Not long after sunrise, I rolled up in a little resort town called Waling. You probably know a place just like it. Two thousand souls in the winter and ten thousand in the summer. The citizens complain about the tourists while they sell cases of beer and suntan oil. I parked the Galaxy in a dusty lot, near a hippie bus painted in psychedelic colours, and walked down to the waterfront.
Speed and sleeplessness broke golden sunlight into jagged pieces on the ocean. A boardwalk ran several hundred feet along the shore and I saw a café at the end of it. I walked in that direction, first on the sand and then the boardwalk. Both seemed like clouds beneath my feet. I was a free man. No one was trying to kill me. I was exhausted and frayed, but deliriously happy to be alive.
A few early shop workers watched me pass, probably marking me as a tourist or trouble or both. None of the shops were open yet and I didn’t pay much attention to them, but I stopped outside the big, stucco building beside the café. The peeling marquee read Theatre de Fantasia, and a banner painted in Day-Glo heralded a show called Alice, Baby! Below it, I saw a sign: “Help Wanted. Maintenance and set construction. See Julian.”
I headed on to the café, a place called Red’s. Most of the booths were full and I saw a lot of young, friendly faces, some of them female and beautiful.
I thought Waling might not be so bad a place to spend some time, so I took one of the last seats at the counter and ordered toast and coffee from a pretty, middle-aged woman who called me “hon”. Even buttered bread sounded like too much food, but the ache in my gut said I needed to eat. The waitress must’ve seen the crazy look in my eyes, because she hovered over me and smiled when I’d finished. The food anchored me enough to smile back at her. Her name tag said “Velma”.
“Saw the sign next door,” I told Velma. “You know Julian?”
“Oh, hon, everybody knows Julian. He’ll be along any minute.” She sized me up. “You going to work for him?”
I looked around the diner. Everyone else had resumed breakfast and morning chatter. “Maybe. It’s a theatre? He shows movies?”
“Other kind of theatre. Julian writes plays, and his actors perform them on summer weekends. The tourists love them. The kids, you know?”
“He owns the theatre and writes the plays? Is he rich?”
“Must be,” Velma said, taking my plate and refilling my coffee. “Anyway, you’ll like it here. Lots of folks your age this summer. Hippies.” She said the word with amusement and no animosity at all. “Some of them live in town and lots more stay at the Marlin, on East Thirty-Eight. Some of the kids call it a commune, but it’s just an old motor court. You need a place to stay, maybe they can help you out. I’d rent you a room but Ronnie’d kill me.” She winked at me and sauntered off to wait on an old man at the other end of the counter.
I watched her walk away and when I turned back around, the Walrus sat on the stool beside me. Dark hair pulled back in a tail, he looked like that guy in The Byrds, David Crosby, but bigger and heavier. He was older than me too, maybe ten years older, and he had the biggest, darkest eyes of anyone I ever knew.
“I’m Julian Brightstar,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Tom,” I told him. “Tom Rimer.”
“You know which end of a hammer to hold onto?”
“I do, for a fact. Army construction and summer jobs before that.”
“Ten bucks a day and a place to sleep.” Julian grinned at me. “No hassles at all, man. You in?”
“Sure. When do I start?”
“Right now. I need a set built by Friday night. And you need to meet the players. You ever do any acting?”
I shook my head but when I followed Julian out of Red’s Café, I felt the gaze of every eye in the place, like I was already on his stage. As we stepped onto the boardwalk, I saw a bearded man the colour of ashes skulking in the little alley between Red’s and the theatre, a beach bum in the last stages of bumming before he becomes a corpse or a guest of the county. Half in shadow, he watched us pass with shattered eyes, and I wondered what hell had given him such a stare.
The Theatre de Fantasia smelled like incense and mildew, but I caught the sweet scent of weed in the mix, so I wasn’t surprised when Julian offered me a twisted, yellow joint. He locked the door behind us as I lit up, drawing the spicy smoke deep in my chest. I’d smoked a few times in Nam but over there, even in Saigon, it made me so paranoid I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking. Home on leave, when I blew a number with the guys, I was fine. Julian’s pot tasted strong and my head turned nicely into muted Day-Glo mush by the third hit.
Julian led me through the little lobby and into the theatre. Built for movies back when movie theatres still had stages, the place might have held two hundred people, except most of the seats in back had been pulled out by the roots. The only light in the cavernous space came from backstage, flickering orange, red and yellow, like a fire.
The pot spun my head and each step took me further from all the things I wanted to leave behind. We walked carefully up the steps to the stage and then back into the wings. The light came from a big room behind the screen, lit by a lamp hung with a slowly rotating shade that scattered flame colours across the walls and ceiling. Almost a dozen kids, boys and girls, sat around a little table or sprawled on mattresses. Flats and decorated set pieces lined one wall. A vivid ocean and a painted beach stretched into a false forever.
As my eyes adjusted to the whirling light, I saw some of the girls in the room were naked, maybe some of the guys too, but my gaze glued to a redhead stretched out on one of the mattresses. She lay there, bare and open, like the most natural thing in the world, and I saw the whirling fire in her eyes, the long, straight mane of her hair, and the tangled flame of her bush.
My cock grew three sizes in my jeans and Julian laughed. “Welcome to Wonderland, Tom,” he said, and everyone laughed, joyous and inviting. Someone clapped me on the back and I looked around to see a tall, dark kid, maybe nineteen, shirtless and muscled like a lifeguard. He offered me another joint and I blew away the last shreds of my sanity.
I remember laughter and dancing, everyone crazy happy. Two of the chicks stayed naked and we took turns, blindfolded, exploring them with our hands, trying to guess who was who. I learned their names. Sheena, the redhead, and Cowgirl, a brunette with wide hips, nice tits and a wild giggle.
Then the girls had their turn.
“Get naked, Tom,” Julian told me, and I remember thinking, what the hell. This was everything I wanted. “Lorina, Sheena, Beth, Cowgirl, make him feel welcome.”
Two of them held me down with tender force: Lorina, a beautiful blonde, the youngest girl in the room, surely no more than eighteen, wearing a long, blue, simple cotton dress; and Beth, a black girl who smiled but never laughed, dressed in a T-shirt and short shorts. They gripped my bare arms and held me while Sheena and Cowgirl worked me over with their hands, not quite touching my aching cock, but massaging every muscle in my arms and legs, my back and my hips, their touch soft as feathers but firm as coarse leather. Everything fell away from me, the blaring, bloody days in Nam, the rough ride home, home itself, until I lay in a pleasurable coma of lust.
“Okay, Sheena,” Julian commanded, “blow him.”
All that remained of my tension was in the seven plus inches of heat she took between her lips. She cupped my balls, pulled me deeper than the girls in Saigon, fearless. She worked for only a moment, slow but insistent, and I came in an endless explosion of fevered dream, the rushing road before my car, the passage out of darkness and into the dawn, into the here and now.
Into Wonderland.
After a while, people drifted away and I slept a little on a mat in that dark room. Sheena, dressed now in jeans and a stomach-baring, fringed top, woke me with a kiss.
“Get dressed. We’re going to have rehearsals on the beach.” She ran her hands over my shoulders and hips, finally catching my hardening cock in her hand and caressing the head. “Cannot wait for you to fuck me,” she purred.
“But Julian wants us now.” She released me and I pulled my jeans on, my thoughts a tumble of fog and lust. “No shirt, baby,” she said and licked my right nipple. “So I can touch you.”
We traipsed out of the theatre and down the boardwalk to the bus I had seen in the lot when I drove in. The front of it had been painted with the face of a white rabbit, the hazy headlights its eyes, front bumper flocked with stiff wiry whiskers, long cartoon ears airbrushed all down both sides of the vehicle. Beautifully painted flowers scattered before the rabbit’s charge, every petal detailed and beautiful.
Under a scrubby tree, at the edge of the parking lot, I saw the ash-faced bum I had seen in the morning. He watched as we boarded the bus. No one paid any attention to him, but I felt a stab of empathy. I now recognized the look in his eyes. I knew it from men in-country, men who had seen bad things, or who had done worse things. I wondered who he was.
Aboard the bus, I wanted to sit with Sheena, but Julian had saved a spot for me in the seat just behind the driver, an enormous Nordic kid named Lars.
“Everyone is in the play,” Julian said, not looking at me, but staring out the window as the bus manoeuvred out of the parking lot full of families, children running seemingly everywhere, bright, summer chaos. “I’ll give you a role too,” he said. “Maybe more than one.”
“It’s a play for kids?” I asked. Out of the lot, the bus bumped down State Sixty, past trailer camps and motel crossroads, everything sun-bleached and holy to my shattered eyes. “Called Alice, Baby?”
“For the kiddies, yeah,” Julian said and laughed. “But the mamas and papas have to dig it too. You ever read Alice?”
“Like in Wonderland? No.” I knew the book was regarded as cool, even trippy, but I didn’t read many books. I’d heard the Jefferson Airplane song.
“I saw the movie,” I said. “And one pill makes you smaller.”
“That movie was a mindfuck,” Julian said. “All that heavy shit right there in the heads of a whole generation, man. Even Walt Disney couldn’t fuck that up.”
I had no idea what he meant but I nodded and focused past Julian on the seats across the aisle, where Sheena and Lorina sat, the baby blonde on the aisle. I stared – I couldn’t help it. She was pale as white porcelain; the afternoon light through the bus windows was warm on everyone else, but she looked like snow, her hair fair as sun on glass, too bright to look directly at.
Julian followed my gaze and grinned.
“She’s our Alice,” he said. “Every tale of Wonderland has to have an Alice, the wise innocent who falls into strange days, brother. Alice is like America, dig?”
Once again, I had no idea what he meant but I nodded and said, “I dig.”
We rode in the rabbit bus a couple of miles down the coast, by bait stands and bars, then we took a narrow turnoff to a desolate stretch of beach, a shore of grey sand sloping to choppy surf, too rough for swimming or surfing. The sunlight capered on whitecaps and kissed my bare shoulders with wellbeing as I helped unload the bus, blankets, and crates of food and drink.
They rehearsed with the sea as a backdrop, a lot of giggling at first, but then the players fell into their work, and I listened and watched awhile. Mostly Julian made them dance, repeating the steps of a complicated reel, critical but funny as he corrected the steps and timing.
“If you can dance on the sand,” he told them three or four times, “you can dance anywhere. Today you are nothing but a pack of cards. Shuffle and deal, brothers and sisters.”
I watched, hypnotized. Cards, of course. I saw it the way Julian wanted it to be, the dancers’ choreographed movements suggesting dovetails and overhand shuffling, mixing and separating again. “When they wear the costumes, the effect will be perfect,” Julian said with a triumphant smile.
They were certainly not wearing costumes now. Most of the kids had initially worn T-shirts and bathing suits but the shirts had all come off and they all danced nearly naked on the shore of the sea, all except Alice – Lorina – who wore her thin, blue dress, translucent when she moved against the slanting sun.
At the end of the rehearsal, Alice danced alone at the centre of the pack, the whirling treys and tens not quite approaching her, but others, Sheena and Lars, grew bolder, and began to pull at her arms, spinning her among the cavorting deck. The dance became a riot of flailing arms and kicking legs, sand like powdered diamonds in the merciless sun, and the pack of cards fell, almost naked, glistening with sweat, onto Alice, all of them laughing like children.
We ate rice, drank tea, smoked hash, and watched the sun burn in a slow crawl down the sky to the juncture of sea and sand. Waling was barely visible around the curving coast. Sheena sat close, leaning on me, her bare breasts a constant heat against my arm or my chest, her hand always on my thigh or my back, fingers firm and warm as brands.
Everyone seemed lost in a mellow fog and Sheena’s voice startled me when she asked, “Did you know Julian is a magician?”
“Stupid,” I grunted. “Magic is lies and tricks.” The collective, stoned consciousness of the group focused on my words. They laughed at me. My breathing quickened and I pushed back a surge of anger.
Julian eased himself out of Beth’s arms, stood up and loomed over me, his shape dark against the red sky.
“No,” Julian said. “It’s not.” His tone was light, gently mocking. “We’re all magicians, Tom. We turn food to shit and time into garbage, wasting our lives with trivia when the real world is only waiting for us to see it.”
“Real world?” I growled. Sheena scooted back as I staggered to my feet. “You don’t know what ‘real’ is!” I tried to punch the air to make my point but my arms remained immobile at my sides, too heavy to support my message.
“You think you know what is real?” Julian asked, grinning. “The only reality, Thomas, is the one we make of dreams and numbers. Lewis Carroll – Charles Dodgson – had genius for both. He knew how to open the door behind the laughing knob, and I, I am learning how too.”
“That’s a load of crap,” I spat. The whole troupe held its breath. I imagined them falling on me, swords and spades, cutting me to pieces. But Julian only watched with a smile until his smile was all I could see.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Nowhere,” I answered. “Everywhere.”
“Then it doesn’t really matter which way you go, does it? Walk with us awhile. You can leave whenever you want to.”
“Tom,” Sheena said and I turned to where she half-reclined on the sand. She had shucked her shorts so she lay entirely nude beneath the stars and moon, the dark red-golden bush between her legs a shadow that concealed amazing things. I forgot my anger, forgot Julian’s bullshit. In the dark, Sheena’s eyes glowed and her lips shone like blood petals. I dropped to my knees, hardly daring to reach out and touch her, but needing to fuck her just as much as I needed to breathe.
Her eyes, her lips, the dark-tipped moons of her breasts, her hands reaching out to pull my shorts down . . . I saw each of her charms in isolation: total, divine. I forgot everyone in the troupe, everyone in the world, except the girl who stretched beneath me. As I moved onto her, Sheena faded away unless I looked directly at her, her eyes suspended in the darkness, her lips, her tongue . . . then I was in her, our bodies gritty with sand, hot enough to become glass, fused like my cock in her pussy, grinding, and I neither knew nor wanted anything in the world but her cunt, her core, and I would do anything to have her.
In that moment, I knew only Sheena’s sweet pussy, but later, when I thought of the beach, I remembered Julian watching us.
Grinning like a cat.
I woke with sand between my teeth and mud in my brain, sprawled on one of the mattresses in the back of the Theatre de Fantasia, naked, with Sheena wrapped around me, sticky and hot. She rubbed against my thigh and I woke up a little and then she rolled to straddle me and ground her crotch against mine. I was only half-hard when she caught my cock and tucked it into her pussy, but the motion of her hip
s brought me to erection and she rode me in slow waves, her fingernails sharp in my shoulders, her eyes wide and hungry. We came together in a slow, rolling rush of sensation and she settled atop me, her hips still working just a little, milking me.
Some of the others in the troupe were already awake and pretty soon we got up and dressed too. Julian led us down to Red’s and we filled three booths with spillover. Julian insisted I sit with him at the bar.
Velma smiled at me and winked. “Found a job, eh?” I wanted to talk to her, but Julian caught me by the shoulder and turned me to face him.
“Serious question, Tom,” he said. “Who are you?”
My head hurt, but Sheena had left me with a sweet edge even Julian couldn’t temper.
“I’m a free man,” I told him.
“That’s not what I mean,” he laughed, his moustache twitching and his jowls shaking. His eyes sparkled kindly, but very dark. “Who will you be in the play? You must have a role.”
“I don’t know. Can’t I just be a carpenter?”
“Oh my word,” he said and laughed. “It is so obvious I didn’t see it. You shall be. You will be the Carpenter.”
We ate our breakfasts and Julian paid for them. I left a two-dollar tip for Velma and winked at her. She didn’t wink back. I saw something in her eyes that might have been worry, and I told myself I’d come back and talk to her soon.
Back at the theatre, Julian showed me the workshop, a padlocked shed behind the theatre with a bench and a decent set of tools. He handed me a rough sketch of the set he wanted made from plywood. I needed to shape it and join it so it could be assembled. Some of the others would paint it when I was finished.
“It’s for the trial of the Knave of Hearts,” he explained. “This will be the jury box and the queen’s throne.”
“Maybe I can be the Knave of Hearts,” I said.
“Lars is our knave for now. Maybe for you, a knight. Just now, you’re our carpenter. Get to work!” He passed me a fat joint and left me alone, which was more than fine with me.
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