Home Free

by Dan Wakefield

  “No. I just gave head to the drummer.”

  Gene went up to a bored-looking woman wearing Levi’s and a “Mr. Natural” T-shirt and asked if there was any thing he could do for her.

  “Yeh,” she said, “bring back the polka.”

  “I’ll do all I can,” he said.

  He wandered on, seeing if there might be anyone he knew at one of the round metal tables scattered around the outdoor pavilion.

  He didn’t see anyone he knew but he saw someone he wished he knew.

  She was alone, eating a hot dog.

  She was small and dainty, with the perfect blond hair and blue eyes of a doll. She was wearing a pink angora sweater, a pleated white skirt that came just above her knees, and blue suede boots.

  He wanted to eat her up. As he went toward her, he hoped she was overage. He couldn’t tell.

  “May I?” he asked, pointing to an empty chair across from her.

  Her mouth was full of hot dog but she nodded, her blue eyes friendly, playful.

  After she swallowed she smiled and said, “Please.”

  He wanted to say something clever, astounding, some bombshell of a line she’d never forget.

  “You with Xanadu?” he said.

  That was the company that recorded tonight’s Group.

  She shook her head.

  He scratched his.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re here,” he said, “but how’d it happen?”

  “I know Ray Behr,” she said.

  “Really? How?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  Of course. Jesus. He was coming on like some kind of FBI jerk.

  But all he could think of were these dumb questions. The thing was, he wanted to know about her, anything, he was enthralled, he couldn’t stop asking things. Her voice was lovely, high and clear, with a kind of lilt, and what sounded a little like an accent.

  “Are you from England?” he asked.

  She laughed.

  “Encino,” she said.

  Gene told himself to stop asking these jerk questions that made him look like an ass. Let it happen. So what if her presence here, like her accent, went unexplained for a while, or forever?

  “Can I get you a beer?” he asked.

  Her cute little nose wrinkled.

  “Can’t stand the stuff,” she said.

  Jesus. Maybe she was too young to drink. He could feel himself blushing.

  “Isn’t it a gorgeous evening?” she said.

  “Incredible,” Gene said. “Beyond belief, really.”

  “I’m glad we don’t have snow.”

  “No! I mean I am, too, Jesus. I spent a couple of winters back East. In Boston, actually. Terrible! Snow everywhere, you have to walk through it to get anywhere. Real bummer.”

  She asked him to tell her more. About the snow. He really got into it. Once he had a subject he loosened up a little, relaxed. Actually she really was easy to talk to, friendly. She laughed easily, and her eyes were incredibly bright, alive.

  They just chit-chatted along for a while, Gene trying to keep her amused, sometimes feeling guilty he might be trying to seduce some innocent teenybopper, but not guilty enough to stop. While he was rambling on she took a small white purse from her lap, almost like a little girl’s play-grown-up purse Gene thought. She took a small piece of folded Kleenex from it, and then snapped the purse shut and put it back on her lap. He didn’t ask about it, not wanting to look like an ass again, so he just kept on talking. He’d exhausted snow as a subject and moved on to fog. She unfolded the tissue, picked up an almost transparent little tab from it, and split it in half with her fingernail. She took one of the halves, put it on her tongue, and swallowed. She pushed the tissue with the other half on it toward Gene.

  “Care to join me?” she asked in that little girl lilt.

  He cared to join her in anything, but he felt it would be best if he knew what it was, even though the question sounded so damn stupid.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Clear Light.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Acid, of course.”

  “Acid?”

  “The very best.”

  He had sworn long ago he’d never do it. He figured he had just the right kind of a head for a bad trip. Only a couple days ago he had begged off dropping some acid with Ray Behr, who said it would be good for their business relationship as well as their friendship to do it together. Drop acid. He had turned down Ray Behr and now here he was sorely tempted to do it with this little girl he’d known for fifteen or twenty minutes. And knew nothing about her except she had come to the party because she knew Ray Behr. Shit! It might be a trap! Maybe Ray Behr commissioned her to come to the party and lure Gene into taking acid with her. The trouble with that was she hadn’t lured him. She had just sat there. Nor had she tried to persuade him. All she said was, “Care to join me?” That was hardly a powerful sales pitch.

  Now she said with only the slightest hint of disappointment in her voice, “Don’t, if you don’t want.”

  But he did want. He wanted to get all mixed up with her, no matter how.

  “I do,” he said.

  He put the little thing on the tip of his tongue, swallowed, and washed it down with some Bud.

  She smiled.

  Her name was Laura.

  Nothing happened.

  They kept on chatting and then after a while they got up and walked around the pretty little lakes. Gene even made so bold as to hold her hand. It gave him a tiny, thrilling little squeeze.

  He wondered when the acid was supposed to start but he didn’t want to ask, he didn’t want to start sounding square again.

  She wanted to ride back to town in the back of a pickup some friends of hers had so they could see the stars.

  Gene said that was wonderful.

  When they got to the parking lot he suddenly, without thinking about it, broke into an imitation Groucho Marx walk, doing it very fast, going around in circles. Laura laughed and clapped her hands together. Like a child, delighted.

  Gene didn’t know if he did it because he was trying to keep her amused or whether it was the acid starting up.

  The important thing was she came up to the room at the Marmont with him. He got her a glass of milk and him a beer.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He realized he wasn’t talking.

  He realized he couldn’t.

  But that was all right. He felt just fine. Nothing bad was happening, he just knew he couldn’t talk.

  He wanted to reassure her, so he went to Barnes’s writing table and got a pencil and a piece of paper. He drew a large letter R on the piece of paper. He smiled and showed it to Laura.

  “R?” she asked.

  He nodded and smiled.

  The R meant “I am all right.” See, the R was the first letter of “right” and it stood for the whole thing.

  She smiled back at him. She stood up and walked around the room, slowly, picking up things, looking at them—pencil, pillow, paperback—putting them back down, laughing every once in a while. Then she came over and kissed him on the forehead.

  “I’ll come back,” she said.

  Gene was still smiling.

  He woke up on the floor, his head resting on a large dishpan. He didn’t remember going to sleep, or getting a dishpan to put his head on. He ached like crazy. But so would anyone who’d spent the night on the floor with their head resting on a dishpan. He saw the R and remembered what it meant. That he was all right.

  Evidently, he’d had a good trip. At least he could think of nothing bad about it. Except he hadn’t felt like trying to do anything about Laura, and he hadn’t even bothered to ask her last name or how to get ahold of her.

  Then he remembered she said she’d be back.

  She didn’t say when, though.

  “Joshua Tree,” Ray Behr said thoughtfully.

  “Who?” Gene asked.

  “It’s a place. In the desert. I’ll
take you sometime. It’s the best place in the world for dropping acid.”

  “Why?”

  Ray Behr looked at Gene intently and asked, speaking slowly and meaningfully, “Have you ever seen the sunrise in the desert?”

  “No.”

  Ray Behr smiled and walked from the room. Evidently his question was the answer.

  Gene had told him about losing his cherry, acid-wise, and Ray Behr had been terrifically relieved, looking forward now to him and Gene doing it together so Gene would know him in a deeper way, find out where his head was really at.

  But Ray Behr claimed he was unable to place this little girl Laura, he just drew a blank. He told Gene not to worry, there was plenty more where that came from. Gene started to explain how that wasn’t so, how fresh and incredible and wonderful this girl was, but he realized he’d only sound like a dreamy-eyed adolescent jerk. Which is exactly how he felt.

  Belle said she didn’t know her either, and when Gene tried to describe Laura he evidently got too carried away and Belle turned up her nose.

  “I know that type,” she said.

  But not Laura.

  No one seemed to know her.

  A week went by. Gene went to all the parties but couldn’t find her.

  But out of the blue, or the past, or both, came someone Gene had forgotten awhile, hadn’t really expected to see in this scene, and in fact he wasn’t quite in it. He was trying to crash it.

  Flash.

  Arguing with a security man at a party after a concert at the Santa Monica Civic. Flash had got into the concert by buying a ticket like anybody else could but anybody else couldn’t buy an invitation to the party, and that included Flash. He was trying to persuade the guard he was somebody. Gene could understand the guard’s skepticism.

  Flash was wearing white buck loafers, gray flannel slacks, a Jefferson Airplane T-shirt, a red button-down sweater, and love beads. His hair was long and brushed down over his forehead in a bangs effect. He looked like he’d got his decades mixed up.

  Gene got him in but after much clapping of backs and just one drink he wanted out again. He said he had just hit the Coast and he didn’t feel at home yet. He said a guy didn’t know “which way to go out here, hip or straight or God knows what else.” That explained the getup he was wearing. He was trying to go in all directions at once, just to cover himself. He kept looking nervously around the room and finally said, “Fuckin phonies. C’mon, man, let’s hit the Strip.”

  Hit the Strip?

  Flash had heard the Sunset Strip was something else (Gene figured he got that word somewhere around Sunapee, New Hampshire) and he was anxious to check out the famous go-go strip joint bars like the Pink Pussycat, the whole big gaudy neon strobe nude nooky but only for lookin at scene, so Gene went along though he told him it wasn’t much different than the Combat Zone in Boston and Flash just laughed and said, “Still a hick at heart, huh, man, defendin the old town.”

  Gene just smiled, sat back telling Flash where to turn and which way, thinking how funny it was for him and Flash to be tooling along in L.A. in the night, who’d have thought it a year ago, and yet everyone was getting here, over the humps of the country like they showed on the geologic maps, over the humps and down into Southern California, Los Angeles, into the final slot of the American machine, the map of its playing board tilted southwest, to L.A., far out, the farthest finest final clink, the slot. Blinkers, buzzers, lights.

  The Strip.

  Strobes throwing jumpy stripes through the room, drums beating the ancient rhythm for bump and grind, so old it must have started on the Sodom Strip, a middle-aged woman wearing only blond wig and silver high heels, looks at row of hushed hypnotized faces upturned to her tits as she cups them, tantalizing, sweat on the foreheads of the middle-aged men mostly in suits and ties some sport shirts one a bull-necked crew-cut head of a brawny construction worker tanned and tattooed he holds up a folded bill and the woman nears, stops, mocks a question whether to come nearer, does, stands so her silver heels are close enough for him to stick the folded five-dollar bill into one, while his head is melting in perspiration, she turns, still moving to the ancient music, kneels, so she is squatting on the heels, moving the rump back and forth so near he can kiss it and does, his tongue flicks hungry out on the strobe-lit ass, gets a hint of it before she stands, moving back along the runway, the five secure in her shoe, looking for another, who?

  When the next entertainer comes on, bored, standard, clad in pink bikini Flash knocked back his little four-dollar highball and said, “Shitman, is this all there is?”

  “Wha’d ya expect?” asked Gene. “Gorillas humping?”

  “Shit. Let’s go to my place and rap.”

  Gene offered the room at the Marmont to have smoke and drink but Flash insisted they go to his motel on Hollywood Boulevard, he wanted to check on his Group.

  “You got a Group again?” Gene asked.

  “Yeh, man. Managin again.”

  “What’s the Group?”

  “Rasputin and the Dreamers.”

  “The Dreamers?”

  “Yeh, these new chicks didn’t go for being Schemers. They’re a little young to dig it.”

  Gene could understand when he saw the girls. They both had on shorts and halters, and looked about fifteen. They were pouting because Flash didn’t leave em any bread for dinner and the TV was no good.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Flash said. “I see the picture OK.”

  “It’s only in black and white,” one complained.

  “It’s more realistic,” said Flash.

  He peeled off a five and told them to go out and get them some burgers and shakes, but don’t go far and come right back.

  When they left, Flash pulled a fifth of tequila from his suitcase and poured a glass for him and Gene. There wasn’t any ice in the place. In fact, there wasn’t much of anything. Gene spotted a couple cockroaches, though.

  “Where’d ya find the girls?” Gene asked.’

  “Here and there.”

  “Runaways?”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  “Yeh, but we’re overage.”

  “Well, they will be, too, eventually.”

  “Where’s your Rasputin?”

  “We rendezvous with him up at Oxnard. Got a gig at a roadhouse there couple miles out of town.”

  Gene offered to help him, maybe get Ray Behr to introduce him to some people.

  “Nah, thanks, man, but I wanna see us make it on our own. Don’t want to owe nothin to nobody. Then when we’re ready to go to a record company we can make our own deal, we won’t have our hands tied.”

  “Sure, man,” Gene said.

  He drank to the success of Rasputin and the Dreamers, told Flash to keep in touch, and said he’d better split, he needed some sack time.

  Flash said to look for his group in Rolling Stone.

  Gene said he’d keep an eye out.

  Where the hell was she?

  One night he came in and found something stuck in his door. A napkin. It had “Hi” written on it. The i was dotted with a circle. It was her. Laura. She had been there and he had been gone. Shit.

  In spite of some Mexican beers and a couple of joints, Gene couldn’t get to sleep that night. Or the next.

  He went back to Dr. Feelgood and got a prescription for thirty 25-mg. Seconals, and a harsh lecture on drug abuse.

  He took one of the Seconals when he went to bed that night and went right to sleep.

  He woke up an hour later, so wide awake he knew he might as well get dressed. Shit. Maybe he really should go down to Joshua Tree and drop some acid with Ray Behr. Maybe he’d have one of those trips where you suddenly had some blinding flash of insight and knew what the fuck it was all about. Life and everything.

  Sunday afternoon he was sitting in the room sipping a Carta Blanca and reading another John D. MacDonald. Violence and lust on the Florida Coast. Gin and mosquitoes. Bones crunching, beautiful broads. The sombitch was almost as goo
d as dope. Kept your mind off itself.

  He almost didn’t hear the little knock at the door.

  It was faint, small, like it might have been a mistake. He got up anyway to look.

  Laura.

  A little navy blue silk dress, white cardigan over her shoulders, white short-heeled sandals, little white vinyl purse.

  He kissed her, hard, and she met it, opened to it, and then pulled away, smiling.

  “Come along now,” she said, in that little girl lilt, and he followed, as she danced so lightly down the stairs, out to a waiting VW bug, black, with beaten fenders. Laura slipped in the back and Gene sat next to the driver, whom Laura introduced as her friend Sue. Sue worked for Xanadu records. They were going to a Xanadu party at somebody’s swanky estate up in the Hills. Sue had a lot of tan makeup on her face, which was pitted here and there. Her black hair was short, with bangs, and she had on a black leather miniskirt and those thong sandals that tie around the legs all the way to the knee. When Gene got in beside her she looked him up and down, kind of an amused appraisal, and let out the clutch.

  A pool shaped like a teardrop, and underwater lights coming on after sunset. The Group played out on the hilltop, the music brought back to the veranda and pool with big portable speakers for those who didn’t want to join the crowd on the hillside. White-jacketed waiters, shrimp rolls, champagne, the joints on silver trays.

  Gene and Laura sat on the grass, away from the hill crowd, facing the veranda and the pool. Laura slipped off her sandals, curled her toes into the dewy grass.

  “Yummmmmm,” she said.

  He had planned to ask her where she’d been and why she didn’t come sooner and how could he find her when he wanted to but all that seemed sort of silly now, square even, like he was some kind of truant officer. All that factual shit might take the magic out of it.

  They passed the neatly wrapped joint between them.

  “Your hair is not yellow,” he said. “I had thought of it as yellow but it’s not. It is gold. It is definitely gold.”

  “Nnnnnnnn,” she said, nestling her head against him.

  A white jacket lowered a tray of champagne glasses in front of them and Gene plucked one off it. They shared.

  Laura opened her little girl purse and took out a tissue. She unfolded it carefully on her knee. There was a tiny piece of purple, like a flake of something. She carefully broke it in half and gave one part to Gene. Each of them swallowed their part, and had a sip of champagne.