by John Nichols
Eddie S. had held Nikita for almost thirty minutes (outrageous!) until Belle London appeared at the jail accompanied by Tribby, to post a ten-thousand-dollar property bond for his release. Over at the Our Lady of the Sorrows Hospital, the diminutive Bonatelli’s heart had stopped thrice during the night while doctors Phil Horney and Ed Diebold labored to save the warped little scumbag. “Stable” was his most recent listing. Rumors had it the senior Bonatelli had not yet decided whether to put the contract on Nikita for traumatizing his kid or for failing to eradicate the useless little bum.
In no mood to promote this balderdash, having found himself—these past few days—traveling uncomfortably close to the core of commensurately puerile shenanigans, Joe slowly chewed on his breakfast and pretended to read the newspaper. Yet his big-lobed ears were flapping. Oh for the guts to scribble down all these stories during the act of their telling! Of course, when he glanced up, surreptitiously letting his eyes probe each animated face in their group, Joe realized that he was ensconced in a den of similarly intentioned vipers. For although all heads were cocked in attitudes of conversational alertness, their heavy-lidded eyes had that half-glazed, introspective look of fireside cats, as they attempted to memorize choice goodies while frantically wishing for the chutzpah to withdraw their little notebooks and scribble frantically, indelibly capturing the rich mishmash of sardonic and histrionic information going down that could be money in all their Nobel banks one day.
Eager to get up, get out, and be gone, Joe couldn’t move. He was held spellbound by the gossip. And anyway, where could he retreat to now that he had no home? While they talked of recent flying-saucer sightings on the gorge rim, Joe wondered: how could he ever face Heidi and the children again? While Ralph Kapansky described his recent aura-adjustment down in Alamogordo, New Mexico, Joe wondered how, even if he managed to raise the cash, he could evict Eloy Irribarren from his adobe shack, thus giving himself, however humble, a home.
They were discussing the Kabala—the Tree of Life. Somebody was thinking of joining that born-again women’s Christian group called Women Aglow, where “they actually speak in tongues.” Somebody else had a friend who had recently joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. They discussed biorhythms and decided how to pull a “cosmic trigger.” Ralph mentioned that he had met a lady, a millionaire tourist from Cincinnati, last night. She had offered to fly him to her Ohio digs where they would do a kundalini copulation in front of her videotape machine. Mimi said in her former life she had been—no kidding!—a grizzly bear in Yellowstone Park. “That’s how come I’m a lesbian today.” Joe failed to see the connection, but nobody else had a problem with it. Where had she picked up this fascinating tidbit about her past?—from Nikita Smatterling, of course. Not only could the man paint ethereal monkeys, but he augmented his income by being a Past-Life Reader as well.
That is, when he wasn’t wearing a loincloth and a pink turban giving naturopathic massages down in the “body cubicle” of Wilkerson Busbee’s Spa and Sauna.
Mimi McAllister ran down the latest on the Hanuman scene. Somehow, the Eastern contingent had been sprung from New York City despite the lack of Baba Ram Bang’s visa, and Fluff Dimaggio’s Sullivan Law violation. Yesterday afternoon, Nikita Smatterling had received a telegram from Wilkerson Busbee saying that Baba Ram Bang (that ninety-three-year-old Darjeeling mystic who, in a previous incarnation, had missed selection as the Tibetan Panchen Lama by a mere millimeter) had expressed a desire to see Sahdra (formerly Penelope) Pinkerton and her belly dancers perform at the Cosmic Banana Café.…
I should have a tape of this conversation, Joe thought. Nobody would believe it. A ninety-three-year-old diabetic east Indian ether-brain sitting at an outdoor café table in Chamisaville, USA, eating an alfalfa-sprout sandwich and guzzling Red Zinger tea, surrounded by graying hippies in turbans, rice-paper shirts, and aoki sandals, watching a bunch of middle-class honky women (outfitted in diaphanous turquoise and salmon-pink crepe)—calling themselves Sahdra, Meshak, and Jamila (who used to be Penny, Peggy, and Paula)—undulate like Egyptian ecdysiasts.
And it’s only the first Monday morning in June!
Then, apparently, somewhere in Ohio, the Hanuman bearers had run into trouble again. It all started when Iréné Papadraxis, who liked to tipple on a flask of cream sherry as they zoomed along, got drunk and, reacting to the hot afternoon sunshine, stripped to the waist. Almost immediately, the driver of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler jackknifed his rig, and Wilkerson had to swing off the road to avoid certain death from the catapulting trailer spewing chickens. Nobody was hurt, but they ended up jammed into a culvert. When police arrived on the scene, Fluff Dimaggio handcuffed himself to the precious Hanuman statue and swallowed the keys—a security precaution in case the cops locked them in jail. Baba Ram Bang retired to a nearby patch of rest-area lawn exclusively reserved for dogs and went into a deep meditative trance, refusing to move when law officers gave him orders. So they arrested the mystic. Rama Unfug tried to film the arrest for evidence in a later brutality case, and was promptly kayoed with a billy club. For good measure, they smashed Rama’s camera, at which point Shanti Unfug kicked an officer in the groin, and Om Unfug whacked his kneecap with her Creative Playthings wooden mallet. Arrested en masse, they were all now cooling their heels in the Clarion, Ohio, hoosegow, even Fluff Dimaggio. The cops had transferred him, and the heavy statue to which he was chained, eleven miles in a lumberyard forklift.
“They’ll never make it by Thursday!” everyone wailed.
Closer to home, various catastrophes and happy adventures were happening to people Joe knew only peripherally. The ex-husband of a woman named Sarah had driven in from Rochester last night and kidnapped her two children because he didn’t like her living with Sam Halaby, a metaphysical teacher claiming to be on his last incarnation (and damn glad of it because he wanted never again to return to this scorched and degrading earth).
Several folks just in from the Wolf Creek Pass Film Festival claimed to have met George Raft … and they had never done so much coke in their lives.
Joe said, “During the three years I have lived in this town I’ve heard that everybody and their brothers and their little sisters and even their dogs and their cats and their canaries toot coke like banshees, yet I’ve never been in a room where people were sniffing, or quiffing, or whatever the hell it is they do.”
Diana said, “You’re kidding. The only place they don’t do coke in this town is in Foodway!”
Rumor also had it that a very rich guy had arrived in town seeking to finance an expedition of unscrupulous well-armed hippies to travel down to Lake Titicaca for the purpose of snatching the Golden Sun Disc of Mu, a precious stone belonging to the head of the Brotherhood of the Seven Rays, Aramu Muru.
They talked about housing and land, about buying and renting and building and house-sitting and financing and searching.
“How you gonna find an acre of land anymore?” Jeff Orbison asked testily. “When Suki and I first hit this valley you could find land for a few thousand bucks an acre. A week ago, my next-door neighbor sold his half-acre for thirteen fat ones.”
“To who?”
“I think it was Ray Verboten.”
Mimi said, “I happen to know that Ray’s first day there he sold the irrigation rights to the new Sonic Burger so they could get hooked up to city water. You know for how much? Eighteen thousand dollars.”
Everybody whistled. A great helium bubble of despair rose to the top of Joe’s skull, doubling the intensity of his headache. No grace, no compassion, no class existed in the real-estate game. The Chamisa Valley was like a slave market, or a whorehouse. An entirely new breed had taken over the town and its once outlying, now incorporated, communities. Despite its pseudohip ecology-conservation rhetoric, when this new breed assessed landscape, all it saw was dollar signs. They rationalized, pretended, lied through their teeth, paid lip service to the Sierra Club, and brought in the backhoes. And Joe was one of them, too, wasn�
��t he? Just another ego with money in his pocket, looking for a Chicano or a snail darter to stomp.
Mimi was trying to buy land from a freak named Baldini Miller: he was moving to Bolinas because he felt the Shanti Institute was too eclectic for his children. Too, the violence vibes emanating from the Pueblo’s sacred mountain were too much of a downer. Her dealing for his half-acre and a hogan had been going great until Baldini put an ax through his foot eight days ago. With that, in an attempt to get straight with his karma, the freak had taken a vow of silence.
“Every time I go over there to clinch the deal, he just stares at me tearfully and shrugs,” Mimi said angrily. “His old lady, Ipu, keeps hitting him with a broom and ordering him to speak, make the deal, and grab the bread so they can split. But he merely continues to shrug, cry, and point at this big blood-soaked towel wrapped around his foot.”
“How much does he want?”
“Eighty-one thousand.”
“Wow! Where are you gonna score that kind of bread?”
“I have it all figured out. Part FHA, part family loans. Where do any of us get our money?”
Crazy Albert, a bearded and barefoot florist, entered the café lugging a newspaper carrier’s sack full of pink and green carnations. Beatifically smiling, he glided from table to table dumping handfuls of flowers in front of the patrons. Joe had heard that Crazy Albert had his own greenhouse in which he grew nothing but these carnations. Apparently he lived on a trust fund, compliments of a bigwig relative at ITT.
Joe simmered, feeling crazy. The air jumped and bubbled with weird molecules of clarity that exaggerated his hearing, tricked his vision. A rush of animosity labored hard to clear his body. He had an urge to bash down his fist, tip over the table, and go ape blaspheming his cohorts: “Parasites! Fascists! Egomaniacs! Sexfiends! Me-crazy jingoists! Amoral fuckfaces! Neophyte Nazis!”
What rough beast, its hour come at last, had slouched into Chamisaville to be born again?
* * *
DIANA CLAYMAN’S HAND thoughtfully scrabbled at the back of his neck. “Joe, are you okay?” Her voice issued from a distant place. And even though Joe wanted to pay attention, he couldn’t stop listening to the others. “I don’t know,” he murmured, barely able to hear himself. Instead, he heard Ralph doing a rap on some fine mescaline that he’d dropped recently up at one of the Little Baldy Bear Lakes north of Chamisaville. Totally ripped, Ralph had caught rainbow trout on tiny flies during a savage hailstorm: he called it one of his most classic, all-time highs. At the next table, three people Joe knew only as Tammy, Vern, and Newlin were having a simple conversation—yet to Joe their words seemed lunatic.
“Why didn’t you give me some more room? I felt like you were crashing in on me, cutting off my space. And I needed that space.”
“Maybe your energy just had to go somewhere else for a while.…”
“I started to realize I don’t even know what your trip is about.…”
“Apparently, we just don’t share the same kind of reality.”
“But I hear you, really. I understand where you’re coming from. I know we could continue to have an ongoing relationship if we would just manage to be more open, especially sexually.…”
“We got rid of some of that anxiety momentum for a while, but then we started laying negative trips on each other.…”
“There was too much deception and the vibes were getting all fucked up by unnecessary distractions.…”
“You needed another space to sit in. You’re not very centered at all. I was really worried. I thought you were on the brink.…”
“I love you all, I really care about you, I really care about people, but I’m not reading you very clearly.”
“Yeah, I know. My etheric is all out of whack.”
“When we discovered that you really needed that time and space, we were able to give it to you, because we understood your creative anxiety.…”
“I think a lot of my problems stem from the fact that in my last reincarnation I was a mandarin sorcerer.…”
“Well, all you really need is love.…”
“Yes, love is the only important thing.…”
The crime scene made its appointed rounds. Somebody had set a fire in the theater last night, trying to burn it down. An artist friend of Mimi’s had parked her car on the gorge rim and walked off a ways to sketch; on her return, all four of her tires were gone. Somebody had lost a toolbox from the back of his truck while parked at the A&W the other evening. Three days ago, after shopping at Foodway, Tribby had placed the groceries in his unlocked Volvo, then entered Wacker’s to buy birthday candles. While he was thus engaged, a thief ripped off the groceries.
“So what kind of freedom do we really have in this country?” Joe said dully.
“Don’t start,” Ralph warned. “I’m not in the mood for your wishy-washy communism.”
“You people aren’t ever in the mood for anything,” Joe said bitterly, staggering to his feet horrendously startled because he was almost crying. For a second his hands paddled the air helplessly, like a disoriented seal begging for its life. Turning, then, he stumbled against his chair, knocking it over, and, chased by Rimpoche’s neurotic barking, he fled from their puzzled, accusatory gazes.
He was surprised, out on the sidewalk, in air he could breathe again, to find himself supported by Diana Clayman. Secreting saliva, he fumbled in his shirt pocket for an Aminodur, popped the pill, and exclaimed, “What’s the matter with me?”
“It’ll be okay,” she soothed. “You’re just strung out. You’ve been going through some heavy shit, haven’t you? When was the last time you logged a decent night’s sleep?”
Joe faced her, honestly perplexed as he tried to catch his breath. “What are you doing here?”
“You look like you need a friend.”
“You don’t appear so hot yourself. Who gave you the shiner, the Polack Apache with bad breath?”
Grinning toughly, Diana said, “Who else?”
Joe gave her more than a cursory glance. She had lovely dark and smooth hair. The skin around her large, dark eyes was wrinkled and slightly red. She had a curved nose—call it a sort of Greek beak—a thick upper lip, and a full, slightly jutting lower lip. His eye was attracted to a small deformity, a grouping under her chin of three or four large black hairs that had obviously been plucked or cut. She wore an overlarge army jacket (with the name Wiggens across the pocket), faded dungarees, and sandals. Her head only came up to his chin.
Joe said, “Excuse the hysterics. I’m not my usual cheerful, shit-eating-grin-personified self. Momentarily, I’ve lost the thread.”
“What happened?”
“Who knows. I’m sick of it already. It’s so banal it’s pathetic. I feel like some kind of Woody Allen cliché. I can’t stand the fact I’ve become a neurotic bourgeois bum just like everybody else.…”
“Hey, kick back a little. You don’t need to trash yourself like this.”
“Right out of nowhere I blew it with my family. I started balling a woman I don’t even know. I just spent twelve thousand bucks to buy some pure coke to sell to buy land and a little house I probably couldn’t ever move into anyway because I’m afraid to evict the old geezer living there. Last night somebody tried to kill me for that dope. But I don’t even know if I’ll have a family to live on that land with if I do make the score. I can’t believe these last two days!”
She put her arm around his waist. “Join the crowd. Angel threw me out last night. He came in around two A.M. dressed in black and choking inside one of those Hanuman gorilla masks. We had a fight. I drove out onto the mesa and slept there. It was beautiful. And the first decent night’s sleep I’ve had in six months.”
“So here we are: Two Lost Souls on the Highway of Life.”
She tossed her head. “I don’t care, I’m used to it.”
“Used to what?”
Her eyes narrowed, indifferently hostile. “It used to be I went around looking for some kind of punc
h line in my life. I was like Candide, you know?—in search of Pangloss. I thought eventually you could reach some sanctified place where important events would happen, and it would all coalesce into something meaningful. But now I know the secret to existence is understanding that life is just something you do until you die. It’s how you kill the time until there isn’t any more time to kill. So I don’t get upset or discouraged about it anymore.”
“For Christ’s sake, how old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
“You look younger.”
“I feel older.”
After a brief pause, Joe said, “Would you do me a big favor, Diana? Go back inside and ask Ralph for the key to his office, tell him I gotta use the phone.”
“Go back in there yourself.”
“I can’t. One more false exit, and I swear I’ll commit suicide. I’m not ordering you around—honest. I’m begging you for a favor.”
“All right, I’ll go.”
As she departed, Spumoni Tatarsky roller-skated across the plaza, heading straight for the Prince of Whales Café. He carried a briefcase full of (either) Acapulco gold or a bunch of those cheap hologrammistic pendants known as dichromates. Resplendent in a black velvet top hat, formal tails decorated by crocheted pink-and-crimson roses, and a railroad engineer’s striped coveralls, he resembled a funky Uncle Sam. Playing the movie-star-avoiding-paparazzi-during-preliminary-hearings-for-his-trial-on-charges-of-murdering-his-internationally-famous-playgirl-wife-by-clubbing-her-to-death-with-a toilet-plunger, Joe hid his face. And, after his regular salutation—“Peace, brother”—Spumoni skated right on by into the Prince of Whales, trailing an odor of marijuana, incense, and dank armpits.