By night, except for the huge tired he felt, he was back to more or less normal.
No more peace of mind.
All gone.
He felt completely at home at Uncle Phil’s now. He liked the people who came there. He felt like he was one of them. There was one particular song on the American Pie album that seemed to be about them all. It was called “Crossroads.” One of the things Don McLean said in the song was how Gene felt, like he was all knotted in the gut and nobody could figure out why.
That’s how everyone seemed at Uncle Phil’s. They didn’t complain about their condition they just accepted it, they did whatever they could to make it feel better. They were in fact far out in a literal way, out along the edge of their own minds, of their own survival. With Uncle Phil farther out, farther along than anyone else. Once when he was offering a batch of some crazy goofballs he’d just concocted to anyone who wanted to try one, the black guy known as Ace shook his head and said, “I’m not like you, Uncle Phil. I don’t wanna obliterate reality. I just wanna modify the sombitch.”
There was a big swarthy guy named Rodney who’d been offered a graduate assistantship in anthropology at Berkeley and he had to decide whether to take that or go into the family business. The family business happened to be the Mafia.
“At least it’s good bread,” Uncle Phil said.
“Yeh, but there isn’t any future in it anymore. Another few years it may not be able to function efficiently.”
“How come?” Gene asked.
“Because the whole thing is based on the ultimate threat—they can kill you.”
“So? They still can, can’t they?”
“Sure. But fewer people care anymore.”
“That’s heavy,” Gene said.
Rodney sighed.
“It’s sure as hell bad for business,” he said.
The people around Uncle Phil’s represented a wide variety of businesses.
Pepper, who was Uncle Phil’s old lady, was in show business. That’s what Uncle Phil called it, anyway.
She worked at a place called the Nutrient Center. It was on the second floor of a run-down office building about four blocks away. The center got its customers by placing an ad in the L.A. Free Press every week that said simply “The Nutrient Center. Consultation by Rhonda.” Enough readers figured it was some kind of kinky sex trip that they went out to Venice and had a consultation. It went like this. When a customer came, Herb, who ran the Nutrient Center, called up Pepper, who hopped on her bike and went over. She would sit on a chair in the back of the room partitioned off by a curtain. If the customer wanted a $5 consultation, Pepper sat there and read a chapter from a book called Nutrition and the Inner Mind. If the customer popped for a $15 consultation, she did the same thing only with her clothes off. That was it. Herb was always on the other side of the curtain so the customer couldn’t get any other ideas about further types of consultation. Pepper said none of the customers yet complained. Some even returned for more consultations, even though they all were the same.
“Isn’t that show biz?” Uncle Phil asked.
Gene had to admit he wouldn’t know what else to call it.
Sometimes outsiders dropped in. Not outsiders in the head sense, but like they lived somewhere else. Not the Marina of course, but Hollywood or Beverly Hills or Laurel Canyon. One time Belle came, with her new boyfriend. His name was Jack. He was a comic, and had just done a gig in Honolulu. His agent had promised him a bit in a new movie. Belle had told him not to believe in Hollywood.
“Do you ever see that Barnes person?” Belle asked Gene.
“No,” Gene said, figuring that was easiest.
“Well, I guess he can’t help the way he is,” she said. “But I hope he burns in hell.”
The comic gave Gene a big slapstick sort of wink.
Gene nodded. He sent his love to Belle’s mother.
He didn’t want to leave his people, his world, but he still felt some kind of loyalty to the old one, to the people from before, so when Barnes called and told him Flash was living somewhere in the Valley and wanted them to come to dinner he said OK he would. At least he didn’t have to take a date.
Barnes picked him up and Gene asked what the hell Flash was doing living in the fuckin San Fernando Valley and Barnes didn’t know, Flash had only said he wanted them to come out and see “what a real sweet little setup” he had there.
“Maybe it’s a nightclub,” Gene said. “Maybe he decided the only way he could get any gigs for that group of his was to own the nightclub.”
It wasn’t, though.
The Valley seemed to Gene like the flattest largest most monotonous stretch of civilized earth anywhere on the planet. The straight flat streets went forever, mile upon mile, an endless repetition of houses or businesses, restaurants and bars and TV repair and Laundromats, Jesus, nowhere on earth were there so many Laundromats.
Flash was living in a tiny house much like the countless other tiny houses extending to infinity on either side of his and across from his. Flash didn’t own this particular tiny house, nor did the woman whom he lived in it with. She just rented.
Her name was Mildred.
She was a manicurist and Flash had met her when she did his nails at a hair-styling salon in Hollywood. After the gig in Oxnard, Flash’s Group had broken up, one of the teenyboppers running off with the new Rasputin, the other returning home to Topeka, so Flash had come back down to Hollywood to see what he could get moving. He was down to his last fourteen bucks so he figured to cheer himself and to show how confident he was no matter how dim things looked at the moment he’d go and get himself a manicure. And as long as he was going to do it he’d get him the best. That’s how he met Mildred. She was the best. The manicure cost ten bucks and he gave her a two-buck tip.
“What the hell,” Flash said out of the side of his mouth, “the way I figure, we pass this way but once.”
Flash had then asked Mildred if she knew of any nice quiet sort of homey place a lonely man could have dinner and sort of on an impulse she invited him to her place, and he’d been here ever since.
As he proudly told the tale Mildred looked on beaming, obviously adoring her dashing knight. She had curly dyed red hair, a too-perfect set of dentures, and was probably clipping her way toward fifty.
“Show your friends the new watch I got you, hon,” said Mildred.
Flash held up his wrist, looking rather critically at the watch.
“It’s silver,” he said. “It’s a good timepiece, but gold is my color.”
Mildred said maybe she could exchange it.
They sat around a small kitchen table for their dinner, which was beef Stroganoff. Flash was very proud of that.
“Is this beef Stroganoff,” he asked, “or is this beef Stroganoff?”
“This is beef Stroganoff, all right,” said Barnes.
“Gene?” Flash asked.
He had to say it, too.
“This sure is beef Stroganoff, man,” he said.
Flash was satisfied. Gene remembered him like that, the satisfied look, the napkin tucked into his sport shirt, eating his beef Stroganoff lovingly made by Mildred the manicurist in a little house in the San Fernando Valley.
He remembered Barnes, driving back, in the dark of the car, telling him there was hope again for his movie getting made. There was a chance that they could get Diana Ross to play the Deb, and if they could then the picture was a sure thing.
“A Black Deb?” Gene asked.
“Sure, man. They have em now. Anyway the important thing is to get a star if you want a studio to back you. Doesn’t matter what the hell color they are.”
Because of this new development Barnes had put aside his new mystery set in the Single Shores. If Diana Ross did sign, then he’d have to do a lot of rewriting on that part.
“Well, I wish you luck, man,” Gene said.
Barnes looked dim and shaky.
Gene remembered just how Barnes and Flash had looked that ni
ght because he had a feeling he might not ever see them again. Not that any of them was going to die, it was just that Gene felt too uncomfortable now going out of Venice, out of the circle of Uncle Phil and his friends. That’s where he was at ease now, that’s where he felt he belonged, and he wanted to be even more a part of it, get into it deeper.
He and Barnes and Flash had simply gone off in different directions. He thought of them, himself, too, and that reminded him of Robert Frost’s old poem “The Road Not Taken” and he wondered if he and his friends had taken the wrong one to ever be free.
Had they? Had he?
Who knew?
He thought a lot about the peace of mind. The heroin. Everything gentle. No freak shows like with acid, no jumpiness that speed made, not over so quick as coke and more than any of them it brought the famous “peace of mind,” the cessation of interior hostilities, the calming of the mind’s confusion, the easing of the pain.
He knew, of course, the ultimate price. Your life. One way or other. Quick, with an overdose, or slow, as more of it gave you less peace and there was no peace in between but doing whatever you could to get the bread to buy the skag that you needed by then just to get back feeling like you were before you started.
Well.
He understood all that.
He tried not to dwell on it.
He walked a lot. He often woke at dawn with the foghorns and he walked the beach, looking at shells, watching the birds, formations of sandpipers, diving of gulls. He tried to focus on very small things. A single pebble. Turn it in your hand. Examine. Commune. A strand of seaweed. A footprint. His own big toe. Sometimes he’d sit cross-legged in the sand, trying to hold his mind still. Sometimes he kept it blank for a while. Not long though. Sometimes the seal came, always leaving Gene wrung out and shaky from willing him away. Sometimes Lou would appear, bright as life. Sometimes Laura, frozen in the door-framed snapshot that last time he saw her. He didn’t want to think of these things, these people or anything, he just wanted to be there. But they kept creeping in, the thoughts. Lizzie. Mulligan. Chicken wings.
One specially warm day he went out on the pier to feed the sea gulls. He laid out a row of pieces of stale bread on the wooden railing, and stood at the end of it. A gull came down and padded toward the first piece. His yellow beak banged down and got it and then the next, advancing along the row. Suddenly there was an angry caw from above and a beating of wings. Gene ducked but this new gull wasn’t after him, it attacked the one that was eating, gave it a terrible blow just under the eye with its beak, knocking it off the rail. The attack was quick, ferocious, frightening, from out of nowhere. Gene dropped the rest of the bread in the water.
At work that afternoon a guy in a loud sport shirt came in and ordered a taco. He had a lot of black hairs coming out of his nostrils. Gene prepared the taco, put it on a paper plate and placed it on the counter in front of the man. The man took a couple of bites and said, “You call this a taco?”
Gene didn’t answer. He took off his apron, folded it neatly, and placed it on one of the stools at the counter. He walked out the door and down Ocean Front Walk, neither fast nor slow, his hands in his pockets.
“Hey, you!” the customer called after him.
Uncle Phil offered Gene a Carlings, and they sat around talking about George Allen’s handling of the Rams for a while.
Then Gene said, “I want some.”
He didn’t have to say what.
Phil nodded and went to the kitchen. It was not for him to make moral or medical judgments. He was not a doctor or a priest. He would never have urged anyone to try it, but if they asked him and he had it he’d provide it for them. But of course he couldn’t keep giving it away. Before he got to the kitchen he turned and looked gently at Gene.
“You understand, it’s not free,” he said.
Gene nodded.
“Nothing ever is,” he said.
About the Author
Dan Wakefield (b. 1932) is the author of the bestselling novels Going All the Way and Starting Over, which were both adapted into feature films. His memoirs include New York in the Fifties, which was made into a documentary film of the same name, and Returning: A Spiritual Journey, praised by Bill Moyers as “one of the most important memoirs of the spirit I have ever read.” Wakefield created the NBC prime time series James at 15, and wrote the screenplay for Going All the Way, starring Ben Affleck. He edited and wrote the introduction for Kurt Vonnegut Letters as well as If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: Vonnegut’s Advice to the Young. Visit Wakefield online at www.danwakefield.com and www.vonnegutsoldestlivingfriend.com.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1977 by Dan Wakefield
Cover design by Andy Ross
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2621-5
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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