“Where were you raised?” Sarah asked. “In a dome?”
The Future Primitives piled off the couch, hairy, pale and unhealthy, the three cult stooges. In an act of uncivil disobedience, one of the males, Mancub, showed Sarah his privates. The other male, Jeremy Roth, too busy for anything that political, grappled and shrieked in a mock mating ritual with the female, Saffron. Sarah was set to get a bucket of cold water to separate them, but Saffron regarded her with such a savage smirk of superiority that Sarah had to take a step back.
These weren’t dogs, Sarah reminded herself. Dogs smelled better.
The Future Primitives brought to Sarah’s mind her favorite Saturday morning kids’ show “Land of the Lost” gone porno; Marshall, Will, and the missing link Choco, getting it on in a prehistoric ménage à trois. The Future Primitives were the worst kind of experimental hippies, scraggly, sexual, and in-your-face.
Sarah had decided long ago that hippies could be filed into four basic categories: experimental, retro, bush, and associative. Experimental hippies were marked by their extremist lifestyles. They believed if you were going to do something crazy, it was best to do it in numbers. For example, the land adjacent to the northwest of the Waterfall was occupied by a cult of experimental hippies called the Spinners who believed God spoke to them through Jerry Garcia’s guitar. To hear the holy word clearly, they took Ecstasy and spun in circles with their arms outstretched until they spewed. What experimental hippies lacked in common sense, they made up for in intensity. They were the most fanatical type of hippie, prone to jail, premature burn-out, and group suicide. They supported themselves through collective business ventures ranging from T-bill accounts to mass begging. The Spinners sold the standard wannabe paraphernalia, marijuana, bootleg Dead cassettes, tie-dyed clothing, to retro-hippies who, in Sarah’s book, were tourists of time.
Retro-hippies, young, white, and predominantly middle-class, saw the surface of the decade they were visiting and shopped accordingly. They littered the sidewalks of Haight Street in San Francisco and Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, bumming quarters for acid and pizza, acting as if they were homeless instead of bored, and packed the second-hand stores, paying top dollar for paisley vests and torn bell-bottoms, fringed leather jackets that were ugly and didn’t fit. They showed up for demonstrations, trying to out-hip each other with their political erectness and stylishly unstylish garb. Their idea of a political statement was to hold hands, form a circle, and sing “Give Peace a Chance.” Sarah felt it was what happened when history was taught by MTV.
But maybe that was all that was left of the legacy, Sarah thought, all that had filtered through the ad execs who wrote the final fiction.
Either way, it was embarrassing to see people her own age that clueless; retros didn’t know the difference between Che Guevara and Chez Panisse. People had died in the sixties, were beaten and imprisoned, movers and shakers were moved out and shook down. Sarah had seen the scars, dealt with the aftermath. Retros didn’t have any idea what it meant to live in a revolutionary environment. Raised in the wreckage, Sarah considered herself a by-product of those times as opposed to waste matter. She had heard the bush-hippies babble, reaching for roaches, pipes, pills, bongs, a copy of Soul on Ice, anything that might ease the memory of their failed attempt to change the world. She had listened to them exhale the oral history of how close they had come to a bright new tomorrow, seen the vision of the better times that preceded the fall burned into their bloodshot eyes.
“You should have been there.” Unsteady hands struck matches for an encore. “It was cosmic.” The Band has played its last waltz, packed up and disappeared into the tranquility of a closing night. “It was like, wow!” Stragglers splayed on the dance floor with cigarette butts and crumpled cups, among dried sweat and lost earrings. “The music, the sex, the love, everybody knew we were winning.” A bulb has burned out in the marquee. “If I could do it all over.” The W does not flash. “You should have been there.” The smell of smoked dope and dissipated dreams. “We were that close.” The anonymous odor of a dispersing crowd. “Everything almost changed.” A door closed, bolted, barred. “It was far out.” A building condemned. “Nobody will ever be that close again.”
Bush-hippies were the ones who headed for the hills after the sixties, dropping further out of society, looking to live independent of the world. They pretended it was perpetually 1969, the revolution was still coming, peace, love, and dope would carry them to the higher ground like Kesey’s bus. Time was marked by the price of an ounce of homegrown. They didn’t check publication dates when they picked up their copies of The Nation, The Guardian, and The Socialist Review from their P.O. boxes, and failed to notice any subtleties as they digested the leftist propaganda whole, substituting old bogeys for new ones. At political rallies the cameras zoomed in on them to discredit the event; dirty clothes, distrusting eyes, dusty FBI files. Same old freaks. Remember what happened last time? The confusion? Civil rights? Vietnam? “One, two, three, four, what are we fighting for?”
Naive, Sarah concluded. But they had been there when the heavy shit went down. Maybe that was too much for them. Too much for anyone. It was up to their security-starved children now, Republican-voting Democrats, video-game-gazing, second-generation dysfunctional, temp-employed whiners from an age without identity. At least the bush-hippies were on the right side. Sarah was certain her contemporaries would be responsible for the disappearance of any rain forest, ozone layer, Communist Party, or poetry that might have existed into the twenty-first century. With bush-hippies, you just had to look past their pretensions and realize they were as self-indulgent as anyone, good instincts but overly nostalgic and severely dependent on drugs. Compared to her set, bush-hippies would be saints if they wiped their asses once in a while.
“Arrrrgh!”
A Future Primitive jarred Sarah from her generalizations, leaving her lumped in the last category: associative-hippie. It didn’t matter who she was, what she thought, how she dressed, how much she hated the people that populated her daily life, she was a hippie by association. Mom was a hippie, Mom’s boyfriend was a hippie, she lived on a commune. Hippie, hippie, hippie. She couldn’t escape the scent of patchouli oil. Sure she had done her share of drugs, protests, Carlos Castaneda, astrological charts, and Ouija boards, but even if it was true, and Sarah felt falling into this fourth category left it open for interpretation, she hated to be reminded of her surroundings, to hear that stigma attached to her name. Sarah McKay, hippie. Not even.
“You better ease up with that shit,” Sarah said, recognizing the snarling Jeremy Roth, a child psychologist who worked the local institutions prescribing Ritalin and Thorazine to children five times more subdued than himself. “I’m in no mood to fuck around. Tell me where my Mom went, and I’ll let you get back to that voodoo that you do so well.”
The Future Primitives, like everybody at the Waterfall, took it for granted that Sarah was in no mood to fuck around. It was a given. Even when she was in the mood to fuck around, Sarah took that seriously too, surrounding herself with friends and letting her hair down like torrents of cartoon rain. If someone suggested she needed to take a chill pill, she shot back, they didn’t know what she needed. If they had a problem with her, tough shit. There was the door, don’t bump your ass on the way out. So when the Future Primitives continued growling, Sarah knew she was in for confrontation.
“Unghhh!”
“Oh yeah?” Sarah responded, wishing she had brought her marlin bat. “Tell me where my mother went or I’m getting my camera and taking some pictures. We’ll see how proud you are of your privates when they’re front-page news.”
The threat had leverage. The editor of the local newspaper was an ex-marine turned radical who told Sarah if she wanted to contribute a column and photograph about the commune, he would publish them. Knowing he once fabricated an interview with a Congressman and punched out the county’s superintendent, Sarah was certain that the editor would print whatever she sent
him, the more controversial the better. But her allegiance to the commune ran deeper than she let on, not to these fawning creeps, but to some of the bush-hippies. Definitely to Mom. Anything she wrote for the paper would not reflect kindly on Mom. But it was a good threat. She knew the Future Primitives only did their thing at the Waterfall because when their dope money ran low they had to venture into the county to support their lifestyle. There were standards to everybody’s depravity. The Future Primitives weren’t so out to lunch that they didn’t understand that employers rarely hired sexually deviant, nonverbal dirtbags. They were susceptible to bad press. Pictures wouldn’t affect Saffron’s part-time position in the holistic health department at the Co-op in Ukiah, but Jeremy Roth had a Ph.D. from Princeton and was no doubt thinking about tenure, somewhere, someday, after his sex drive and field research slowed down.
“I’m going to count to three, mostly because I can,” Sarah told them. “If I don’t get an answer, I’ll see your picture front page.”
Mancub leered at Sarah and crawled to the couch where he humped the crease between the cushions. Sarah made a mental note never to look there again for loose change. Saffron fondled her breasts and did her best Clint Eastwood. Jeremy watched nervously. Sarah started counting.
“One…”
Mancub bared his teeth, wolfing a succession of barks. Saffron pinched her nipples, eyes never leaving Sarah’s to further her excitement. Jeremy appeared uncertain, caught between getting his rocks off and a hard place.
“Two…”
Saffron reached for Mancub’s hairy butt which she squeezed as they both found a rhythm, yawping and grinding. Jeremy waded in to their midst, but lent no limb or appendage. Sarah felt sick.
“Three!” she said, spinning on her heel to search for her camera.
“Wah ugh all,” Jeremy grunted.
Saffron stopped stroking Mancub and gave Jeremy the sneer of a woman cheated out of her orgasm by a man who had given into his own. Mancub turned from his penetration of the pillows, lint clinging to his penis.
“What?” Sarah said, almost at the door. “Speak the language. I don’t have a doctorate in primitive cultures.”
“Wah ugh all,” Jeremy repeated.
“Waterfall?” Sarah asked. “She went to the waterfall?”
“Ughh.”
“What does ughh mean?” Sarah demanded.
“It means, yes, you little cunt,” Jeremy said, his voice scratchy from lack of use. “It means someday I’ll give you what you deserve and you better hope your diaphragm’s in when I do.”
“Really?” Sarah replied, used to this kind of vulgarity. “Didn’t Hobbes say the great equalizer in the state of nature was that everyone had to sleep? Your cabin’s by the water tank, isn’t it? If you ever dream of touching me, Jeremy, you better wake up and pray you still have a penis. And if my Mom’s not at the waterfall, pick up tomorrow’s paper, I might misspell your names. Saffron, is that with one f or two?”
Sarah extended one, then both middle fingers. Saffron charged forward on her knees, baring her teeth. Jeremy grabbed her by the ankles, pulling her back. Mancub padded over and clamped his mouth tightly on the nape of her neck. Sarah was ready to kick Saffron square in the face.
“Let the freaker go,” Sarah told them, but they didn’t remove a finger. They were into the restraint. Sarah could see Jeremy’s member was hard. Mancub pawed Saffron’s breasts, turning her howling from aggressive to erotic. Saffron thrashed between them, but it was play-acting now. Sarah turned to go before she needed another lifetime of therapy, muttering, “Fucking experimental hippies.”
The waterfall was a mile from the main house. A trail off the main road led to a path that curlicued to a ravine where water fell from a river into a pool sixty feet below, shattering into shards of sparkling light, shimmering rainbows, shadows of leaves tattooing your body. There was another pool at the bottom of the gorge, the water of the first pool filtering over the sides into the second, twenty feet lower, then flowing into a river that wound into the forest. Although there were two waterfalls and two water holes, the first was where residents hung out. It was a sanctuary, the inspiration for the commune, out of a storybook where nymphs bathed with fairies and unicorns. But of course Sarah could never be there alone, an assortment of hippies were omnipresent, messing with her boogie.
As a child, Sarah had prided herself on being able to walk from the main house to the waterfall at night without a flashlight. If she got lost, she pretended she was a wiccan and asked directions from animals and birds, the moon and stars. But she knew the way by heart, rocks and inclines, fallen branches and stumps. She was ready with word magic if evil spirits came to harm her. The hills were full of spirits, some bad. The worst wasn’t a spirit at all, but Mom’s ex, Marty the Poobah.
Sarah remembered a yellow crescent above the trees, fixed firmly with indifference as she ran, branches lashing at her arms. She turned to see a strawberry jam smile smeared across the Poobah’s face, a bleeding animal in his hands. The juices of lust. She was a rabbit bounding in a predictable pattern, through the underbrush, over boulders and low limbs. His naked body flashed white whenever she snuck a peek to gauge the distance between them. She would die if he caught her, possessed her insides. “E pluribus unum,” she shrieked, but the spell had no effect. He was on her tail.
Sarah had always been lucky enough to get away. Others at the Waterfall were less fortunate, girls and boys. As they aged, Sarah saw them develop violent and promiscuous dispositions. They became withdrawn, fascinated with fire, crying in their sleep and drawing pictures of monsters, sucking their thumbs and refusing to eat.
“All the men are after you,” Mom had said, after Sarah blew the whistle on the Poobah for chasing her. “Do you know how hard that is for me? You’re young and beautiful. I can’t compete with that.”
“Mom, he tried to kill me,” Sarah told her.
“Hon, there’s a difference between sex and death,” Mom said. “You’re gonna have to learn that.”
For months, Sarah wouldn’t let herself be alone. She became inseparable from Lisa, stopped going to the waterfall, bought a deadbolt for her door, and quit relying on Mom for protection. She turned to her friends, music, books, painting, the marlin bat, spirits. On her own, she learned the difference between sex and death, making love and rape. It wasn’t clear to her whether or not Mom ever did.
Sarah heard splashing as she neared the clearing where the steepest part of the climb remained. Descending, she spotted someone swimming in the icy water and her mother lying out on a towel in her black Dior one-piece, looking like she was poolside at the Betty Ford Clinic. Today there wasn’t much sun, even less heat. But since the glut of skin cancer reports and the depletion of the ozone, residents of the commune had started wearing swimsuits, large hats, and sunblock. Some swam naked, but covered up after they got out of the water. Even the Future Primitives and hard-core nudists kept to the shade.
“Aren’t you cold?” Sarah asked, sliding down the last incline, almost losing her Walkman in the process, putting it back into her jacket pocket as she regained her balance.
“If Kate Hepburn can do it every day, so can I,” Mom said, setting aside her paperback and lighting a Gauloise.
“What’s his excuse?” Sarah gestured to the boy she identified as one of the Poobah’s illegitimate children, Raven Newchild, who was climbing the face of the gorge and diving off its side with workmanlike repetition.
“Crank or X,” Mom answered, taking a pull of the cigarette. “He was tripping when I got here. Drugs affect children differently.”
Really? Sarah thought. No shit.
“What are you reading?” Sarah asked instead, deciding there was no need to start harshing right away.
“Something Aslan’s into called Cyberpunk,” Mom said. “It’s sort of Raymond Chandler meets William S. Burroughs. Bleak landscape, lots of computer talk, virtual reality. Sort of literary acid house.”
What a contradiction
, Sarah thought, “literary” and “acid house.” Sometimes people smoked pot and recited bad poetry, but not like they dropped acid and watched Fantasia or took Ecstasy and listened to shitty music. She had never seen someone embrace an altered state and reach for Tolstoy.
“Shouldn’t you master one reality before you move on to another one?” Sarah asked.
“Cute, hon,” Mom said. “You know negativity makes you tense. Look how clouded your crown chakra is. And your posture. You’re so tight.”
“I know, I’m slouching toward abrogation, the great black void,” Sarah said. “Only happy thoughts and a good chiropractor can save me.”
Sarah spied a newt in one of the tiny pools of water in the rock. She caught it by its slippery orange tail. As a girl, she used to hunt them for hours. It wriggled between her fingers, tail whipping. She stroked its back and belly, experiencing the tactile pleasure of its slimy skin before returning it to its home.
“Why don’t you go for a dip and clear your channels?” Mom asked.
“Because it’s freezing,” Sarah answered, her hand cold from catching the newt, wondering why Mom wasn’t shivering.
“Temperature is a state of mind,” Mom said. “The water is cleansing, not cold.”
If Sarah didn’t change the subject, she would have to listen to how Mom had walked on coals and made love on a frozen pond, the personal experiences she always cited in arguments about mind over matter.
“Where’s the Poobah?” Sarah said, watching Raven plunge into the water hole, bobbing to the surface with frenzied eyes.
“I don’t know,” Mom said. “I think he’s tending his hamsters.”
The Poobah had been trying his hand at genetic engineering in a shack where he also cooked synthetic drugs. He was attempting to create a breed of designer rodents that could be put into the anal passage to heighten sexual pleasure during intercourse. The Poobah wanted to cash in while gerbil jamming was hot. He was toying with bone structure, crossbreeding hamster cells with armadillos and porcupines, trying to create rodents he could package as “ribbed” and “studded.”
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