“Nobody.” This was Mike’s field of special competence. “There’s just no way to keep that kind of secret. Not even in China. No.”
We stared at each other with matched expressions of unbridled surmise, and then, in chorus, said, “The Pill from Outer Space!”
I dropped to the floor, laughing, and rolled about a bit, now and then gasping, “No! Mother of God! Oh wow!” but mostly, “No!” Mike was doing much the same thing, and Sean looked unusually tentative.
“It’s absurd,” I yelped. “Also corny. It’s impossible to take seriously. It’s worse than third-class pulp science fiction. It’s just unthinkable. Therefore,” one of my favorite words, “once you’ve eliminated the unthinkable…”
Michael, still semihelpless on the floor, agreed. “It’s a Communist Plot,” he chuckled. “Elementary.”
This bit of unreason was only a little easier to take, but eventually we calmed down and took it. I had a few reservations, but Mike — who was hooked on spies and such to begin with — was wholly smitten by the notion. His eyes hinted at incredible schemes.
“Well,” he said at length, “what’re we going to do about it?”
“Do?” I hadn’t considered that angle.
“Yeah, do. We’re not gonna let ’em get away with this, are we?”
“Of course not, I suppose.”
“Right. Whatever this plot is, we’ve got to thwart it.”
“We do?”
“It’s our duty, baby. They’re trying to overthrow society, Chet. And where would we be without society?”
It was an interesting question, but I didn’t like any of the answers.
“Okay,” I resigned. “What’re we gonna do?”
We discussed it for almost an hour, confusing Sean beyond repair and swearing him to absolute secrecy. He was already a little afraid to open his mouth anyway, and when Mike casually mentioned plastique, you could almost see Sean shrivel up. But his eyes were just as excited as Mike’s.
“We’ve got one solid handle,” said Michael the Theodore Bear.
“Which is?”
“Laszlo Scott,” he replied. “Sean and that chick got their pills from Laszlo. But where did he get them?”
Another interesting question. Laszlo Scott was an exceptionally slimy creature, capable, to my mind, of any enormity, but he was also imposingly stupid, and I couldn’t imagine any really competent Communist Plotter making use of him.
“Where indeed?” I counterqueried.
“Right!” Mike snapped. “That’s what you’ve got to find out.”
“I?”
“Who else? You’re the local Laszlo Scott expert. It wouldn’t do much good if I tried to follow him, would it? Sean can help you.”
“You want Me to follow Laszlo?”
“Only for a few days, until he gets more pills. That’s when the fun begins.”
“Following Laszlo?”
“C’mon, it won’t hurt you. It’ll be Fun, Chester. Really. You can take notes.”
Groovy. So I resigned myself to tailing Loathsome Laszlo, but I was already sick of the whole routine. I had a whole anthology of arguments against this project, beginning with, “If this is really a Communist Plot, we ought to notify the FBI,” and ending with, “I’m a musician, dammit, not a spy,” but it was already evening, and we had to go west.
I didn’t really want to follow Laszlo.
7
IT TURNED out to be an exceptionally quiet Sunday, especially by Village standards. Aside from the horde of teenyboppers, none of whom represented enough money to matter, plus half a spate of bewildered-looking tourists who were most likely hunting for Chinatown, the streets were deserted.
“It’s a turndown day, baby,” Chaz said when I reached The Mess, something like eight-thirty. He was right. There were more performers in the house than audience.
“Yesterday must’ve worn ’em out,” I probably explained.
Anyhow, Charley closed The Mess a half hour later, and all of us — we Tripouts, Al Mamlet, and a banjoist from Chicago I’d never seen before who somehow knew what he thought was all about me — split for The Garden of Eden.
M. T. Bear and Sean were already there, of course, along with Gary the Frog, a few Davids, and the customary strangers. They were clustered around our family table, overflowing slightly into the aisle, interfering with the waitress, chattering like a tribe of typists, and generally carrying on as was their noisy wont.
Gary, his face even more of an acne farm than usual, was loudly endeavoring to master a twelve-string guitar he’d neglected to tune, while one of the Davids kept saying excitedly, “Hey, baby, let me try it? Huh? Huh, Gary? Kin I try it?” All very natural.
Mike was doing his standard best to catch everyone’s ear, saying, “But it’s a Plot, don’t you understand?” but everyone’s ear remained blithely uncaught. Mike’d hollered Plot too often. Everyone believed him, but nobody cared. Constant excitement is a drag.
The Garden of Eden, immune to Sunday doldrums, skirled about the table like a neurotic river, babbling, jostling, everyone sort of accidentally groping (sort of) everybody else, all of which made it hard for me to get through to Mike. “Pardon me,” I said politely once or twice, pro forma, with no visible effect. Then “This is a Raid!” I yelled in a thick bass voice. “Don’t nobody move!”
The noise was something awful — high-pitched shrieks, low thuds, lots of Oh Wow’s, and other hip chaos — but when the dust cleared, I only had to shove and push a little bit to get through to the table.
“Why didn’t you just yell Fire?” asked Mike.
“Howdy, baby,” added Sean.
And, “Where’s my Geetar?” croaked Gary the Frog, thank God.
I sat down gratefully. Some David surrendered his seat to Sativa, who whispered what I chose to think was thanks. Patrick, Stu, and Kevin pulled up chairs obtained from somewhere. A version of quiet descended on The Garden of Eden. Even the Kallikak box took five.
“What’s happenin!?” I smiled, pretending nothing was.
“They don’t believe me,” Michael grieved.
“Why,” I shrugged, “should they?”
A slow voice, like a tawny port, breathed, “Who is That?” into my left ear. “He’s Pretty!” Sativa always talked like that.
“Sean,” I explained.
“Huh?” He hadn’t heard the question.
Okay. “Sean,” I said with flawed formality, “this is Sativa. Sativa love, meet Sean.”
“Oh yeah!” Vast enthusiasm. “You sure sing Good.”
“Pretty.” She had a few-track mind, like most of us in those days, but more openly. She slithered from her chair to a position directly behind young Sean and started to stroke his hair ever so gently. At the first stroke he twitched slightly, being unaccustomed to such things, then leaned back and enjoyed it.
“Ai-yah,” I told myself. “Well, I won’t have to worry about those two for a while,” not that I’d intended to.
“Hi!” That was Harriet, Gary the Frog’s fan club et cetera, surging through the crowd like an amiable elephant. “Guess who I just saw outside?”
I knew better than to bother.
“Laszlo!” she lisped.
“Oh God,” said the rest of us.
“Laszlo Scott,” she went on. “He says he’ll have more you-know-what tomorrow.”
“Groovy.” That, of course, was Gary.
“Laszlo.” My evening was shattered. I’d forgotten about that. Laszlo Scott indeed, whom my best friend Mike said I had to dammit follow tomorrow. I thought about that for a while, missing out on the activity around me. When I got back, Sativa was on Sean’s lap, and I couldn’t quite tell whose arms were whose, which was splendid; Gary the Frog was sitting on Harriet’s lap, which made more sense than chivalry; Michael and Patrick were trying to understand each other, a hopeless hobby they were fond of; the Kallikak box was playing one of Our songs, by God; and Laszlo Scott, alas, was flowing up the aisle toward me, and I did
n’t have a tourist’s chance to get away.
Laszlo was easier to understand than to believe. He throve on ridicule, an amazingly complex perversion. Not just any old ridicule, mind you: Laszlo was a connoisseur. He was perfectly willing to endure the esteem of young female tourists, on which he made his living, as long as Mike and I and other such Village aristocrats, all of whom he hated in proportion to his need for them, put him beautifully down. (Once, in an excess of something I’d rather not think about, Laszlo got a coffeehouse gig that involved his being beaten up by the manager after closing every night. He held that job for six months, until the manager got busted in New Jersey for aggravated assault and the coffeehouse closed down.)
Laszlo stood some five plump nine in his fragrant stocking feet. His hair was so blond it was almost invisible, wherefore he sported a translucent pussycat beard that gave his (let us call it pasty) face a patently absurd ambiguity, an almost aggressive absence of form. In the middle of this face, which might be ugly if anybody cared, sat two little eyes, wet blue, beady, red-rimmed, and porcine, surrounded by no visible lashes or brows.
“Laszlo,” I once said in a fit of divine inspiration, “is a blue-eyed maggot in drag.” No one ever disagreed.
(Laszlo was coming closer. His progress up the aisle was slow, because he stopped to manifest himself at every table on the way, but he was now only three and a half tables away and my stomach was beginning to turn.)
Laszlo was a poet, so to speak; a coffeehouse poet, of course, given to clambering up on stages and reciting his works at helpless audiences, hopefully for money. This was his claim to membership in coffeehouse society, and even though his poetry was generally incredibly bad or stolen or both, we honored his claim, without necessarily honoring Laszlo himself — a superhuman task not worth the effort.
(Now he was two tables off and clearly audible, alas. Mike’d noticed him and was trying to communicate with me by vague and frantic hand signals that I carefully ignored, preferring to sink into happy catatonia.)
The trouble with Laszlo, however, was none of this. The trouble was that Laszlo was a skunk, a nerd, a slimy loathsome thing whose major joy was to bring trouble and discomfort to everyone he encountered. For kicks he sold oregano to high-school kids from Queens. He stole from people poorer than himself as a matter of habit. He invented foul stories about innocent people and circulated them for a hobby. He once caught a social disease and spread it broadcast, especially among the naive and virginal, for upward of six weeks, until it got too uncomfortable even for him.
Laszlo was an incurable backstabber. In the Village society, where trust took the place of law, he could not be trusted. He was a wolf in black sheep’s clothing, a one-man plague. Even worse, he was a notorious drag.
The thing is, if Laszlo had been at all intelligent, or even kind of clever, or if he’d just had something like a sense of humor, we’d’ve pretty much ignored his faults and weaknesses. I myself was moderately fond of one or two worse characters who had the saving grace of being interesting. With such people, you take their flaws into account, more or less automatically doing whatever you must to protect yourself, and then enjoy these people as you’d enjoy anyone else. After all, no one’s perfect. But Laszlo, alas, was stupid, which simply could not be forgiven.
And now he was finishing off the table across the aisle (“Is it true your old lady’s hustling?” he was asking a hyperjealous drummer), and we, especially I, were next. Oi. Laszlo had a special fondness, so to speak, for me, mainly because I was pretty successful in a number of arts he pretended to practice. I’d published two small books of pretty good verse, and a few novels, and I used to write for the East Village Other until it sold out to the Establishment and went slick, and I was a mildly famous rock-n-rolly, and so on. In other words, I was popular in a world he wanted to rule. I was a number of things he’d’ve liked to’ve been, on his terms, which made me a natural target for him, and here he came.
“Good evening, Mister Anderson. How’s your commercial little world tonight? Have you heard the news?” He was dressed, as he’d been for the past six weeks, in tattered cavalier poet garb — rusty purple patched tights, formerly black shabby high-heeled, knee-high boots a size or so too large, a lace-front shirt nearly as dark as his boots after six weeks’ uninterrupted wear, a swallowtail coat that might’ve once been black but was mainly green by now, a battered three-cornered hat with a limp and dirty plastic feather sagging down from it, and an opera cape of indeterminate color badly patched in some other indeterminate color. Furthermore, he smelled.
“Ah yes,” I less than sneered, “it’s little George.” When he arrived in the Village, two years ago, he changed his name from George Harper to Laszlo Scott, and I never let him forget it. “I suspected you were around. Something in the air, if you know what I mean.” I never talked like this to anyone else.
“And there’s little Mike,” ignoring me. “Saw Maidy yesterday, baby, hangin’ out at Times Square. Dig?” Maidy Clark was Mike’s immediate ex-mistress, about whom he was going to be sensitive until the next one came along.
Mike stood up, clenched a fist, said, “Laszlo…!” and then remembered that we had designs on Master Scott and, shaking his head like a bear among bees, sat down again.
“What news, Georgie?” I was hoping to get it over with as quickly as could be.
“Well, baby, I just signed a contract. With Columbia, you dig? They want me to tape my own songs, baby, with a band.” He purred unwholesomely.
“Sure, man, sure. Just like Dylan, right? What happened to that contract you signed with Victor? Gonna do both? And how about that book you were doing for Viking?” Laszlo’s greatest personal weakness was that he could never remember to whom he’d told which lie. “So what else is new?” I hated to hear myself talking like that. I wanted to go away and take a bath.
Laszlo promptly changed the subject. “I s’pose you’ve heard about my Pills,” he sneered.
Mike’s ears came to a visible point.
“Well, I heard about some pills,” I confessed.
“Mine,” he exulted. “Reality Pills, you dig? An’ I’m the only connection, baby. Me. You want some?”
“What do you mean, you’re the only connection? Bullshit. Where’d you get ’em?”
“That’s my secret, baby.”
“Not for long, Georgie, not for long.”
“Long enough, baby. Want some?”
Mike was obviously memorizing all of this and ready to spend the rest of the night analyzing it. He took being a spy and/or detective seriously, the only way really to enjoy it. The rest of our group, for various reasons of their own, were listening almost as intently. Only Sean and Sativa were ignoring our discussion. They had other things to think about.
“You want some Reality Pills?” Laszlo repeated.
“I dunno,” grudgingly. “Maybe.”
“Sure, Captain Cool. Yeah, maybe. Tell you what I’ll do: I’ll have some more tomorrow, dig? If I see you, baby, I’ll give you a special deal, just for you, Andy, ’cause you’re sort of a poet, too.”
“I thought you were givin’ ’em away,” croaked Gary the Frog.
“Just creating a demand, Froggy. You know.” One very smug Laszlo.
“Yeah,” I said, cynicism dripping from my words so strong I was half afraid my teeth’d rot. “The first one’s always free, right? We know how it is, Georgie. But how do we know the next batch’ll work? You’ve got a great name for oregano, baby.”
It was next to impossible to predict what would offend Laszlo, but this seemed to. He drew his cloak around himself in a dramatic gesture that knocked two cups of coffee and a Coke off the table behind him, elevated his nose some fifteen degrees, and sniffed, “That’s your problem, baby. See you then.”
He huffed off aromatically to bug some other table. I took a deep breath. Sativa giggled. Gary the Frog started to say something, forgot what it was, and snapped his slack mouth shut with a liquid click. Mike was bursting to
say something, but not till Laszlo was out of range.
“Michael,” I whispered loudly, “can you really believe that biped fungus is a Communist Plotter? And besides,” I’d been thinking about this for a while, “how could that damn thing be a Communist Plot if it couldn’t be tested secretly?”
Mike looked around cautiously. “Siberia,” he hushed.
“Siberia?”
“Right. They used monkeys or something. Obvious. Who’d notice a monkey’s hallucinations anyway?”
“Well, I would,” said Harriet from under Gary the Frog.
“Me, too,” I agreed. “And what about Laszlo?”
“He’s a tool.” My density seemed to annoy Mike. Pity. “That doesn’t change the plan, though.”
“Oh.” I’d been afraid of that.
“Tomorrow,” Mike went ruthlessly on, “he’s getting more, right? That’s our chance. It’s all so simple.” Mike had a habit, at such times, of spreading out his hands as though he were trying on a crucifix for size. This meant he was practicing superhuman patience with such clods as myself, who were unable to understand such obvious schemes.
“Are you people, you know, like Talkin’ ’bout Somethin’, man,” Patrick stumbled, “or is it one of your rants?” We’d put him on by accident once with the plot of a spy story we never got around to writing, and he’d wondered about us ever since.
“Just a rant,” said the security-conscious M. T. Bear.
“Groovy.”
Whereupon the table talk turned to fairly general subjects, mainly yesterday’s adventures, the Reality Pill, who was sleeping with or without whom, what bands were rumored to be breaking up and why, the Reality Pill, who might be selling what for how much, the apocryphal history of Andrew Blake and everybody else we knew who wasn’t there, modern techniques of counterespionage, wiretapping, housebreaking et al, and other quaint topics dear to our twisted hearts, but especially Reality Pills.
“I don’t care,” Stu insisted. “I want ’em.” Mike had been expounding his Communist Plot theory.
“Sure,” I said loyally, “it’s probably a great high for people like us, but can you imagine the Whole World on that stuff?”
The Butterfly Kid Page 5