Season of the Witch

by James Leo Herlihy

  Roy looks at me, says, “Small conference?”

  By this time we’re out in the sunshine, leaning against the fender of a parked car. Winston bows elegantly. “You like for me to step aside, good people?”

  “No, no,” Roy says. “It’s okay.”

  Roy and I talk, using the ultra-quiet secret language, no melody, no facial expressions. It sounds like mumble-jumble to everybody but us. Winston discreetly scans the sky and steps back a pace.

  ROY: What do you think we can afford?

  WITCH: I don’t know. What do you think?

  ROY: How much we got?

  WITCH: About twenty-nine dollars.

  ROY: IS he really a brother?

  WITCH: I can’t tell.

  ROY: Me either. I thought maybe you could.

  WITCH: He’s too good-looking. My judgment is wrecked.

  ROY: I know what you mean.

  WITCH: You dig him, too?

  ROY: Sort of. But how come he never smiles?

  WITCH: Doesn’t blink his eyes either.

  ROY: Maybe we better forget it.

  WITCH: Right. We haven’t even got jobs yet.

  ROY: Okay.

  WITCH: Besides, who needs hash? We’re high anyway.

  ROY: True.

  Roy tells Winston our decision. We apologize for using up his time and offer to buy him a cup of coffee.

  He bows. “No, thank you very much, my friends. I bid you good day, long life.” Still no smile, no blink. But he nods nicely.

  Roy and I proceed to Tompkins Square Park. It’s late afternoon now. New York is looking great. Everything is either gorgeous, or gorgeous-awful. The only thing that’s just awful, period, is the junk all over the streets and sidewalks. Every kind of garbage imaginable. I mention it to Roy. Roy, fantastic guru that he is, suggests that if our heads are in the right place, we can groove on it, get to where we really dig the litter everywhere.

  I tell him I agree entirely, but I wonder if we can ever learn to dig the dog turds. Roy is convinced we can. So we sit on a bench and look at some dog turds, trying to groove on them. About three benches away, an enormous German shepherd is dropping a nice steaming specimen for us. Roy and I both spot it at once, and exchange a glance.

  “How you doing?” he says.

  I shake my head. “I’m not making it. How about you?”

  “A little headway, maybe.”

  “Fabulous. Tune me in.”

  “Well,” he says, “what I’m doing is I’m thinking about the soul of that dog.”

  “I’ll give it a try.”

  So I try it. I think of the dog’s soul, and I give it a Secret Zap. Then I say, “Roy, that’s not his soul crapping up the sidewalk.”

  Roy nods, ponders a while longer. Then he says, “Everything that comes from the human body is sacred. Shit, piss, cum, spit, hair, the whole thing.”

  “That’s humans though. Right?”

  “You think human turds are better?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Besides, dogs are sacred, too. Aren’t they? All living things?”

  “Absolutely. Every little cockroach.”

  Roy looks at the fresh pile again, regards it with great seriousness. Then he says, “I don’t know if I can make it a hundred per cent in one afternoon though. Can you?”

  “No,” I say. “Let’s not force ourselves.”

  “Right.”

  We walk over to Avenue B, where everything gets really thick. Every kind of person imaginable, all colors and sizes and styles and genders, milling madly around, each on his own trip. I fall in and out of love three or four times, very quietly, nothing wild. Each affair lasts a half a block or so. Suddenly it’s twilight. Roy and I both find ourselves hung up on an old Slavic lady with great cheekbones and an enormous junk collection. Lots of people like junk, but this lady carries hers with her in these miraculous shopping bags that somehow hold things even when they’re terribly torn. She stops at a wire trash barrel to collect more goodies, then empties out her entire stash to rearrange it on the sidewalk: jelly glasses, rusty coat hangers, broken clocks, magazines without covers.

  I say, “Roy, she’s got it made, she’s learned to groove on litter.”

  Roy says, “Yeah, but I think she’s hung up.”

  We move along.

  We go into this weird cave-type coffee place where all the longhairs are mad at us. I wonder what for? We flash peace signs. Nobody flashes back. I sotto-voce to Roy, “They look like brothers. What’s wrong?”

  Roy shrugs. “Maybe they’re on reds. Let’s split.” And I think, If that’s what Seconals produce, they could really hurt the revolution!

  Suddenly I got this awful fit of depression and had to stop writing. Then this kind Western Union man started a conversation. I guess I look scared and he wants to comfort me. But it made me even more anxious than ever trying to keep up a conversation when I know something awful is happening to Roy. That’s all I can think about. Sitting still doesn’t help, and kindness doesn’t comfort me. I’ll have to keep writing.

  After we got out of that down-head coffee place, something must have clicked over in our heads, because we kept attracting bummers, one after another. Sick-looking kids—our age, more or less—kept stopping us on St. Mark’s Place, asking for money. The first bunch were so scroungy-looking, we gave them a dollar. And then, I don’t know exactly how it happened, but suddenly these sad-looking types kept appearing out of nowhere, telling us their stories, and we kept handing out our money like there’s no tomorrow. Roy kept saying, “They’re worse off than we are, Witch.” And I kept agreeing. We’d given away seven dollars before I saved us from total ruin by giving vent to a neat little wave of fury. This filthy chick with electric hair was sitting on some steps, and she actually hollered at us when we walked by. “Hey! Give me some bread!” It was like a demand. I stopped dead in my tracks and looked straight at her. A total mess, pimples, pale, wild eyes, crud all over her clothes, God knows what under her fingernails. Her hair looked like it had died and gone to hell. Suddenly—why so late?—it dawns on me what’s happening. I’d been vaguely wondering why our generosity had been bringing us down. Isn’t love supposed to help your high? How come then both Roy and I kept feeling worse instead of better. The more we gave the more desperate and scared we felt.

  I look at this chick’s eyes, and they’re like the barrels of a couple of mean little guns pointed at us. That’s what gave me my big flash. All these people we’ve been slopping over with our darling icky kindness were just a tacky tribe of bloodsuckers spaced out on drugs. They acted as if all they knew about brotherhood had come from a quick course at the Pentagon.

  Witch moon-in-Scorpio Me—I think I’m learning to respect my awful side—sprang like a snake. God knows what I told her. I was brilliant. Roy must have thought I’d freaked out. In a way, I had. I started with How dare she shout at me and make demands. Then she made her fatal mistake, she looked at me half amused, half disdainful, like I’m some uptight little fluff from suburbia that doesn’t know her ass from a hypodermic needle. So I let her have it. I told her she and everybody like her were undermining the entire revolution. It was a fabulous speech, I wish to hell I had it on tape.

  But here’s the really awful part.

  She heard me.

  She really heard me. I’d made her feel like a totally unsacred little dog turd. And she started crying. So I joined her. Pretty soon we’re all sitting on this stoop, Roy on one side, me on the other, and this poor smelly little wreck in the middle, and we’re all hugging each other and saying how all right everything’s going to be. Pretty soon I noticed her eyes were scanning the street again. I suppose all three of us had begun to feel our thing together was over. Roy and I got up and walked away. The good-byes were more or less scattered. She hardly noticed we were leaving. I guess she had crystals on her mind, poor dear.

  I don’t know what time it was. Seems like it had been dark for ages. Roy and I walked back to Third Avenue an
d without even talking it over we headed for the hotel, holding hands all the way. The Dexedrine was still doing its number in our heads, but our bodies were tired. I simply ached all over, and I know Roy was dying on his feet because his beautiful big eyes were just a couple of pink slits and his pimples stood out more than ever.

  At the hotel, we talked. No, we didn’t talk. We rapped. We rapped forever. We went over every little thing that had happened. Our doped minds were like hot little tongues and they licked in and out of every little corner of the entire day. Then we tried to shut up and couldn’t. Finally we got undressed and rubbed each other’s backs. I noticed Roy’s cock was shriveled up to nothing. Delano said men get that way when they’re speeding. I don’t know what happens to women, but if I’m any sample, they begin to feel like witches. Not white ones either. Old and purple and ugly.

  We stayed in the room for quite a while. There was almost constant emergency-type noise. Banging in the halls. Arguments. Screaming. Sirens. Roy said we’d get used to it. I sat on the window sill trying to breathe but all the air was secondhand. Roy did his Yoga.

  Then, sitting there looking into the street and hating everything in sight, I flashed on the ending of an old dream I used to have. There’s not much to it. I try to scream and can’t because my voice doesn’t work. Then the dream itself came back, the whole thing.

  In the dream, Mother’s chaise longue is covered with the skin of a big black furry bear. I sneak into her room naked and lie there feeling the fur on my body. I turn over and lie on my tummy. The fur feels wonderful on my breasts, but just when I’m really getting into it, Mother comes and catches me. This memory is so strong I wonder if it was only a dream? But I know it couldn’t actually have happened because there’s no bearskin on her chaise. It’s just chintz. Anyway, she starts calling me terrible names and comes after me, so I run downstairs and out of the house. The back yard becomes a great forest, but it’s Mother’s forest and therefore not a real one. (Nothing of Mother’s is real!) And she’s still chasing me. So I try to scream, but I can’t. Because the rule of the dream is that your voice can’t work unless the forest you’re in is real.

  “Roy,” I said. “I know I shouldn’t be rapping at you when you’re trying to do your Yoga, but listen to me, will you, for a minute? Someday, before I die—as soon as possible in fact —I want to go into a forest naked and make a terrible noise. Can you understand that?”

  I could actually feel him thinking it over. This is one of the reasons he’s so perfect to talk to. He hears you. He takes what you say inside of himself and really gets the feel of it before he answers. Especially when it’s important like this.

  “What kind of a noise will it be?” he said. “A scream or a song or a prayer or what?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’ll just be the sound I make.”

  “A really terrible sound?”

  “Absolutely terrible.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I could dig that.”

  “Roy. We’ve made a mistake, haven’t we?”

  He leaned back on his hands, legs still in the lotus position. “What we did wrong was we picked the wrong scene. We shouldn’t have picked New York.”

  “It’s my fault.”

  “No,” Roy said. “We both decided.”

  “Yes, but I had this big thing about I’ve got to find my father. If it hadn’t been for that, maybe we’d have gone to Boulder or Laguna Beach or Big Sur or someplace beautiful.”

  “We can still do that.”

  “With no money?”

  “Not right away, but later maybe.”

  So we had fantasy talk about what it must be like in California, and about all the communities we’d heard about in Colorado. And when we ran down again, I said, “Roy, if you decide to split for Canada, I’ll be with you completely. I just want you to know that.”

  “You think we should?”

  “I don’t know. But we ought to consider it while there’s still some money left, don’t you think?”

  Neither of us felt we were thinking clearly enough to make a good decision, so we went for a walk, hoping the change of scene would help.

  By the time we got dressed and into the streets it was 6 A.M. The sun was coming up and we got high just on dawn alone. You can’t get a complete view of the sunrise in New York, but on certain streets you can see all the way over to the river where the light is strongest.

  We walked over to West Village and had scrambled eggs and toast at an all-nightery on Sheridan Square, then walked all the way back to Third Avenue. People were climbing in and out of the subway holes, populating the day. It was sort of nerve-racking seeing all these people running around doing their thing, and us not even having jobs.

  On the way upstairs, that same black prostitute smiled at us. I thought she must be headed for the streets again, and wondered if she wasn’t getting awfully tired.

  We lay down and tried to sleep and I think we succeeded for a while. But what I remember most clearly is lying there with my eyes wide open wondering what the fuck we were going to do next. For a while at least I must have blacked out, because when I opened my eyes I saw Roy sitting in the middle of the floor, fully dressed, in the lotus position. He said he was trying to get at his inner resources to help him through the day. I got down on the floor with him, but neither of us were able to meditate. There was too much clutter in our heads, so we decided instead to get into some old-fashioned praying. Roy said he thought if we were really serious about it we ought to do it on our knees.

  “But if we’re God,” I said, “who are we getting on our knees to?”

  Roy thought about the question for a minute. Then he said, “I don’t really know. Praying isn’t really my thing.”

  “Then what are we doing it for? Just in case?”

  “God takes all these different forms,” Roy said, “you and I are just two of them. I guess what you pray to is all the forms you can’t see.”

  “Spirits?”

  “Yeah. Like that, I guess.”

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  Then Roy said, “Listen, if we’re going to pray to the spirits, I think I’ll address a few of them by name. Why not?”

  “Go ahead,” I told him.

  “Okay. I’ll say the names, and you say them after me.”

  We got to our knees and Roy started right in.

  “Dear Buddha.”

  “Dear Buddha.”

  “Dear Jesus.”

  “Dear Jesus.”

  “Dear Carl Jung.”

  “Dear Carl Jung.”

  “Dear Mohammed.”

  “Dear Mohammed.”

  “Dear Hermann Hesse.”

  “Dear Hermann Hesse.”

  “Dear Malcolm X.”

  “Dear Malcolm X.”

  “Can you think of anybody else?”

  “What about Martin Luther King?”

  “Sure. Dear Martin Luther King.”

  “Dear Martin Luther King.”

  “I guess the prayer is just Please help us get our trip together. Right?” He looked at me.

  “Right.”

  “Shall we say it together?”

  I nodded. And then, together, we said, “Please help us get our trip together. Amen.”

  While we were getting ready to go out, I said, “Do you think any of them really heard us?”

  And Roy said, “In a way, I do. Don’t you?”

  “In a way, definitely. Definitely.”

  We spent the day looking for jobs. We split up for little intervals, each of us going his own way and meeting back at the hotel to exchange news. But there wasn’t much to exchange. I went into about a hundred shops and asked if they needed any clerks. Nobody did. Roy went to Everything for Everybody. Delano said they could help longhairs get jobs, but the girl there told Roy you had to “join,” which cost $15. Besides, she said, he looked too young to fill any of the openings they had today.

  This age thing is a problem we hadn’t considered. Ro
y’s 19, but he looks 16, and he can’t show his papers, because when you go underground, you can’t use your real name. If you do, the Army can trace you.

  He got this notion that if he wore glasses he’d look older. So we went to the dime store on 8th Street and bought a pair. I didn’t think they helped at all, but Roy did. By then it was after five and the business day was ended, but Roy wanted to test his glasses on some late-hour bookshops, hoping one of them might need a clerk or a stockboy.

  Meanwhile, I went back to the hotel and experienced a certain misadventure that I’d rather not write about. But I have to. Because if I don’t I’ll start thinking about the fact that I’ve been waiting here at Western Union forever and

  ROY IS NOT BACK YET!!!

  That black prostitute was on the comer of 9th and Third Avenue when I passed by. We smiled at each other and I went upstairs. About two minutes later there was a knock on my door. “Just passing by,” she said. “Thought I’d pay a visit.” She came in and we sat on my bed and swapped names. Hers was Loretta. We rapped for a few minutes. I acted terribly surprised when she told me what she did for a living. I have to face the fact that when somebody throws me for a loop, my first reaction is to say something phony. For instance, I said, “You’d never know it to look at you,” when that’s exactly how I did know it. It embarrasses me even to remember it. I did say one thing I believed though. I told her I thought prostitution was a perfectly splendid profession. At first she looked puzzled, but pretty soon I sold her on what a fine public service she was performing. Then I started rapping about all the great courtesans of history, their genius in divining the needs of men and changing the course of human destiny. I have no idea why I carried on so. The poor thing seemed so flattened by her life, I guess I wanted to fluff her up a little. Then she said, “Baby, if you think it be such a picnic, how come you looking for a job selling shit in some store? If a gal digs working on her back, what the fuck she want to be on her feet all day for?”

  So I actually considered it for a while. Finally I said I didn’t think I could do it and stay in a good head, because it might make me anxious and depressed. I tried to explain what I meant, and then suddenly I realized if I convinced Loretta that whoring was depressing, maybe it would start depressing her. I hate lying, but I hate even worse to bum somebody else’s trip. So I tried to end the discussion by telling her she was right, it was all talk, and I’d just been trying to hide from her the fact that I was too chicken even to attempt it.