Season of the Witch

by James Leo Herlihy

  When Roy finished his story, we decided to look for a place to smoke Winston’s joint. It’s hard to find a hiding place in Manhattan. We ended up smoking it right on the street, trying to handle it like tobacco. Our heads were so hungry the first toke went right to work on us. By the time we’d had three apiece we were flying, so we put it out and saved the other half for later. Then Roy did this angel-shit number on my head.

  We were on 10th Street, headed for Third Avenue, when all of a sudden he stopped walking, stood stock still, banged his forehead with the heel of his hand and let out this 20-megaton WOW!

  I thought, Wow, that was quite a wow. This must be something major—and waited for him to subside enough to make an utterance.

  “Witch,” he said, “give me your hands.”

  I did. He took them in both of his.

  “Listen, something fabulous is about to happen to us.”

  “What?” I gasped.

  “I don’t know, but it will. Do you realize what we just smoked?”

  “No. What was it?”

  “Are you ready?”

  “Yes. But give it to me fast. I’m dying.”

  “Angel shit!”

  “Angel shit?”

  “We have just smoked angel shit.”

  “I never heard of it, what is it?”

  “Any grass that’s given to you by a brother when you really need it is angel shit.”

  “Really?”

  “And when you’re high on it, something fantastic always happens to you.”

  I said, “How can this be angel shit if we got it from Winston?”

  “Winston’s a brother, isn’t he?”

  “He’s not my brother,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “He just ripped you off, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” Roy said. “But that was before.”

  This is 100 per cent typical of Roy. I remember one time we were down in his lair listening to music. The basement window was open and this strange alley cat came by and looked in. After a few minutes she jumped in and sniffed out the place while Roy and I laid there and watched. She got into everything he had and Roy just let her do as she pleased. Then she jumped up on a table and knocked over a glass. The glass rolled onto the floor and broke. The sound of the crash scared her, so she jumped out the window and ran away. I’ll never forget what Roy did. He sat up and said, “Hey, man, don’t split!” And that’s the way he is. You can break right into his pad, go over his whole place, take anything you want, and on your way out he says, “Hey, man, don’t split!”

  I’m digressing.

  Back to angel shit.

  Roy convinced me that Winston qualified as a brother, and it wasn’t hard. He just said, “Either we’re all brothers or we’re not. Which is it?”

  And while I was thinking about that one, he threw in the clincher: “Besides, if love only came from perfect people, there wouldn’t be any. Would there?”

  I said, “Roy, how come you never told me about angel shit before?”

  And he said, “Because I just made it up.”

  Then he laughed so hard he fell down. Literally fell down. Right on the sidewalk. Then I started laughing, and nearly fell on top of him. At this point, a police car came rolling by all lit up like a psychedelic rat.

  “Fuzz fuzz fuzz!” I fuzzed.

  All mirth subsided abruptly.

  We pulled ourselves together and proceeded up 10th Street, tightass as a couple of archbishops, and when the squad car turned the corner I said, “Roy, if we’d have got busted, would it still be angel shit?”

  “Listen,” he said, “you think you’re pretty funny. Right? Well I’m going to tell you something. That shit was angel shit. The fact that I invented it doesn’t disqualify it, does it?”

  “Of course not!”

  “I mean, I can create magic, can’t I? I’m a god. Am I a god or not?”

  “You are, you are!” I said. And I meant it.

  “Okay then, watch! Something fantastic is going to happen to us tonight. Something fantastic and fabulous. In fact, it’ll be something absolutely superpluperfectfantabulousMcThwirp!”

  “Rip that off again, will you?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Try.”

  “SuperpluperfectfantabulousMcThwirp!”

  “SuperpluperfectfantabulousMcThwirp?”

  “Right.”

  “Love the McThwirp.”

  “Thanks. Thought you would.”

  “This ought to be quite a night.”

  “It will be.”

  It was.

  We met Sally Sunflower.

  She was sitting at the Western Union office when we walked in, and greeted us with the biggest and beamingest smile I’ve ever seen. Ever. And since this smile has changed our entire lives, I must describe in detail the celestial being who produced it.

  Sally Sunflower looks exactly like her name. Sometime when I feel like it, I’ll write the story of how she came to be called that.

  Sally’s hair is blond and naturally frizzy. If my mother got her hands on it, she’d have it straightened in five minutes. But it’s perfect as it is. It picks up every light within miles and makes this enormous shimmering 3D halo around her entire face. And what a face! It’s big and round and pink and gives the impression of smiling even when it isn’t. She also laughs a lot, and her laughter is completely musical. In fact, her whole person is some sort of an instrument, a harpsichord maybe. Whoever happens to be with her is the sheet music she’s reading and out comes this tinkling babbling little song, just for them.

  What an awful paragraph! I make Sally sound like a real gorp, all sticky-drippy with banana syrup oozing out of every opening she’s got. This is frustrating. You write the exact truth about someone you love, and out comes a complete falsehood. What can I say that would really capture her?

  I suppose the Salliest thing to be said about her is that she’s so pleased about other people. For instance: she’s more pleased about me than I am even. That’s the way she seems to feel about everybody. She is genuinely, totally, deeply enthralled and delighted and flipped-out over every last one of us.

  Although Roy and I had no way of knowing it at the time —and she’s much too modest to mention it herself—we’ve since learned that Sally Sunflower is practically a historical figure. No one knows how many soldiers she’s talked into putting down their guns. At least two San Francisco cops quit the force after turning on with her one evening! She’s been busted seven times, and is generally fabulous in every conceivable way. Sally’s 22 (a Virgo with the moon in Aquarius), so of course she was one of the first flower children, saw the summer of love at the Haight, marched at Century City, helped exorcise the Pentagon. But she was in the Movement even before 1967. A close friend of Kerouac’s turned her on to grass when she was 14. She had her first LSD in an electric cocktail on the Merry Pranksters’ bus. She helped the Hog Farm pass out food at Woodstock. When Abbie Hoffman sees her on the street, it’s Hi, Sally, Hi, Abbie, kiss-kiss. Ditto with Joe Frazier, Allen Ginsberg, Frank Zappa, Paul Krasner, and God knows who else. In fact, she’s known just about everywhere as one of the highest heads in all the tribes.

  Certainly she’s the highest chick I’ve ever met. And living proof that a really high head can keep her trip straight even in New York.

  And without money, too!

  Sally’s been here seven months and one of her major sources of income is Western Union. Whenever she’s caught really short, she thinks of someone to send a telegram to and the money always comes. This time it was coming from her ex-grandmother in Las Vegas who makes barrels from gambling. I asked her if it bothered her to beg, and she said no, because it wasn’t begging. Then she explained:

  “Begging is a whole special trip and I’m not into that. I work for a living. I do embroidery. Right now I’m making a blanket. Would you like to see it?” She reached into her bag and showed us her work in progress, an old Army blanket she was transforming into a peace b
lanket by embroidering MAKE LOVE NOT WAR all over it with big psychedelic lettering. She started it a year ago, on the day a friend of hers went to prison for draft refusal. She figured it’d be finished by the time he got out and then she’d present it to him. I thought it was beautiful, but I didn’t see how she could make her living by giving things away.

  “It’s easy,” she said. “I live on a post-revolutionary economy.”

  Roy was fascinated. “What kind is that?”

  “You do what you can for others, and when you need something for yourself, you ask for it. That’s all there is to it.”

  “And that’s post-revolutionary economy?” I could see Roy filing it away in his head.

  “Right. My guru says that’s what the revolution is for, and the only way to bring it about is to live as if we’d already won.”

  Roy said, “He sounds like a very heavy dude. Is he a Marxist or a Christian or what?”

  “Neither. All he believes in is consciousness. He says when people really know that all men are brothers, politics will disappear. We won’t have to be religious any more either. We’ll be holy instead.”

  “My guru says we’re holy right now!” I couldn’t resist sticking that in.

  “Oh, absolutely!”

  Then I said, “Roy’s my guru.”

  “No, I’m not,” he said. “We’re each other’s gurus.”

  “Far out!” Sally sang. “That’s just what my guru says! He says all the people that really know are gurus for each other.”

  I said, “Yes, but aren’t some people more gurus than others? For instance, I know. But Roy really knows, and that’s how he can be my teacher.”

  Roy said, “Come on, Witch. You really know, too. What are you talking about?”

  “What about before? Didn’t you have to teach me to love Winston?”

  Sally wanted to hear all about Winston, so Roy told her the story. Hearing it the second time through, I had the mad feeling he was telling about a love affair instead of a robbery. Sally was enraptured. She’s a good talker, but she’s even better at listening. And she doesn’t keep interrupting the way I do either. Her face is completely alive to what you’re saying, so you end up with the feeling that what you’re telling is wonderful and important and true.

  At the end of the story, the three of us went outside and did up the other half of Winston’s joint. Sally thought it was terrific. It was her first toke in three weeks, so her head was practically virgin. Roy asked her if she’d been going without grass because of the famine, and that’s when Sally first mentioned this family she’d joined up with. They were all dedicated to the natural high, trying to achieve it by the way they lived, in love and peace. She said none of them put down grass or acid, but they had this little non-rule they tried to follow: Use as little as possible, but stay high no matter what.

  When we went back inside, the clerk said Sally’s money had arrived. She put the cash in her bag and sat down with us again, because Roy wanted to hear more about living on a post-revolutionary economy. That phrase really had hold of his mind.

  “What about the people you send wires to?” he said. “Do they live on a post-revolutionary economy, too?”

  “Maybe not all of them,” she said. “But I always assume they do. After all, you have to give people the benefit of the doubt. Especially if they’ve got lots of money. Haven’t you noticed how uncomfortable rich people are? All the ones I’ve known are always going around embarrassed or ashamed. They try to cover it up, but I think they must feel like real freaks. Do you suppose that’s why they keep to themselves so much? So they won’t have normal people staring at them?”

  I said I hadn’t thought about it. Roy said he had, but he didn’t know.

  “If you let people have a chance to help you,” Sally said, “it helps them get high. Have you noticed that?”

  We said we had.

  “But of course,” she said, “you have to make it easy for them to refuse. For instance, you have to make it clear that you’ll go on liking them even if they say no. And one thing I never do, no matter what, is make up emergency stories. Some kids do that, you know, but I just—well, for me it’s wrong. Even if I was hungry I’d rather go without food and call it a fast. Fasting can get you high, too.”

  I noticed Roy looking at me, and I got sort of defensive for a minute. “I’ll bet you’re thinking about that wire I sent Mother.”

  Roy’s lip pulled to one side and his eyebrow went up.

  I said, “Sally, I’m afraid I do lie once in a while.”

  “So do I,” Roy said. “We both do.”

  “Does that make you hate us?” I asked Sally.

  She looked stricken. “Oh, Witch! Don’t say such things! Nothing could ever make me hate either of you! You’re both angels, don’t you know that?”