Home Free

by Dan Wakefield

  They were booming around these curving roads, high up, and turned onto a dirt job, almost a path, with bumps that were jolting them around like pinballs. On a hillside, Gene saw tents. Definitely not pup. Ray Behr skidded the car up alongside some other cars and vans and a truck in a sloping meadow. They got out and Gene looked across at the tents on the hillside. There was one huge one and three or four smaller ones ringed around it. The tents were of multicolored stripes. Flags flew from them, trim little pennant jobs, whipping in the wind.

  Gene looked and said, “Wow.”

  “Well,” said Behr, “it’s not Camelot, but it’s better than somebody’s living room. C’mon.”

  The party was to get publicity for the first album of a Group called Epidemic. Half the musicians in it looked like they’d been in one. There were six of them, playing on a raised platform in the main tent. Their own appearance didn’t match the party motif. They looked scruffy and dazed, like a juvenile gang apprehended in the heist of a truck full of Ripple. Gene figured the exotic tone of the party was maybe to take people’s attention off the Group. The tent was strewn with gaily colored pillows and long divans. A woman with dark hair, a gold headband, and a gold belt around the waist of her short white dress reclined on a purple divan, sipping champagne and examining her outstretched toes. The nails were painted gold. Every so often a man wearing a cloak, a monocle, and a top hat came to the divan and fed her a grape. She ate it, not seeming to notice the man in the cloak. Gene wondered if they were just guests, or part of the rented decor. It was hard to tell—not just about them, about anyone. He had never seen so many people in costume outside of Halloween, but this was different. Except for the hired harem serving girls, the costumes people had on were real. That is, it was what they would wear to a party, or maybe to lunch. With friends, or in public anywhere. There was an Indian princess, a pair of turbaned twenties flappers with strings of pearls and long cigarette holders, a paratrooper, motorcyclists, beachboys, swamis, and more cowboys than you’d care to count. And even real stars, famous people Gene recognized. Mama Cass! Right there, walking right by him, the real Mama Cass, in the abundant flesh. Some he didn’t recognize till he was told. A tall, pleasant-looking fellow who seemed out of place, wearing only an ordinary sport jacket, open-neck shirt, slacks, waved to Ray Behr. That was Paul Morrisey, Andy Warhol’s movie director. Gene figured looking ordinary must be his costume.

  Ray Behr had to get moving now, he set Gene loose amid the marvels of the tent. Young girls in harem costumes passed silver trays with hot hors d’oeuvres, some with cold, some with neatly rolled joints, carefully arranged in patterns that harmonized with the shape of the tray. Gene took a tiny grape leaf stuffed with lamb, and a glass of champagne. After he did the grape leaf he took a joint, settled on a purple pillow, lit up, enjoyed, all of it swimming around him in the noise, the blare of Epidemic, which, if nothing else, added to the sense of disorientation. He dug it.

  Every so often he caught a glimpse of Ray Behr nodding and bobbing through the crowd, giving his wry grin, laughing but looking somewhere else, then he was coming right toward Gene, a woman beside him shaking her finger, lecture fashion. Unlike most of the other women she looked quite ordinary, wearing a plain kind of baggy brown pants suit, serious black-rimmed glasses, carrying a bulky straw bag. Maybe the anonymous outfit was just her costume, maybe she worked for Warhol, too, maybe his latest star, who knew?

  “Edie, this is Gene,” Ray Behr said. “Gene, will you look after Edie a moment while I attend to some matters?”

  “My pleasure,” said Gene, uncurling from his pillow to stand. The woman plopped down on a gold pillow. Gene sat down again beside her.

  “I’m tired,” she said. “And I don’t want any more double-talk from you people. This whole thing, it’s ridiculous, and if you call this a buffet dinner, I don’t. And what’s the point of a tent, for Godsake? It’s hot in here. And the smoke. You can hardly breathe.”

  Gene didn’t know what her problem was or what he had to do with it, but he knew she was feeling lousy and mad at the world and since he was in a marvelous high feeling wonderful and at peace with the world he thought everyone else should feel that way, too. It seemed a shame if anyone didn’t feel just as good as he did, and anything he could do to help them he would.

  He offered her a toke from his joint but she screwed up her face like he’d offered her a rancid prune.

  “Hate that stuff,” she said.

  “Then may I suggest the champagne. It’s quite excellent, and very cool.”

  She looked at him suspiciously, like he was trying to trick her, but he just smiled and got her a glass of champagne.

  “I noticed you before,” he said.

  That part was true.

  “Oh?” she asked.

  He had her interest.

  “You looked real. Like a real person. Not like one of these cartoon people, pretending to be something else.”

  “You mean you’re not taken in by this cheap display of glitter and half nudity?”

  “It’s not my scene,” he said.

  That was true, too. He only wished it was.

  “It’s really kind of—childish,” he said.

  “Well, that’s a refreshing point of view.”

  He kept feeding her. Champagne and flattery. He fed himself champagne and grass along with it. It was easy.

  Suddenly a man in a French Foreign Legion uniform ran up to Gene and said Ray Behr wanted him right away.

  He was put with some others in the back of Ray Behr’s mighty Olds. He didn’t know where he was going or why. He closed his eyes, smiling.

  He woke on a living room couch. There was pleasant soft music, a few people talking. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. The girl he’d watched being tickled in the office came over and asked if there was anything he’d like.

  “There was,” he said, “but I can’t remember what.”

  She smiled.

  “How about a sandwich and a glass of milk?”

  “Right,” he said. “That was it.”

  There was a plate-glass window looking down at sweeps and sprinklings of lights. Belle had told him how pretty it was. This was the living room of Ray Behr’s house in the Hollywood Hills. Gene blinked, got different lights. An authentic Wurlitzer jukebox from the forties. A pinball machine. Starkie was sitting in a green leather barber’s chair in the center of the room, cranking himself up, then down, slowly. A painting of a palm tree at sunrise. A blown-up black-and-white photograph of the entrance to Ralph’s Market in Hollywood, covering a whole wall.

  The tickle girl brought him a plate with a large ham and cheese on rye with a pickle and a napkin laid beside it and a tall glass of cold milk.

  “You must be the guardian angel,” he said.

  She winked.

  “Just Patty.”

  He wolfed down the food and just as he was wiping some mustard from the corner of his mouth with the napkin, Ray Behr sat down beside him. He was holding a can of beer.

  “You did good,” he said.

  “How?”

  “Getting that bitch out of her funk.”

  “Edie?” he asked. “Easy.”

  “Not for most people.”

  “What’s her problem?”

  “She thinks she has power. In a little way, she does.”

  “Who the hell is she?”

  “Edith Ast. She writes a rock column out of San Francisco. The trouble is, it’s syndicated. That’s where the little power comes in.”

  “Well, I’m glad if I helped or anything. It was fun. It was quite a party.”

  “I’m glad you enjoyed it. That means you’ll like working for me. Would a hundred and ten a week be OK to start?”

  It was almost twice what he’d made at Adams House, Publishers.

  “When do I start?”

  “You already did.”

  “I did? When?”

  Ray Behr gave it his famous sardonic smile.

  “When you got the fir
st glass of champagne for Edie Ast.”

  Electric.

  Electric guitars, electric bass, electric organ, twang and boom and trill of everything turned on, turned up, and the lights, beating and slashing, electric sight and sound, together. Gene began to feel he was electric. Wired. Turned on, plugged in, pulsing.

  Parties. His company had them for clients. The record companies had them for Groups they were pushing, singles, albums, new stars; promoters had them before or after concerts, everyone going back and forth to each other’s parties, part of the business, keeping up, keeping in, staying with it, on top of it, being there, seen, the scene.

  Ray Behr was always on top of it, magnetic and enigmatic. Some said he’d been a serious musician who had played under Ormandy in Philadelphia and for no apparent reason in the midst of a concert had thrown down his oboe (some said flute) and said fuck it, and had come to L.A. Others believed he had been a hot young executive at Chrysler and one day walked out of a board meeting, said fuck it, and had come to L.A. Of course he had all the women he wanted, they couldn’t resist the sardonic smile, but some said he’d never got over his first wife, who was either, depending on whom you heard it from, a dazzling product of Scandinavian royalty (she slipped away to elope by crossing some fjord in a boat with muffled oars) or an octoroon beauty descended from Sieur de Bienville, founder of the city of New Orleans. Whatever the case, it did not prevent successive waves of other women from trying to make him forget.

  “Chicken wings!”

  Ray Behr stopped his pacing to exclaim this latest stroke of genius.

  Mouths hung open and heads shook in sheer wonder, breath sucked in and let out in low whistles of admiration.

  Ray Behr had put his foot down an hour before saying how sick he was of these same cocktail weenies and rubbery shrimp and half-dollar-size slices of bread with some anonymous gunk spread over them and crummy crackers that you stuck in some sort of goo that looked and tasted like paste—no! The end of that. People were sick of it. Give em something new for Godsake. Original. Something to munch on and drink with that hadn’t been used before just because everyone was stuck in the same old rut.

  Starkie had moved his great bulk forward from his Buddha squat and said, “Cracker Jack! Boxes of Cracker Jack. You’d get a prize to take home. Novelty item.”

  Ray Behr wrinkled his nose, showing how wrong it was.

  “Sweets?” he asked.

  That’s all he had to say. Everyone knew the idea was a bummer.

  Starkie grunted, his head falling back on his chest in renewed contemplation.

  Joints had been passed, a few uppers taken, Wild Turkey was sipped, and still for more than an hour Ray Behr had paced in silence, his associates mute, except for one desperate cry of “Sardines?” which he didn’t even acknowledge. And then, out of nowhere, just like that, he had pulled the answer right out of the air.

  Chicken wings.

  Of course.

  And then he went himself one better, he took the basic idea and put the finishing touch on it, the one thing that would make it even more of a hit.

  They wouldn’t just be any old chicken wings, they would be Colonel Sanders Chicken wings! And they would be served in the regular Colonel Sanders cardboard chicken buckets! It was too much. It was perfect. Camp. Hip. And yet functional. Couldn’t you just picture the goddam cardboard chicken buckets sitting around on cocktail tables at this posh estate in Beverly Hills?

  Hell, it was art.

  It was Gene’s job to arrange for the procurement and delivery of chicken wings for two hundred people, an assignment he handled with the efficiency and dispatch that Ray Behr was coming to expect from him.

  “No sweat,” Gene had said when the chicken-wing assignment was delegated to him, even though he realized at once that part of the tricky logistics of the thing involved accurately estimating how many chicken wings a guest would be likely to consume at a cocktail party for a rock group.

  “No sweat,” was what he always said. He had learned to handle the company car, a hearse painted red white and blue by one of the hip young Los Angeles artists. He made pickups and deliveries: food, liquor, record albums, promo materials, dope, bodies. Not dead. Just out of it. Smashed. Fried. Booze or dope or uppers or downers or combinations thereof or all of the above. He was adept at administering the tickle in the throat, the steaming black coffee, the random bandage, and if necessary, the deposit of the body at Emergency. But, of course, he tried to avoid that. He kept a first aid kit in the glove compartment.

  He had to be up, not only in his head, but at all hours, till dawn off and on, and Starkie got tired of doling out his own Ritalin pills to Gene and gave him the name of a nearby Dr. Feelgood who serviced many in the music industry.

  “You don’t have to make up any symptoms or shit,” Starkie explained, “just tell him what makes you feel good.”

  “Dexamyl,” Gene said.

  He said that because he and Lou used to take it when they had to stay up late or get up out of some downer and it hadn’t made him near as nervous as this Ritalin that Starkie had.

  “No!” the doctor shouted.

  Had he got the right doctor?

  This one was pasty-faced with patches of black left from careless shaving. He had black hair slicked back over a shiny dome. He sure as hell looked the part. Later Gene learned this doctor offered free prescriptions to selected women in return for the opportunity to suck their tits. There were rarely any takers.

  Right now he was giving Gene a lecture on the evils of Dexamyl and how the U.S. Government had just issued a warning to doctors that this dangerous substance was being abused and should henceforth only be prescribed to hyperactive children and adults who suffered from some disease Gene never heard of that was some kind of sleeping sickness.

  Dr. Feelgood asked with a sneer if he could qualify in either of those categories and Gene said no, was there anything else the guy could give him, his work required his staying up late a lot.

  Dr. Feelgood gave him a prescription for Ritalin.

  Evidently that drug was newer and hadn’t been officially abused yet so Dr. Feelgood wouldn’t get in any trouble giving it out, even though it affected Gene a lot more powerfully than Dexamyl and made him more edgy and jangled.

  Well hell, it got him up, that was the main thing.

  Everyone agreed the party with the chicken wings was something else, but the party at the Busch Beer Garden was the one Gene would never forget. That was another of Ray Behr’s astounding inspirations. Even harder than dreaming up things to serve at parties was thinking of new places to have them in. Offbeat, camp, surprising, but most important new. And it seemed every place in the greater Los Angeles area had been used. The old dance pavilion at the deserted Santa Monica amusement park. Everybody’s beach house in Malibu. The ballroom of the old Ambassador Hotel in downtown L.A. The pool at the Marmont. Yawn. Ho hum. Jesus. Every place had been done. Short of an airlift, where could you find a new place for a party?

  “Is there any way of doing something underwater?” Starkie wondered.

  “No acoustics,” Ray Behr said in quick dismissal.

  And then it came to him.

  The Busch Beer Garden. They really had beautiful grounds and gardens, pretty little artificial lakes, and tours of the actual brewery in these jazzy little monorail cars that went up in the air beside the building so you could look down through the windows and actually see the beer being made! Not only something new but something to do in the likely event you got tired of hearing whatever Group it was perform.

  The crowd was in such a good mood, what with the monorail tours and the artificial lakes to walk around and the free hot dogs and beer in big cardboard cups that said Budweiser, hardly anyone complained about the band, an undistinguished English Group called “Fly.” They hoped to be the new Beatles or Stones. Who didn’t?

  Belle had come so Barnes could go to still another rock party, he couldn’t seem to tire of them. He had discovered
early on there weren’t any “movie parties,” at least not of any kind of scale and interest like the music events. Movie parties were proper little sit-down dinners at married people’s houses where you talked about shit like Vietnam and the Panthers and Antonioni. Very heavy, responsible. The new Hollywood. You mentioned the word “starlets” they looked at you like you had farted. That was the old Hollywood. Bad old sex-ridden fun-filled crazy erotic old Hollywood! Shit, Barnes said, born too late again. But at least he had the luck to meet Belle, whose array of advantages included being invited to all the good music parties.

  She went for his sake, and the chance to complain about the music. If “hardly anyone complained about the band” at the Busch Garden bash, Belle was the hardly. She stood there shaking her head, scornfully staring at the musicians banging and blowing away at their trade.

  “Look at them. Do you realize those are grown men?”

  “Don’t mind her,” Barnes told Gene, “she’s prejudiced.”

  “Worse yet,” Belle said, “I can hear.”

  Barnes led her off to look at the pretty little artificial lakes.

  Gene just milled for a while stopping to light up or light up someone else, seeing if anyone wanted anything, alert, looking, listening.

  Two tall, statuesque women sharing a joint, one wearing a long gown with a slit to the waist on one side, the other in an old Girl Scout uniform and brown leather boots.

  “Grace Slick has some nerve, naming her baby God.”

  “I know. It’s so damn San Francisco.”

  A man in a white jump suit and crash helmet, a girl in satin hot pants and halter.

  “How about a hit of the coke, Roger?”

  “We promised we wouldn’t have any more till we got back home.”

  “We can always break our promise.”

  In a break between sets a girl in a cowgirl outfit rushing to the Budweiser keg.

  “Gimme a beer, gotta wash it down.”

  “Bad frank?” the concession man asked as he drew her a beer.