Beach Blanket Bozo

Chapter 4 of Carnival

Carnival

Chapter 4

Beach Blanket Bozo

joon 29 1967

jime

im sndn this frum uh mlbawx in krpntreu

if u look awn uh map ul c thats olmos 70 milz nawt bad 4 uh da an uh hafs rid

spnt thu nit awn thu bch gawt stond an prtd wut uh trip

howz thu lag btr i hop don fel 2 bad iv gawt uh sunbrn an mix gawt kaf kramps an ed kawt uh kold but thats kool iv rele tufnd up uh lawt jime an thu sunbrn duznt bawthr me uh bit im gunu hav uh sooprtan bi thu tim we mak thu h8

did u dig that

thu h8

thats wut we kawl it uhp her

nuthen much 2 rit uhbowt rele its jus bin uh konstunt prt good ppl good xrsiz good dop an ech pasen da brengz us that much klosr 2 paerudis

wish u wr her

wl thats awl 4 now jime tim 2 go rol unuthr joent

trublz trublz

tak it ez

kevn

Kevin opened the mailbox hatch carefully. Slowly raised his other hand. Released the letter. He let the hatch slam shut and took a deep breath before lowering his rigid arms an inch at a time. For a full minute he stood like a man of stone, eyes closed, sweat trickling down the back of his neck.

The label on the salve’s container had promised cooling relief, but this hadn’t been the case for Kevin. He winced when his shirt, sticky with the stuff, clung to his chest and shoulders as he gently turned on his heel.

Eddie, sitting slumped against the diner’s wall, called Kevin by name with the gasping decrescendo of delirium. The fat boy slowly opened his eyes.

They’d made excellent time this morning, having quickly abandoned their chilly little beach for the warming exertions of the road. The previous day’s sickness left Kevin empty and irresolute, irritable and ill. But he was obsessed by sunburn. All morning he’d been silent and moody, answering Mike’s painfully abbreviated gibes with grunts and with monosyllables. Having looked forward to this adventure as a gift from whatever gods watched over ambitious young revolutionaries, Kevin now saw those same gods deriving mischievous delight from rubbing his mortal nose in his enthusiasm. Yet this morning he’d never once allowed himself to lag. His bitterness had provided the balls to push him all the way to this perpetually summery little community barely ten miles south of Santa Barbara.

Eddie’s eyes were swollen, his jaw slack. Every few seconds he would sniffle and moan. Kevin, walking over stiffly, wondered again if Eddie had an allergy unknown to any of them. He was in pretty bad shape for a boy suffering a simple exposure cold.

“Bike says your badgakes are ready,” Eddie said miserably, placing a hand over his eyes. When he removed the hand his fingers were wet with tears. “I ca’d ead eddythig righd dow.”

Kevin nodded. “Thanks, Eddie. I wrote Jimmy you said Hi.”

Eddie dropped his head in acknowledgment, but lacked the strength to haul it back up.

“Why don’t you stay out here in the sun for a while, Eddie. It’ll do wonders for your cold.” Eddie, managing to half-raise his head, immediately let it fall backward and roll side to side against the diner’s wall, looking like a man undergoing intense interrogation. His entire body went limp. Kevin walked inside to join Mike at a window booth, asking heartily, “How’s the legs?” while seating himself with care.

“Not so hot,” Mike grumbled. “Every time I walk it feels like my calves are tearing apart. And when I sit down they cramp.” An untouched bowl of cornflakes was on his side of the table. On Kevin’s side was a big plate of steaming buttermilk hotcakes with elderberries and chocolate whipped cream, a side dish of bacon and scrambled eggs smothered in Tabasco, a plate of hash browns with chopped onion and chives, butter-drenched french toast topped by praline sprinkles and orange-mint marmalade, and a large glass of iced prune juice with lemon slices and maraschinos.

“How about you?” Mike asked indifferently.

“Ha!” Kevin barked. “A little sunburn. But you don’t see me bitching about it, do you? What’d you guys expect, a pleasure cruise? Figures I’d be stuck with a couple of crybabies.” It felt good to say that. Real good. He rubbed his hands vigorously, elbows held tightly against his ribs. “Well! This outdoor life sure brings out the appetite in a guy!”

Mike glared, good and hard. “It sure brings out the bullshitter in a guy, too. Just you wait, hopalong. Next time you’re stuck crapping out your brains somewhere…just you wait.”

Kevin chuckled lustily, but forced himself to eat slowly. When he’d finished he belched for effect, only half-satisfied. Mike still hadn’t touched his cereal.

Kevin smiled tightly. “Don’t pout, sonny boy. Papa’s gonna burn one bad-a*s doobie and fix you right up.”

Mike wobbled to his feet like a newborn colt. Kevin tipped the waitress lavishly and paid for both their meals. Mike wasn’t impressed; he knew a fool when he saw one.

The boys rejoined Eddie, who hadn’t moved a muscle since Kevin’s departure. Only an occasional moan verified he was alive at all. Kevin’s mock gaiety grew oddly real as he considered the extent of Eddie’s and Mike’s compound misery.

“A fine bunch of revolutionaries we are! Only one day gone and we’re all ready to throw in the towel!” He flashed a joint, cried, “To the Movement!” and fired it up with a flourish. “To Love and Peace and Good Dope and Heavy Sounds forever and ever and ever!” He took an enormous draw, handed it to Eddie.

Eddie allowed his head to roll in Kevin’s direction. He peered at the reefer doubtfully, his eyes so watery and puffy he had to tilt back his head to see. The flesh around his nostrils was red and inflamed from constant furious sniffling; his lips rubbery and limp. He couldn’t decide whether a toke was worth the effort, so he just sat there, looking gloomily at the rising smoke, and at Kevin frozen in the awkward pose of leaning down with arm extended, eyes growing redder and redder as he held in the hit, comradely grin gradually dissolving to a tortured grimace, smoke escaping from his nostrils in tiny spurts. Finally Eddie poked out a trembling hand, accepted the cigarette and drew on it weakly. He held in the smoke for half a second before going all to pieces, hacking and retching and sneezing and drooling.

Kevin simultaneously exhaled, his explosion nearly matching Eddie’s. After a minute, when he’d caught his breath, he realized that the one elongated hit was all he’d need--he was already tripping. He looked at his friends dully, at a loss for words or action. Mike was hitting the joint now, and Kevin suddenly saw Mike as a frustrated enemy masquerading as a revolutionary for cheap thrills and the exploitation of their friendship. The insight passed instantly, and Mike became a scrawny boy getting high with his buddies; a third comrade, albeit an annoying one, on a journey that was to become a turning point in their lives. The background and boy became a cartoon, again became real. Kevin swiveled his gaze to the street. Cars were zipping around like ants. Doll-like humans dotted a backdrop of cardboard houses painted in watercolors. He felt his eyes throbbing like twin hearts, realized his breath was held. He let it out with a sigh, felt a hundred years old, then forty, then an awkward sixteen again. Kevin found he couldn’t face the clockwork reality of the street, so he turned back to his friends, his eyes finally resting on Eddie simply because they had to rest somewhere. After a moment Eddie seemed to feel Kevin’s eyes on him, and slowly turned his head to return the stare as best he could. Embarrassed, Kevin creaked to his feet and mounted his bike. Eddie followed suit sniffling, Mike introspectively, still sucking on the joint.

They rode on through the morning almost like strangers. By one o’clock the day had peaked at 86 degrees, and their private gripes were being dissolved by the remarkable recuperative powers of sunshine and unrestricted liberty. By three Eddie’s cold or allergic reaction had vanished without a trace. The boys barreled through Santa Barbara, stopping only to drop water balloons on cars from an overpass. A long refreshing swim at Goleta Beach did wonders for Mike’s cramps, and even Kevin’s sunburn was forgotten in the exhilaration of the day. A vendor at Naples provided kraut dogs, pretzels, and tall cups of Fresca. They raced on the open highway and Mike won hands down. At fancy swerves it was Eddie all the way. But at ‘chicken’ Kevin came on like an eighteen-wheeler. They smoked another joint and zinged pebbles at petrified spider crabs on the rocks past El Capitan Beach. And the sun crept down and turned everything lemon, then amber, then tawny gold. And up from the sea came cooling salt breezes, smelling of algae and things submarine.

And Kevin was lying flat on his back looking up at Eddie’s tiny face, which seemed miles away, and wishing Eddie would quit calling his name over and over and over. Why couldn’t Eddie see that he was right here, right in front of him, and how many times did Kevin have to tell him that he was right here and could hear him loud and clear?

“Right here,” Kevin said thickly, the words ringing in his skull. He forced his eyes open wide. “Right here!” he said, loud and clear.

“Wow,” Eddie said. “You okay now, Kevin?”

Mike’s face appeared over Eddie’s shoulder. “Told you he was faking.”

Kevin sat up. His face was wet with tears. His left shoulder hurt like hell.

Eddie steered a fuzzy pair of glasses into view and precariously guided the arms to straddle Kevin’s brow. The world swam into focus. Kevin raised his heavy hands and took over from Eddie, setting the crooks of his spectacles in place behind his ears. One of the plastic arms was twisted and gouged. “What happened?” he asked, because it seemed the appropriate thing to say.

“S**t,” Mike said. “Crybaby.”

“You don’t remember?” goggled Eddie. “We were all just coasting along having a good old time. You said something that didn’t make any sense--something about hairs in the air. I slowed down like you were and said, ‘What?’ and you just kind of looked past me for a second. Then you went face-first over your handlebars and did a nosedive onto the road. I couldn’t figure you out.”

“Hairs in his head is more like it,” Mike said.

“So I got off my bike and bent down to check you out. I thought you might’ve been hurt. Then I saw: you were having some kind of fit. Your eyeballs were rolled way up in your head like that Incredible X-ray Man guy, and your mouth was working real funny, and you were squeaking and burping.”

“Spastic,” Mike whispered nastily, his eyes gleaming over Eddie’s shoulder. “Spazz-o!”

“Then I remembered this film we watched in Miss Phugitall’s class, and they had this guy in it--only he was faking--and he was behaving just like you were.”

Eddie said reasonably, “They stuck a wooden spoon in his mouth, so he wouldn’t chew up his tongue, I guess,” and then, with profound frustration, “but I didn’t have a wooden spoon!” He blinked at Kevin, shook his head compassionately. “All I could find to use was the arms on your glasses, which were right next to me on the ground. So I stuck in one of the arms and you really gobbled it up. But I guess it stopped you from biting your tongue; you’re not bleeding.”

“Scarfhound,” Mike said. “Eats anything.”

Kevin nursed his shoulder with heavy electric fingers. His toes had the same numb-tingle, but the scary feeling passed as he stood and walked around. Eddie had to convince him a dozen times that he and Mike weren’t just pulling his leg and waiting for the right moment to let him in on it--he couldn’t, for the life of him, remember a thing other than riding along feeling splendid in the late afternoon sun. It made no real sense, but even as he paced he began to sense a connection with that chilly wet November night, when he and Eddie had huddled in the Mikolajczyks’ boxlike garage loft and Eddie had gone on and on about the Movement. Kevin had been a fascinated, avid listener, and had pumped Eddie--who had been only too thrilled to provide--for all the juicy details about Free Love, psychedelia, communal living, an under-thirty society, and open nudity. And Eddie had played guru, lighting an enormous marijuana cigarette and passing it to his new friend, and Kevin had taken his first puff. Many people don’t feel the effects of THC the first time; some never do at all. Perhaps they simply refuse to relax and enjoy, fearing they’ll expose their secrets and weaknesses to any persons who just might be checking them out, never suspecting that those persons might also be feigning nonchalance for fear of exposing their own secrets and weaknesses to any persons who just might be checking them out while actually feigning nonchalance. But for sure Kevin wasn’t one of these social combatants, forever inspecting their armor for chinks. His secrets, at that time, weren’t worth shielding, and his weaknesses, he felt, were already exposed for all to see. After three draws he was sucked away from all the silly, self-promoting games continuously played by the insecure when dealing with others. He froze in a gawking stupor, unable to say a word, staring at Eddie. Eddie, who was just as high, had also been rendered mute by the drug, and in their embarrassment they had fought eye contact, turning aside to study either of the two rectangular doors of the loft. The awkward silence, broken only by the forlorn pinging of rainwater hitting the aluminum downspout, had grown and grown, and both boys had continued to look fixedly at a different door as if awaiting a revelation, too self-conscious to even clear their throats. Just when the silence had become deafening, and the pretense of composure too painful to support, both doors had been yanked open to reveal the awesome bulk of Big Joe, filling up all the space like a hairless King Kong, a simian snarl squishing his sweaty, purpling face. At last Joe’d found an outlet for his rage.

“You’re sure you’re okay now?” Eddie asked as they rode along.

“Yeah, Eddie. Yeah…I guess I’m fine. I don’t feel any worse, but it sure is spooky. I think it might have something to do with these little blackouts I’ve been having lately.”

“The heat,” Eddie said. “That must have been heatstroke.”

“Some kind of stroke.”

“We won’t have to ride so hard tomorrow,” Eddie offered considerately. “We’re really making good time, anyway. Look,” he said, pointing at a cluster of palms sprouting idyllically alongside the flat, flat highway. “There’s Refugio State Beach. We could camp here. Gee, look at the sun go down.”

The boys, slowing, gradually coasted to a halt.

The sunset was breathtaking, so gorgeous it was painful to watch for long; another superb example of those wonderful westerly light shows displayed summerlong on the Southern California coast. The boys watched the day shutting down, until the bloody hub of the spectacle succumbed, swallowed by the sea. As twilight deepened, the flat wet sides of certain rocks on the jetty lit up like the facets of crudely cut gems; the creaming waves retreated from the sand to leave brief, ever-changing swirls of sapphire-emerald dust. The ocean became a broad highway of shimmering crests, of bobbing patterns growing ever subtler as night drew on.

There were still small bands of merrymakers scattered over the sand, and while the boys were wheeling round the parking lot a young man broke from one of these groups to run up waving. “Hey! Any of you guys got a match or a lighter? We’re fixing to get a fire going, and out of half a dozen people not a one of us has a light. I mean, is that unreal, or what?” He had long brown hair and an enormously thick mustache, a round face and a jolly round belly. He seemed genuinely friendly.

They stopped. Mike was first to offer a book of matches. “Here you go. What’s cooking?”

“Hot dogs and marshmallows. You guys hungry? Come on over. We’ve got some wine we’re gonna pass around.”

“Far out,” said Kevin. “And we’ve got some dynamite pot.”

“All right!” The young man danced a little jig. The boys dismounted, shouldered their bikes, followed him over to his group.

There were three girls throwing twigs on a tepee of slightly larger branches, two young men strumming battered guitars, a third playing a harmonica, and a fourth clapping his hands in time. Three fat gallon bottles of a cheap red wine were shoved in the sand. The young man with the thick mustache offered his name as Smokey, and introduced the girls as Cathy, Stephanie, and Michelle.

Cathy was a vivacious brunette of nineteen, a trim girl forever chatting and gesturing, doing her best to inject inane merriment into the little party. She was full of bubbly cheer and girlish affection, and when she shook hands she smiled at Kevin in a way that made his palms perspire. From the sternum up there was a disturbing similarity between her and the raven-haired girl; and also in the way she carried herself, and smiled without real humor. She wore indigo slacks and a man’s work shirt, open modestly at the throat.

Stephanie was a tense little braided blonde in a faded beige granny dress. She was constantly grinding her teeth and clenching her fingers--the gymnastics of amphetamine tripping. She would listen with undivided attention, passionately, as if sucking energy and spirit from the speaker, nodding constantly and vigorously. She was both leech and radiator; when the speaker had been bled to exhaustion, the leech would turn. Stephanie would speak with rapid-fire enthusiasm, running her words and sentences together and rarely pausing for breath. The stuff of her conversation was absolutely meaningless to Kevin; simply the downhill prattle of a silly girl in the grasp of stimulants.

Michelle was the quiet one; a big, chunky girl in her early twenties. She had short dishwater-blond hair and a pasty, rotund face. Since she didn’t talk all that much, she was perfect prey for the long-winded passages of Stephanie. Kevin fell in love with them all, but ever and again his eyes would fall on dark Cathy with a kind of catatonic sorrow.

It turned out the boys were in illustrious company. Once the fire was leaping and the wine circulating, they discovered that the three musicians had played in a number of L.A. clubs and had hopes of a recording contract. They were named William, Steve, and Koko Joe. They were hitchhikers, as were Smokey and Guy (the young man who had been clapping in time to the trio’s music). They had all been picked up by the three girls in Michelle’s chartreuse and carmine Volkswagen van.

“I’ll let you in on a secret,” Smokey informed Kevin when it had grown fully dark and they were comfortably positioned round the fire. He looked around furtively. The beach was practically deserted. “Me and Guy are,” he said under his breath, “ditching the draft! I think I can trust you, brother; you got an honest face. But it’s like a big, big secret, so just don’t go blurting it all over the place, okay? Nobody likes a blabbermouth.”

“Wow,” Kevin said. He’d already rolled three cigarettes from his stash, and was in the process of lighting one. He dropped the match and extended an appreciative hand, repeating, “Wow. I mean, more power to you! But where are you guys gonna hide out? They’ll be after you with cops and trigger-happy soldiers.”

Smokey clapped his hands with delight. “Saskatchewan!”

Guy looked up sharply. “Jesus Shmesus, Smokey! Tell the f*****g world, why don’t you?” Guy was a somber, shapeless fellow, with a bushy brown beard and an electric mane of curly brown hair reaching nearly to the small of his back. He wore rimless spectacles, and was dressed head to toe in leather, fancying himself a powerful advocate of the American Indian. The rights of the American Indian, Kevin knew, was a major issue of the Revolution, and he respected Guy’s brave visual participation. Ultra-liberal Guy somehow equated the United States’ involvement in Vietnam with the grievances of Native Americans who, though miserable enough stuck on shrinking reservations, weren’t going anywhere.

Smokey put a hand to his mouth, embarrassed and chagrined by this latest in a long line of indiscretions.

“Hey, it’s cool,” said little Eddie, in the fire’s flicker looking half his age. “We’re all revolutionaries nowadays. You guys don’t have to worry about us blowing it for you.”

Guy grumbled, uncertain.

“That’s right,” Kevin said, figuratively standing behind his friend. He remembered his lessons. “And when my time comes I’ll be right behind you. Nobody’s gonna make me fight a war that’s none of our business. I mean, the whole thing’s a joke! The fatcats are just keeping it alive because they’re afraid to back out now that they’ve made such a big deal about how high and mighty we are. Well, they shouldn’t have committed us in the first place!” He smiled and winked at Eddie, hefted a jug and began to guzzle.

Suddenly, by spontaneous, tacit agreement, everyone around the fire was a full-blown and highly opinionated participant. The guitarists stilled their picking and leaned forward. Cathy’s airy chatter tapered to murmurs and cooing. Michelle turned her morose, dejected eyes to Kevin and Guy. Stephanie sat cross-legged and tense, nodding her head rapidly from Kevin to Guy and back, desperate for one to begin.

“That’s just about it, brother,” Guy said at last, apparently satisfied. “Vietnam’s an embarrassment to the government pigs. This country had to go stick its bully-nose where it didn’t belong, and now the s**t’s so deep we can’t step out of it without leaving big holes. So we send more Army Issue children to fill those holes. And what happens--the poor sons of b*****s go crazy over there. Who wouldn’t? After you’ve been satisfactorily dehumanized you’re sent out into the jungle with froth on your lips, chanting some vicious doggerel about righteous GIs and rotten gooks. And once you’ve seen a quartered child, or a mother hugging a garbage bag full of hamburger that was her husband…man, once you’ve seen enough of your buddies walking around with some peasant’s ear for a medallion and brainwashed gleams in their wild eyes, well, you just flip out. You got no choice. You can adjust to it and kill your quota, or cringe in the bushes and smoke dope and hope the war’ll go away. It’s no wonder guys are deserting like never before.”

“Those poor boys,” Cathy mumbled wistfully, realizing any efforts to stir up a cheerful party would now be in vain. “But what’s going to happen in the long run? If the President and his cronies are out to make trouble, what’s to stop them from spreading the war in Vietnam until all Asia, and then the whole world, gets sucked into it?”

Guy put his palms on his knees and leaned forward pointedly, the fire’s light dancing on the lenses of his spectacles. “Just this: the Movement’s in full swing now. Everybody’s deserting or dodging. Pretty soon there won’t be anybody left but those poor brainwashed b******s overseas, and if they don’t get blown away by the Viet Cong first they’ll shoot each other like dogs. One of these days Uncle Sam’s going to point his Great Greedy Finger and say I…Want…YOU, and there just won’t be anybody. Everybody’s gonna be in Canada. A new free society north of the border, and nothing but a bunch of sick, malicious old fogies down here. We’ll call Canada ‘New America’, and our children will grow up to be peaceful and strong. No more of this rowdy bullshit.”

Kevin nodded and nodded. He lowered the jug and passed it to Smokey, lit all three marijuana cigarettes and passed them round.

“Hey, man,” Koko Joe said to the group in general, “we got a song about The War. It’s an original.” Koko Joe was a thin, excitable type, with a long peaked nose and eyebrows that ran together. His face and neck were ravaged by a hardy acne condition which, by the looks of it, extended well below the collar of his blue serge shirt.

“Lay it on us,” Mike said happily. “Wail on.”

“Okay, okay,” Koko Joe muttered nervously, rubbing his palms together. “I know you’re all gonna dig this. It’s like I wrote the lyrics myself, man; a lot of time and thought went into it. This song…this song shows just where our generation’s at.” He looked to William with his harmonica, then to Steve. He held his own guitar in a clumsy embrace. There was an awkward silence as they studied one another, synchronizing their movements. Suddenly Koko Joe nodded. His friends began to play, harmonizing on backing vocals, as he sang in a coarse, wobbly voice:

“Oh, baby, baby, what’s comin’ down?

Life’s such a bummer, man, I can’t hang around.”

(Can’t hang around)

“Oh, baby, baby, what does it mean?

The War is a drag, man, I can’t dig that scene.”

(Can’t dig that scene)

“Don’t wanna fight! Don’t wanna die!

Just wanna hang out in my room and get high.”

(Why?)

“’Cause baby, baby, The War isn’t cool.

I may be a freak, but I’m nobody’s fool.

Baby, yeah.”

(Yeah!)

“Baby, ooh.”

(Ow!)

“Baby baby baby, ’cause hey man, I dig you.”

Kevin joined loudly in the applause. He’d been steadily imbibing wine for fifteen minutes now, and his movements were sloppy, his voice slurred.

“Right on!” he roared repeatedly, long after the applause had died. He lifted the jug again, pouring down his throat and over his chin onto his shirt. Kevin set the jug back down with a lopsided grin and pulled out his baggie of grass. He spilled a lot trying to roll another joint.

“Let me roll one,” Eddie offered. “You’re losing it, Kevin.”

Kevin turned his head and squinted. “F**k you!” he snarled, his head lolling. “So you don’t think I can roll, huh?” He shrieked with indignant laughter and blacked out. Eddie carefully disengaged the baggie. “Sorry,” Kevin mumbled. “Go ahead and roll, Mike.”

Mike, half-hidden by leaping flames, called out devilishly, “Sounds good to me, Mike!”

Eddie laughed. “How much you want me to roll, Mike?”

Kevin recklessly threw out his arms, accidentally smacking the side of Eddie’s face. “Whoopee! I don’t give a f**k, Mike! Roll up the whole f*****g thing for all I f*****g care!” He grabbed the jug and chug-a-lugged. On the back of his eyelids swam a radiant image of Cathy, wholly naked and almost dripping with desire, her arms spread wide in beckoning heat. He lowered the jug, but upon opening his eyes found he was looking at big morose Michelle. Kevin tried a knowing, sexy smirk. Her expression didn’t change. “Me shell:” he croaked, in perhaps the world’s worst McCartney impression, “Ma Bell.” The laughter and chatter ceased abruptly as the young men and women all turned to stare. Kevin sniggered, hefted the jug and staggered around the fire to plop down with the three girls, his knee resting against Stephanie’s, on his right. He looked to his left at Michelle and grinned hideously, his intention being to win Cathy’s affection by making her jealous.

“Hey, what’s happening, Mike?” he said. Michelle stared for a long hard moment, her dejected eyes burning in the campfire’s glare. When the slap came Kevin was so drunk he didn’t see or feel it. He only knew he was now facing Stephanie, and that one side of his face was having a delayed reaction to yesterday’s sunburn. “She’s playing,” he drooled, “she’s playing hard to get.” Stephanie nodded rapidly, urging him on. When he continued to grin stupidly she commenced upon an endless barrage of undulating chatter, a barrage way too frustrating to follow.

Kevin offered occasional affirmative grunts in return, quickly becoming depressed by the incessant banter. He took increasingly long swallows from the jug, astonished to find he’d already guzzled well over half the contents.

And now Cathy seemed to notice little Eddie for the first time. He had come over to return Kevin’s grass, and Kevin heard her cry out, “Ooh! Isn’t he just darling?” Kevin sluggishly swung his head until he was facing in the direction of her voice, squinting to focus his lazy vision. He saw Eddie standing with his head down and his hands thrust into his pockets, blushing terribly, a silly grin on his elfin face. Cathy was exclaiming melodiously, making a great fuss over him, smoothing his collar and playing with his hair. Eddie took it all like a puppy being scratched behind the ears, eyes half-closed and tail tucked under.

Kevin swelled with rage, certain he’d been outmaneuvered. He began chugging wine with furious tension.

“He’s so cute. Just look at him!”

Kevin simmered, only dimly aware of Stephanie still jabbering at his elbow. He angrily raised the jug and threw back his head. The glass mouth rang hard against his front teeth, but he paid no attention, swallowing with vindictive haste. The alcohol had a nasty warning taste now, but continued to flow down his throat with little resistance.

“Look at those adorable freckles! Oh, he’s so sweet!”

The blood was roaring in Kevin’s ears, his teeth were grinding together. His fingers clenched with murderous energy, his trembling face flooded with blood. His whole frame grew tense.

So he didn’t hear Eddie approach, and wasn’t aware of his close presence until Eddie had repeated himself.

“Hey, Mike! I brought you your grass back!”

Kevin looked up with a black, ugly snarl. “You f*****g son of a b***h.”

“What?”

“That’s right,” he said, standing and weaving. “You heard me, prick.” He hiccoughed, poured wine down his throat and over his face. He tore the baggie out of Eddie’s hand and stuffed it in his own shirt pocket.

“Kevin, you’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Sure I do, you little rip-off b*****d.” Eddie’s blurry figure kept disintegrating and reforming, replicating and throbbing back into focus. Kevin addressed all the sneaky little regimented b*****d Eddies with vicious sprays of contempt. “I know just what I’m talking about, you little pansies, you traitorous turds.”

Eddie was aghast. “What did--what did I do?”

Kevin took a slug to steady his vision, the jug much lighter in his hand. It was like drinking diluted kerosene now, but the fact that he’d managed to nearly finish off the jug only bolstered his ego. He swayed, steadied himself, lifted the jug and swallowed. He dropped his arm and belched fire on unstable Eddie, then raised his voice two octaves, mimicking a girl’s.

“Oh, what did I do? What did sweetsy-weetsy li’l Eddie-weddie do?” He lowered his voice to a guttural, sputtering rumble, spacing his words out menacingly. “I’m gonna kick…your…a*s, punk.”

“Look, Kevin, whatever I did, I’m sorry. But let’s talk about it in the morning, okay? You’re really making a scene, and everybody’s getting uptight. So why don’t you just crash out in your bag here. Everything’s cool.”

“F**k ’em!” Kevin bellowed. “F**k ’em if they don’t like it!” He took a swallow and pivoted awkwardly, ready to squash all comers. The fire blazed out at him, dazzling, backed by what seemed an army of shadowy gargoyles. “F**k you all!” he raged, then pivoted in reverse to re-confront that conniving little prissy b*****d Eddie. He had trouble finding him, so he took another long swallow. A cataract poured off either side of his chin and at last the jug was empty. He gave a huge manly groan of satiety and carelessly flung the jug. There was a ringing thud and a sharp cry. Kevin wobbled his head in the direction of the cry. Someone didn’t like him throwing the jug? Well, he would deal with he/she/it/them later. But first of all these little pansies here. He rolled his head back to face Eddie.

“Okay, punks. You wanna hassle, we’ll settle this right here and now.”

“I’m not hassling you, Kevin. You’re my friend, my blood brother. What about peace, and love? We’re revolutionaries together, Kevin. We’re friends. Let’s talk about it tomorrow when you’re sober.”

“Right here and now,” Kevin roared. And the roar kept right on roaring, filling his ears with Fourth of July reverberations, imploding his skull with mad dreams of whirling faces and leaping flames. His pulse shot off in jackhammer rage at the whole conspiring world as he lunged forward, threw a haymaker at Eddie and felt the planet screech to a halt. Kevin was out before his face hit the sand.