by Maddy Wells
The woman we picked up was Susan Artis. She was a big girl, big breasts, long legs, birthing hips. Her face, though, was delicate. It was made whiter by her dark curls and black eyes and Lance told me that her brain was fried. She had done too much acid and was given to tremors and sudden crying. “Sounds like a normal girl to me,” I said.
“No, no, it’s the acid,” Teddy said.
The men wanted to believe in the danger of dope so they could feel adventurous taking it.
She had modeled briefly in New York, but her voluptuous body couldn’t maintain a waif-like appearance for more than a few days, and for that she had to fast for weeks. It was a hell of a tortuous way to make a living, and the only tangible she netted from the experience was a Physician’s Desk Manual knowledge of drugs.
The part that made Susan interesting to me was that she had briefly been in involved with Rick before we met. She had, in fact, put him up in her family’s apartment in New York City. It was her parents, returned unexpectedly from a trip, who had thrown him out the morning he was waiting for me in front of the button store. Rick the lady-killer.
Her parents weren’t at their country house, they were in their apartment in the city, probably barricading the fort against the next wave of hippie intruders, and Susan asked me if I wanted to drop some acid and so we did. I had never done acid before and everyone made a big show of envying me my first time.
“It’s always best the first time, because it hits you by surprise. You never suspect that there was all this neat stuff inside you,” Arpad said. He told me he had done acid one hundred and twenty times. He was trying to train his brain so it wouldn’t need any stimulation like acid, so that it would just kick into a cool grove on its own. It was the only time all weekend he spoke a complete sentence. I guessed it was the silent brain training.
Teddy, who had done acid only once himself and didn’t like it, insisted on acting like a nursemaid, fixed us a batch of scrambled eggs and a container of Carnation’s Instant Breakfast (chocolate) for nourishment. “You got to eat. Or you’ll go bad in the middle of things.”
“I heard of people jumping out of windows on acid, I never heard of anyone dying of starvation,” I said, already feeling wobbly as the drug did its dragon walk down my spine, causing Teddy’s face to get smaller and his body to become absurdly big. I laughed and fell back on the sofa. Susan rolled back next to me. Soon I forgot Susan as I watched the others file back and forth in front of us, trying to jimmy open Susan’s parents’ liquor cabinet. It was taking them an incredibly long time to do something so simple.
“For God’s sake, open it!” I screamed. “Open it, open it, open it!”
The Guru had appeared by my side, stroking my head. I remember thinking he really smelled sweet. I didn’t know why I found his odor so offensive in the bus. “Why can’t they open it?” I started to cry.
“It’s only juice darlin’” he said. “Juice heads will always find a way to get their juice.”
Lance gave me a mean look from the living room door. He hadn’t taken any acid. He didn’t like to be that much out of control. I stuck my tongue out at him, but my tongue rolled out and out. It never stopped rolling out. I didn’t have the energy to reel it back in. In exhaustion, I let it stay where it was, where people could use it as a carpet.
Susan had jumped up and was pulling me off the sofa. “We got to get outa here,” she whispered dramatically.
I nodded and we slipped out the door while the others were occupied with the lock on the liquor cabinet. It was getting darker, with a “hint of rain,” Susan kept repeating, like a mantra, kicking her shoes off, thumping the ground. “Hint of rain, hint of rain, hint of rain.”
We followed a back road into the woods in our bare feet, the trees, satyrs from another world, teased me. Half-man, half-plant, their rough bark in sympathy with the ragged skin that housed me. The wind blew their branches towards me attempting an embrace. I felt adored. I reached back, lying down on the road, waiting for these giant creatures to take me. I remember laughing with happiness, and if it’s possible to have an orgasm in your soul, I certainly had one then.
As suddenly as that sensation came, it left, leaving a void for reality to reenter. I became aware that it was more than hinting at rain now, it was pouring and we did the only sensible thing we could, we stepped onto the porch of someone’s house. The house was a little off the road, painted white with red shutters, red and white geraniums on the windowsills. I laughed, thinking the owners had a great sense of humor to decorate with such a silly motif. The door to a two-car garage attached to the house was open. No cars were inside. We went into an enclosed porch. It wasn’t locked and anyway we had the right to enter because one of us had decided no one could own property.
“What an absurd idea,” I lectured, “that someone could actually own a piece of the earth that was given to everybody.” I could hardly wait to get back to tell our friends. My thoughts had never been so lucid.
We snooped around the porch, which was set for dinner, for us! A round table covered with a red and white gingham tablecloth was set with five place settings. Through some sort of cosmic acid connection, the person who lived in this house was waiting for us. A Doberman Pincher crouched in the corner, but after investigating, he seemed unimpressed and lay back down, putting his head on his paws. I stared into his eyes, trying to remember why it was that you weren’t supposed to look a dog in the eye—a sign of challenge to the dog’s manhood or something—when Susan came out of the house, where she’d been looking around.
“Check this out,” she commanded, going back inside.
I hesitated then figured what the hell. If you can’t own the earth, you can’t own a living room either or the logic breaks down. And everything seemed so logical to me, so self-apparent. I couldn’t imagine what had been keeping me from seeing the truth before. I decided that acid was very good stuff indeed and I would do it as often as I could and get everyone else I knew to take it. Alex, for example. She should take a gallon to get her off of whatever weird trip she was on.
I was stuck outside the door, unable to engage my body while my mind was using up all this energy. Susan came out and dragged me into the living room, which was like stepping into a duck blind. Decoys, all sizes and colors lined the floor like a platoon. There were even some that were big enough to sit on, which we did, riding around the room like we were toddlers on tricycles. On the ceiling paddling bird feet were stenciled, giving the disconcerting illusion that we were watching ducks swim overhead.
“Jesus,” Susan said. She had a joint in her pocket, which she fired up and passed to me. “I got to mellow out a little bit. This duck thing is heavy.”
“Yeah, heavy,” I said. I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was underwater and I found myself gasping for air. “Do you think the people who live here are cool?”
“Very cool,” she answered.
We wandered into the kitchen and saw that someone had been preparing dinner. A chopped onion was on the cutting block, an uncooked carcass of some bird in a pan, and the radio was on, tuned to a station that was having a call-in vote on which group you liked better: the Stones or the Beatles. An open half-gallon bottle of Almaden Chablis was on the sink and a half-drunk glass of wine was next to the cutting board.
“What happened here?” I asked. It looked as if someone had been abducted right in the middle of fixing dinner.
“I’ll bet really cool people live here,” Susan said. “They didn’t want to scare us, so they left to let us get acquainted with things.”
“They’re going to be so glad to finally meet us.”
“So glad.”
We debated whether or not to start cooking the duck (“You think they really eat ducks? Maybe it’s a goose, or a mean ole chicken. I wouldn’t mind eating a chicken.”) and decided that we were too fucked up to do it right and would probably burn the place down, which we didn’t want to do because we liked these people with their weird red, white and duck
y thing, and we wanted them to like us, which they wouldn’t if we burned down their house. Anyway, since no one could own anything, the place belonged as much to us as to the people who lived here full-time, so we didn’t want to burn it down in case we came back to visit.
We hung around, waiting, for what seemed like hours in acid time, probably five minutes in elapsed time, before we got bored and decided to move on. Susan left the roach in an ashtray for them, finished off the wine in the glass and we headed out, back up the driveway. The Doberman got up to stretch and we waved good-bye to him.
We were at the point where the driveway met the road when a red Cadillac convertible with a white canvas top sped down the muddy path, almost knocking us down as it turned towards the house. Between the windshield wipers, we could see that the driver was a shriveled up woman with white hair, steel glasses and deep furrows between her eyebrows. She braked to get a better look at us and the Doberman started barking, clawing at the porch screen, suddenly mad to break out and tear us apart.
Susan and I grabbed hands and ran into the woods, until we collapsed against a tree, panting hard and laughing until unaccountably we started to cry. Susan had medicine for that, too. She pulled out some green and black capsules (“Librium will set you free, my dear”), and we opened our mouths for rainwater to wash them down. Every emotion had its antidote in a drug, and I began to see the possibilities of a life lived totally without wants or needs. Those minutes I spent in the woods with Susan Artis while the Librium liberated my soul were some of the happiest I have ever spent. For the life of me, I can’t tell you what weird Puritanism keeps me, even now, from becoming a pill freak, letting their cool narcotic fingers soothe my overheated psyche.
Susan was a nice girl, which seems an odd appellation to pin on a girl who ingested every chemical and man she could corner. In my drugged state she seemed the pinnacle of mother earth warmth. And nice. So nice, in fact, that I told her everything about Alex and Rick and what I planned to do to them.
Susan wasn’t surprised that Alex was my sister. She knew who Alex was, of course. “Yeah, you kind of look alike,” she said, ignoring my welts and scary hair. I had as much similarity to Alex as a painting by Picasso has to its model, but for a while we accepted the fiction that I, too, was a great beauty. I had never talked to anyone about Alex before, especially not a girl, and it seemed like a betrayal, which I justified by saying that Alex was betraying me. She was supposed to be helping me achieve my (our) destiny, and she was deserting me for her own happiness.
Her black eyes narrowed in interest when she found out that Rick had deserted me for my lovelier sister.
“But what about you,” I protested, “He deserted you” I squeaked out the last part, “For me!”
Susan shrugged, easy with the flow of men in and out of her life. It would never occur to her to punish one for abandoning her any more than she would expect retribution for doing the same. But she sensed that it wasn’t so casual for me. I aroused her protective instincts. Women, I have found, can be ferocious defenders.
I lowered my head in fake despair. “It’s not him I care about, it’s Alex.”
As solid as I felt my fledgling friendship with Susan at that moment, an hour later I was betrayed again as she told everything to Lance. I could tell by his easy laughter and mocking look towards me that he hadn’t done any drugs, and I felt at a disadvantage as you do when your mind is the only one in chaos. But later, when we were alone, he said that Susan would be the perfect person to help us and I was right to tell her. Her parents had connections (“With, you know, real people. Her father is a lawyer”) and they thought that Rick was a scurvy boy who had to atone for the sin of entering their daughter’s life, a punishment that would keep him from being so bold again. Some time in Vietnam was just the ticket for a class crasher like Rick. The nerve of him, a blue-collar boy going around stealing women better than he deserved.
Teddy made a stew that had cooked too long on the stove and burned. The meat itself was unidentifiable and I couldn’t help thinking of ducks—God, that seemed like weeks ago—so was glad it was inedible. I started making pitchers of Carnation Instant Breakfast, which the crew drank as fast as I could mix it. The Guru had come out of whatever hole he had retreated to and drank too. In truth, I was starving and wanted a glass myself, but I couldn’t seem to get at it, so quickly did everyone slurp up the brew.
We planned to get on the road first thing in the morning to get to Woodstock. Teddy and Arpad checked out the map with initial resolve, then later I saw them in the same position, smoking a joint, the map in a heap at their feet.
The Guru spent a full hour in the master bedroom’s shower, steaming a month’s worth of dirt off himself and inadvertently steaming the pictures and wallpaper off the walls. It looked as if the bathroom were melting. I couldn’t be sure then how much of the perceived destruction was the residual acid in my system and how much was reality, but the next morning everyone was tiptoeing over strips of sticky wallpaper on the floor.
Lance and I slept on the same bed, everyone assumed we would because we were technically living together, I guess. But the truth was, that after that first night, Lance and I had never actually slept together. We would have our version of sex, then I retreated back to my lair, the futon. We never shared anything as mundane as pillow talk. I was trepidatious as he crawled in next to me, but I didn’t flinch as he hit me good-naturedly on the rump and told me that enlisting Susan’s help to get Rick was the best thing I had ever done. The best thing. Her father was a lawyer. Did I know that? He began a monologue about something or another, when I dozed, the acid making me dream of shrubbery suddenly sprouting legs and walking off of lawns. The owners couldn’t get their hedges to stay put as the bushes ran amok in blind circles. Beating the shrubs with sticks didn’t help as they had no nerve endings, and trying to talk reason to them didn’t help as they had no ears. I laughed aloud and Lance woke me to ask what was so damned funny.
At three o’clock, we were awakened by a loud knock on the door that turned out to be Susan’s cousin, a hippie from Florida who made belts. He traveled with his wife, a large dark haired woman in a red muumuu and a two-year old boy, naked except for a nautical cap that said, “Captain Gerber.” They too were on their way to Woodstock. We stayed up the rest of the night talking, groovin on how cool we discovered each other to be, discussing the best routes to get there. Everyone had an opinion about it, which seemed stupid because it wasn’t as if there were a lot of choices in the matter, just find Route 87. The meatier part of the discussion was more about how to get out of town without arousing suspicions in the local constabulary, because among us there must have had two pounds of drugs. With long hair and trails from old trips streaming from the back of Volkswagen busses we might as well have worn a bullseye.
Around seven o’clock they set up their tent on the front lawn and everyone went to sleep, passed out until the middle of the afternoon. By then, of course, after coffee, cigarettes, some stale cinnamon buns for Captain Gerber, everyone was hungry, so Susan and I took the Captain shopping at the local Shop Rite. She showed me how to shoplift cigarettes, by taking the carton off the shelf, ripping out the bottom end and slipping the packs into her waiting woven Greek bag. I was changing Captain Gerber’s diaper on a closed check-out lane, causing every available employee to come over to chastise me, while Susan slid plastic wrapped steaks in her bag, topped it off with red potatoes and sashayed out the front door, nonchalantly picking up a newspaper on the way out.
Susan and I made dinner. The guys rolled joints. Lance told me that Susan had been in touch with her father and that the “wheels were in motion to get that sonofabitch, Rick, or whatever his real name is. It’s not even his goddamned real name. Do you know that? Not even his goddamned real name.”
After toking up, no one was motivated to get in the vans and go anywhere, so we smoked some more and swatted away mosquitoes, despite Arpad’s insistence that smoking marijuana produces a chemic
al in the skin that repels insects. Or maybe it was LSD, he said, as we scratched ourselves raw. It probably was the LSD, because none of the pests were bothering him. He must’ve had enough acid in his system to “kill every mosquito in the Keys” as Susan’s cousin said. Everyone decided that they needed immunity, too, and Arpad passed around tabs of White Lighting as if it were insect repellent and we began the day all over again from a different perspective. There was no more talk of going to Woodstock, as we spent the remainder of the weekend immobilized. Like a miracle, no more mosquitoes bothered us and we considered founding a new religion based on it, but like other drug-induced great ideas, the notion was downgraded to a joke when the drugs wore off.
I have to say in the middle of all this, that I felt for the first time that my life was taking off, that perhaps I didn’t need Alex to take me into another world. I was in another world and, in my way, I was having a great time. My need to get Rick in order to get Alex back, didn’t seem quite so desperate. I had actually spent a weekend thinking of something other than her. I even broached it with Lance, that perhaps we ought to forget the whole thing. Or at least put it off and let the romance die of natural causes.
“Are you crazy?” he asked. “That’s the drugs talking, not you.” The only thing he had imbibed all weekend was Susan’s parent’s scotch. He seemed put off by my sudden lack of passion for our joint pursuit, so I wasn’t surprised later when I heard sounds coming out of Susan’s bedroom, the door was open, and I could see him balling her. Susan wasn’t doing it for anything other than the fact that it was her nature to fuck any man who asked her to. But Lance was too vocal, and he never made any noise, so I knew he was making sure that I discovered the price of my desertion.
“Anyway,” Lance told me later, as he toweled off from his afternoon tryst, “It’s too late. Susan’s father hates him more than you ever could. Rick screwed his little girl.”