“Don’t blame me,” Richter said as he began to rewind it.
“Think I’ll hobble outside for a breath of fresh air and about a gallon of whiskey.” Trahearne said as he heaved his bulk out of the chair.
After he left, I asked Richter if he knew any of the actors’ names.
“Surely you jest,” he said. “In this business, only the creme de la creme have names, and usually they are assumed. However, I did recognize the chap who played the milkman—in another context, of course.”
“What context?”
“He once ran a pornographic bookstore downtown,” he said, “and I think his name was Randall something … Randall Jackson.”
“Is he still in town?”
“No, he left after this film,” he said, “which was his single effort. I seem to remember someone telling me that he was some sort of paperback distribution agent. In Denver, I think.”
I asked if he knew anybody else or anything else about the film, but he had never seen the girl again, which meant that she had dropped out of the business. I thanked him, then stood up to leave.
“Do you mind if I ask you a question?” I said.
“Of course not,” he answered pleasantly.
“What are you doing with all these films?”
“Catalogue, classification, and cross-indexing. Preparing for a scholarly study of the decline of American pornographic film.”
“Isn’t all this expensive?”
“I have a grant,” Richter said blithely. I didn’t ask from whom. I didn’t want to know. As I left, he was humming as he reloaded his projector.
Outside, Trahearne and Fireball were sitting back, drinking and watching the Sunday traffic on Folsom
Street—two cabs, a babbling speed freak, and an Oriental wino. I climbed into the car, wishing I had a greater variety of drugs with me. Or less blind luck.
“Was that the girl you were looking for?” Trahearne asked.
“No,” I lied. “It looked something like her but it’s some chick named Wilhelmina Fairchild.”
“Could be a stage name,” Trahearne suggested.
“No,” I said. “Richter knows the lady personally. She’s working in a massage parlor over in Richmond. So unless she’s developed a German accent since she left home, it wasn’t Rosie’s daughter.” I wasn’t sure why I lied to Trahearne. Maybe because I was embarrassed for Rosie. Or for myself. Whatever, I didn’t want him to know that it had been Betty Sue on the screen, flickering among so many hands.
“For Rosie’s sake, I’m glad,” Trahearne said. “I stopped in her place by accident and drank there a couple of days because I liked the place and her bulldog. I didn’t talk to her much, but I liked the way she poured the beer and handled the bar, so I’m glad her daughter didn’t end up like that. Or worse.”
“Me too,” I said. “What now?”
“Palo Alto.”
“Why?”
“To talk to Betty Sue’s best girl friend from high school,” I said.
“Maybe she’s out,” he said. “Maybe you should call first. Maybe we should hang around the city tonight. Have a few drinks, you know, relax and rest a bit.”
“No rest for the wicked,” I said, then tucked the Caddy between a taxi cab and a semi-truck, ripping off two dollars’ worth of Trahearne’s tires. “It’s a nice day and a pretty drive,” I added as soon as the truck driver stopped blowing his horn.
“If we survive it,” he said.
“You want to drive this fucking barge?” I asked angrily, mad about my lie and the movie.
“You just drive it however you want to, son,” Trahearne said, holding up his hands. “But don’t get mad at me. I’m not in charge of the world.”
“Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m crazy or the world’s a cesspool,” I said.
“Both things are true,” he said, “but your major problem is that you’re a moralist. Don’t worry, though.”
“Why?”
“It’ll pass with age,” he said. “But talking about crazy—what was that fellow doing with all those films?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
I was partially right. It was a nice drive. Except for a scuffle Fireball had with a large gray poodle who wanted to sniff his ass at a rest area, and except for the rich lady in the Mercedes who belonged to the poodle and who slapped Trahearne when he suggested she do something impossible and obscene with her lousy damned play-pretty mutt, it was a lovely drive. But Trahearne was right about calling Peggy Bain first.
The girl who lived in the apartment address Albert had given me didn’t know where Peggy Bain lived, but she did know somebody who might. We spent the afternoon kicking around from apartments to bars and back again, talking to a long series of people who knew where she might be. Finally, as we tried the last possible place, a backyard barbeque all the way up in La Honda, the sun headed behind the coastal hills and Trahearne began to whine like a drunken child. He had forgotten his promise to stay at least as sober as me. Trahearne and Fireball were as drunk as dancing pigs.
At least the bulldog had the decency to pass out in the back seat. As we parked in the string of cars beside Skyline Drive, Trahearne sniffed the air, muttered party, and stopped whining.
“Maybe you should stay in the car,” I suggested.
“Nonsense,” he said as he tugged a fresh quart of Turkey from under his seat. “If my famous writer act doesn’t work, lad, I’ll show them my invitation,” he added, waving the whiskey. “I’m always welcome at parties,” he said as he lurched out of the car.
Of course the old bastard was right. The bearded young man who answered the doorbell had met Tra-hearne some years before at a poetry reading in Seattle, though Traheame didn’t remember him, and he welcomed us into his house, introducing Trahearne to his guests as if he had been the guest of honor all along. Within minutes, he had arranged glasses and ice and Peggy Bain sitting across a picnic table. Traheame shooed the host and his fans away, sat down beside Peggy Bain, and flopped a heavy arm over her shoulder as he called her honey. She was a genial lady with a face as round as a full moon looming above her thick wool poncho. When Trahearne explained what we wanted, she glanced at him, then me, then broke out in a fit of stoned laughter so fierce that she had to remove her rimless glasses and set them among the dirty plates on the table.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said over and over again, only stopping to giggle. Then she lowered the pitch of her glee, rubbed the tears out of her eyes, and said, “Man, I haven’t seen her since high school.” She paused long enough to shake a hash pipe out of her sleeve and light it, then offered it to Trahearne. He took a greedy hit, then held his breath and muttered dynamite dope! like some kid. When she offered it to me, I shook my head, trying to stay straight for a few minutes longer. “I ran into her father down in Bakers-
field a few years ago, and he said Betty Sue had been living in a commune up in Oregon, but she had left.”
“Remember the name of it?” I said.
“Man, who can remember those names,” she said. “Sunflower or Sunshine Starbright Dreaming or Sun-fun or Sun-kinda-pretentious-hippie-shit.” After she stopped chuckling at her own joke, she added. “Whatever its name was, it was somewhere outside of Grants
Pass, I think.”
“When did you talk to her father?” I asked, and Trahearne muttered yeah as he fondled her square shoulder through the rough wool.
Peggy’s face stiffened and she slipped her glasses back on, sighed and lifted her hands. I thought I was about to get a long question about who the hell I was to ask about Betty Sue, but she turned to Trahearne, saying, “Hey, man, I ain’t into starfucking, okay? See that lady over by the back door? The one with the scarf around her head and all that heavy metal hanging off her neck? That’s where your action is, man, okay?” Then she lifted his large hand off her shoulder by the fingers, dangling it as if it were a dead crab, and dropped it in his lap.
“Excuse me,” he mutte
red without a trace of sincerity, looking at his lap and peeking toward the back door at the same time.
“Don’t be bummed out, man,” Peggy said.
“No sweat,” he said, then slid off the bench and limped toward the house.
“What’s wrong with him?” she asked.
“Artistic temperament,” I said. “He thinks famous writers are supposed to get fucked a lot.”
“Not that, dummy,” she said. “What’s wrong with
his leg?”
“Old war wound,” I said.
“Which one?”
“Pick one,” I said, “they’re all the same.” I had been 91
trained in the right radical responses by a crew-cut first lieutenant with a text on radical responses.
“Right on, man,” she answered on cue.
“But back to Betty Sue,” I said. “How long ago did you talk to her father?”
“At least six years ago,” she said. “I know because I was still married to that redneck asshole from Santa Rosa. We were down in Bakersfield on some kind of United Farmworkers blast, and I saw Betty Sue’s daddy’s name in the paper. He was playing at a place called the Kicker, which I assumed was short for Shitkicker, so a bunch of us got high and went out to test the rednecks. Of course, we took two of the biggest hippies in the world, two logger kids from up around Weed. We wanted to look back to see how the other
half lives.”
“How were they doing?”
“Just like you’d expect, man, living high, wide, and handsome in Bakersfield,” she answered, grinning. “But old man Flowers, he was one cool dude.”
“How’s that?”
“Singing in the band, running the bar, and dealing nose candy like a bandit,” she said. “Cocaine?”
“Nothing else makes you feel so good,” she said. “At first we thought he was bragging to impress the hippies—you know how straight people do—talking about selling coke to all the big names playing around Bakersfield, but after the second set, he took us back to his office, and we did a ton and bought five grams. Good stuff and fairly cheap.”
“And you talked about Betty Sue,” I said, trying to bring her back from her cocaine memories. And mine too.
“Right. I asked if he’d heard from her, and he said she’d called once, a year, maybe two years before, asking for money to split from the commune scene.
Probably one of your typical fascist hippie scenes, you know, man.”
“But you don’t remember the name?”
“Like I said, man, Sun-something,” she said, then paused to glance up at me. “You looking for her because she’s in trouble?”
“No, not that,” I said, then realized that after the film I didn’t know why I was looking for Betty Sue anymore. “I stumbled into her mother, and she hired me to look around for a few days,” I said.
“Sorry, but I can’t help.”
“That’s okay,” I said, “she’s been gone too long anyway.”
“Just barely long enough,” Peggy whispered, looking down, all the stoned laughter gone now.
Behind her, the clouds surrendered their last crimson streaks to a soft, foggy gray. A single tall evergreen tilted against the falling sky. Behind me, the party began to rumble like thunder. Peggy relit the hash pipe, and this time I accepted it from her. We shared the smoke as the evening winds rose off the cold sea, rose up the wooded ridges, and herded the party inside, people muttering thin complaints like little children called from play to the fuzzy dreams of their early beds. The plate-glass windows along the back of the house reflected the last vestiges of the sunset, and beyond, like a double exposure, the party trundled silently onward, mouths opening, wounds without sound, gestures without meaning. Beside a doorway against the opposite wall, Traheame stared sadly at the sunset.
“What else can I tell you, man?” Peggy asked when the pipe had gone out.
“I don’t know,” I said, then moved around the table to sit beside her, close but not too close, my fingers locked behind my head as I leaned against the littered table. “I just don’t know,” I said as I tried to see the ocean swells and the evening fog below the wide and empty sky being overcome by a nascent darkness. “Maybe you could just tell me about her,” I said. “All about her.”
“That’s too much,” she said.
“Just barely enough.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Tell me what she looked like in the sixth grade with pigtails and elbows and knees, or tell me—”
”I’ll be damned,” she interrupted. “I’ll just be damned.”
“Why?”
“You’ve never met her, right?” “Right. Why?”
“I can tell by the way you’re talking,” she said, “that you’re stuck on her.”
“It’s a professional hazard,” I said, trying to wriggle out of it. “I get stuck on everybody I hunt for. They stop being pictures and words and become people, that’s all.” I nipped at my drink to ease the dry bite of the hashish. “Sometimes the people I think I’m hunting for don’t turn out to be the people I find,” I babbled. “Or something like that.”
“Cut the bullshit, man,” she said. “You’re stuck on her. I never met a man who wasn’t. Goddammit, she could do a lot of things well, but nothing better than
that.” “What?”
“Getting men stuck on her—she did that best of all. They used to come for miles around just to sit at the queen’s feet, just to touch her hem—oh, hell, that’s not
fair.” “What?”
“She just never found anybody as good as she was,” Peggy said, then picked up a wine glass in her stubby fingers. “She was the most beautiful woman in the world and she was only a girl—just like me, man, just a little high school kid from Sonoma, but she was so beautiful, a beautiful, lonely lady, lonely because nobody was good enough for her.”
“Stuck up?”
“Not a bit of it, man,” she said, “or.why would she like me? Listen, man, I spent my school years watching pretty girls try to be my friends so they’d look good standing next to me, but Betty Sue, she didn’t care about that, she was my friend, and better-looking than the whole bunch of them, and smarter and nicer—the whole bit.”
“You’ve thought about her some?”
“Not a day goes by, man, that I don’t.”
“I see.”
“You don’t see shit, man,” she said quietly. “I loved her, you see, loved her. I didn’t know what it was all about until I had survived two nightmare marriages, but since then I’ve found out, and I loved her. When she ran away, I cried my eyes out, man, cried myself blind. Before that, I thought that was a cliche, but when she left, I wept until I couldn’t see.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I hated her too,” she confessed, “but that was my fault. I lined up with the smitten swains but didn’t know what I was doing for years. And hell, if she was here tonight, you and I could stand around with our tongues out.” Then she tried to laugh as she socked me on the arm. “Lined up to meet the lady.”
“I never stand in line for anything,” I said lightly.
“This is a lady you’d kill for a chance just to stand in line,” she said with a sad smile. “Or something like that. That didn’t make sense, did it?”
“I know what you meant,” I said. “Thanks for your trouble.”
“No trouble, man,” she said. “I’m like this all the time now. And when I finish law school, I’m gonna make the world pay for it.”
Since it was the first happy thing I had heard her say, I wished her well and thanked her again. Then I wandered toward the far side of the yard to find a bush to water.
Betty Sue Flowers. I had talked to three people but hadn’t found out anything worth knowing, except that everybody who knew her was stuck on her still. Maybe I was too. Maybe I didn’t have any choice in the matter any more. But I had to make up my mind. Her daddy lived down in Bakersfield, Randall Jackson might still be in
Denver, and the remains of the commune were in southern Oregon—long trips in three different directions, and none of them on the way to Montana. Rosie’s eighty-seven dollars was getting a workout, and I was getting nowhere, but that’s always where I knew this one was heading anyway. So I shook it off and headed back to the party.
When I walked through the kitchen, Traheame was leaning against the wall beside the lady with the chains, offering her the slug they had removed from his hip, saying, “You charming little devil, you, I’d like you to have this as a good-luck piece.” He tickled her under the chin.
“Why don’t you lick her on the arm,” I said, but they both ignored me. She giggled and accepted the good-luck gift, and Trahearne lifted her hand to his lips. As I tried to walk past, he grabbed my neck with a meaty hand and hugged me toward him, his huge face rubbery and flushed with the whiskey, hanging over mine like something butchered in a nightmare.
“And what did the little dyke have to say?” he asked.
“Nothing I didn’t already know,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“The party’s just getting interesting.” He leered at the chained lady, sloshed whiskey into my glass, and patted my shoulder. “Hang around,” he said, gathering
the lady with silken clinks beneath his arm and leading her into the twinkling night.
“Have a good time,” I said. “Have a hell of a good time.”
“You’ve got to learn to relax,” he advised over his shoulder, “learn to have a good time.”
Ah, yes, the good times. The parties that last forever, the whiskey bottle that never runs dry, the recreational drugs. Strange ladies draped in denim and satin, in silver and hammered gold. Ah, yes, the easy life, unencumbered by families or steady jobs or the knave responsibility. Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ else to lose, right, and the nightlife is the right life for me, just keep on keepin’ on. Having fun is the fifth drink in a new town or washing away a hangover with a hot shower and a cold, cold beer in a motel room or the salty road-tired taste of a’ hitch-hiking hippie-chick’s breast in the downy funk of her sleeping bag. Right on. The good times are hard times but they’re the only times I know.
The Last Good Kiss Page 9