In the Land of Dreamy Dreams

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Good evening,” Gus smiled politely at the lady. “Uncle Clarence, you been looking for me?”

  “Come here, Gus,” Clarence said and pulled the boys out of earshot of the lady. “Gus, you got me in all kinds of trouble with your momma. She yelled at me for an hour yesterday. What you been doing with that stuff, smoking it yourself?”

  “No, I ain’t. This here is my partner, Robert. We don’t do nothing but sell it to rich white kids in the park. Robert lets me keep supplies in his basement when we got anything to keep. And I got the money I owe you too.” Gus produced three ten dollar bills and some crumpled ones and started counting it out to his uncle.

  “Well, you ain’t getting any more shit off me one way or the other.” Clarence was feeling good. He had drunk just the right amount of Apple Jack. He kept his hand on the boy’s shoulder as he talked. “I don’t feel like having your momma after me and I’m off you for laying out so much. That’s what’s got her so hot.”

  “Uncle Clarence, you can’t do me this way. I got my partner, I got my business, I got my customers. Momma ain’t gonna find out anything. I’ll stay home every night. I never knew you to be so scared of her before.”

  Gus was pulling out all the stops. Great tears were forming in the corners of his eyes.

  “Oh, for Jesus’ sake,” Clarence said, not wanting the lady to see him making a kid cry. “I’ll give you enough for one more week and we’ll see how you stay home and keep her pacified. You come over to my place after dinner and I’ll fix you up.”

  Gus and Robert looked at each other. Their eyes lit up like someone had just dropped a quarter in a pinball machine. They were set for another week.

  Robert McLaurin’s father, his name was Will, thought the spring of 1971 was the worst time he had ever lived through. He was a management lawyer. All he did at work was try Equal Opportunity Employment cases, and he had lost five in a row. All he did at home was argue with Robert McLaurin’s mother, her name was Lelia, about whether or not Robert was taking drugs.

  They argued so much about Robert they had stopped being in love with each other. All day long at the office Will thought about the argument from the day before and used his legal mind to think up ways to make his arguments more convincing.

  He would drive up in front of his house after work and sometimes it would take him three or four minutes to get ready to go inside and start arguing. He would look up at the fine house he had bought for his family and wish he was someplace else. Finally he would pick up his briefcase and go on in.

  Lelia would be running around the kitchen in a tennis skirt trying to get dinner on the table so Will wouldn’t know she hadn’t done anything all day but play tennis. Will would say, “Did you call Robert’s coach?”

  “I couldn’t get him on the phone.”

  “What do you mean, you couldn’t get him on the phone? They don’t have phones anymore at Horace Green School?”

  “Are you accusing me of lying?”

  Will McLaurin was not a big man. He was five nine with broad shoulders and curly red hair and black eyes. When he started arguing he lit up like an actor on the stage.

  “Lelia, I said did you call the coach or did you not call the coach. Don’t make something up. Just answer the question.”

  Lelia McLaurin looked like a blonde housewife on a television commercial. She had a good figure from playing tennis all the time and she had a bad temper from getting her way all the time.

  “I don’t have to listen to this. I don’t have to hear this while I’m cooking dinner. If you keep this up I’ll leave and you can cook your own dinner.” She was furiously buttering French bread to go with the fried chicken the cook had left warming in the oven.

  “Lelia, listen to me. All I’m asking is did you call Robert’s coach or not. I’m not accusing you of anything and I’m not trying to put anything over on you. Did you call Robert’s coach and ask him if Robert has been showing up for practice?”

  “I left a message but he didn’t call back.”

  “Did you go out and see if he was at practice?”

  “I’m not going to spy on my own child. Stop ruining my evening. Have a drink or something. He goes to practice. He bought a new track suit just last week.”

  “Lelia, will you look at this for a minute. Just look at this and then we won’t discuss it anymore,” and Will handed her a yellow legal pad with a list printed on the first page.

  “What in the hell is this?” She turned toward him fiercely, her pleated skirt twirling around her legs.

  “That is a partial list of the furnishings, decorations, and trinkets in our only son’s bedroom. I was hoping you might sit down and read it and think about it.”

  “This legal garbage. This goddamn lawyer list,” and Lelia ripped the page from the legal pad and threw it at the pantry door.

  The list read:

  1. Black light

  2. Two strobe lights for altering perception of light

  3. Poster of androgynous figure on motorcycle smoking a marijuana cigarette

  4. Poster of Peter Fonda smoking a marijuana cigarette

  5. Package of sandwich-size baggies, often used to parcel out marijuana into what are known as “lids”

  6. 36 long-playing record albums featuring artists who smoke marijuana and advocate the use of various drugs in the lyrics of their songs

  7. Recipe, supposedly a joke, for the manufacture of LSD from sunflower seeds

  “You have to stop spying on Robert! That’s just their way of being cute. He pretends he’s in the revolution. I think you hate him.”

  “If you call walking in his room spying. That is a list of objects that can be seen by a person of normal eyesight standing in the middle of his room.”

  “You hate him.”

  “Lelia, I don’t hate him. I hate him hanging around the park all the time. I hate him barely passing at school and never reading a book anymore. Lelia, a madness is stalking this city and I don’t want to lose my son to it.”

  They were out in the hall. Lelia was getting a raincoat out of a closet. It wasn’t raining. She was getting out the raincoat because it is hard to walk out on someone wearing only a tennis skirt and a LaCoste shirt. She was crying.

  Will took the raincoat away from her and tried to put his arms around her. They hadn’t made love to each other for two weeks.

  “Look, tomorrow is Friday. Leave Robert with your mother and we’ll drive to Biloxi for the weekend. We can lie around in the sun and talk things over. Let’s get out of town and try to love each other and see if we can think straight.”

  “All right. If you won’t talk about it anymore tonight. The other day I saw him riding a little black boy around on his handlebars. You’ve got me so paranoid I thought there was something wrong with that.”

  “What time tomorrow could you leave?”

  “I’m going to the beauty parlor at four. I’ll pick you up at the office at five-thirty and we’ll take the expressway from downtown. We can stop in Mandeville and have dinner at Begue’s.”

  “Sure we can. Bring a shaker of martinis. We’ll drink all the way to the coast like the old days.”

  Then the McLaurins had a peaceful meal for a change and Will and Lelia went up early to bed.

  As soon as they disappeared Robert called up Gus and told him the good news that they would have the house to themselves for the weekend. He smoked a joint and drifted off to sleep listening to his radio. “Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry, drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry.”

  Gus was waiting for Robert in the front yard when Robert came home the next day. Gus was excited. He loved the McLaurins’ beautiful old house. He had spent the night there once before when Robert had a baby-sitter. Robert had sneaked him in. What Gus really liked was Robert’s father’s shower. It had an attachment that gave you a massage while you took a shower. Gus said it felt like little pieces of diamonds hitting your skin.

  On this particular Friday Rob
ert felt good to be walking in the front door with his friend. The McLaurin house was built around a wide central hall. At the far end of the hall a staircase five feet wide rose to the second floor. The hall was hung with an amazing assortment of paintings.

  “Your momma sure does have a lot of pictures.”

  “She painted this one herself.”

  “What’s it a picture of?” Gus asked.

  “What does it look like to you?”

  “A fire. A big field of fire.”

  “Well, she says it’s a picture of the inside of her head when she was going to have me as a baby.”

  “I wouldn’t have guessed it.”

  The boys went on in the kitchen. They decided to really have a party.

  Lelia entered the Magic Slipper Beauty Salon with a sigh. She was exhausted from rushing to get there on time.

  “Tim, I’m sorry I’m late. I got in school traffic on the Avenue.”

  “It’s okay, sweetie, but we’ll have to skip the manicure. I’ve got a date at six.” He handed her a leopard-printed smock and nodded toward the dressing room. His silver hair was cut in a Prince Valiant. He was vain of his body and his clientele. He put up with a lot from Lelia because she had been named to the list of Beautiful Activists two years in a row before she had turned herself into a tennis-playing machine.

  “He’s driving me crazy,” she said, settling into the shampoo chair. “Between the two of them I don’t care if I live or die. I can’t even play tennis worth a damn. I lost every important match I played last week. I’m down to six on the ladder.”

  “Sweetie, you can’t let them do that to you. What does Arthur say?” They shared a psychiatrist. This creates a strange bond between people.

  “He says I have to work through it. Will and I are going to the coast for the weekend to talk it over. We may end up sending Robert off to school. Will wants me to treat Robert the way his mother treated him, the old guilt routine. Look what it did to him. He doesn’t even know he’s neurotic. At least I know I’m neurotic.”

  “Lelia, is that you?’ Danny Adler’s mother came up with her hair wrapped in a turban on the way to the back for a pedicure.

  “Janet, how are you?”

  “Listen, thanks for asking Danny to spend the night. It really worked out beautifully because we are planning on being out late tonight.”

  “Janet,” Lelia sat up, half-rinsed, “Janet, I didn’t ask Danny to spend the night. Will and I are going out of town for the weekend. Robert is staying with Mother. Are you sure he said Robert asked him?”

  “Yes, he said you-all were taking them to the movies.”

  Tim started laughing. “The old mom’s-out-of-town game. I’ll bet they’re shacked up with some charmers in your bedroom right this minute.”

  “I’m going home,” Lelia said, “Tim, get this stuff off my hair and comb me out.”

  “You can’t go home like this.”

  “I don’t care. Just comb out my hair. I mean it, Tim. Janet, I’ll call you later.”

  “Sweetie, take a Valium. You want a Valium?”

  “Oh, could you, thanks.”

  Tim fished a bottle out of his pocket. “One or two?”

  “Two.”

  Lelia parked the car two houses away and walked across the lawn and onto her front porch. She felt like a member of the CIA. She could hear the music playing as she walked across the yard. She could hear the music before she stepped onto the porch. She could hear the music and through the floor-length windows of the living room she could see Robert draped over the beige-and-white-striped loveseat holding a cigarette in one hand and nodding dreamily with his eyes closed. She could see the mirrored cocktail table with the silver champagne bucket and the two-hundred-year-old red crystal Madeira glasses beside it. Robert got up and walked into the next room to change the record.

  Lelia stepped into the hall.

  Gus came walking down the stairs. He came walking down the carpeted stairs and down the wide walnut hall with its sixteen-foot ceilings. He came walking down the hall wrapped in a plush baby-blue monogrammed towel from the Lylian Shop. Pearls of water were dripping down his face from his thick soft hair. Widely grinning, hugely smiling, Gus came down the hall, down the Aubusson runner, down Lelia’s schizophrenic, eclectic art gallery of a hall, past the Walter Andersons, the deCallatays, the Leroy Morais, the Rolland Golden, the Stanford, past the portrait of Robert’s grandfather in the robes of a state supreme court justice, past the Dufy. He had just passed the edge of the new Leonor Fini when Lelia stepped into the hall and they spotted each other.

  Here Gus came, in the baby-blue towel, black as a walnut tree in winter, draped as a tiny emperor, carrying his empty champagne glass in one hand and using the other for an imperial robe clasp. Expansively, ecstatically pleased to be, delighted to be, charmed to be alive on this, the fourteenth day of April, nineteen hundred and seventy-one; he, Gus, man of parts, friend of white man and black man, friend of oak tree, levee, and river, citizen of New Orleans, Louisiana, dope pusher to the Audubon Park, dispenser of the new Nirvana. He, Gus, five feet one inches, one hundred and two pounds of pure D Gus, walking down the hall.

  Lelia screamed. She screamed six months of unscreamed screaming. She screamed an ancestral, a territorial scream. She screamed her head off.

  “What in the name of God are you doing in my house?” she screamed.

  “Robert,” she screamed, “what is this black child doing in my house? What is this goddamn black pusher doing in my house? Robert,” she screamed, “get in here this second.”

  Gus’s eyes met hers at a forty-degree angle. His huge black eyes met her wide aluminum ones down the long hall and held for a moment and then Gus cut and ran back up the stairs to the bedroom, trailing the towel behind him, his tiny black butt shining in the reflected light from the stained-glass window in the stairway alcove.

  Robert ran past his mother’s screaming and up the stairs behind Gus and the two boys ran into the master bedroom and slammed the door and threw the safety bolt and Robert stood with his back to the door breathing like a runaway mule.

  “What are we gonna do now?” Robert said, his heart pushing against his fake soccer shirt.

  “I’m getting out of here. That’s what I’m doing,” Gus said, pulling on his plaid pants and searching for his boots.

  “You can’t get out of here. There isn’t any way out.”

  “There’s that window,” Gus said. “There’s that window and that’s the way I’m going out.” He pointed to a double French window that opened onto a false balcony and overlooked the side yard. The top twelve feet of an old crepe myrtle tree pushed against the balcony waving its clusters of soft pink flowers in the breeze.

  “You can’t get out there. It’s forty feet to the ground.”

  “I’m going down that tree.”

  “That’s a crepe myrtle. You can’t climb down a crepe myrtle.”

  “If it’s the only tree I got, I can climb down it,” Gus said, putting on his jacket and pushing open the French doors.

  Lelia was beating on the door with her fists.

  “Robert, if you don’t open this door you will never leave this house again. If you don’t open this door this minute you will be sent to Saint Stanislaus. I’ll call the police. I’ve already called your father. He’ll be here any minute. You might as well open the door. You better hurry and open this door. You better answer me this minute.”

  “That’s the maddest woman I ever heard in my life,” Gus said, throwing one leg over the balcony.

  “Don’t do it, Gus. Gus, don’t do it,” Robert said, grabbing him. “She won’t really call the police. She’s just saying that. It will be all right when my father gets here.”

  “Let go of me, Robert,” Gus warned.

  “Robert,” she screamed, “if you don’t open this door you will be the sorriest boy in New Orleans.”

  Robert turned to look at the door. He looked past the beautiful white-lacquered four-poster
bed with Lelia’s favorite sun hats hanging gaily from the bedposts.

  As he turned to look at the door Gus shook his head and reached down and bit the freckled hand that held him. He bit Robert’s hand as hard as he could bite it and Robert let go.

  Gus jumped into the heart of the crepe myrtle tree. He dove into the tree and swayed in its branches like a cat. He steadied, grabbed for a larger branch, found a temporary footing, grabbed again, and began to fall through the upthrust branches like a bird shot in flight. As Robert watched, Gus came to rest upon the ground, his wet black hair festooned with the soft pink blossoms of the crepe myrtle.

  Then, as Robert watched, Gus pushed off from the earth. He began to ascend back up through the broken branches like a movie played in reverse, like a wild kite rising to meet the sun, and Robert was amazed and enchanted by the beauty of this feat and jumped from the window high into the air to join Gus on his journey.

  And far away in the loud hall Lelia beat on the door and beat on the door and beat on the door.

  There’s a Garden of Eden

  Scores of men, including an ex-governor and the owner of a football team, consider Alisha Terrebone to be the most beautiful woman in the state of Louisiana. If she is unhappy what hope is there for ordinary mortals? Yet here is Alisha, cold and bored and lonely, smoking in bed.

  Not an ordinary bed either. This bed is eight feet wide and covered with a spread made from Alisha’s old fur coats. There are dozens of little pillows piled against the headboard, and the sheets are the color of shells and wild plums and ivory.

  Everything else in the room is brown, brown velvet, brown satin, brown leather, brown silk, deep polished woods.

  Alisha sleeps alone in the wonderful bed. She has a husband, but he isn’t any fun anymore. He went morose on Alisha. Now he has a bed of his own in another part of town.

  Alisha has had three husbands. First she married a poor engineer and that didn’t work out. Then she married a judge and that didn’t work out. Then she married a rich lawyer and that didn’t work out.