Of Mice and Morons

Chapter 5 of Carnival

Carnival

Chapter 5

Of Mice and Morons

It was pale morning when Kevin’s crusted eyelids, through no desire of his own, peeled apart to admit the day. His face was half-buried in chill morning sand, his nostrils clogged with the stuff.

A flurry of intense sensations woke his silly a*s in a hurry.

Chief among these was a sense of desperate, soul-shaking thirst. His mouth was so dry it felt glued shut. It was this terrible, all-consuming thirst which had so urgently roused him from his near-coma.

Or was it?

Right after the thirst came a knotting of the gut, followed by an overwhelming impression of freefall. The early morning light crashed against his retinae. Kevin’s eyelids slammed shut, and the light’s aftermath went cartwheeling through his brain. He shuddered violently. The shudder preceded a sick, scary pain in his skull. Everything went blood-red.

Nausea came hurtling up his spine like a runaway locomotive, broke into his brain with a screaming clang-a-lang-a-lang of alarm, shook him right to his knees. He trembled there, on all fours on the sand, absolutely overcome, a half-squashed cockroach struggling to crawl. His jowls were quaking, his face purpling, his eyes rolled up in their orbits.

A sputtering relay on the cerebral control panel caused him to jerk forward his right hand, then to advance his left knee. Arm followed leg as the smashed cockroach made its way to the ocean’s foaming edge.

Kevin’s diaphragm reared, hauling up his belly and arching his back, preparing his body for the ejective motion of lurching forward to puke his guts out. But his esophagus remained constricted. Nothing was evacuated, and Kevin was treated to a mad, suffocating vision; seeing, in his imagination, a tiny spark of fight abandoning the control tower in his splitting skull. All was chaos in there, the punch-drunk operator laughing hysterically amid a hellish scene of billowing smoke and pinwheeling jets of flame.

The reaction to heaving is to gasp desperately, accompanied by a rocking motion on the supporting arms in the opposite direction of the heave--but air met the same impediment. When Kevin’s ravenous cells received no oxygen his body arched up again, his eyes went sightless. Once more he lurched forward; every aching cell, every agonized, quivering nerve called to arms in a last-ditch, all-out attempt to hurl onto an area of a few square inches of sand. Kevin’s black, fluttering face was drawn magnetically, irresistibly to the spot.

But the heave was a bust. Nothing was ejected, and no air burst into his lungs as ecstatic shrieking razors. When his body rocked back this time, it was with the sluggish tremor of submission. Red firefly sparks leapt convulsively in his consciousness, while the senseless, rocketing film of his life played over and over, half an inch high on the fuzzy silver screen of his mind. All engines shut down for Kevin, and darkness stormed his brain like warrant-brandishing cops bursting through the door to his soul. It was lights out.

Yet he slumped with a horrible croak, gagged, and barfed out mouth and nose for all he was worth. As the gasping reaction drew him back he still received no air. Kevin’s flapping face immediately took on the rictus of unrelieved vomiting. Pulling back from the fifth or sixth heave he did manage to draw some air, maybe a teaspoonful, but his throat at once cruelly seized shut.

Kevin hurled once more, his stomach bursting. He went briefly insensible; choking, gagging, swooning. Finally air flooded his lungs. Gradually he got into a broken rhythm of gasping, until the hands got to work in his gut again, twisting and compressing. He vomited twice more, but less forcefully.

When he was finished he remained hunched, glutting air with great stabbing hiccoughs. Violet light began to swirl against his retinae, grew red, composed itself.

Kevin was a sobbing wreck, trembling head to toe. After a minute he managed to crawl away from the piteous mess he’d made. His arms buckled and he pitched face-first into the sand, where he lay in a rapturous fever of cool, nectarous air. He wanted to lay there and luxuriate in it, to drink it to his heart’s content. He wanted to weep himself dry, but before anything else he simply had to get rid of the disgusting taste in his mouth, the burning residue in his nostrils.

He pushed himself to his feet, stumbled off to the restroom, pounded despairingly against the locked door until his streaming eyes fell on a water faucet. The boy gargled and spat, ducked his head under the water’s thin arcing column, filled his mouth and swallowed. It was a mistake. He quickly flashed the water, hacked some more. He rinsed his mouth, spat carefully, stood and controlled his breathing, let his thumping heart gradually slow.

It was over. Kevin dragged his feet through the sand.

Eddie was sitting up in his bag, rubbing his eyes. Mike was still asleep, only the top of his head visible. Eddie grinned when he saw Kevin shambling up.

“So you finally came out of it! How’s your head?”

“Terrible,” Kevin admitted, slumping. He sat on his half-buried sleeping bag and massaged his temples. It felt like there was an enormous aching bruise in there, lividly etched on the living walls of his cerebrum.

“I held onto your glasses for you,” Eddie said, and handed them over.

“Thanks, Eddie. You’re really a pal. Did I make a scene last night?”

“Boy, did you ever! Don’t you remember?”

“I--I guess I drew a blank.”

“You don’t remember grabbing the girls and getting all pissed off about something? Or hitting Cathy in the face with your wine bottle? What a shiner she got! Don’t you remember taking a swing at me?”

Kevin swallowed. There were vague impressions of just such scenes shuffling in his mind, but he had tried to suppress these thoughts, afraid to dwell on them and possibly form incriminating chains of association, chains which might reveal further ugly misdemeanors lurking like w****s in the shadows of his memory. So now he said, “Sort of. But not really. I think I remember taking a swing at you. Gosh, I’m sorry, Eddie. I just didn’t know what I was doing.”

“Oh, heck, Kevin, that’s all right. I knew you were wasted. You missed me by ten feet and passed right out.”

When he’d gathered the nerve, Kevin asked, “And that was it? I just crashed?”

“Yeah, for a while there. But then you woke up about two hours later. We were all still partying away when you came staggering into the middle of our circle and pulled out your dick.”

Kevin jerked from the butt up. “I did what?”

“Yeah, man, you just stood there holding your pecker for everybody to see. Nobody said a word. It was weird. You were rocking back and forth like one of those plastic punching clowns, and we knew if you let go there’d be a fountain out of control. But nothing came out. I guess you must’ve thought you’d done your thing, though, ’cause you put it back in and zipped up.” Eddie squinted with merriment. “So then you got your pecker caught in the zipper and started howling. By this time we were all cracking up. Finally you zipped up your pants and just stood there swaying. All of a sudden we saw one leg of your Levis turning dark. I couldn’t believe it--you were pissing your pants! I laughed so hard I cried.”

“Oh no…” Kevin’s pounding head rolled in his hands. “No!” But suddenly he could see it as Eddie had described it, vividly, as if it was happening now before his eyes. The fire and their astonished faces lit like jack-o-lanterns. Their laughter. His brain throbbed anew.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, enjoying himself. “And then you started raving.”

“Raving?”

“You were yelling about how everybody was trying to screw you around, even your friends. That shows how drunk you were. Me and Mike never did nothing to wrong you, Kevin. Anyway, you started calling the girls names--”

“Oh, come on!”

“Really! Every dirty name in the book. You said they were all full of s**t and had these like super-snotty complexes. Then you started calling them a herd of two-bit s***s and cocksucking w****s. You kept shouting about what complexes we all had. You were starting to get, I mean, like, super loud and rowdy, so one of those draft dodgers--I guess he was kind of paranoid--suggested that maybe you should just shut the f**k up and go to sleep. Well, that got you really pissed off. You started yelling that the girls were s***s and b*****s again, about how you wouldn’t f**k them with my dick. Then you kicked sand all over the fire and that was pretty much the end of the party. All those people packed their stuff up in their van and split.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Kevin groaned. “Oh my God.”

“And then you had this big crying jag.”

“Crying jag!”

“Yeah. You started bawling about how sorry you were, over and over. Mike asked you if we could maybe roll a joint and smoke it with you. We thought some pot might help your head. You looked up and just stared at us for a minute with tears all over your face. Then you took your stash out of your pocket and said, ‘Sure, you cocksuckers. Take my pot, just take it all’, and shook your whole stash in the air, laughing like a lunatic. Then you started hitting the sides of your head with your fists and bawling about how sorry you were again. You got to rapping about killing yourself, and we were getting kinda worried there. Me and Mike never saw anybody freak out on wine before. But finally you just cried yourself to sleep.”

Kevin languidly wagged his aching head. “Don’t tell me any more. Please. I can’t take any more.”

“There wasn’t any more. Like I said, you did the big boo-hoo scene and crashed right out. There wasn’t anything left to do after that; we three were the only ones left on the beach. So we rolled you up in your bag and went to sleep. I’ll say this much: you wasted a lot of pot, but you sure had a swell time. I should’ve drank more of that wine.”

Kevin looked at him then, convinced Eddie wasn’t making this all up. If only his head would quit pounding. But the more he thought about it, the surer he was he could remember most of the scenes almost exactly as described by Eddie. The raving and name-calling…hadn’t he had a dream like that? And the crying--that was plausible; weren’t his eyelids stuck together this morning? No sin in crying when you’re plastered out of your mind. But wetting his pants! Kevin placed his hands on his thighs, as if to wipe his palms. The material on his right leg was dry, but the left side was damp and crusted with sand. He hung his head.

Mike squirmed in his bag and sat up sleepy-eyed. He threw out his arms, yawned cavernously, blinked at Kevin.

“G’morning, shitface. And how are our complexes today?”

Kevin turned away. “Lay off. I already paid for it.”

Mike yawned even wider. “Man, do I ever have a hard-on. There’s nothing like sleeping on sand.”

“Well, don’t go back to sleep,” Eddie said. “I’m hungry.”

Mike scratched his legs while peering irritably at Eddie. “So tell me, boy genius. You just tell me where you plan on eating. From the looks of things this beach is the hot spot of the whole coast, and the only building on it’s the bathroom.”

“We won’t get any breakfast just sitting here,” Eddie said, with the practicality of a tramp.

Mike nodded sullenly, rolled his neck, and stepped out of his bag. As he shook out the sand he stared hard at Kevin. “Well we might have got a ride in that chick’s van if somebody didn’t have to go call her a claphound.”

“Shove it,” Kevin whispered, and struggled to his feet. He waited for the pounding in his head to soften with eyes squeezed shut, breath shallow and controlled. “Let’s get going.” He dragged his bike and sleeping bag toward the parking lot with small painful steps.

Mike, rolling up his own bag, grunted, “All right, hold your horses! But you better not eat too much, man. I mean it. I don’t wanna spend half the day outside an outhouse again.”

“Don’t worry,” Kevin whispered, swallowing a combination of stomach acid, vomit residue, phlegm, and saliva. “I’m not hungry.”

They rode for half an hour before finding a place to eat, and by then the sun had turned away the stiff morning cold. Kevin sat outside while his friends ate their breakfasts, his mind all in gloom. Even after his pals had eaten and they were again pedaling up the highway he found he couldn’t shake it. His mood continued to darken.

Surely there were lessons to be learned on this trip if he were to enjoy it, or even survive it. The lessons should have been obvious.

But it seemed he was being attacked almost exclusively by the things he cherished and stood by, and this made the hurt harder to bear. To enjoy eating was to wind up sick as a dog. To drink was not the happy, comradely excursion of the old days, but a nightmare of distrust and distortion. Good old pot didn’t seem to be helping his head at all, and the sun was no longer his friend, but a wicked, searing overlord.

Kevin reconsidered the price of morphing his embarrassing girth into dignified golden muscle. The greatest pains were in the expected spots: triceps, calves, thighs; but unexpected aches lurked in the back of his neck when he raised his head, his chest seemed about to rip down the middle whenever he inhaled too deeply. He computed the extent of torture yet to be faced against the impossible distance yet to be covered, and concluded he would one day arrive arthritic and hunched, a hopeless cripple.

Nodding as he pedaled, Kevin barely managed to pay attention to the road. An unsuccessfully interred memory came back to haunt him: he as a chubby child at his uncle’s funeral, boxed in between the wheezing mountain of Joe Mikolajczyk and his squat sniffling wife as they ponderously filed along. Kevin had been ridiculously dressed in knee-high pumpkin-colored stockings and shiny Buster Brown specials, in navy blue shorts, a pink ruffled shirt with lemon-and-lime striped tie, and a tiny plum vest that must have originally been worn by an organ grinder’s monkey. And the somberness of the occasion had done a number on the boy’s bowels. Kevin now remembered with horror his pleading, in frantic whispers, to be taken to the restroom, and his mother shushing him at first, and then covertly smacking him on his bottom as he grew insistent. The boy had hopped and danced in wailing agony, and the mourners had turned swollen annoyed eyes on the mother and son. And Joe had swatted him hard on the back of his head and lifted him and shook him. And try as he would the boy had lost all control, crapping wildly on his brand new “special bought” clothes as his father bellowed in his face and shook him and shook him and shook him and shook him.

“And,” Mike was saying, in a just-loud-enough aside to Eddie, who was now riding between Mike and Kevin, “we could be toking on some pot if it wasn’t for fatso over there. It’s just been one fuckup after another.”

Kevin looked at Mike’s sneering, harshly-cut face. What was it about Mike, besides his rude words and hostile manner, that had been eating away at Kevin’s brittle camaraderie for as long as the heavyset boy could remember? There was something rotten, almost evil, about the way Mike always took the negative view; about how he would push you just to the point of a fight and then desist, laughing at your heat. Seeing the wicked twist to Mike’s lips, Kevin was suddenly aware that he’d never once seen the boy wearing a good old, winning, sincere smile. Someday, Kevin thought, his eyes burning directly into Mike’s, whose own eyes narrowed and gleamed at the look, sooner or later, buddy, you and I are gonna get into it, and when we do, m**********r, I’m gonna kick your a*s so bad it’ll take a surgeon to get my boot out of your butthole. Mike’s eyes seemed to shine brighter. His sneer grew broader.

“Look, beagle breath,” Kevin said hotly, while his stare still had the advantage over Mike’s, “you wouldn’t have smoked any pot at all if it wasn’t for my groovy generousness, dig? And I’ll do any darn thing I wanna do with my pot, y’hear? If I wanna throw it away, then I’ll throw it away, whether you like it or not. And I don’t dig being called fatso, man, ’cause it’s not fat, punk, it’s muscle, which you’d know if you weren’t all skin and bones.”

Mike’s sneaky, pouncing grin didn’t falter a bit. “Oh, yeah, fatso? Well, fatso, I’ll f*****g call you fatso any fat f*****g time I want to, fatso!”

Kevin saw red, his eyes straining in their sockets. He turned his wheel sharply toward Mike, intending to leap on him as cowboys did when fighting steed-to-steed in spaghetti westerns. In his unblinking rage he discounted Eddie’s presence between them, and all three went sprawling in a crazy tangle of arms, legs, and spinning wheels. Kevin found himself on his butt, wearing his bike’s frame like a yoke. When he got to his feet Mike was cussing and spitting from behind Eddie, who was doing his best to hold the little bully back. Then a station wagon was bearing down on them, sounding its horn and swerving wildly. They all sprawled shouting to the side of the road. When Kevin picked himself up this time he was out of breath. Mike began laughing at him, which was worse than name-calling, then remounted his bike and slowly rode away. He chuckled viciously as Kevin feigned pursuit, too exhausted to give chase.

“Come back here,” Kevin gasped, “and fight like a man, you chicken.”

“F**k you, fatso!” Mike called back, now roaring with laughter. “Fatso, fatso, fatso!” he sang. “Come over here and call me chicken!”

But Kevin was too worn out to do anything except hang his head. When Mike realized Kevin was not going to play his game he returned gradually to rough formation, not uttering a word, but snickering nastily and victoriously.

“Why?” Eddie wondered. “Why do you guys keep chipping away at each other? We’re all friends, right? What kind of impression are we making for all the straights? We’ve got to live in peace, you guys. What are they going to think of L.A. in Frisco if we get up there and start brawling?”

“Oh, bullshit,” Mike sneered. “When are you gonna grow up?”

“No, really,” Eddie said reasonably. “That’s what this trip is all about, Mike. We want to go up to the City and see our people. If we’re fighting between ourselves we don’t really deserve to be there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they wouldn’t have us.”

“Oh, Christ! You can’t even have fun any more. Not around you guys.”

A knowing look passed between Eddie and Kevin. The look was not lost on Mike, who tensed and considered them rabidly, ready to burst into tears. “So that’s it!” he cried. “F**k you both then!” Mike put down his head and pedaled hard. He maintained his distance fifty yards ahead, refusing to look back.

After an interval of silence Kevin offered, “I agree with you, Eddie. You know that. I think what you said just now was really together, and I guess I looked pretty bad all ready to fight like that, and last night, too, when I got rowdy. But I was drunk last night, so I figger I’ve got an excuse for that bum trip, and believe me, I learned my lesson. But just now…I don’t know, Eddie--you saw how he was pushing me. I don’t think Mike’s a real brother at all. I don’t want to fight, but, darn it, I don’t like being pushed! I wish we could’ve come without that guy.”

Eddie nodded emphatically, relishing his role as mediator. “I’m not blaming you, Kevin. That was obviously all Mike’s fault, and you reacted like anybody. But now dig this--and I’m not trying to preach to you; I just want to say it before I lose my thread. I’ve been doing a lot of reading; stuff by Leary, Huxley, Kesey, Hesse. And the whole trip is that we can’t let other people’s hangups get to us. So you take a guy like Mike. Okay, I’ve known him forever; ever since we were kids together in Pasadena. Now Mike is a prick with a capital p, right? I don’t know why he’s like that, but he is. He’s got his good side, but the point is he’s the kind of guy who likes to pick fights and start trouble. All right. I’ve learned from my reading that a dude like Mike wants you to retaliate, see? He needs to justify his rowdy nature, so he tries to make someone else throw the first punch, and then he figures he’s defending himself, fighting against the bogeys that’ve been haunting him all his life. That’s his hangup, but we make it ours by getting pissed in return. If you let his attitude get to you, well, then you’ve got two people who’re rowdy. You see? Mike’s so messed up he thinks I’m taking your side, so he’ll need somebody else on his side to even the odds. Then you’ve got four people involved. When this action goes down between whole countries you get the mess we’ve got in Vietnam. But now we’ve got guys who refuse to get involved, and who just plain won’t fight. That’s the only way to deal with it, and that’s what the Movement’s all about. Like, when Mike gets hot, you just smile and flash him the peace sign. Pretty soon he picks up on the idea that nobody’s out to get him after all, and he starts to groove. It’s that simple.”

Kevin grunted and smiled sheepishly. “Yeah. I oughta know better. Thanks for talking me down, Eddie.”

“No thanks necessary,” Eddie said, gobbling down Kevin’s gratitude. “It’s not my thought. Like I said, I read it.”

“Well, if you look at it like that--you know, like Mike’s sick--then I can’t really hold his crummy attitude against him, can I?”

“Right.”

Kevin braked and took a deep breath. “You know what I’m gonna do, Eddie? Just to prove I’m hip to the Movement and all, I’m gonna go tell him no hard feelings. Right to his ugly face.” He pushed off, and after a minute had almost caught up. “Hey, Mike!”

Mike tensed. He turned his head only partly round, just far enough to keep an eye on Kevin. “Yeah? What do you want?”

Kevin drew even, smiled. “I just wanted to say that everything’s cool. No hard feelings.”

“Oh yeah? What have you and your good buddy been rapping about all this time? Gonna ditch me, is that it? Well go right f*****g ahead, fatso. I can make it without your s**t.”

Kevin’s smile grew taut. He spoke through his clenched teeth, only his lips moving. “No, really, man. We haven’t been ganging up on you or anything like that. I just want to drop the whole thing and be friends. Let’s keep it cool.”

Mike stared suspiciously, unmoved. “Why?” he jabbed. “So you say you just wanna pretend nothing never happened, huh, fatso? Yeah, fatso? Well, okay, fatso; that’s just fat f*****g fine with me, fatso. We’ll let it go and stay friends…fatso!”

Kevin’s eyes blazed. “No offense, see? It’s not your fault when you get nasty or rowdy.”

“Oh, yeah? It’s not, huh?”

“No, man, it’s like you’re sick and you just can’t f*****g help it. That’s why I’m willing to let it drop. I figure you’re going through some bad head trips, is all, and so it’s like the duty of all us true revolutionaries to keep cool when you get uptight, so that maybe someday you’ll catch on and get your stupid act together like the rest of us.”

“Is that so?” Mike spat, mouth twisted out of shape, teeth bared in a ferocious snarl. “Well maybe I don’t want your help, dig? I mean, did you hear anybody asking for your fat help? I didn’t! And if I ever do need help, four-eyes, you can rest assured you’ll be the last fat creep I look up!”

“Now listen here, man. I’m trying to be friendly, right? So don’t blow it! Like I said, you’re sick, punk, and don’t know what you’re saying, so I’m not holding it against you! Why can’t we just be friends, cocksucker, and let the whole f*****g thing drop before I lose my f*****g temper and kick the holy reaming s**t out of you? Can’t you see, God f*****g damn you all to hell, that you’re screwing up the whole f*****g revolution?”

Mike snaked back his head and aimed, lunged and spat a thick gob of snotty saliva directly onto the lens covering Kevin’s furious red eye. He kicked out hard, connecting with Kevin’s thigh. Kevin flew off his bike sideways and went hollering and cartwheeling through the dirt.

By the time Eddie pulled up, his best friend was wiping his glasses and cheek with a shirt sleeve. Kevin got to his feet wordlessly, rubbed his scraped rump and looked to his bicycle. One pedal was bent, its carpet sleeve thrashed. The chain was fouled.

“I tried,” he told Eddie. “You saw how I tried.”

“Don’t lose your head,” Eddie pleaded.

“Oh, I won’t. Funny, but I don’t feel mad anymore. Only tired.” He winced. “And hungover.” He looked up the road. Mike stood in the spare shade of an equally scrawny spruce, blinking hatefully at them. “The guy’s sick all right. You saw how he acted when I tried to make up.”

Eddie shrugged helplessly. “He’ll come around, eventually. If you show him you’re still not upset he’ll have to see how wrong he is.”

“I--I’m not sure I can talk to him. Not right now.”

Eddie licked his lips. “I’ll go tell him you’re not mad. You ride back here.”

Kevin nodded. “Okay, go ahead and give it a try. Like I said, I’m perfectly willing to meet him halfway. But I’m telling you, Eddie, one of these days I’m gonna kill him.”

Eddie grimaced. He pushed off. After counting to ten Kevin followed slowly. He watched them riding ahead, Mike gesticulating heatedly while Eddie tried to get a word in edgewise. As they pulled close together, the action was transferred one to the other; Eddie making explanatory gestures while Mike glowered. Suddenly Mike pulled back his arm and socked Eddie hard on the ear. Eddie dragged himself to the curb and collapsed. After a minute he forced himself into a sitting position, buried his head in his arms, and began bawling like a chick. Mike sat down on the other side of the road, looking paranoid and bitter.

Kevin sighed. His heart went way out to Eddie, who was just too ingenuous, just too innocent to survive a world of bullies, jackals, and perverts. He needed someone like Kevin to protect him from the callous hordes ranging worldwide, their senses perked for gracious prey to trample. Poor Eddie would die a burn victim--he’d be persuaded and swindled; seduced, abandoned, enlisted, betrayed. He’d wind up penniless, homeless, helpless, friendless--suckered and set up and suckered again. And, having been royally screwed by every person he’d ever trusted, he’d speak eloquently from his deathbed of his unbending faith in the ultimate goodness of humankind. Now Kevin glared at Mike. It would be the last time Eddie was punched. He made sure Mike saw his look of exaggerated spite as he dismounted next to Eddie.

Eddie looked up at Kevin, then past him at Mike, now slowly coasting across the road.

“Whatcha doin’?” Mike asked ominously, a hateful sneer on his face, his fists ready to go at the first wrong move. “You guys talking about me behind my back? I thought we all agreed before we left there wasn’t gonna be no secrets.”

Eddie looked away.

Kevin said, “You can think what you want, dude. We were minding our own business, so why don’t you just mind yours?”

Mike ground his teeth together, blinking rapidly. Finally he exploded. “Why don’t you mind yours, you fat f*****g Polak! Why don’t you crawl back in your hole where you belong! Everything was just bitchen before you showed up and started taking sides. Me and Eddie used to have a real good time until you got him all hot on this f*****g ‘Revolution’ bullshit. Love!” he spat, his whole face trembling. “Couple of f*****s, that’s what you are!” He avoided looking at Eddie when he made this accusation. He stabbed a forefinger at Kevin’s nose. “And it’s all because of you!”

Kevin’s fists rose halfway to jabbing position. But then he peripherally noticed Eddie watching him intently. It came to Kevin in a flash that this instance was, clearly, a kind of test. Eddie’s words were still fresh in his mind:“But now we’ve got guys who refuse to get involved, and who just plain won’t fight. That’s the only way to deal with it, and that’s what the Movement’s all about.” His ten-speed had been left leaning against his flank, and, in a surprise move, Mike deftly grabbed the handlebars of Kevin’s bike and pushed off before the fat boy could snatch it back.

Kevin ran in hot pursuit while Mike roared with malicious hilarity. Mike skillfully steered Kevin’s bicycle for a few hundred feet before allowing it to drop with a crash. He kicked and kicked at the spokes with his heels, then used the front wheel of his own bike to wreak further damage.

Kevin screamed out a string of loose obscenities and fell to his knees. His eyes were welling with tears. Mike rode off guffawing.

There was little damage; only a few bent spokes and an ugly scrape on the leather seat. Kevin straightened the spokes, breaking two, and mounted with the weariness of depleted rage.

“Don’t let it bum you,” Eddie said soothingly as they wobbled away together. “I know just how you feel.” He laughed. “Look at us, crying like a couple of kids. Only three days on the road, and here we are, blubbering away like the world’s gonna end.”

Kevin looked at him glumly, sniffed away his tears and swallowed. He knew how important this trip was to Eddie, and in gratitude for the friendship he’d done his royal best to keep Eddie’s enthusiasm hyped up over the months. But now he was beginning to treat his serious doubts seriously. At last he made his confession.

“You’re right, Eddie. It’s just that I wasn’t ready for all these bad vibes. I thought this was gonna be a giant joyride, and everybody would be cool. But ever since we left things’ve been getting worse. For me anyway. It’s been one big disappointment after another. Eddie, I don’t know how to say this…but I think we’ve been fooling ourselves. So far everybody I’ve met from Frisco has been a gazillion percent different than what I expected.” He sniffed again, chucked Eddie lightly on the arm. “Well, partner, it’s good to know I’ve got at least one true friend.”

Eddie colored. “You can always count on me, Kevin.”

Kevin regarded little Eddie affectionately. “But we’ve still got to score us a lid. That was pretty dumb of me to throw it all away last night.” He darkened. “And when I get some more I’m not gonna smoke any with Mike.”

Eddie’s delicate brows arched. “Oh, no! We can’t be like that at all. That’s not fair.”

“You mean you still feel that way, even after he punched you for no reason?”

“Mike’s our brother,” Eddie said with conviction. “We can’t ever forget that, no matter how he acts. Elsewise we’d might as well just turn around right here and head back home.”

“Wow. You really are a heavy revolutionary…now I feel guilty as all heck, Eddie. How can I ever clean up my act?”

“I’m telling you,” Eddie told him, “that things are going to improve naturally. The nearer we get to the City, the cleaner our heads will be. We’ll be like angels, Kevin--everybody who comes within a thirty-mile radius of the City instantly becomes turned-on. These people we’ve run into are on their bum trips because they’re away from the City. ¿Si comprendo? They’re going through Love Withdrawals.”

“The Haight,” Kevin corrected him gently. “That lousy Jesus freak told me they don’t like it called ‘the City’ up there. Disrespectful and unhip.”

“Really!” Eddie’s eyes lit up and his jaw dropped (Eddie really loved extending his hip vocabulary and adding odd facts to his private storehouse of informational tidbits concerning the Revolution. Back at Santa Monica High he’d been well-known as an authority on the subject. Eddie’s shy nature had prevented his vaulting to campus prominence, but he was one of the few boys popular with almost everyone. It was Eddie who had introduced Kevin to marijuana that rainy night last November, and it was Eddie who had fired Kevin’s imagination about San Francisco, and molded their relationship of eager teacher and faithful pupil. Although Kevin was willing to let Eddie mentor him, he really dug the chance to catch him off guard; to pay his friend back with a trippy morsel and look cool in the process).

“And they don’t like the word ‘hippie’ up in the Haight,” Kevin added pointedly. “They think it’s a real put-down.”

“No kidding!”

Kevin could see Eddie tucking the information away.

“Thanks, Kevin! ‘Hippie’ does sound sort of plastic, I guess. We’ll just have to call each other ‘freaks’. Nothing plastic about that.” Eddie was silent for a minute. He then looked defiantly into Kevin’s eyes, as though he didn’t expect to be taken seriously. “I--I’ve been thinking, Kevin. Um…you know how important this trip is to me. Look…what I’m trying to say is…I think this is the biggest thing to ever happen to me. To you too. I didn’t tell you before we left because I sure as heck didn’t want to freak out your head, but, what I’m trying to say is…ism…uh…ism…is…this is just too heavy! Kevin, this is the Big Ditch. Damn it, it’s the Ultimate Run!”

Kevin nodded hiply, knowing he’d really scored some major points here. “I can dig what you’re rapping, man,” he said, “and it’s all like totally groovy. I’m tripping too. My head is, you know, like truly happening.”

“No, you don’t know what I mean! Kevin, this trip’s for real! What I mean is…is…I’m not coming back! There. I’ve said it.”

Kevin gawked. Tears peeked between his eyelids. When he could get his mouth together he managed, “Eddie! This is crazy! What a mindblower!”

“What is?”

“Eddie, I planned to run away, too! I didn’t tell you for the same reason.”

Eddie’s whole body locked up.

They turned, sharing something ineffable. After a few seconds the tears were squeezing between Eddie’s eyelids. He did his best to suppress them, but it was too late. The boys hugged and sobbed and laughed, pounded one another on the back.

“Revolutionaries together!” Eddie cried. “All for one, and one for all!”

“Forever!” Kevin spewed. But something was bugging him. A cloud passed over his joy. The Big Ditch? “Eddie…you aren’t planning on ditching me up there and sticking me with Mike, are you?”

“Of course not,” Eddie said, sobering considerably. “What ever gave you that idea?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Nothing, I guess. I’d just hate to get separated, that’s all. I knew this trip was important to you, Eddie, but I never thought you’d want to leave your mom and dad for good. Me, there’s nothing that could make me happier than to never see my folks again.”

“Kevin,” Eddie said with solemn finality, “nothing in the world means more to me than getting to San Francisco and living there for the rest of my life. Nothing! The worst thing anybody could do to me would be to stop me from getting up there. He’d might as well cut out my heart. I’m determined!”

Kevin set his jaw. With a whole mouthful of soul he said, “Eddie, it’s like you can totally count on me. As long as I’m with you I guarantee nobody will screw up your plan. I guarantee it! We’ll be the heaviest flower children the Haight ever saw.”

“And you’ll change your feelings about Mike?”

Kevin squeezed his hand brakes. “And I’ll even change my feelings about Mike. But it’s gonna be hard.”

“Just you wait,” Eddie promised. “If we’re cool to Mike, constantly, his whole trip’ll change. We’ll be proud of him.”

And sure enough, Eddie’s prophecy proved correct. Several hours later, while Kevin and Eddie were shoveling hamburgers at a Gaviota food stand, Mike slunk over and said with an embarrassed smile, “Hey, you guys. I was rapping with this cat who says he knows where we can score some pot.”

“Far out,” Kevin coughed. It was the first time they’d spoken since the quarrel.

Mike looked over his shoulder and beckoned. A small Filipino boy, with round pleading eyes and glistening coal-black shoulder-length hair fastened at the back, walked over shyly, avoiding their eyes. He looked about sixteen, and wore baggy slacks, rope sandals, a floral-patterned short-sleeved shirt.

“Guys,” Mike announced, “this is Mitchell. Mitchell, this is Eddie and…that’s fa--um…that’s Kevin.”

The Filipino boy shook hands, coloring deeper. “I can score grass,” he fumbled, speaking quietly, “but have to go ways get. Friend of mine works head shop. Has lids for sale. Good pot.”

“That’s cool of you,” Kevin said. “And I’ll give you a nice pinch for going to the hassle.”

Mitchell blushed again. As they followed him down the sidewalk, Eddie couldn’t resist nudging Kevin.

“See?” he whispered. “What’d I tell you? Mike’s sorry, so he’s helping you score. He feels bad about acting tough, and now he’s doing his best to make it up to you.”

Kevin grinned awkwardly. “I guess you’re right, Eddie. It’s like everybody’s got love in their hearts. They just gotta be shown they’re not alone.”

“Now you’re grooving.”

The grin remained on Kevin’s face, but the scene in his mind belied it. Eddie might be right about a lot of things, but he was just too guileless to see beyond the surface. So for now, in Eddie’s company, Mike was okay, Mike was safe. But the clock was running against him. He’d become, in Kevin’s eyes, Pure Evil. Pretty soon, when the time was right, Kevin vowed, in the name of the Revolution, to kick the holy crap out of him.