The concerts long sold out, at the last minute he’d procured the tickets from a ‘broker,’ a service that’d set him back nearly a grand for tickets with a twenty-five dollar face value. Ouch.
The week before Christmas he’d called Uncle Leap, in name only, an L.A. entertainment lawyer and pal of Billy’s dad—his lawyer, one day, when ready to sign with an agency. Cal Leaphart made his own call and found Billy only the best of seats, a pair for each night. Uncle Leap, beside himself with pleasure. One of those old 60s hippies turned moneygrubbing yups, they ‘rapped’ for twenty minutes about the Dead. Had all kinds of stories. Endless dope, endless pussy.
“But they say if you can remember the 60s, you weren’t really there. That’s what I’ve heard, Uncle Leap.”
Bah, he said. “Old wive’s tale. The dope back then wasn’t like booze. High was wide-awake, son. Not asleep.”
Billy, his true intention with all these ducats? To call and surprise Libby! Make up, finally! Talk her into letting him fly her out to meet him in Northern California, on a romantic Deadhead getaway fantasy, all expenses paid, with no skin off anyone’s nose—but he couldn’t speak for other sensitive body parts, no sir, only that this time—this time—he’d take it at her pace.
Even if sex didn’t end up happening at all.
He could wait.
Let her decide.
This, Billy thought. This here’s growth, y’all, in Ruck’s yokel voice he trotted out from time to time to make everyone laugh.
At the time of formulating the Oakland Gambit, Billy had been tipsy on mimosas at Mucky Turnbull’s father’s lake house where Meat Mallet had a weekend-long songwriting session going, and the logic of his plan had made sense amidst the boredom he felt working in a musical genre that now left him cold. And foolhardy, a cockamamie scheme, one thankfully not pursued. Other than blowing money on the tix, which he might as well use.
As though Libby would ever trust him again.
Get real.
He quelled these nettlesome worries. It would all work out. Except for the problem of her absence.
Arriving in California after lunch West Coast time, Billy took a cab from SFO to Union Station, got hustled by a drooling nitwit trying to carry his bags down onto the cavernous BART platform for a tip; Billy, rebuffing the con artist with a reasoned threat of sudden, violent evisceration.
After a different sort of hustle—waiting for the train and dealing with jostling holiday crowds, grifters, drunks, and San Francisco weirdos—he got himself checked into the Days Inn across from the Oakland Auditorium Arena, busted out a tie-dye and a fresh pair of Birkenstocks purchased at Bergdorf’s back in New York, and hit the Dead scene.
Billy, raging and partying with the Deadheads who’d already set up camp in the neighborhood, made friends fast. Getting stoned, but taking it easy on headier materials. This, an academic experiment, not a bacchanal. That formula had proved all but ruinous.
In any case, these shows, as Billy had learned, represented the peak Dead event of every year: the culmination of another turning of the calendar’s page, a symbol of steadfast longevity by both musicians as well as followers, the gathering of the tribe, the summation of another spin around the sun. The New Year’s run. A finish line. Hottest ticket of the them all, and for a band whose shows were always SRO.
Billy, admiring their success. Bunch of lucky-ass, filthy hippies. Talk about shoving it to the man—fifty-million a year bought a whole heap of fuck-you.
The parking lot of the motel remained a roiling, raucous circus throughout the run, with hippie busses and other vehicles parked on every available square inch waiting for the official arena parking across the street to open. His room on the ground floor, right outside the window a guy had started running a nitrous operation out of his VW pop-top. All Billy had to do was wave money and the vendor handed him ice-cold punchballs through the open window; nitrous, a good thing, a calming, headtrippy, albeit ephemeral experience. Weed and hash and pot brownies and goo balls and shrooms and shroom tea, oh my. Liquid LSD in little vials. Sheets of blotter. Even white powders, but that was way on the Q-T. Billy, less a participant in all that than being in observer mode. Looking for the right partner for his little experiment in control.
Inhaling the gas until getting aural hallucinations—sirens in the distance going wah wah wah—Billy began passing out. He fell forward, conking his head against the screen of the soft babbling television set on which he’d been watching a cable rerun of The Big Chill. The nitrous had made him feel as though he were in the movie with the characters, sitting on the couch with the actor William Hurt when he says, “I think the man in the hat did something terrible.”
Imagine if Libby were watching it right now back home in South Carolina. And saw Billy in one of her favorite movies. Imagine it.
Hearing Libby’s voice calling out to him from the other side of the television glass.
Seeing her reflection in the glass of the open window.
Reaching out.
But not Libby—a real girl standing in the open window.
The nitrous buzz wore off. “Word, sister.”
“Hey now, brother.”
“Join me?”
“You bet.”
Voluptuous, dark-eyed hippie girl, voice deep, sexy, alluring; Sophie Sunflower, she said her name was, a ridiculous, made-up identity which made her no less attractive. Not unlike Libby in some ways, but in others not like her at all. Libby, no hippie. Down to earth, maybe. This chick, Jesus, she had dreads and armpit hair.
“You been on tour for a while?” he asked as though he’d been following them since the sixties.
“Ever since Jerry’s coma,” whenever that had been. He didn’t ask. His ignorance as a newbie would have outed him. “But like, West Coast only?” she clarified.
“Right on. It’s like kismet.”
“How’s that?”
“These are my first West Coast shows.” He held up his hand for a high-five that she returned with gusto, laughing and sucking on her own punchball of gas. “Meant to be.”
Billy, improving backstory, said he’d been hard on board since Dylan and the Dead back in ’87; had done shows from New York to Timbuktu but never here to motherland, somehow.
To which she said, right on, right on. “Never too late.”
Glad to hear that of her status as one of the vagabond followers—if the experiment went south, maybe nobody would miss her.
No back home, maybe. A romantic notion.
“Where are ya from?”
“South Carolina,” Billy lied. “You?”
“You don’t sound like a southerner.”
He shrugged. “My parents were from the city. New York, I mean.”
“Mine, too.”
“How about now? From where do you hail, maiden?”
“Right here and right now,” she said, nodding, her voice lowered almost a full octave by the effects of the nitrous oxide. She’d lost the thread of the conversation. She tooted her balloon. Laughed.
After a micro-hesitation, Billy, accepting a hit of X she offered. More nitrous. Puffing the amazing weed.
Sophie, like, literally BLOWN AWAY to discover Billy’s set of tickets sitting on the small desk attached to the wall.
“Holy crap—you have an extra for all four nights?”
“There they are.”
“I’m still searching for the thirtieth,” she enumerated by holding up a finger and scrunching up the side of her face as though in deep calculation. At last she said, “And New Year’s, too. Of course.” She finished in a whisper, her pupils dilated, already spun.
Billy purred, “If you’re unencumbered, they could be yours. Or, ours—if you know what I mean.”
She asked what he meant. He explained.
“Right on. Right on…” A sparkle of connection. “What do you want for them?”
“I just want somebody sweet to party with, babe.”
Now she got squirrelly. “You don’t look like
a Deadhead. You’re not like, a cop. Are ya?”
“I’ve got the Deadheady credentials right here,” said Billy, hand over tie-dye covered heart. “I am not de po-lice.”
Smiling at him, beatific, sloe-eyed, alluring. Jackpot. “The lots are open now. Let’s go get happy.”
“Yeah—let’s do that.”
Focusing on Sophie Sunflower throughout the concert, hands all over one another, X-ing like crazy, Billy half-hard and ready for a decent, accident-free pop or three; he barely looked at the stage.
Jealous, though: his new free-spirit ticket wench seemed to have more close friends than Billy could imagine in his own life. Embraces, long lingering hippie hugs with both sexes, twirling and swirling with other guys, gals, the ushers in their sky-blue Bill Graham Presents windbreakers.
She’s like the mayor of Deadville. Half the audience would be looking for her if she up and vanished.
No accidents.
The Dead, rocking the arena, Garcia grinning and shredding his Doug Irwin; a double encore, rare, all anyone could talk about while streaming back into the parking lots for the massive post-show party already underway outside, percolating as though it had never stopped during the concert.
But Sophie and Billy not tarrying, heading straight back for the hotel across the highway; both horny as hell, literally running.
Tender sex, turning wild and wooly. Sophie, a game companion for Billy’s intensity. She met every thrust, howling and clawing at him.
Shoving her arms back. Holding her down.
Fighting back with him, scratching at him.
In later repose, Sophie, stroking his sore cock, said she’d never seen a more beautiful specimen. “What an angel man.”
“Man of your dreams?”
Mm-hm, she cooed.
But as it often happened in the afterglow, her face—shiny, swollen and sweaty, nasty hair all dreaded like snakes, hairy as an ape—turned ugly. He wanted to shove her hippie head through the TV. Wanted to fuck holes she didn’t yet have.
Calm.
Blue.
Ocean.
A technique he’d picked up.
The next morning, with approving lust in her eyes, she went to grab her stuff from a friend’s van. Moving in with him for the duration. More practice awaited.
Billy, awake on New Year’s morning, still tripping from the rip-snorting three-set Dead show, sat across the room staring at the inert, seemingly lifeless body on the bed.
His mind, a blank—he’d killed her after all.
But then the body farted, low and long.
Sophie Sunflower, who’d chosen alcohol as her New Year’s blowout drug of choice, lay flabby and stinky and hairy, only passed out and snoring, not dead. Dirty, calloused feet blacker than printer’s ink stuck out of the twisted, stained sheets. Bruises and scabs all up and down her shins. Drool down the pillow, leaves in her hair where she had fallen down outside in the a patch of landscaping on the stumble back from the show.
But still alive.
He’d fucked like a madman for four nights with no accidents.
The test is over.
Sneaky, quiet as a church mouse, Billy gathered his various accoutrements and pieces-parts, much of which he’d packed before the show last night. He slipped on his travel wear of an oxford shirt and khakis, rinsed out his mouth and combed through his short but growing hair. Left a note with a phony name and address in New York, ‘William St. Hubbins,’ a condo on Park Avenue where he and his father had lived before Bill the elder got into politics and moved to DC, a secure building that wouldn’t let a skunky trollop like Sophie into the lobby if her life depended on it.
He signed it, See-ya, wouldn’t-wanna-be-ya. Tears of laughter, streaming down his face. Snorting and trying not to guffaw. Desperate not to wake her.
At the last second Billy filched money from her purse, a hemp bucket-bag covered in ribbons and bows. He took what little cash she seemed to have—maybe seventy dollars in wrinkled, assorted bills. Took out her ID and debit card, slid them both in between the mattress and box springs. A prankster.
Downstairs he handed the hotel clerk the wad of her money to “keep his trap shut when the crazy bitch in room 111” calls asking for information on the former room registrant who’d decamped for fresher climes.
Confidential: “I made a terrible mistake hooking up with her, one of those whacked-out hippie losers. Now I need your help disposing of her.”
“Goodness me.”
“I beg you—let her sleep it off until late checkout time.”
The young clerk, gay, dapper and dimpled, flattened his lips into a hard line of disapproval. “I wouldn’t dream of giving out your information to anyone not registered alongside you. It’s prohibited by law.”
“So we’re ‘down by law’?” Billy, a little sparkle, teasing him with an art movie reference, the kind Libby would get. “You and me?”
“We’re down, all right.”
“Bless your heart,” he said. “See ya next year.”
The first week of January, a fresh start, a new dickhead—he meant ‘decade’—found him back in his Carolina condo. He looked around, excited about the spring semester.
Vowing: I don’t need Libby, or any of them.
But if he could have her, now he was sure he could exhibit control.
Could be normal.
Normal as she required.
Months later, however, upon hearing that she and Devin were planning to move into an apartment together—like the committed lovers they already were when he first met them—Billy, gut-punched anew.
Despondent.
Leaning over the railing of his balcony, inches away from hurling himself over the edge, but lacking the stones to do so.
Billy, since the awful night, lying to himself every second. Truth? He hadn’t stopped thinking about her for one blessed moment, nor the possibility of reconciliation.
He sat down in the cool Carolina winter air to write a letter—two letters, one for each of the friends he’d wronged. One more attempt with her. Before he tried more desperate measures, most of which he wasn’t yet willing to define.
Forty-Three
Creedence
After missing the concert, Creedence fell into a deeply persistent depression. Despite having let Dusty do it inside her—a mistake, she now believed—she proceeded to break up with her confused and heartbroken first-time loverboy. He had cried in the car next to her for an hour. Pitiful.
This act precipitated no shortage of fresh turmoil and animosity between Creedence and her mother. A drama. Tsunami-like, in fact.
"How could you do this to him. To us.” Eileen, weeping and wailing, clutched a damp tissue and smoked like a demon. “You’ll never find a boy sweeter than our Dusty. It always worried me you wouldn’t grow into good sense.”
Creedence, her powers of speech devolving into wet slobbering incoherence, knew her mother correct on one point: the daughter suffered from retardation. Learning disabilities. Who knew.
Dusty might be the only one to love her.
This is Mama talking. There ain’t nobody who don’t do what she says.
Bullcrud. She’d show them all.
But by the holiday season, Dusty’s own whining and pleading persuaded her to grant him a repreive. Welcoming him back by letting him put his peterpiper inside her again, this time without the rubber he had forgotten to procure, and since he promised to pull out before ‘it’ happened.
Said eventuality occurred, however, sudden and abrupt, on a downward stroke—the fourth or fifth—when he groaned and his eyes rolled back, a familiar visage of pleasure.
“Don’t!”
“Cant help it—oh.”
Pushing him away. His rock-hard, short mushroom of a penis popped out still spurt-spurting. Some got inside anyway, the rest all over her thighs. She didn’t know how such a stubby thing could produce so much.
For three weeks Creedence, terrified of pregnancy, praying and wishing to never be
pregnant for any reason; and then voilà, her visitor arrived. Afterwards, she made Dusty buy a whole thirty-six count box of Trojans. He kept them stashed in the spare tire in his grandmother’s car, like a kilo of dope he was smuggling.
After another dozen instances of him not lasting long enough, a question, nagging—when would Dusty be able to make her feel good too, to achieve a kind of release like he enjoyed, volcanic, cathartic? She knew from the times in the bathtub what it was supposed to feel like. Creedence started keeping in an ill-used girlhood diary, a growing log of hash marks for each time they had intercourse, planning to put a red asterisk, or maybe a gold star, by the instance in which she at last found an equivalent satisfaction. Dusty needed an instruction manual.
At Thanksgiving she spoke to Devin for the first time since the Incident of October the 27th, as the concert outrage had been called in her diary, a ledger of accumulating milestones, transgressions and hash-marks awaiting an asterisk.
She lay on the bed in Devin’s old room, still used by him on school breaks and in the summer, as such preserved in a state of relative stasis: Movie and rock posters, an Atari video game console still hooked up to the orange black and white television set, an old toy box in the corner with junk piled on top. The toy box, a keeping place into which she suspected Devin had not peered for a long, long time.
Sitting in his desk chair, leaning back against the wall by the window looking out on the driveway and cul-de-sac, Devin seemed wearied by her continued anger: “I’ve explained in every way I know how that it simply could not be helped. Now put a sock in it.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I even said I was sorry, too,” in a voice that sounded like Yogi Bear. “Ah sure did. Boo-Boo did, too.”
“Boo-Boo? Is that what y’all call Roy Earl?”
Devin, shrugging. “Nah.”
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