by Lisa Mason
Are You Experienced?
Susan sees the headlines all along Hayes Street as she hurries to meet Nance at the Blue Unicorn Café. You can’t miss them, in every newspaper box:
HIPPIE DRUG MURDERS
SYNDICATE MOVES IN
But when she slides into the seat across from them, she finds that Nance and Professor Zoom are unimpressed.
“If you’ve ever lived in the Village,” Professor Zoom says, studying cream swirling in his coffee, “you’re just seeing the Village all over again. It’s the same old shit. I, for one, am vastly displeased. I mean, I split New York to eighty-six all that.”
“I thought you went to Harvard,” Susan says. “Isn’t that in Massachusetts?”
“Massachusetts, New York,” he says with a withering glance. “It’s all the same old shit.” He actually looks at her for the first time since she sat down. He moves and speaks as if he’s in slow motion, suspended in some remote inner place, even more self-absorbed than he used to be. Three-quarters comatose, instead of half. Before she can wrest a glimmer of reaction, his eyes flick back to his coffee cup, staring as though the chipped ceramic is an artifact of fantastic complexity, the swirls of cream spelling out some oracle.
Susan knows what the headlines are about. Five days ago, John Kent Carter, also known as Jacob King or Shob Carter, was found in an apartment furnished with nothing but a mattress on the floor. The mewing of a cat trapped inside brought a neighbor. The apartment’s walls were splattered with psychedelic rainbows and his blood. Shob had been stabbed twelve times. His right arm was gone, cleanly severed above the elbow. Shob had been known to handcuff the briefcase in which he kept his cash to his right wrist. Earlier that week, his girlfriend had helped him count out three thousand dollars in small bills. The police found no briefcase in the apartment. Shob called himself an unemployed flutist, but everyone knew he dealt LSD.
Two days ago, William Edward Thomas, also known as Superspade, was found zipped into a sleeping bag snagged on the cliff below Point Reyes Lighthouse. He had been shot in the back of the head. The corpse was three days old. Superspade had been known to carry fifty thousand dollars in cash. Some said Superspade dealt acid, some said he only dealt grass. Some said Superspade and Shob had made a deal. Everyone says each had been approached by the Syndicate and ordered to get organized or get dead.
“Starbright’s never lived in the Village,” Nance says, inhaling her third Kool as though she desperately requires mentholated smoke for proper respiration. “Have you, sweetheart?”
“No, I haven’t, Penny Lane,” Susan says. “And neither have you.”
“Starbright has never even been to New York, or anywhere, really.”
“I have so been to New York. On the way to France for Christmas.”
“On the way to France for Christmas.” Nance widens her eyes, drops her jaw. “You mean Daddy finally took you along?”
Susan studies her coffee cup.
“Daddy jetting you around doesn’t count,” Nance proclaims. “You’ve never been anywhere on your own, sweetheart.”
This is one of Nance’s new affectations, calling everyone sweetheart with her strange pronunciation shweethaut. She speaks in a phony accent, accompanied by a cunning wink. She’s bleached her shocking crew cut ivory-white. She gesticulates, fluttering her hands. She looks as if she’s been dipped in lacquer and turned hard and shiny.
Susan sighs. What did she expect? That they could be best friends again? Take things up the way they were before Susan’s father forced their separation? Or, if not exactly the same, then a new friendship, more daring and fun now that they’re both so much older and on their own.
She’s chased after Nance for nearly two weeks, never finding her at the Double Barrel house or, if there, too spaced out to come to the phone. Yes, she’s had expectations. She expected the old spark, the excitement of their first meeting on the Panhandle. Or at least a warm nostalgia, like looking at family photographs together.
Abandon expectations, oh ye who run away to the Haight-Ashbury. Nothing is real, reality is nothing.
She hadn’t expected to see Professor Zoom with Nance this morning, either. Nor had she expected his bleached white hair, kohl-lined eyes, and pancake makeup. He and Nance look weird, even by Haight-Ashbury standards. Like vampires. Or ghouls. Professor Zoom’s ice-cold aloofness adds another undercurrent of tension between her and Nance.
She hates this. Everything is wrong. She doesn’t want things between her and Nance to be wrong anymore. Try, Susan. “Wow,” she says, “it’s scary about Shob and Superspade, huh?”
Nance shrugs, squeezes her lips in a sardonic little smile, and raises her eyebrows at Professor Zoom, excluding Susan. Nance, the drama queen. With fingers as fragile as fish bones, she offers him her Kool. “Starbright scares easily. Don’t you, Starbright?” she says in that awful phony voice.
The big news this morning, and the reason for the lurid headlines, is that Eddy Morris, also known as Shank, was arrested outside Sebastopol. Shank is a well-known Haightian with a predilection for speed and acid. The police pulled him over as he exceeded the speed limit on his way to Morning Star Ranch in a black ’62 Volkswagen bug belonging to Shob. The police discovered a right arm wrapped in a bloody pillowcase in the bug’s back seat. In a fit of squeamishness, the newspapers don’t want to say the arm belonged to Shob. Shank didn’t want to say, either. He told the arresting officer, “I’m very, very hazy about that arm.”
“Shank was involved in a burn,” Professor Zoom says, taking the Kool and studying the smoke eddying from its tip. “That’s the way it is, sweet pretty pussies. When a burn comes down, shit comes down.”
Susan shivers and sips her coffee. She never drank coffee in the morning before. Coffee was her parents’ prerogative. Now she can’t imagine how she ever woke up without it. She feels as if she’s been half-awake her whole life. As if her former reality was like watching herself on TV.
This is real. This is as real as it gets. She knew Superspade. A tall, handsome black dude, he lived two doors down on Clayton with a series of pretty young white women. Susan always thought Superspade had style with his leather jumpsuit and his button, “Faster Than a Speeding Mind.” And she knew Shob. He was always hanging out on Haight or at the Avalon Ballroom. A pixie-faced guy, sweetly aging at twenty-five with his handlebar mustache and receding hairline, his button said, “America is Going to Pot.”
She shouldn’t feel sad Shob and Superspade are dead. Shob and Superspade were bad. They were drug dealers. But, she thinks, recalling her Econ class, people want to buy pot and speed and acid. They’re screaming for it. There is—what did her teacher call it?—a consumer demand. Shob and Superspade were supplying that demand. You could say they were capitalists. Entrepreneurs. Their products are illegal, of course, and with good reason. But isn’t entrepreneurialism the American way?
Or the Syndicate’s way.
Susan doesn’t know. It’s like everyone has been infected by the virus from the planet Psi 2000. The virus releases people’s deepest repressions. Last night, Susan watched the Star Trek rerun of “The Naked Time” with growing horror. The virus makes people act as if they were shooting crystal meth, the dope easiest to score these days. Mr. Spock weeps over his mother, Nurse Chapel wants to sleep with Mr. Spock, and crewman Tormolen dies of despair. And Mr. Sulu—sweet Mr. Sulu with his flat, pockmarked cheeks—threatens everyone with a fencing foil! It reminds her so much of the mood in the Haight-Ashbury that she turns the TV off before Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Scotty prevent the ship from being sucked into Psi 2000. She knows they save the Enterprise. They always do.
The question is, can this starship be saved?
She doesn’t have to take this bad theater from Nance and Professor Zoom. She scrapes back her chair and stands. “I think you’re right, Professor Zoom. I think Shank was involved in a burn. Did you know Stan the Man was involved in a burn? The dragon’s blood wasn’t acid, it was rat poison. He burned S
tovepipe and the Lizard for seven grand. You knew that, didn’t you? Plus, he still owes me a hundred bucks for my time and trouble.”
Nance stares at her, wide-eyed. No drama queen this time.
“You tell Stan I want my hundred bucks, Professor Zoom. You know what I heard? I heard when a burn comes down, shit comes down. Now, where did I hear that?” She slings the woven handbag Ruby gave her over the shoulder of her high-collared shirt.
Nance grins with that sly appreciation Susan used to love. For a moment, her eyes twinkle at Susan, a look that gives her courage.
“Dig it, Harold. You take care of it for me,” Susan says. “And how many times do I have to tell you? Do not to call me a pussy.”
Professor Zoom scrapes back his chair. He’s gone.
“Far out, Starbright,” Nance says. “You have passed the acid test.” She pats the chair. “Don’t go. Not just yet.”
Susan sits. Try. Try.
“Stan really burned some dealers?” Nance says.
She nods. In all the crazy times she had with Professor Zoom, they never shared a smoke with such intimacy. She swigs her coffee, burning her tongue. “So. You balling him, too?”
Nance cackles. “Sweetheart, who am I not balling?”
Weather Report
The blues life is a mystique. And the blues-life mystique is that if you want to do anything, you have to lose your arm. You have to pay a lot of dues, to live full out, if the cost is in dues. The only people who can do it are oppressed, the hard-kick seekers who lay down the patterns of extreme beauty for this civilization. They’re people who got burned for who they are and what they did. Do you understand what that means? People who get burned for who they are, are oppressed beyond recourse. To be oppressed beyond recourse is the blues life.
Interview with Peter Berg
Voices of the Love Generation, by Leonard Wolf
(Little Brown and Company, 1968)
Susan loves the Blue Unicorn. It’s one of her favorite cafés. You can curl up on the swayback sofa with a friend, use the chessboards and sewing kits, read the books and magazines lying around. There’s no jukebox like in Bob’s Big Boy. Instead, there’s a funky old off-tune piano anyone can play, and people do, mostly badly but sometimes pretty well. The owner is a grizzled old Beatnik who believes coffee is the supreme drug of enlightenment and has a soft spot for hippie chicks. Susan always pays for one cup, and he always gives her two free refills.
Nance sits down with her second cup and says, “Guess what? I panhandled George Harrison yesterday.”
“You mean—George Harrison?”
“Yeah! We were hanging out on Hippie Hill passing doo around. The Pied Piper was playing his guitar. This dude strolled up, wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and flowered bellbottoms and a button that said, “I’m the Head of My Community.” He walked up to the Piper and said, “Can I borrow your guitar, man?” The Piper said sure, and the dude riffed into ‘Norwegian Wood.’ Pretty soon everyone’s screaming, ‘It’s George Harrison! It’s George Harrison!’”
“Wow! No shuck?”
“No shuck.” Nance lights another Kool. “I would have balled him in a second, but his bucktooth wife was tagging along. Is she ugly or what? So I panhandled him, instead.”
Susan finishes her coffee, goes to the counter, returns with a refill. She turns over a newspaper lying on the next table. Sure enough, beneath “Hippie Drug Murders” is a photograph of George Harrison in heart-shaped glasses.
Nance ball George Harrison? Susan is offended. George Harrison’s wife is one of the skinny, white-blond models in Life and Seventeen. She is the ideal of beauty everyone adores. What makes Nance, a girl from Euclid Heights with a freaky crew cut, think George Harrison would ever want to ball her?
“Is Marilyn still around?” It’s a mean question, and Susan knows it.
“Who’s Marilyn?”
“That girl from Mill Valley. Stan the Man was balling her.”
“I don’t know any Marilyn. I never met any Marilyn.”
Uh-huh, as Ruby would say. Susan studies her. “Penny Lane, Stan’s not someone you can depend on, you know.”
“Sweetheart, I haven’t depended on anyone since 1960. I mean, Stan, say hey, he’s good in bed and he’s always got good dope, but I’m not hung up on him or anything like that. Who has time for hang-ups? It’s freakin’ neverending party at the house. So many cool people. And music, always music.” She punches Susan’s shoulder. “Well, you know. Zoom tells me you lived there a while.”
“Yeah, I did.” Zoom. Count on Nance to dub Harold ‘Zoom.’
Susan can’t help it. A pang of envy strikes her. The neverending party where you don’t have to give a damn about the Syndicate or the Vietnam War or whether spades from the Fillmore are going to burn your house down or some guy you thought you maybe were falling in love with is plugging in with his electric lady friend back home in the future. It felt good not to give a damn.
And she threw it all away, her connection to the Double Barrel house, to the neverending party. For what? Her chaste little room, her chaste little crush on Ruby? Ruby, forbidding her to watch TV unless there’s a science fiction program on. Switching off the TV when she walks into Susan’s room to talk. What kind of Nazi is she, anyway? And Chi. There’s a freak. To think she was starting to fall for him before he talked about Bella Venus. Her painted head. Balling while they link. Gross! Oh, he still tries to act cool. He still follows her around like a lost puppy. But she stays away from him now as best she can.
So what about the demon. Be ready, always? She’s ready. Let the demon come. Let the demon try and touch her. She doesn’t trust Chi’s ability to stave off the demon any more than she trusts the government’s ability to stave off a nuclear war. Survive? Far out. She’s surviving.
“But are you in love with Stan the Man?” Susan persists.
“Sweetheart, I love everybody.”
“You don’t care if he balls other girls?”
“Love isn’t the possession of someone’s body. Anyway, love is crap.”
“Love is the highest, holiest consciousness we can attain.”
Nance howls with laughter, tears spurting from her eyes. Other patrons in the café turn and stare.
Susan looks away. Does she know this person?
In a while, Nance calms down. “Are you in love with that red-haired dude?” she asks sardonically.
“Not anymore.”
“There, you see? Can I have him if you’re done with him?” Nance digs in her ratty handbag, takes out an eyeliner pencil and a compact, and starts to fix her makeup.
Susan can’t finish her coffee. She pushes the cup away.
“So how’s tricks at the Mystic Eye?” Nance grips the cap of the eyeliner in her teeth. “I heard Ruby Maverick is down on dope.”
“That’s true.”
“So you’re not smoking or tripping or anything?”
“I’m done with that scene.”
“What a square.” Nance snaps the compact shut. “Still, I’d like to meet her.”
“Meet Ruby?”
“Yeah.” The shrug. “I’d like to rap with her about the trip that came down on her.”
“The trip?”
“Yeah, her cousin was a junkie.”
“I know. She told me.”
“Then you must know how he raped her. He was going cold turkey, that’s what Stan the Man says. And the cousin, he raped Ruby. She was like twenty.”
The shock is like touching a frayed electrical wire. Speechless, Susan fiddles with her coffee cup.
“That’s how junk is, you know?” Nance says. Fake-cool of the new expert on the street. “When you come down from junk, you go crazy and wild. Crystal meth is just the opposite. When you come down from crystal, you just want to lie down and die. Anyway, I’d like to talk to her about it. Compare notes.” Nance giggles. “Remember how we used to trade crib notes at the back of class?”
Susan nods. What on earth is Nance talking abou
t? The question hovers like a storm cloud, dark and foreboding, before she works up the nerve to ask. “Compare notes about what?”
Nance rolls her eyes and tokes her Kool. “About my stepfather. Stepfather, huh. I mean, Handy Andy, my new daddy-o. You know.”
“Know what?”
“For goodness sakes, Starbright. He started doing me when I was seven. Mom went out, God knows where, and he came into my bedroom. He gave me a little kiss goodnight, and then another little kiss goodnight, and then his hands were in my PJs, and then he did me. He’s been doing me on and off ever since. Oh, he slaps poor ol’ Dave around, but Handy Andy saves the very best for me, sweetheart. I mean, that’s why I had to leave.”
“Oh, Penny Lane,” Susan whispers.
“I thought you knew.”
“You never told me. You never said a word.”
Nance rubbing her crotch on the nub of her bicycle seat. Nance making angels in the snow, pumping her slim little pelvis up and down. Nance leaping from the old oak tree in Cheryl Long’s front yard, shouting, “I want to die! I want to die!” Nance dancing in the recreation room in front of Susan’s father, smiling at him as she moved her hips like a belly dancer. Daddy had frowned. Susan thought he was unfair. She still does.
“Don’t cry, sweetheart. Really, I thought you knew. That Starbright, she’s the smart one.” Nance scoots her chair next to Susan’s, circles her arm around Susan’s shoulders. “Poor Starbright,” she croons. “Daddy called her stupid for being best friends with that tramp, that no-good so-and-so. But Starbright knows very well Daddy knows she’s not stupid. And that Starbright, she is so sensitive. Mom and Daddy fight sometimes, but they’re not divorced, they would never do that. I mean, what would the neighbors think? Mom’s not very nice sometimes, but Starbright will get new clothes for the ninth grade, won’t she?”
“Stop it,” Susan says, recoiling.
“Oh, and Granma died. She loved Starbright more than anyone, but she died, anyway, and Starbright was sad. And Daddy? He works so hard, he doesn’t have time for Starbright except to yell at her and take her to France for Christmas, poor thing.”