Empty Pockets

by Dale Herd

  “I am, man.”

  “All right,” Mark said.

  Bill walked back along the side of the pickup and then out toward the road. There weren’t any cars coming. The highway was empty. He hoped one would come soon. He didn’t want to be standing when Billy and Mark went by. What a rotten trip this had been. It really had.

  “But not me,” Bill said fiercely. “Not me.”

  The Big Apple

  Their first time in Manhattan they stayed with Felicia’s college roommate, Dolores, and her roommate, a good-looking boy named Gary.

  The second night there, Gary, who had been gone all evening, came back to the flat with a man named Morton. Morton was about thirty-five years old and wore a gray suit. Dolores was away visiting an aunt and uncle somewhere up on Long Island and Gary and Morton slept together in Dolores’s bed. David lay awake listening to them.

  “It makes me sick,” he said.

  “Ssh,” Felicia said. “Live and let live, babe.”

  “Not me,” David said, “I’m getting the fuck out of here. I hate this goddamn place.”

  Felicia reached out and held on.

  “Come back here, you silly,” she said.

  She kissed his arm and pulled him back down. “Listen,” she said, “you know that I know Gary from school, don’t you? Do you know that?”

  “No,” David said.

  “Well, I do,” Felicia said. “And I worry about him. I used to worry about him a lot. He’s had some pretty horrible things happen to him. His mother slept with him until he was sixteen. Did I tell you I slept with him once? I think I’m the only girl he’s ever slept with.”

  “No,” David said, “you didn’t tell me. Did it make any difference? He seems pretty happy the way he is.”

  “Not like us,” she said. “Now here, come here, let’s be happy too.”

  Army

  Carol Ann came in, mildly ripped, happy in her eyes. Where is that boy, she said, ough, god damn him, I’m going to eat that boy up when he gets here, love, yes I love him, I love everybody, people are everything, aren’t they, what else is there, sex, what else have I got going for me except my body, drugs, she laughed, her eyes full of secrets, old age, no, I’m not afraid of old age, everybody gets old, what do you expect, no, the only thing I’m afraid of is obsolescence, I’m afraid of getting obsolete, no one has to do that, no one, now repeat after me, women know more than men, repeat, women know more than men. We laughed together, she went out the door into the street.

  Lucy in the Sky

  Standing up, head tipped forward, listening (Gray, a twenty-three-year-old college graduate surfing until he is drafted, not to the Vietnamese war, yet he would like to see a war. Blond, moderately long hair, tan, Levi’s, sky-blue deck shoes, striped red and white shirt), mind jammed with the sensory impressions of this house: its colored crystal prisms strung by wire across the windows, its psychedelic-rock music posters on the walls, the mauve and rose and cream scarves partitioning the room that gently billow from second to second as wind comes in the open window behind Hansen sitting in a lotus on the couch—all of this a newness alien from the old of surfboards and Goodwill mattresses on the bare floors and surf pictures on the walls of the old surf house where he lived while going to school when Hansen, two years ago, age eighteen, first came on the scene having left his parents’ home and moved in (that surf house gone now in an urban renewal project that in a year would not only have demolished the row of similar houses on Ventura Point but will, because of a long, high, stone and steel and concrete seawall, outrider of a planned six-story concrete and palm-surrounded resort hotel, destroy the rock and sand formations of an ancient river mouth made point break, a peeling symmetrical surf break that provides on a strong west swell power rides up to an eighth of a mile long, waves that give a rider an ecstatic pride in his own courage in riding them; rides that Gray feels are the major accomplishments of an already long athletic career; rides that so far are the best moments of his life), seeking, Gray felt, his friendship, his approval—all of this a newness overlaid by one other impression: the hypodermic syringe lying on the white of Hansen’s kitchen sink; hearing now Hansen speak in answer to his warning about being hustled by queers while hitchhiking north, hearing Hansen now say, “So, it’s all the same, man; it’d be a new trip,” blinked, paused, got a mindflash of darkness and the highway and some forty-five-year-old fag unzipping Hansen’s fly, and then, suddenly, totally, finally (at once thinking of Hansen’s favorite saying, “Whatever happens, man, happens. It’s all up to the stars.”) understood him, understood why he always fell off in hard sections of hard waves, understood why he wasn’t surfing anymore, understood why he had gone AWOL, understood the dope dealing, the turning on of his thirteen-year-old brother, understood the syringe, understood exactly where Hansen was; felt excited by the insight, relieved of any further curiosity, and disgusted enough to say, “Well, man, we’re going up to Stanley’s if you want a ride to get you started and right now I’m going outside ’cause if the police really are coming it could be anytime and I sure as hell don’t want to be here when they do.”

  “Wow, man!” said Hansen.

  Hoefer, looking at Gray, said nothing.

  Gray, wanting somehow to undo the harshness of his own statement, looked up out the window, looked back at Hansen, then picked up the binoculars off the couch and brought them up to his eyes, looking beyond the two blocks of tract housing, a field, the gray-ribboned freeway, focusing them for distance on California Street, seeing moving into clarity off the dark brown of the upper parking lot beyond the two squat silver Shell Oil storage tanks the long gray-green walls, six, seven, eight, more stacked out toward the horizon, the first good wave breaking maybe two hundred yards out across the high tide, its face a solid six foot, maybe seven, but too much wind, way too much, sections pushing over everywhere along its line. Gray jumped to the fourth wave, still smooth looking, a good five-footer starting to peak over, made the opening turn, stayed high in the pocket by the white now breaking, then drove down the green and out, setting up to make a hard turn back up. The long bulging wall ahead collapsed, turning over into whitewater.

  “Stanley’s the only place,” Gray said, looking back at Hansen, seeing Hansen smiling, thinking then, He’s freaked out, seeing Hansen’s Indian moccasins, his rotten Levi’s laden with iron-on patches, the faded cloth a soft white blue, the patches green, jean blue, dark blue, wheat, black, solid over both knees and up the thighs, pants Gray thought of as part of Hansen’s new doper style (but not that, not style in the usual mode of unusual dress for gaining attention but a style pronounced by a girl at a recent party, saying, “Those are your soul pants, right?” “Yeah, right,” Hansen had said, liking her, liking that she had defined it for him, seeming to know that he had created the pants: had washed and sewed and ironed them; had ironed then sewed on each patch actually working on them everywhere in town; had slowly welded and pressed them into his psyche under a variety of mostly steam irons everywhere, Grandma’s, Mom’s, a girl’s, even Gray’s new place; with each new tear had ironed on patch after patch after patch until, simply, they weren’t cloth pants any longer but were flesh, his flesh), pants that didn’t fit with the athletic look of the hard, tan belly and chest and shoulders, pants that were one more bad omen for Hansen’s future, pants that matched the ruined, blood-reddened whites of Hansen’s eyes now looking into his; Gray thinking then, What a handsome guy, what a dumb fuck, why feel sorry for that; then looked at Hoefer sitting impassively in the armchair, running his hand through his beard, obviously not seeing that Hansen was simply fucked, Why, Gray thought, even bother talking with the guy? If he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care.

  “I’ll be down in a minute,” Hoefer said, seeing that Gray was asking him to leave.

  “Okay,” Gray said. He tossed the binoculars next to Hansen, glanced at a Day-Glo orange-and-pink-bordered black poster of a tall, skull grinning, white skeleton draped in a garland of roses announcing THE
GRATEFUL DEAD, AVALON, SAN FRANCISCO, thought symbolically, That figures, and said:

  “See you, Hans.”

  “Okay,” Hansen answered.

  As Gray turned and walked out the door, twisting to avoid the last scarf, looking ahead to the dark well of carpeted stairway going down to the street, sensing the age and decay of the house, remembering then not clearly the visual picture (the slowness of it, the absolute concentration, the pulling of the red into thin, clean glass then the gentle, steady, perfect push back) but thinking mostly of the shock he had felt when watching one of Hansen’s new buddies shoot tranks at a party a week ago, remembering how the kid (another guy who wasn’t surfing much anymore) had smiled afterward, softly, quietly, some kind of weirdly beautiful light in his eyes, not looking up at Gray, it seemed, although his eyes had been fixed on him, but seeming to be looking up at something else, someone else directly behind Gray, although there had been no one there, Hoefer sighed, and Gray, hearing him, thought, What the hell is Hoefer going to do? There’s nothing he can do.

  In a minute Gray was gone and Hansen, still grinning, shrugged and shook his head.

  “Well,” Hoefer said, “queers are a pretty strange trip, you know.”

  “Ah, I was just jiving,” said Hansen. “What’s his problem anyway?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He really gets uptight sometimes,” Hansen said.

  “Well,” said Hoefer, “not that it’s any of my business but what’s the deal on that needle? You use that thing?”

  Hansen threw out his hands.

  “Bad karma, man.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “Sure,” Hoefer said.

  Hansen grinned.

  “Listen, you ass, why don’t you wait a couple of days? C’mon out to my place. We’ll ride Rincon tomorrow when the tide’s better.”

  “No, I better not.”

  “I can dig it,” Hoefer said, deciding to leave. He stood up. “Seeing some country’ll be good for you.”

  “Yeah,” Hansen said, “and save my ass, too.”

  “It will.”

  “I know.”

  “Okay,” Hoefer said.

  “You want to share a number before you split?”

  “Well,” Hoefer laughed. “Sure.” He sat down. “Gray brought me up here to get you off the dope, you know.”

  “Well,” Hansen said, “the dope.”

  “The dope,” Hoefer laughed, “sure.”

  Hansen got up, going past into the kitchen. Hoefer heard the oven door open, close.

  “Your stash in there?”

  “Part of it,” Hansen said. He came back in carrying a cellophane bag of dark, wet-looking grass. “The rest is up in Santa Barbara. You want this stuff? It doesn’t taste too good.”

  “No, not now.”

  “Yeah, take it, man. I’ll put it out back. You can swing by later and pick it up.”

  “How much you want for it?”

  “Nothing, man. It’s a gift. I can’t use it. I’m splitting for sure. It’s jail time around here, you know. I can’t dig that. My name is on the list. I’ve got to go.”

  “Well,” Hoefer said, “yeah, wow, okay Where’ll you put it?”

  Hansen was looking down into the bowl of a dark, curved pipe. He didn’t answer for a moment.

  “Out by the fence. You know that chain-link fence by the freight office? I’ll bury it there at the corner.”

  “Good,” Hoefer said, watching Hansen push a finger down into the bowl.

  “Here,” Hoefer said, getting up. He struck a match and held it over the bowl.

  Hansen inhaled, sucking the flame down.

  “I’d heard that things were hot,” Hoefer said, “no pun intended.” He sat down next to Hansen. “I thought I’d come by and see what was going on.” Then he laughed. “No, man, really to get your new stick. Are you taking it? I mean, you’re not hitchhiking with it, are you?”

  “Yeah,” Hansen said, passing the pipe, speaking without letting out smoke, talking up against the top of his throat, “my little brother has it, but go ahead. Tell him I said you could use it. You’ll really dig on it. Yater really knows what he’s doing.”

  “Good,” Hoefer said. “It’ll work good in this swell.” He looked at the pipe in his hand. “Listen, man, what’s with your needle trip, like I don’t understand that.”

  “That’s nothing,” Hansen said, “it’s just a thing like all the guys in the brig were on to it and this one guy from L.A. liked me so he gave me the spike, a totally spaced-out dude, you know, it’s no big thing.”

  “Okay,” Hoefer said, taking a toke.

  “It’s cool,” Hansen said. He took the pipe.

  “I mean, like it’s a little scary, you know.”

  “Listen, Hoef,” Hansen said, “I’m into a good thing.”

  “Yeah?” said Hoefer, watching the side of Hansen’s face, looking at his eyes.

  “God,” Hansen said, still not letting the air out of his lungs. He considered that expression. “Yeah,” he said.

  “God?”

  “God . . .” Hansen was saying again, giving Hoefer the pipe. Hoefer took another toke, closing his eyes at the burn hitting the back of his throat, smelling the sweet, harsh reek. “. . . like I think I got really close.”

  “Yeah?” Hoefer opened his eyes, letting out the smoke, seeing no color, feeling the warmth, his thought taken by God, the word, enjoying the word, feeling from it a moment of sensation like a church thought, the smoke rolling in his brain, the invisible host, laughing at that pun, feeling that laugh as a moment of quiet and calm that made things (now looking past Hansen onto the rose color of a scarf dappled with shadow and weight and space, feeling too, the space between Hansen and the rose, both floating) seem musical, full of wonder, near to that feeling, the pure feeling that often sitting in his church gave him . . .

  “I’m not thinking God thoughts at all now, man,” Hansen said, “and it’s a real bringdown, you know what I mean? I mean, there’s this giant hassle at me now so I’ve got to cool it for a while, right?”

  “Yeah,” Hoefer agreed, “that’s right,” thinking, Yes, it is, it is a God feeling, it must be (at eighteen at his father’s insistence, he had driven off the coast to Utah and Brigham Young University, driven there in a ’56 Caddy-powered ’34 Ford Tudor with his Velzy-Jacobs racked on the top, starting higher education full of fear and rebellion, feeling ill-prepared and stifled, wanting no more formal education now that high school was over, not even wanting to see what the university had to offer, hating first the climate and then the rigidity of studying, feeling there was little hope of success for him in either the temporal or the spiritual world there, longing for the coast, the sea, missing his true satisfaction: the pump and lift of surf excitement shooting adrenaline into him seventy, eighty times a day, and so left the first time he received what he wanted, a failing grade on his first English composition exam, this three weeks after he enrolled, and came back to the coast to be tossed out of the home, then—he sold the car—going on his own, surfing through that winter, ending at the sea’s edge, living under the Malibu Pier during the summer of ’59, beginning a career based on hundreds and thousands of hours spent in the water: creator of the best rides ever seen at Secos and some at Malibu and Rincon, too: solitary, unique, magical performances, his whole land appearance based on his role as a performer, full hair and beard, shaggy cutoff sleeveless woman’s fur coat, flamboyant shirts and pants, never shoes, always dark glasses: rides that made him a star in high school auditorium sixteen-millimeter surf movies, earned him board endorsements and free trips to Hawaii and always work in nearly any surfboard shop on the California coast; rides that gave him for more than nine years a strong sense of self-worth, this sense arrogantly based, a complete hang-everything-else sense, a sense necessary to develop his skill; and rides done on hundreds of days spent totally stoned, first smoking marijuana that first summer at Malibu, marijuana becoming both a sacramen
t of his free existence and part of his pre-performance ritual, then a part of the joy of riding, a way of taking himself into his own body, but then quit two years ago at the age of twenty-seven after being rejected in love, had turned back to the church and his family, started work full time, won the girl back, married her, then started again, even though he felt he shouldn’t, because, as he told her, telling her this while he was stoned, she wasn’t, “a tool for seeing the divine, like out there now”—both of them standing together on the beach at Oil Piers looking out along the pier seeing a wave silently loom up under the strutwork, dark, then emerald green, taking in sunlight through the back, diffusing it, spreading it in a moving glow gliding steadily toward them, all translucent along its face, all green motion and form—“I can feel the whole weight of that wave actually moving through my head, I mean feel it, its reality, and can merge into it becoming one with that moving part of the entire breathing apparatus of the planet . . .”) the same feeling. “You know, man,” Hoefer said, “I get it in church. You ought to go to church with me. Why don’t you?”

  “I mean,” Hansen said, “it was with my little brother, you know, like I’d dropped a tab and went out at C Street and Donny was out and we started paddling up to Stables without saying anything, it was just like that, we looked at one another and I went into it, like, well . . . wow . . .”

  “Yeah,” Hofer said, giving the pipe back.

  “You want some? I’ll lay some on you.”

  “Acid?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, man,” said Hoefer, “I already know, you see.”

  He shook his head at the offered pipe.

  “You sure?”

  “I know.” Hoefer laughed. “That’s what I said.”

  Hansen laughed. He took another toke off the pipe, then dumped the ashes out the window. “Bye,” he said.

  “Right.” Hoefer laughed. “That’s it, you know. It’s a groovy feeling.”

  “It was really beautiful,” Hansen said, “like all I had to do was remember, you know, just remember.”