Season of the Witch

by James Leo Herlihy

  I didn’t get to class because I was too busy writing. It took me all afternoon to get last night’s entry completed. I left out the interruption for sleep because it didn’t seem important, but now I feel I have to confess the omission so my journal won’t catch me lying to it. Anyway, the break came when I was describing Peter’s reaction to Percy’s farting.

  At that point, when I went to bed—it must have been at least four, maybe five o’clock—there were still sounds of activity coming from the attic. Archie and Peter were still up there talking. Archie was probably operating on leftover speed, but I don’t know where Peter gets his energy. Anyway, with the attic right at the top of the stairs over our alcove, I couldn’t help but hear a few choice bits, especially when Peter raised his voice. I suppose you could call it shouting, but I think of it as passionate oratory. These are some of the scraps I picked up:

  “Of course God’s a fuck-up. Why shouldn’t He be? Aren’t you? How can He straighten out if you won’t?”

  “I’m going to say one last thing, and then we’re both going to sleep: Your generation is the luckiest generation in all human history. Your fathers have handed you a technology capable of transforming the planet earth into the kingdom of heaven—in your lifetime. Unless you blow it. And I mean you, Archie Fiesta. Who the hell did you think was running this show? You are, boy! You are!”

  “Mr. Fiesta. I’m sorry to inform you, you’re not turned on yet. You’re a head, but you’re not turned on. Learn the difference fast, or the whole world will go down the drain! . . . No, it won’t! No, it won’t, goddamnit! Because I won’t let it! Do you hear me?”

  “If you keep seeing shit everywhere you look, don’t you know that’s dangerous? Don’t you know you’re going to build your life in the form your vision takes?”

  “You want to know why I take such pains with you? It’s because I need you! That’s why, shithead!”

  “Consciousness, goddamnit! Consciousness! CONSCIOUSNESS! CONSCIOUSNESS!”

  I think it must have been at just about this point, when Peter was shouting for consciousness, that I finally lost mine. Or a part of it anyway. It didn’t feel like real sleep, because there was too much going on in it. Anyway, when I woke up just before dawn I felt sure Sara the Ghost had been here visiting me. My mind was so tired I might have been hallucinating. But I’m inclined to think it was really Sara and that she was trying to tell me something.

  She had some other people with her, real darlings, too, but I can’t remember anything specific about them. I just remember feeling pleased that Sara had found some other ghosts to keep her company, and wondering why they were all hovering around our alcove. But in the state I was in I couldn’t ask. My mouth wasn’t working. Or maybe it was just my will that was out cold.

  Sara was saying, “Bodies are awfully important, honey, bodies are awfully important.” I knew she meant something specific and terribly simple, and yet my mind couldn’t get hold of it. So I began to feel a kind of panic, and it was the panic that made me open my eyes and sit up. I heard myself saying, “So what? What about it?” right out loud—and I’m afraid my tone was awfully irritable.

  Suddenly, I knew.

  All sorts of things I’d been puzzled and alarmed over clicked instantly into focus, and I knew. But still I had to go through all the motions of finding out, just as if I didn’t know.

  Roy was next to me. He seemed to be fast asleep, but it was too dark to tell. Ever since he repaired the skylight upstairs, we get a little light in our alcove each morning, but it was too dim for seeing what I had to see. So I lit the candle and held it near his arm. It looked so frail and skinny sticking out of his T-shirt. Even before I saw the needle mark, I had to clench my jaws to keep from crying. And there it was, a tiny pink hole right over the vein in the crook of his arm.

  I asked myself, What are you going to do now, earth mother? Sit here and cry? Lay your head on his shoulder, bathe his arm in kisses and tears? As much as I wanted to do those things, I couldn’t. It would be like some truly unforgivable act of disloyalty, or faithlessness. After all, this wasn’t just some skinny little jackass with tracks on his arm. It was Roy. No, not Roy, John. It was John, ally of my childhood, John, my wise guru, my strong friend, my tall son, my loyal brother, my soul’s lover. Knowing these things about him, making them new and real all over again, there was nothing left to cry over. And the minute I felt truly okay again, Roy opened his eyes and looked at me with a truly okay smile.

  I said, “How long have you been awake?”

  “Long enough,” he said, “to know you’ve been checking out my needle mark.”

  “Well,” I said, flashing defense, “if I showed up with a needle mark, wouldn’t you check it out?”

  “Sure, I would. Listen, I’m not bummed. I’m glad we’re talking about it.”

  “You shot up with Archie, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Groovy. And super-horrible. I’m sort of glad I did it. Now I know I could never be a speed freak.”

  “Did you do it a lot?”

  “Twice. Once one afternoon, and then about four or five hours later. Remember the other day when I came in all fucked up?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, it was a couple of days before that. But it took a lot of time to come down, it was really shitty. I had to stay stoned out on grass to keep from falling apart. I thought I loved him, Witch. And I do! But I mean I thought I was in love with him, and now I know I’m not. Witch, I want to tell you my new theory. Being in love isn’t ever really loving, it’s just wanting. And it isn’t any good. It’s all aching and misery. I say fuck it! Do you think I’m right about this?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m going to think about it a lot. Because it sounds just like what I had with Delano that summer. Remember how I just cried and ate for two whole months? I hated it, and I gained seven pounds. Did you know I was starting to get that way about Archie, too?”

  “Yeah, I figured you were. But you broke it during that acid trip, right?”

  “Right. I saw his soul, Roy. It’s very beautiful, too, but it’s dark and sort of heavy-looking. Did you see it that night?”

  “No, I was just digging his bod, and it almost freaked me out. You know something, Witch? I could become a sex fiend, a real maniac.”

  “Couldn’t anybody?”

  “I only know about me. I would have done anything, just to touch him. That’s why I shot up with him. Because I figured then we’d go to bed and all. It’s really spooky to think about.”

  “Did anything ever happen?”

  “Bedwise?”

  “Mm.”

  “Yes and no. We went to bed. But then I realized Archie wasn’t digging it, so nothing really happened. I don’t think he digs sex, not with anybody, not even chicks. All he wants to do is keep his head fucked up with dope.”

  “Why would he go to bed with you at all if he didn’t really want to?”

  “I hate to say this, Witch, but I think he was hustling me. I had forty dollars left of that bread from your mother, and I let him buy a quarter of an ounce of meth with it. It was stupid, I know, but I was sort of hypnotized. So was he. He was hypnotized by the idea of getting some speed and I was hypnotized by the idea of going to bed with him. Only we didn’t really talk about it, we just sort of got into it. It was a mess. Then after we shot up, Archie decided to sell off half of the stuff in dime bags to raise bread for some more.”

  “What are dime bags?”

  “Little ten-dollar packages. You get about two blasts each out of them. Anyway, the next thing I knew, we were into dealing. Or he was. Because that’s when I cut out on him. I said, ‘Archie, I love you, man, but I’m not dealing out of Canal Street.’”

  “Well, why did he? I mean if he had to deal the stuff, why not do it out of that other place, the one on Spring Street?”

  “That’s another story. Spring Street is hot. That whole building is crawling with dealers.
You never saw such types in your life, Witch, real hoods, and they deal heavy. I mean quantity! And there was a bust there three days ago. I saw the whole thing from the window. About eight cops’ cars, a real fucking raid! I thought we were next, and so did Archie. But you know what he did? You won’t believe this. I said, ‘Archie, let’s flush this shit down the toilet, quick!’ And he said, ‘Never panic, man,’ and he put the stuff in his pocket, walked out in the hall and down the stairs, right past the cops. He even shot a peace sign at them! I swear! I was right behind him! But I wasn’t carrying anything, so I figured I was reasonably safe. Then he brought the stuff over here and stashed it in his room.

  “Let me tell you what scares me about Archie. He likes that stuff so much, he’d take any kind of a chance for it. No kidding, you should just get a look at some of the goons coming in and out of that Spring Street pad. Remember Winston? Well, I never see him—but those two buddies of his are in and out of there all the time. I recognized the one that took my pants.”

  “Did he see you see him?”

  “Yeah, he saw me see him all right. It was on the corner, about a half a block from the building, and there were two cops right across the street. I thought, Wow, I could get this cat arrested! But y’know I felt like I’m more on his side than I am on the cops’, does that make sense?”

  I said I thought it did.

  Roy said, “Witch, you know what I really hate about this revolution? It makes you think about sides. You always have to think about which one you’re on.”

  I’ve just been doing some figuring, and something has to be terribly wrong. It’s only 16 days since Roy and I got on the bus in Detroit. I’ve written enough in that time to fill a whole book. If I keep going at this rate—say 5000 pages a year for 50 years, my life will be 250,000 pages long and fill 1000 volumes! This is really distressing. Because even if I cut down to a measly 10 per cent of my present output—which doesn’t seem at all likely—it’d still be 100 volumes long, and my publishers would force me to cut even more! Using small print, maybe it could be crammed into 50 books.

  CANAL STREET, SEPTEMBER 27, 1969, 4:30 A.M.

  Ingmar Bergman calls this time of night the hour of the wolf. The darkest thoughts in your soul come to the surface and you can’t not look at them.

  What’s scaring me is something Peter said about the United States government. It’s the single most horrifying thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life.

  He said the U.S. government is certifiably insane because it demonstrates the three classic symptoms of psychotic paranoia:

  a. Delusions of Grandeur (Thinks God intends it to run the world.)

  b. Persecution Complex (Convinced the other guy is out to get him.)

  c. Repressed Homosexuality (Gun fixation.)

  What makes it psychotic is that it’s gotten out of control. (Murders a couple of thousand people a week.)

  CAPRICORN CAPERS, INC., MONDAY, OCTOBER 6, 1969

  This is my first entry after a ten-day fast from writing. Now my literary body is all purged and lean, and I have a wealth of rich material for breaking my fast.

  First: A ménage à trois has been going on at Canal Street right under my nose, and I didn’t know a thing about it until yesterday morning.

  Second: Archie has disappeared. His clothes are gone and everything.

  Third: Sally and I have jobs. We mail catalogs and samples for this novelty manufacturer on East Broadway. It’s probably temporary, because pretty soon they’re installing an addressograph system. But meanwhile we get two dollars an hour, and it’s sort of fun for a change to have to be someplace every morning. Besides, now I can contribute to the Grocery Pig again.

  Fourth: Roy moved out of the alcove.

  Sunday morning, while Roy and I were still in bed, Jeanette came down from the attic in her robe. She said hi and trotted on down to the kitchen. I didn’t see anything unusual or even interesting about it until a few minutes later when she traipsed by a second time—on her way back up with a tray of coffee cups—three of them!

  A few minutes later when Roy woke up, I told him about Jeanette taking coffee up to the attic in her robe. I said, “Do you suppose the three of them sleep together?”

  He said, “Sure. Didn’t you know that?”

  I was flabbergasted, mostly because he knew about it and I didn’t.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.

  “I didn’t think it was important.”

  “Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it? I mean isn’t it worth telling, for godsake?”

  “Yeah, I guess. But I took it for granted you knew.”

  I was so pissed off, I started to pout. “You don’t tell me hardly anything any more.”

  “That’s not true. I just told you about Archie and me, didn’t I?”

  “I guess. But still, I feel sort of—I don’t know—left out. You mean Doris and Peter and Jeanette have been sleeping together up there all this time, and everybody knows it but me?”

  “I don’t know who knows it. But there’s nothing secret about it, Witch.”

  “Who told you?”

  He thought for a minute. “Archie.”

  “Where is Archie, by the way? He’s never around any more.”

  “I don’t know where he is. Peter told me they’d made an agreement, and then Archie just sort of disappeared.”

  “What agreement?”

  “Archie promised he’d never shoot up again unless he came to Peter first. The deal was that Peter would hold his stash for him up in the attic, hidden in some secret place only Peter’d know about, and then if Archie ever thought he just had to have a fix, Peter promised he’d give it to him himself.”

  “Wow! Do you think he would?”

  “He promised, so he’d have to! But first he’d try to talk Archie out of it. That was the whole idea behind the agreement. Peter wanted to get a crack at him sometime when he was on his way to the needle.”

  “What happened? Did he bring Peter his entire stash?”

  “Nah. Just the one dime bag he had in his pocket.”

  “Then he did have something in his pocket that night! Remember how Doris’s mind picked it up when we were all trying to Zap him?”

  “Yeah. Then Peter picked it up from Doris. So did Archie, I guess. Anyway, he gave him what was in his pocket, and Peter’s got it hidden up there.”

  “And now Archie’s disappeared entirely?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about his things?”

  “They’re gone, too. He must’ve snuck in when nobody was here. Nyoom noticed it a couple of days ago.”

  “Do you suppose he’s at that Spring Street place?”

  “Could be. But he doesn’t answer the door. I’ve been there four times looking for him.”

  “Roy, do you think Archie is doomed?”

  Roy took a moment to think about it. Then he said, “I don’t want to make guesses like that, Witch. It’s like writing a person off, to say he’s doomed. It doesn’t seem fair.”

  Suddenly I had a dreadful idea. “Roy, why don’t you move into Archie’s bed. It’s empty, isn’t it?”

  He said, “Don’t you want me here with you?”

  Obviously he liked the idea. My heart sank. “Well, it’s awfully nice sleeping with you. But maybe we’ll both dig being able to stretch out. This is awfully narrow you know. How do you feel about it?”

  He thought for a minute. “Okay, I’ll move in with them. And whenever we want to sleep together, we can. Right?”

  I knew he wouldn’t want to, and I’d be too proud to suggest it.

  “Right,” I said.

  Last night I missed him terribly. But how can you snuggle with someone who wishes he were somewhere else? The answer is, you can’t! Not only can’t but mustn’t!

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 1969

  I’ve been wondering lately if all the others get the same thing I do from our mealtime Zap, so last night at the table I asked everyone to say what they were feeling.<
br />
  SALLY: We all know we live inside of God’s head, right? But when we close our eyes together, we can see how really pretty it is in here.

  CARY: It’s communion. Jesus said do this in commemoration of me. And then they passed the potatoes. Only they should never have called it the Last Supper. They should’ve called it the First Zap.

  ROY: Me, too. That’s what I get out of it. I dig the super-Christiness of it, knowing we’re all in the same place in our heads, loving each other all at once. Only I’m not thinking about it like that. Mostly I’m just into it. And then after, if I was nervous or anything, I start being calm instead.

  JEANETTE: I can’t say, because for me it’s not a word thing. It just feels great. I feel like, Man, I’ve got company! You know?

  DORIS: I welcome any opportunity to hold hands with a tableful of beautiful people. It makes me happy, that’s all.

  NYOOM: The Zap is a spiritual apéritif, if you will. Infinity visits the alimentary canal, sanctifies the digestive system, as it were. Hmmm?

  PETER: I can’t add a thing. I agree with everybody.

  THE AUTOMAT, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 10, 1969

  Horn and Hardart make delicious macaroni and cheese, but I can’t even taste it today. I’ve been in a down head all week. No, it’s worse than that. I’ve been teetering back and forth between vaguely miserable and desperately depressed, with only the briefest letups in between, and I don’t know what’s wrong. Everything seems to be—but I can’t single out the thing that bugs me most.

  I just got paid a few minutes ago. It didn’t help at all. And I’d sort of been counting on it, too, because last week, getting the first pay envelope of my life really turned me on. It only had $28 in it, but to a girl who’d never earned a dime, $28 can do a real number on her head. The first thing I wanted to do was buy presents, so I spent the afternoon shopping (and staying away from Central Park J.C., where I’m headed the minute I finish this entry—my first class since the day of the Staten Island disasterette ). I thought having earned the money for the presents would make me feel as if I’d made them by hand or something. Maybe so. But I couldn’t find anything anybody’d want in any of the stores. So I contributed half the money to the Grocery Pig, and got this fantastic wage-earner’s high out of it that lasted the whole weekend. I also chipped in with Nyoom on a lid of grass—another very heavy first—and that pushed me right over the top. I was flying.