taking all their goddamn dope and I seen the goddamn cops busting their goddamn frigging heads in. Now you hear me, boy. I want you to steer clear of them freaks, right?”

“Yes sir,” Kevin lied.

His mother squinted in his face, smiling hideously. “Your father knows what’s best, dear. You just do what he says and have a good time.” She winced and forced a hand to the back of her neck.

“Yes ma’am. Well, can I go now?”

“Hang on a sec’,” Joe said. “I know you been shaking quarters outta my change bottle for three weeks now, kid, but I figger it’s already been spent on whatnot. You don’t gotta pull that crap. You ask.” Grunting and groaning, he reached to the floor, picked up his trousers, found the left rear pocket and pulled out a patent leather billfold flattened and molded to the curvature of his elephantine behind. “Joe Mikolajczyk takes care of his son,” he wheezed, and began thumbing through the bills. “Now, here’s three hundred dollars for your trip, and I don’t want you spending it on no dope, hear?”

Kevin’s jaw dropped. This sudden, unaccountable generosity astonished him; it was radically out of character. He looked at his mother, smiling kindly--also very much out of character. She gave her face an extra crinkle, said, “Go ahead, dear. Take it.”

Kevin held out his hand. As Joe placed the money on the boy’s palm he gripped it firmly, almost painfully. “What I said I meant, Kevin. You keep your a*s out of trouble.” He belched. “Now go on, get the hell out of here. And have a good time.”

His mother clamped his head in her hands and gave him a sloppy hyperopic kiss. “Now don’t forget to write, dear. I would’ve packed you a nice lunch of cheese and salami sandwiches, but my back is so sore and I can’t get around like I used to.” Her expression became resentful. “And you know salami makes me break out!” She showed him a trembling claw, the digits twisted and rigid. “See my hand, how it shakes? That’s because we’re worried about you, dear. You don’t think we worry about you, sweetheart, but if you only knew of the migraines your poor mother’s developed from worrying about you. All the time. Night and day I worry and I worry and I worry until I think it’s going to kill me!”

“Aw, g’wan, leave him alone,” Joe mumbled. He grunted and shifted with a strong blast of rectal wind. “Get out of here, kid. Beat it.”

Kevin’s mother pawed at his hair, trying to put it in order, but he pulled away. “Have a good time, dear!” she called, though he was standing right next to her. “Send us a postcard!”

Kevin nodded, walked to the front door, opened it gratefully. “Thanks,” he said. “I will.” He carried his bike out. As he gripped the doorknob a jangling thrill raced up his arm. With the closing of this door he would be shutting away all the pressures, all the domestic minutiae that made his life unbearable. He closed the door firmly, and the electricity stopped. From inside, muted by the door, came the sound of a long gargling belch, followed by a sour, drawn-out report from Joe’s posterior. There was an explosion of raging exclamations, a whimpered objection from his mother, then Joe’s voice, booming like God Almighty, “Goddamn it woman! Just turn up the goddamn TV!” Immediately a crowd roared and the windows shook. The madness was drowned out. Kevin trembled and stuffed the bills in his wallet. There was no getting around it now: he was gone. One hundred percent officially free.

He mounted and rode down the walkway as fast as he could. For a moment he was certain he heard his mother open the door and call after him, but he closed his mind to it, veered onto the sidewalk and thence into the street. He tossed the letter into the first mailbox he encountered.

According to plan, Kevin and Eddie were to rendezvous at Mike’s house, and Kevin was preparing to turn onto a street that would lead him there when he remembered the money he’d crammed in his cheap plastic wallet. He pulled to the curb and stopped, shook his head unbelievingly. Three hundred dollars! That was a great deal more money than he’d ever dreamed of possessing at one time. He wanted to pull the bills out and count them over and over, but that would be foolish in broad daylight. The world was crawling with people who would cut your throat without hesitation for such a sum. Three hundred dollars…

And suddenly, disgustedly, he thought of one crucial item they’d overlooked in the haste of preparation: unless he was severely mistaken, he and his buddies didn’t have a single joint between them. Kevin shook his head, marveling his own absent-mindedness. What was the point of their pilgrimage, if not to keep their minds defiantly fogged in the name of the Revolution? The problem had always been one of money, but with his new small fortune Kevin could easily afford an ounce of the best marijuana around and hardly dent his capital. And hadn’t Perky, a senior at Kevin’s high school, told him in the hall to come by if he wanted any grass? That had been a week ago, just before school let out, and Kevin had seen Perky--who had been on his way to the principal’s office to be expelled for lewd and rowdy conduct--only in passing, Perky giving his message without slowing his insolent gait. Kevin didn’t know him well; Perky was way too hip to publicly acknowledge the existence of a boy as shy and uncool as Kevin, and, if it hadn’t been for the slight elevation in popularity Kevin had gained by turning-on with Eddie that cold November night in the Mikolajczyks’ garage loft, his status might well have remained a miserable zero. As it stood, he now knew a few students previously scornful of his society, and, by extension, of Perky’s trafficking in marijuana. Of course, in a week’s time it was entirely possible Perky was already dry. That gamble would just have to be taken. Kevin knew no other dealers. But he knew where Perky’s house was, as did anybody in school who was anybody, or aspired to be Somebody. Perky was the only kid from Santa Monica High to have attained the supreme status of tenant. His parents--one chronic w***e and one terminal alcoholic--shared the school board’s disgust of their incorrigible son, and were more than glad to let him move out on his own. Legend had it that Perky, obstreperous insider that he was, had traveled and partied with some of the most outrageous freaks imaginable, and could actually knock back a whole pint of tequila without barfing.

So Kevin found himself pedaling hard, up and down the little maddeningly neat avenues, till at last he stood panting across the street from Perky’s house.

It was an old, decrepit structure, all rotted lath and crumbling plaster. The yard was in an agony of neglect; overgrown with weeds, choking with refuse. Very little of the original paint remained at the time of Perky’s occupancy, so he and his wild friends had (according to legend) thrown a terrific three-day party; a party replete with every drug known, with fell motorcyclists and hot-blooded girls.

There on the opposing sidewalk, Kevin stood and admired their handiwork; the fruit of three days’ mind-blown labor.

Each windowsill was painted a different hideous color, and on most Kevin could see how the paint had oozed from the sills to dry on the walls or wretched hedges beneath. The tongue-and-groove sides of the house were a continuous painted mural; some portions ridiculously childish, some not so bad. Each side of the sharply angled roof bore a huge peace symbol in off-white paint, presumably for view by air. Kevin’s father, who had read about Perky’s house in the offended local newspaper in a famous article dealing with bizarre lifestyles, had often wondered aloud why the goddamn police didn’t come and raid the goddamn place, why the Air Force didn’t bomb it all to hell. Apparently the owner, who lived in Nevada and received his ill-gotten rent by money order, didn’t know or just didn’t care.

Kevin, having waited for a break in traffic, now pedaled across the street, up the drive’s curb outlet and along the oil-marred driveway to the front porch. An amazingly old Airedale drew itself up on spindly legs at his approach, disturbing a cloud of flies. The dog woofed a half-hearted, perfunctory warning, gave it up and crumpled back down, the cloud descending with him. “Nice doggie,” Kevin said, looping his lock and chain through the bike’s spokes and around the frame. He snapped shut the combination lock, turned and confronted the front door. The door’s window was smashed; a tie-dyed rag of a curtain fluttered behind the knives of splintered glass. This would be the door leading into the famed anteroom, the purported scene of so many lecherous parties. The house proper was built back of this narrow anteroom, so that the room itself poked out like an add-on, which it probably was.

Kevin could hear familiar music blasting inside the house. Moving his lips to the lyrics he realized it was The Doors, and that that was Morrison barking out Back Door Man. The music emboldened him. Kevin, front door man, stepped up and rapped three times on the scarred, splintering wood.

At once there was a sound of stumbling, of a scrambling body knocking over a piece of light furniture. Then an abrupt tapering in volume as the music ground to a halt. The house seemed to grow cold in the new silence, seemed to draw into itself. Kevin heard what might have been voices in distant parts of the house, but with all the air and street traffic he couldn’t be sure. Then came a quick pattering of bare feet on creaking floorboards. More silence. Kevin had, after half a minute of this silence, an odd feeling he was being watched. He turned his head and could have sworn he’d peripherally glimpsed a dark, intense face watching him from between parted newspaper curtains. But the newspaper curtains were closed. There was no face. He turned back to the door, thought for sure the corner of a curtain behind another window had just ruffled shut. The house was obviously occupied; why wouldn’t he/they answer? He knocked again, harder, small chips of the door’s smashed window tinkling at his feet. This time there was the sound of heavy furniture crashing on the floor, followed by a quickly muffled breaking of, perhaps, crockery. Thumping footsteps. Quick whispering. The music wound up to its former ear-splitting volume like an air raid siren. Clearly the plug had been pulled at his first knock, and just now reinserted. Uneasily, Kevin locked on the footsteps booming to the door.

The door was wrenched open and Perky squinted out, long tufts of dirty black hair disturbed by his quick movements. From the heavy footfalls, one would have expected a person at least the height and weight of Kevin, but Perky was a little guy, who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. Though Perky’s startling face inevitably brought on unintended stares, any initial interest was quickly replaced by a kind of morbid thanksgiving. Perky had lived a rough, cheap life on the streets. At some time during his violent childhood some rival or other had secured the weapon and opportunity to smash little Perky’s nose so badly as to make it, in profile, virtually unrecognizable as a nose at all. Perky’s forehead was quite broad, which in a way bore out the flattened nose and lent his face some congruity. But the bones making up the lower half of his face were thin and brittle and looked, except for a haze of black stubble and patchy acne, almost effeminate. A fractional harelip gave his mouth a permanent snarl, and when he spoke one couldn’t help but notice that all his front teeth, save a lonely incisor on the bottom gum, were MIA. The consequential awkwardness with consonants caused him to snap and grimace when he spoke, which only made him seem meaner than the frightened and frustrated survivor he was. His skin was the color of tallow, his eyes--with whites visible all around--the color of lead. Of course he was a most touchy and cynical young man, yet, in all Santa Monica, his reputation as generous host was without parallel. His alarming eyes narrowed now as they looked straight into the eyes of Kevin, two steps down. He edged out, partly closing the door to block the music roaring out like floodwater.

Kevin smiled crookedly. “What’s happening, Perky? ’Member me? Kevin Mikolajczyk. You told me last week at school you had lids for sale. Hope I’m not too late.”

Perky sneered. “Hate to have to bum you out, man, but I sold all that pot the same night. I got some more yesterday but it was a burn; all full of parsley and crap. That’s all right, though; partner of mine’s got a sawed-off .44. Tonight we’re gonna pay the dude who ripped me off a visit, blow off his balls and screw his old lady.”

“Wow!” Kevin said, jolted by the graphic mental image of Perky and his friends kicking in the door of a rip-off’s pad and exacting their rough street justice. Then he remembered his own tough luck and frowned wryly.

“Sorry to hear about you getting burned, Perky. I was really hoping you had some lids for sale, ’cause me and a coupla partners are jamming up to the City to catch the big concert, and it would sure be a drag to go dry. Do you,” he wondered unwisely, “know anywhere else I can score?”

Perky considered. “Yeah, well maybe I can do you right. Buddy of mine couple streets over’s got some lids. Really righteous s**t. I gotta go rap with him about something anyway. Come on in.”

Kevin stepped up and inside. As Perky slammed the door there came another smash and stumbling of feet. They were now standing in the well of the anteroom. An old gravy-spattered tablecloth concealed most of the room, while to their left upon entering were three wood steps leading up, then the doorway into the front room, which, though narrow, extended the width of the house. Kevin followed Perky up the steps and his pupils quickly dilated. The front room was all in gloom; scarcely a ray of light could squeeze beneath the mangled curtains or through interstices in the grime on the windows. All the furniture and appliances looked like junk thrown out of Salvation Army shops as beyond repair, or pilfered from Goodwill boxes in the dead of night. The carpet was a godforsaken mishmash of oily, jagged scraps, nailed indiscriminately wherever most convenient for the drunken decorators. Walls were riddled with holes and smudged with the acne of puerile graffiti. Wherever possible those holes had been covered with loud and outrageous posters depicting feverish rock stars. There were coffee tables scarred by cigarette burns, broken lamps with boxer shorts for shades. On the floor a child’s phonograph, hooked up to a bulky amplifier and public address loudspeaker, shrieked, crackled, skipped and sputtered through a very scratchy copy of The Doors’ first album. Perky knelt and turned the volume down to a tolerable level as Kevin shook his head in fascinated approval, a thin smile on his fat lips. This place was a revolutionary’s dream; the atmosphere positively reeked of lack of supervision and good times--of drugs, booze, and wild parties unhampered by the gross, antiquated antics of embarrassingly naïve parents. Kevin’s eyes, wide with wonder, continued their sweeping appraisal. Several brassieres were nailed triumphantly to the ceiling, their straps hanging in yellow withered surrender, like crepe streamers. A few badly-torn easy chairs hugged the walls, each with a single rusty spring poking up as a bitter unidigital comment on the state of its surroundings. It didn’t take much imagination to visualize those chairs occupied by bearded revolutionaries and sneering motorcycle outlaws, all engaged in the wholly laudable business of headlong whoopee-making.

Then the boy’s eyes grew wide and his smile crumbled. For he saw--thanks to the dull glint of a brass earring--a strange little man standing tensely in the corner. The man was lamentably scrawny and small, wearing a gray cut-off sweatshirt and baggy Levis, grungy sneakers. His hair was a riot of long black tangles shot with white, and amid that mess his tiny eyes were in constant flashing motion: from Kevin to Perky to the anteroom doorway, from Kevin to Perky and back to Kevin. He was apparently frozen with apprehension, and this motionlessness, the poor visibility, and the stranger’s congruity with the gaudy and wasted face of the room, had initially fooled Kevin into believing he was alone with Perky. Now the guy glared rabidly at Kevin, radiating an instantly infectious paranoia. He looked starved and punished, dogged and discombobulated by some utterly absurd vision.

“Hey, man, it’s cool,” Perky said, metronomically rocking an arm back and forth before the wildman, whose irises appeared to follow the motion while the orbs remained fixed. “This guy’s a friend,” Perky went on hypnotically, “a friend.” He turned to Kevin, indicating the quiet guy approvingly with a thumb, “He’s been stoked on speed for three days now without crashing. He can get you and your partners some righteous crystal for your trip if you want.”

Kevin looked at the quiet guy, feeling haunted, and shook his head.

“Whatever,” Perky said.

“How is this pot?” Kevin asked, feeling the quiet guy’s eyes scrambling across the back of his neck like tiny tarantulas.

“Like I said, man, it’s really good s**t. That’s why it goes for fifteen dollars. It’s from Lebanon, man, way over by China. Lebanese Lavender. You know.”

“Sure,” Kevin said. “Right.” He’d never heard of any such strain of marijuana, was reasonably certain this would be just so-so local stuff. But Perky’s transparent assurance was not entirely unexpected. In the groggy dawn of the age of Aquarius it was rare to score without complications or deception. He was also sure that this ounce didn’t really sell for fifteen dollars, that Perky would pocket the extra five. That, too, was to be expected, was part of the game.

“Here,” Perky said, reaching into his shirt pocket, “I’ve got a joint you can sample.” He fished out a thin marijuana cigarette and lit it with a showy gesture of cordial indulgence, took a long draw and passed it to Kevin.

Kevin sucked on the joint and could tell by its harsh tongue and wishy-washy bouquet that the weed was local, though of fairly good quality. A seed popped at the cherry as the joint began to spider, fell to smolder on the carpet.

Perky was straining to hold the smoke in, taking small quick gulps of air to force it deeper, his face growing red and contorted with the effort. “Whaddaya think?” he wheezed, letting the smoke out slowly.

Kevin exhaled, took another hit. He nodded and let the smoke out with a whoosh.

“Yeah,” he croaked, as the boo’s effects crept up on him. “Yeah.” He took another deep hit.

Little Perky was suddenly all impatience. “Well c’mon then, man…gimme the money. C’mon!” He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.

Kevin looked at him uncertainly, pondering the mystery of Perky’s words. And what was the reason he was…money. Why money? Because! A holdup? Kevin’s expression clouded progressively toward absolute blankness. He didn’t remember owing Perky any money.

“Well, c’mon,” Perky said exasperatedly. “You want a lid or not?”

Of course! That’s why Perky wanted money. Kevin could have kicked himself. He chuckled. This grass was better than he’d thought.

“What’s so funny?” Perky demanded.

“Sorry,” Kevin said. “This pot’s really good.” He pulled out his wallet and froze. There were all kinds of bills in the wallet; fives, tens, twenties. He was suddenly and unaccountably rich! Then he remembered Big Joe giving him the money and imagined himself slapping a palm on his forehead. He drew twice more on the cigarette. It burned his fingers and he gamely ate the roach.

“Yeah,” Perky was saying, nodding. “What’d I tell you?” He took a ten and a five from the fan Kevin had made of the bills. “That’s a lot of bread, man. I can do you a really good deal on a pound of this stuff.”

“That’s okay,” Kevin quacked, his voice seeming to originate in his nose. “I need the bucks.”

“Whatever. Back in a flash.”

“Oh, Perky,” Kevin post scripted, not thinking, “you won’t let any of it get away?”

Perky stopped dead and glared. “F**k no,” he said with quiet acidity. “I got enough stash I don’t gotta go pinching any lid I get for you.”

Kevin colored. “I was only kidding.”

“Yeah. So was I.”

He slammed the door in Kevin’s face and left him alone with the quiet guy. Following the slam, the record player’s stylus hopscotched across a particularly warped section of The End, ripped through the final grooves, and settled into a rhythmic bobbing at the label’s perimeter. Kevin knelt and lifted the arm, turned down the volume, started the record over. It was the only album around. Shrieking laughter blew out of one of the bedrooms, but right now all he wanted was solitude. He’d put his foot in it with Perky all right, no doubt about it, and maybe stiffed his one and only big opportunity to step up the social ladder on the off-chance he, a seasoned traveler, should ever return from his pilgrimage. It was that joint. Grass, grand old herb, had made his tongue stumble again. And now he was beginning to feel self-conscious; hulking and silly-looking. With Perky offended, the logical move was to try to build some sort of casual, cynical rapport with the quiet guy, who knew Perky and was therefore, most likely, something of a celebrity around town. But before he could approach a conversation the quiet guy jumped up and began peeking between the curtains, his head darting side to side. Temporarily satisfied, he cocked his head as if listening intently, repeatedly flexed his fingers, turned his head. Stared crazily at Kevin.

Kevin cleared his throat. “Big jam in Frisco,” he managed.

At last the quiet guy spoke:

“Man,” he said, and something behind his eyes shot past so quick Kevin got a kink in his neck trying to follow, “there’s always something heavy going down in Frisco, y’know?” The quiet guy’s jaw worked back and forth and round and round as his face fought to find a center. “People be going there getting wasted, man, y’know? Yeah man, anything, everybody, y’know? Heavy sounds, man, yeah heavy people getting stoned, y’know? Everybody!” Kevin could have sworn the man’s head had just spun around. Now the quiet guy shrank into himself like a rattler backing into its hole. From that imaginary hole two tiny coals peered guiltily at Kevin. “Did some crystal,” the quiet guy hissed, punching the side of his fist into the wasted crook of his arm. “Jeez! That’s my thing, y’know; if nobody digs it, well, that’s their thing, y’know?”

“Yeah,” Kevin said uncomfortably. “I know.”

The quiet guy came out of his crouch, smiling and gently shaking his head like a man suddenly made aware of some mild irony. “Yeah, man, dudes be amping out in The Haight, y’know? Twenty cats to one spike, man, hairy, let me tell you, a super rush, y’know? All of us, man, everybody, man! Getting jacked-up, y’know?” The quiet guy pressed his face up to Kevin’s in a pose of confrontation. “Some dudes me mainlining skag,” he whispered threateningly, “y’know? Heavy man, very heavy.” He cocked his head, nodding. “Very heavy, man, very. Heavy.” His eyes rolled like coins. “Getting wasted, man, y’know? To the max, man! Man,” he concluded, “man, there’s always something heavy going down in Frisco, y’know man? Always. Y’know?”

“Right,” Kevin said. “Right on, man.” But something was nagging him. “The Haight,” he mumbled, almost inaudibly. “I…I guess you mean the City.” He asked incredulously, “Guys are shooting up? But that’s not…right…that’s not what Eddie said…” He demanded in a voice thick with urgency, “But what’re the people like? I mean, it’s all peace and love, right?”

The quiet guy’s eyes went foggy at the word people. His stare did not seem to register Kevin before him, but was rather focused inward, as if the boy’s question were a real poser. He spun around and darted to the newspaper curtains, then systematically moved along the wall, carefully separating pages to peek outside.

“Who--who are you looking for?” Kevin asked, worrying that perhaps the quiet guy knew something that he, Kevin, didn’t.

The quiet guy whirled, blinking. A fevered look of warped understanding made his eyes appear to sink deeper into their caves. He edged along the wall until he was as far from Kevin as the room’s confines allowed. He looked frantically to the front door as if debating dashing out into the arms of a lurking gendarmerie, then quickly back to Kevin. His mouth fell open, a string of saliva joining the lips. Pressing his palms flat against the wall, he froze in the white-hot glare of an imaginary spotlight.

“Um…I have to use the head,” Kevin mumbled. “I’ll catch you later.” He turned and pushed past the soiled bedspread separating front room and dining room. “What a trip,” he breathed, and realized he was trembling. After a moment he gently pulled back an edge of the bedspread to peek into the front room. The quiet guy was back at the windows, inching aside the classifieds, carefully looking out. Kevin let go the bedspread and turned to contemplate the small dining room.

Garbage all over the place. The room stank of three-days-old refried beans and of cigarettes doused in beer. One leg of the dining table had collapsed; plates and utensils, crusty with the molding residue of meals long forgotten, were scattered on the dusty, tattered carpet. True; Perky’s place was rumored to be a mess, but not like this.

Now, instead of awaiting Perky’s return where they’d parted, Kevin was stuck with having to make a choice. He could go, a stranger treading private premises, through either of two doorways he was facing. Retracing his steps into the front room was out of the question. He stood there a good while, twisting a lip with forefinger and thumb; his mind, murky from the grass, interpreting sounds as a kind of mixed track of music and sound effects. To his left was an improvised door of stringed ceramic beads. From behind this partition came the orchestral braying of a television, with choral accompaniment of soprano giggling and baritone guffaws. To his right was a hanging American flag. From behind this flag came the sounds of more voices from the kitchen; voices gurgling like streams, rumbling like quakes. Kevin listened closely, and was unsurprised to discover he couldn’t identify a single voice in either room. The marijuana’s addling effects had subtly grown more pronounced throughout this steady bombardment of curious impressions, and his mind was so busy merrily making mud pies out of each new thought that the simplest problem automatically became a crisis. He stood stock-still, dreading the likely outcome of any confrontation. But his choices were simple. He could confront the strangers in the kitchen. He could confront the strangers in the television room. He could stand here, confronted by his own cowardice, until Hell froze over.

Kevin impulsively pushed past the flag into the kitchen, where the worst conceivable thing happened: all movement and conversation ceased abruptly as everybody turned to stare at him. Out of all nine or ten people he knew only Gary, the sycophantic, squat little Jewish informer who had ratted on him for having marijuana in his gym locker last month. There were three girls in the room; the teasing, coquettish type, and each possessed slender limbs and seductive eyes. As in an advertisement for hair dye, the hair shade from girl to girl varied to the extreme: an ashy blonde, a fiery redhead, and a brunette whose long waves were a glossy raven black. The blonde was perched on the lap of a guy wearing wraparound sunglasses and mechanic’s overalls, a paisley-pattern headband keeping his long hair out of his face. He zoned out on Kevin, grinning stupidly. The redhead, interrupted while drawing little heart shapes on the kitchen wall in bright vermilion lipstick, stared at Kevin drunkenly before yawning widely. The raven-haired girl--a young woman, really--had apparently been flirting with three strangers sitting on the sink counter. Kevin cursed his intrusion. Two of the guys were campus honor boys, wearing the blue and gold Letterman jackets with the school’s insignia on the front. The guy in the middle looked tough and dangerous; dark hair combed to cover the tops of his ears, a cruel jet-black mustache. Weekend hippie, Kevin thought. He avoided the guy’s unwavering stare, felt instinctively that he was a bully; maybe some punk on leave from the Marines. Christ, the way he looked he could even be a narc. The three other boys in the room were about Kevin’s age, and were gathered in a tight circle on the floor, like aborigines around a campfire. One made an obscene noise at him, bugging out his eyes and puffing his cheeks in a mocking caricature. Now Kevin could see the object of the boys’ concentration. Two were shaking a cracked aquarium back and forth on the floor. Inside the aquarium was a small, terrified brown rat recently fished from the garbage. The third boy was using a slender steak knife to playfully poke the scrabbling creature. This boy now looked at Kevin and grinned ear to ear, plunged the blade into the rat, held it up bloody and squirming for Kevin’s revolted inspection…

…but the raven-haired girl had the loveliest red, red lips, the brightest, bright green cat eyes Kevin had ever seen…

Oh, she easily outshone the other girls, with her skin so creamy and white it seemed almost translucent. Her jaw line was a fine, sweeping cut, her neck slender and gracefully elongated--like the rest of her figure tapering and so…very supple. But what really blew him away was the LARGEST AND FIRMEST PAIR OF BREASTS he’d ever witnessed on a figure…so…oh, so slender. They were--were--barely concealed by the lapels of her unbuttoned! beige cotton shirt, which was casually tucked into the waistband of a pair of skintight snow-white slacks. This tucked bit of shirt promised to pop…FREE! at any moment, as each breath or shifting of weight worried at the waistband’s hold. Kevin, instantly in love, supposed correctly that she was an enchantress much sought after. But in reply to his stare of longing she giggled, then buried her face in the lap of one of the honor boys and laughed uncontrollably. Despite her sparkling eyes she’d plainly had a lot to drink.

“Debbie,” said the dangerous-looking guy, patting the girl on her fantastic behind and nodding toward Kevin, “kiss this dude and see if he turns into a prince.”

Gary laughed. It was a hollow, underhanded laugh. “Hey, man. Hey, hey; what’s happening, Irving? What’s on your mind, man?”

Kevin’s flabby cheeks turned crimson. These people were making a fool of him.

“Just tripped in to say ‘hi’.” His voice was a hoarse rattle. He straightened, said with businesslike demeanor, “I’m waiting for Perky to get back. He went to score me a lid.”

“Why don’t you just trip out?” suggested the guy with the mustache.

Kevin cleared his throat. His mouth was suddenly very dry. “I was talking to Gary,” he said weakly.

“You’re talking to me.” The guy lowered himself from the counter with catlike grace. He looked as powerful and obstinate as a rhinoceros.

“Oh Christ,” Gary said. “I mean, look you guys, don’t go starting no fights in here, okay? Perky told me to watch the pad and keep things cool if he leaves. So if you wanna hassle, do it, like, do it out back.” He shrugged and dropped his arms; body language meant to convey a simple message to everybody present: he wanted absolutely no part.

All eyes turned to Kevin expectantly.

“Look, I don’t even know this guy--”

“My name’s Dave. Your name’s S**t.”

“--and I didn’t come here to hassle anybody. You know. Peace is my bag.”

“Oh my God,” said the raven-haired girl. “Peace is his bag.”

The big guy shoved Kevin hard, sent him crashing into the kitchen wall. The redhead inadvertently drew a line across her hearts motif and moved out of the way. The talking and joking had ceased. Someone in the adjacent bedroom thumped playfully on the wall in response to the thud of Kevin’s poor head.

“Listen, creep,” Kevin’s antagonist said viciously, “if you want trouble, you’re f*****g with the right guy.” He grabbed Kevin’s shirt at the lapels and lifted the boy a good foot and a half off the floor. As big and as heavy as Kevin was, the dark-haired bully had hauled him up with what seemed a minimum of effort.

“No man,” Kevin gasped. “No sir. I don’t want any trouble.”

Now the raven-haired girl tugged at the punk’s sleeve, looking annoyed.

“Oh, come on, David. You’re not impressing anybody.”

Kevin, sputtering in a miasma of beer breath, squirmed against the wall, completely helpless. His glasses hung over his mouth, his face steadily grew darker as his assailant’s knuckles pressed into the soft wedge of flesh over his windpipe. He intermittently heard arguing voices, then a very direct challenge as Dave looked back up, grimacing. “You want trouble?”

“No sir,” Kevin croaked.

“Then split.”

“Yes sir.”

He let go of Kevin’s shirt and the boy dropped in a heap, retching, at last lurching to his feet to stagger into the dining room. Kevin was half-conscious of voices in the kitchen, but the words bounced around in his skull like caroming billiard balls.

“You’re quite a man, aren’t you? A real tiger.”

“Yeah, yeah. And who’re you supposed to be, Pocahontas?”

“Oh, when are you gonna grow up, David? That poor kid couldn’t be more than fifteen.”

“Listen, s**t. This is my fist, see? I want you to repeat what you just said, real slow this time so I don’t miss a word.”

Kevin plowed through the bedspread, whacked his toe on the doorjamb, and stumbled into the front room waving his arms like a drowning man. The quiet guy, running the gamut of his wildest nightmares, almost climbed the wall as Kevin blundered by, while Kevin, choking on his own saliva, used one hand to knead his throat and the other to guard his head against any obstacle he might encounter.

Through the front room doorway, past the gravy-stained tablecloth, and into the trashy anteroom. Kevin plopped down on a badly lacerated couch and a cloud of dust enveloped him. He coughed.

Someone was tiptoeing through the front room. There was a hell of a racket as the quiet guy stepped squarely on the record’s turning face, a moment passed, and the tablecloth was pulled aside as the raven-haired girl looked in. One side of her lovely face was bright red. The sparkle had left her eyes and rolled down her cheeks, to be wiped away like eyeliner. She sniffled, smiled weakly and sat, with a springy settling of breasts, next to him, snapping open a glossy black handbag embossed with turquoise and silver wildflowers. From this she exhumed two silky hankies, her compact, a filterless Camel, and a disposable lighter. In the compact’s little round mirror she watched herself light the cigarette, dabbing at her subdued green tigress eyes, speaking to her reflection:

“Look, I’m sorry about David. He’s always like that after a few beers.”

Kevin grunted noncommittally. “He your boyfriend?”

“Oh, he’s not my old man or anything like that, if that’s what you mean, and I’m not his old lady. We’ve shacked up a few times, but we’ve never felt, like, all that serious about each other. I don’t think I’ve ever felt really serious about anybody.” She paused to peel a tobacco fiber off her lip. “Anyway, it was sweet of you to take it so well, and please don’t hold it against David. He can’t help it when he gets drunk. I mean, nobody is really responsible for what they do or say when they get drunk. Why else would you drink, if not to have a good time and forget your responsibilities? So it’s not really his fault, is it? Oh, it’s not your fault either, don’t get me wrong. Just bad timing. You had as much right to be there as anybody.” She switched her gaze from the little mirror for a moment to look at him with a transitory curiosity. “Just what are you doing here, anyway?”

Kevin yanked himself back together. His attention had of course been focused on the gentle gyrations, vivacious vibrations, and miscellaneous mind-bending movements of the raven-haired girl’s magnificent, mouth-watering mammaries. Now he looked at his hands defensively, afraid to meet her eyes lest she read the guilt cringing behind the black ports of his pupils. But he was certain--certain she had seen.

“I’m wait--I’m waiting for Perky,” he said gropingly, his voice damp and hot in his throat. “He went to score me a lid.”

“Oh, I really am a mess. Crying like a little girl. Over nothing, am I right? Here,” she commanded, handing him the compact, “you hold this.” She then handed him her half-smoked cigarette. This left her hands free to finger shiny tufts of hair into place while exhaling twin streams of smoke from her exquisitely chiseled nostrils. And he sat there, his own hands wretchedly full, helplessly staring from one marvelous melon to the other while they dipped and rose, as if puppeteered by the fingers arranging those long waving tufts of hair. He’d already forgotten the incident with Dave. She finished with the hair and, to make matters worse, plucked a lipstick tube from her handbag and began, occasionally licking her lips with a slender red tongue, to paint her lips a moist, vulval pink. Kevin squirmed in gnashing misery, wanting desperately to bury his head in the hot valley between those impossibly buoyant mounds.

He had his inhibitions.

In the first place, he was too inexperienced to find the courage--he was certain such an ungentlemanly response would fill the raven-haired girl with rage and disgust. Second, he was becoming aroused to the point of giddiness. He felt sweaty and faint. And he was spellbound, hypnotically affixed to the bewitching quivering of those barely concealed love loaves. But most important, and most perturbing, was his own numb realization that he was already in the grip of a need so powerful it was making him physically ill.

“I know it’s just sickening,” the raven-haired girl was saying, “to see a guy act like that. But he’s not really like that, he’s really sweet, really. No really, David’s like that, really, and I wouldn’t want him, or any other guy, any other way. Really. Honey, I’m really sorry about the whole thing. Sometimes I think he likes trouble, but that’s just the way guys are, I guess. I mean, I don’t need to tell you what guys are like, am I right? Haha. Not that I give a damn what he does. He can play up to that little bleached-blonde b***h all he wants; it’s none of my business. It’s his business, not mine. Am I right?”

She paused to consider him again, her expression, Kevin felt, not unlike pity. Then she leaned close, wraithlike, seemingly without the slightest shift in weight. Kevin trembled little tremors of panic, perspiring in the heady fog of her breath, all beer and nicotine and cosmeticized femininity. Very near, she tickled his eardrum with that manipular breath, her tiny voice whispering, “I just don’t give a damn.”

Kevin recoiled from the intended peck of moist painted lips on hot puffy cheek, his ears burning bright red. She drew back in mild offense.

He tore his heart from her eyes; his own eyes, being the furtive and traitorous telltale red of a pot smoker, certain to reveal his agony. All the glib lines and knowing looks he’d cooked up over thousands of lonely hours were instantly dissolved in the aching reality of her loveliness; and now, in the shadow of that loveliness, his own body seemed to grow clammy and foul. Sick with embarrassment, he turned his head to face the still life of dusty objects in the anteroom’s corner: a poster reading LOVE THE ONE YOU’RE WITH, the paper peeling and discolored, as was the wallpaper, by last January’s rain; a ruptured beanbag chair, its innards scattered all about the room; a half-collapsed mahogany end table--perhaps once a fine piece--shoved in the corner and bearing: a dozen empty beer cans; ashtrays overflowing with mashed butts, ashes, and peach pits; an ice cream cone turned end-up, the ice cream itself having dried trailing down the table’s legs; a small portable television with coat hanger antenna, its dark picture tube miraculously intact. Captured on that dark convex surface was a fisheye image of Kevin, his head and shoulders flattened and expanded comically. The image of the raven-haired girl was very tiny behind his flat mountainous face, and as she drew back she grew tinier, minute, vanished.

“Oh, Christ, I didn’t mean it like that,” she said wearily, having caught the agitation in his eyes before he turned his head. “Really.” She placed a reassuring hand on his thigh and squeezed, to let him know, and to remind herself, that she was a real, live, flesh-and-blood woman with thoughts and feelings of her own, and not just another mindless, flirtatious fleshpot. “Really I didn’t. Why is it that whenever I’m upset I think roses and talk crap?”

Kevin tried to correct his posture, but there was a weird energy keeping his body crimped unnaturally, bent away from the raven-haired girl’s sultry radiation. He’d never been this close to a real, live, flesh-and-blood woman before, let alone one with a slim ivory hand on his leg. The hand seemed to be passing some sort of current through his body, and, so close to the hand, Kevin’s chubby little pecker was beginning to respond. If she didn’t remove her hand soon, he knew, there would be a violent internal upheaval; he would erupt and ooze off the couch into a silly-looking puddle on the floor.

“Listen,” she said, “I really am sorry about David making such as a*s of himself.” She removed her hand and rose to her feet, embarrassed.

“No sweat,” Kevin whispered hoarsely. “He was just stoned, like you said.”

Out of sympathy, more for herself than for Kevin, the girl now experimented with tact, saying, “You take it just like a man,” fully knowing how important those words could be to a boy at his stage of development. “Really.”

Kevin blushed furiously.

The girl paused in the doorway, looking back over her shoulder, holding the old tablecloth away and presenting a captivating view of her backside.

Her snow-white slacks stretched gracefully over her beautifully rounded cheeks, clinging with heart-pounding precision to every perfect curve. Her stance was statuesque; weight on the right leg, one hand resting assertively on the left hip--just the way nudes posed in the photographs Kevin had hungrily, secretly studied. Her hair fell loosely to her shoulders, an apostrophe-lock dangling in front of her eye as she looked back.

She was, Kevin thought, far more beautiful than any of the glossy, margined girlies he’d ever admired. The look on that face should have been erotic: oily, sexy, turned-on. But she was only gazing sadly, and he was gripped by the terrible realization that she was looking right through him, not seeing him at all.

The girl smiled sweetly, her eyes sparkling. She cupped and shook her right hand at waist level, blew him a kiss and whispered, “Peace is my bag,” before letting the curtain fall. The incredible image dissolved. But the vision--that one grief-triggering, mind-rending exaggeration of reality that can make or break a personality--remained onstage, and Kevin swore to himself right then and there, even as its author passed out of his life forever, that he would never lose it.

He stared bleakly at the tablecloth. Then at the wall. Standing, he tore the cloth aside and peered out. Kevin stepped anxiously into the front room, but the raven-haired girl was nowhere to be seen.

She was gone.

The front door flew open and Perky blew in. He plucked a rolled wax sandwich bag from under his belt, handed it to Kevin.

“Here, fucknut.”

The quiet guy, his hands clenched into pathetic bony fists, wailed horribly and half-crossed the room. “Man!” he cried, “don’t ever do that! I thought you were the pigs.”

Kevin tucked the bag into his shirt pocket. It felt like a good-sized ounce. “Thanks,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. And look at the f*****g tape. I never even opened it. Did you hold down the fort? Have any hassles?”

“No…yes and no. Everything’s cool.” Kevin stepped outside, plodded down the steps and stood on the walk, knowing his heart was heading for hell in a hurry. It was as though all his gingerly-embraced, sluggishly-entertained reasons for keeping on were being left behind in that house, his soul scampering puppywise at the raven-haired girl’s nerd-damning heels, or hovering plaintively to now and again be caught as a silly-looking reflection in her compact’s all-seeing mirror. “Later,” he said. “And thanks again, Perky. Really.”

Perky was about to close the door when his jolted features softened. He cocked his head quizzically and studied the look of absence on Kevin’s face, as though he too could feel the power humming like a well-tuned engine inside the house. There was a long and somber silence. “Have a good trip,” he said quietly. “Watch out for our Boys in Blue.” A thought struck him and he smiled. He closed the door gently.

Alone, Kevin automatically genuflected at his bicycle’s rear wheel and began, with thick nerveless fingers, to work the tumblers of the combination lock. The raven-haired girl’s face, lips puckered for casual near-kiss, swam into focus on the truncated knob on the lock’s round, numbered face. The face drew nearer, and, as in the reflection on a Christmas tree’s bulb, the smooching lips enlarged until they became the whole image; the lips parting as they grew closer and larger, then only the black hole leading into her mouth, which grew larger and larger until it completely filled his senses. A sharp pain stabbed behind his eyes, grew intense and passed, left him staring at the lock in his hand. The lock was open. Perspiration was thick in his eyebrows. He stood weightlessly, took off the lock and chain and secured them under the bike’s seat. The world revolved giddily and a metallic taste came to his palate as he mounted. He coasted across the flat driveway to the sidewalk and veered blindly on the pavement. There was a jarring thump as his bicycle lurched off the curb. The jarring wrenched him back in time to avoid spilling, and then he was coasting clumsily alongside parked cars.

A man with close-cropped hair and a very red face leaned his head out the passenger-side window of a passing car. “You stupid-a*s hippie! Watch where the f**k you’re going!”

Up yours, Kevin thought.

With another jolt he remembered Mike and Eddie, and was just pulling into a gas station to make a call when he saw them riding his way.

Eddie turned his snubby, freckled face and pointed.

Eddie had reddish-brown hair brushed down all around, to make it look long as possible. He was tiny and intelligent, bashful and thin, with large brown doll eyes wide with winsome enthusiasm.

Mike, a spry, testy boy with very white skin and very black hair, was wearing cutoffs and his big brother’s Army shirt. Mike was so scrawny that, shirtless, the veins of his arms and chest showed clearly. He looked up darkly and waved. Then they were both pedaling hard.

“We figured you were at your house,” Eddie said breathlessly, “but your mom said you left already, so we looked all over for you. We’re ready to go.”

“Yeah,” Mike said, “let’s go. Let’s get the f**k out of here.”

Kevin grinned conspiratorially and pulled out the fat sandwich bag.

Eddie’s eyes opened even wider. “Far out!” He rubbed his hands together in anticipation.

“Hey, put it away!” Mike hissed. “Goddamn you Kevin, you’re gonna get us busted!”

Kevin tucked the contraband in his sleeping roll. “Well then,” he said, surprised to hear his voice so steady, “all we need is some rolling papers and we can get going.”

“I brung plenty,” Mike said proudly, his voice ringing as in anthem: “Banana-flavored and wheat straw!” He tamped it down a tad. “And I got two roach clips and swiped my old man’s pipe.”

“And I’ve got all the pots and pans and a bunch of canned food,” Eddie panted.

They looked at one another nervously. Mike raised his arms and Kevin saw that the middle finger of each of Mike’s hands was erect in the flip-off sign. Suddenly Mike cried out, with rude loudness and all the sincerity he could muster, “F**k you, you goddamned cocksucking son of a b***h of a town!” Eddie gave a war whoop and they all began riding to the corner. The light was against them, and as they were waiting for it to change Kevin turned and looked back to where the roof of Perky’s house jutted sharply above the others.

His vision returned, only this time it was not the numbing, unforgettably curvaceous pose. The raven-haired girl was on her knees in this scene, wearing only a few strategically draped scraps of silky fabric; fragments as flimsy and tattered as her recent hauteur. She was looking up repentantly; bruised, bemused, and belittled--all hair and bosom and tender femininity--and her DEFEATED BUT FOR YOU, MY LOVE eyes were rapidly scanning the cold, hard features Kevin’s generous imagination had ascribed to his face.

Don’t go, the girl’s eyes begged.

Please.

“I’ll be back,” Kevin said aloud.

His friends turned and stared.

The light changed to green.

The girl in Kevin’s vision trembled.

“I’ll be waiting,” she said.