by Robert Dunn
- - - - -
Kay writes every day till lunchtime. I can hear her typewriter clacking away from her rooms at the top of the house. I go to the public library one afternoon, have to sneak Toto in in a bag, and find three of her books, the titles in gold on water-bled red binding, hand-stamped dates showing how many times they’d been checked out on a pasted-in slip of paper. The one in my hand: Last time out was March 12, 1965—two years ago.
I take a closer look at the book. It’s in English, of course, but there are a lot of words I don’t recognize in italics. I think they’re German or French. It’s a novel, and it takes place in Europe. I read a few paragraphs, and suddenly I want to be just where this book is taking place. I don’t have a library card and ask a tall, pretty librarian how I can get one. She says I need proof of a permanent address. Oh. I put Kay’s novel back on the shelf, right where I found it.
Toto gets a kind of a cough, and I worry I’ll have to take him to a vet, which I can’t afford. I don’t have any money to speak of. Kay says as long as I stay with her, she’s willing to give me an allowance, but that doesn’t seem right, and so I keep heading down to Haight. I’ve been having a lot of luck in front of the Peace Eye bookstore. It’s almost summer, and the street is getting clogged with tourists and warm-weather hippies. I keep Toto close to me, and he gets better.
The Beatles have put out a single, and it’s blowing everyone’s mind. You can hear it pouring out of nearly every window on Page or Masonic. I love the freaky side, Strawberry Fields Forever. Story is it’s John Lennon remembering a place where he grew up in Liverpool. Some place, eh? I think what a song written about where I grew up would be called. Grange Hall for a While? Newberry’s When You’ve Got a Quarter?
And so the days pass.
- - - - -
Look at Flower, she’s back on the streets. I—I had a huge fight with Kay. I can’t—boy, she was mean. What happened? I can hardly. . . .
O.K. Here’s what went down. She told me she thought it was disgusting that I kept panhandling. I pulled out my pockets. There was three dollars and change there.
“I told you, I can give you money,” she said. Her silver eyebrows were cocked up high.
“And I told you, I don’t want to take money from you.”
“Why not?” She was breathing steadily, but I could tell she was worked up. “You take it from strangers.”
“Yeah, but that’s what we do. It’s the vibe.”
“The . . . vibe?”
“Yeah,” I said, “the vibe.”
“What in the world does that mean?”
“It means, there’s always money enough out there. It means you can live free—”
“Free?” She spit that out. “That’s just this silly word you hippies have.”
I was back on my heels now, realizing I was being attacked. I held Toto closer to me. “Only ’cuz you’re jealous.”
“I’m—”
“Yeah, old and jealous. I’m living this free life, and you’re not.”
“What’re you saying?” She took a step toward me.
“What are you saying?” I didn’t flinch.
“I’m saying, as long as you stay here with me, I forbid you to go beg on the streets—like some pathetic mendicant.”
“You . . . forbid . . . me?”
She folded her arms over her chest. She was wearing a pleated ivory blouse.
“Lucinda!” she called out, but it was too late. Toto and I were out the door.
One dollar and forty seven cents, I say to myself. I couldn’t get my usual place in front of the Peace Eye bookstore, so I’m next to a phone booth in front of a liquor store. I’m not sure what day it is, though it feels like a Saturday. A lot of people are out. There’s one of the tourist buses they run by. Old men and women are staring at me through the bus window. I hold up my middle finger.
Some old guy drops a quarter in my cup. I’ve seeded it with pennies so when someone drops something, it makes a nice rattle. I’m a success! I add the quarter to my total. One dollar and seventy-two cents.
Should I have taken Kay’s offer? I know I had it pretty sweet there, but truth was, I was getting bored. I’m not down here in the Haight to have the easy life. I’m here for adventure, fun, kicks. And . . . I haven’t been having much of that lately.
Clink. What was that, a dime? One dollar and eighty-two cents.
With a little luck I’ll be over two bucks soon. Then maybe I can afford a nice dinner at Love Burger.
Still with no place to sleep tonight. Maybe I’ve gotten a little spoiled, not so into the park again.
But, hell, it’s only a little after noon. See, that’s what I mean. Staying with Kay, knowing where my bed and three squares were coming from, I was getting soft, settling for the easy life. For real! I never used to worry where I’d end up. I’d just be—Toto and me, we’d just always be taken care of.
It’s been cloudy all morning, and finally it starts to rain. It’s been a really wet spring here in San Francisco, and I’m sitting there on the street with my jacket zipped all the way up, Toto warm against my breasts, and this sort of mothy fake fur collar I got pulled tight around my neck. I’m pretty much beneath an overhang, but I have to keep scrunching up my Keds to get them out of the rain.
I grit my teeth. Sit there. The rain’s keeping the tourists off the street, and I don’t pick up more than a couple nickels the rest of the day.
Hmmnnnnph! No, I’m not going back to Kay’s. I’m not—
“Hey, Flower, how ya doin’?”
I look up, and it’s Harley. He’s got his big moony grin underneath his bike helmet, and he’s looking so goofy and stupid, I just can’t help myself. I go, “I’m fuckin’ miserable!”
“Babe!”
“I mean, I’m sitting out here, I don’t have much more than a fuckin’ dollar to my name, Toto’s shivering, I’m hungry, and I don’t know where I’m crashing tonight.” I look up at him, and I can tell my paraffin-blue eyes are huge and round. Has being at Kay’s spoiled me this much? But I keep going. “And all I’m lookin’ at for dinner is whatever I can swipe from the fuckin’ market. Harley, I can’t eat another meal of Vienna sausages and Hostess fruit pies!”
“I hear ya, babe.” Harley’s squatted down so he’s at my eye level.
“You—” Harley’s still smiling like a loon.
“You oughta come with me—”
“Oh, yeah, under your tree in the fuckin’ park—in the rain?”
He shakes his head. “I got a whole new scene going, babe.”
I don’t remember him calling me “babe” so much before, if at all. There’s something sort of bigger than usual and cocky about him, can’t quite put my finger on it.
“Like what?” I say.
“Like the answer to your prayers.”
“Oh, yeah!” I let out, clearly meaning: Yeah, sure, tell me all about it.
But maybe that’s part of what I do mean, because Harley says, “Found some people—interesting people. Got me off the street.” He reaches into his jeans and pulls out a roll of bills. First one off the top is a twenty. Shows me the next one, it’s a twenty, too, as if I’d think it was just a fake roll.
“What’re you doing, Harl? You working for somebody?”
A smirk. “I don’t call it work.”
“What is it?”
He runs a finger across his lips, zipping them.
That pisses me off, and I pull my knees even closer to my chest. The cool air snaps at the bare skin through the holes in my jeans. Toto squirms upward, trying to get his head out of the opening in my jacket. I unzip it a couple inches and he pops his bright-eyed head through. Then coughs. Shit! I hadn’t heard the cough for a couple weeks.
“Harley, what the fuck are you into?” I shout, just losing it. “Why won’t you tell me?”
“Let me take you to dinner.”
“What?”
“Dinner, babe.”
“What, in a restaurant?”
“No,” I say. I’m still full of fire. This doesn’t feel like spare change, it feels like a handout.
“Hey, come on.” He stands up, and it’s weird; it’s suddenly colder and wetter with his head three feet farther from mine.
“What about Toto?” I finally say.
“We’ll sneak him in. What you feel like? I been going to this steak place over on Masonic, up the hill.” Harley keeps smirking. “Steak, you ain’t had it for a while, it’s pretty righteous, Flower.”
Against my better judgment I start salivating. It’s terrible, my mouth’s getting all ahead of me; and the next thing I know I’m following Harley down the street.
- - - - -
Harley still won’t tell me what he’s up to, but he says where he’s staying there’s plenty of room, and that I oughta come crash with him. I tell him straight out that I’m not doing a thing with him, and he half squirms and half smirks but finally says, “Hey, who even thinks I want to put moves on you?”
“I’m serious.”
“Me, too, babe. It’s O.K.”
“And quit calling me babe!”
So here Flower is, on the back of Harley’s bike, my belly full, pleasant little sauteed-mini-mushroom burps popping out of my mouth, and we’re heading out Parnassus, which turns into Judah, dodging the white and green streetcars, Harley gunning his hog, Toto and me holding on for dear life—but digging the rush—and then we’re heading up a hill, then stopping on this stone-quiet block in front of a big old Victorian house behind a black-metal fence and gate.
The whole house is dark, like nobody’s there, but that doesn’t stop Harley. We climb a switchback of steps up to a wooden landing, and he just twists the knob and walks in.
I see candles—along a long hallway, then back into distant rooms, nothing but homemade candles, wax swirled in multicolors, and each flame a slightly different tint: some yellow, others peach, some blue, even a few purple. It’s pretty trippy.
From the back rooms comes music, Indian raga–like but with electric guitars and drums, and an organ droning over it. My eyes are adjusting, and when we get through the hallway, we’re in a dining room with a big oak table and Indian fabrics on the walls and billowing down from the ceiling. It’s pretty strange, like something out of an Arabian Nights tale—like we stumbled into a tent in the desert with nomads or something.
I’ve taken Harley’s hand, and I’m letting him lead me and Toto along. Finally, I hear voices. They’re coming from a kitchen, which is to the left of the room we’re in, down another short corridor.
The kitchen’s lit normally, and in it are three guys and a chick. Two of the guys are big, with tight black T-shirts and thick, greasy hair falling past their shoulders. The chick’s a little older than me, and taller, with straight blonde hair, like mine. She’s pretty, and I immediately flash on whether she’s prettier than me. I don’t think so; she’s got something a little tight to her mouth that crimps up her face and there’s no apple-blush to her cheeks. The third guy’s wearing a leather vest with fringes and a paisley shirt with a high collar buttoned up tight at his neck. Above the collar he has an Adam’s apple so big it’s like the first thing I see; it keeps beating in and out, like some kind of heart.
The kitchen is so thick with doobie that I feel my eyeballs start to pop.
“Hey,” Harley says. I’ve let go his hand and am leaning up against a refrigerator painted in pink and lavender swirls.
“You’re the new guy, right?” the guy in the leather vest says. He has thin dirty-blond hair parted right in the middle and falling to his shoulders. He’s half a foot shorter than the other two guys.
Harley nods.
“Who’s the chick?”
“I’m Flower,” I say. “This is Toto.”
The guy gives me a quick smile. “And I’m the Wizard.” His eyes are laughing brightly. He’s holding a joint and takes a hit off it, then squeaks out in a heliumlike voice, “You can call me Wiz.”
The blonde chick chuckles. Her fingers dance over to the back of the guy’s neck and she rubs it.
“So how’d it go?” this Wizard (who I know, of course, is throwing a goof at me) asks Harley.
“Bitchin’,” he says. “Everybody just where they were sposed to be, everybody had the scratch.” He gives his right front pants pocket a pat.
Wizard nods. “We’ll go settle up in a bit.” He holds out his joint. “You want a hit?”
“Yeah, man.” Harley takes the joint, then passes it to me. I’m still not into weed that much, but, hell, I think, I’m already pretty stoned just being here and breathing the freaking air; and so I take the cigarette, which is down to roach-size, and hold it at the end of my middle finger and thumb. Its coal almost burns my skin. I pull the joint up to my mouth, but then something gets to me, and I only mock take a drag off it.
“You ain’t gonna get high like that, sugar,” Wizard says. With a deft hand he reaches out with a clip and grabs the roach. “You gotta hit it hard!” He pulls smoke off the sizzling joint down his throat, the roach glowing flame orange, until the Zig-Zag paper combusts and nothing but a fine flicker of black ash floats down to the floor.
The blonde chick reaches over and puts her mouth over Wiz’s, and he blows his smoke into her. They clutch each other for a long moment, swaying in the center of the kitchen. When they finally pull apart, Wiz says to Harley, “O.K., dude, let’s go finish up our business.” He looks straight at me. “Flower, you’ll be all right here, right?”
I pull Toto closer to me, then nod. What else can I do?
“I’m Sheree,” the chick says. She holds out her hand. “Let’s go play some music.”
I’m not really getting a bad vibe off the place, or even one all that strange for what’s going down in San Francisco. Maybe it’s just because I was at Kay’s for the last week I’m thinking about it at all. Anyway, Sheree leads me into the main room—what at home we used to call the living room—and it’s thick with the Indian cloth and handmade candles. It’s so dark that I bump into a knee-high round wooden table and start to fall. Sheree reaches out but not in time. Fortunately there’s a bunch of big fat pillows on the ground, and I just tumble into them. Toto scampers up to me and starts licking my face to make sure I’m all right.
The only thing Sheree says is, “Are you more into the Dead, Quicksilver, or the Airplane?” She’s standing over the stereo, fanning record albums.
“I dig the Beatles,” I say. “Though I crashed with the Dead a few weeks ago.”
“Really?” Sheree goes. “That sounds cool.”
I nod. Toto’s still up at my face, his little tongue going crazy on my chin. I finally lift him up by his warm belly and try to get him settled on one of the pillows.
She puts the first Dead LP on the box, and the first song, The Golden Road ( To Unlimited Devotion), comes up. Lucky me.
“So what do you guys do here?” I ask.
“Where you from, New York?”
I shake my head, Huh? “No, I’m from up north in Oregon.”
“Oh. You know it’s only people from back East who ask what you do. You’re from here, you ask what’re you into.” Her voice is sort of high and breathy as she says this.
I feel my mouth twisting. “O.K., Sheree, what’re you guys into?”
“Oh,” she says, her nose going up in the air. “Lots of things.”
I’m suddenly standing, walking down the hall. I call out, “Hey, Harley, where are you?” Toto, deep into his pillow, doesn’t follow me.
No answer. There’s a staircase, and I start to climb it. Everything’s still candlelit, and it’s no less dark as I get higher. I’m treading very carefully, don’t want to trip again.
I call out again, “Harley? You up here?”
It’s almost totally dark as I move along the second floor. There are doors, open only a couple inches. I hear the Dead album floating up the stairs, but I also hear str
ange sounds. They’re faint, and I can’t make out what they are. They sound to me something like giant sponges being wrung out. I hear what I’m sure is water dripping. And then something human, I think. Sighs, or are they moans? I can’t tell. It’s like a thousand whispers all at once—and in my head, it’s like they’re all coming straight at me, like a flurry of arrows.
I’m back down the stairs in a flash; back with Sheree and Toto, sitting there like some little pasha on his pillow. And—thank God—there’s Harley and the guy who wants me to call him the Wizard.
“Hey, Flower, where were you?”
“Looking for you.”
“I’ve been here all the time.”
“Stop it!” I say, and it comes out loud. “I didn’t smoke any weed,” I say under my breath to myself. “I didn’t—”
“Anyway, Carl here—” he gestures to the blond-haired Wiz guy “—he’s got a proposition for you. Easy, peasy, babe. And it’ll put a quick hundred bucks in your pocket.”
- - - - -
So here Flower is, I’m on a bus, a big green duffel bag slung up on the rack above, half a dozen kilos of Maui prime stuffed in underneath my new change of clothes, and I’m reading Anna Karenina (spent last summer up in Bend lost to War and Peace; saved my head) and gazing out the window. I’m wondering what Sacramento’s going to be like. (The weed’s actually for a small town called Davis, a few miles west, with a university there—and a deep hunger for smoke.) It’s awful flat around here now, and I guess it’s the center of farm land, but different from home—more rows and rows of whatever they’re growing. Guess they aren’t growing much weed, or else I wouldn’t have to be here running it in.
The truth is: I’m scared to death.
The joy is: I’m scared to death.
Wiz—why call him Carl?—fronted me twenty-five bucks plus paid my bus ticket, and Sheree promised she’d take care of Toto. (When I woke up the next morning, I found a dozen people sitting out in a big backyard, drinking coffee and tea and eating these wonderful sweet cranberry muffins from down the street; Sheree said Toto could hang out there in the sunshine anytime he wants.) Harley’d admitted he’d been moving weed around for a month now and was rolling in cash, and I—I was damn tired of having nothing of my own, as cool and free as that was supposed to make me feel.