Not every person on the bus was on that journey. Some were leading regular lives. Coming back from visiting family. Going to the city to look for work. But history tends to forget that majority who are merely keeping on keeping on, and one in five believed they were going on to something bigger and better, traveling inexorably toward some higher place—ignoring the fact that in reality many of them were also moving away. Leaving behind old places, old people, old lives, casting them off like old clothes, skins that chaffed and constrained. Most who arrived in San Francisco that year were barely old enough to have given old lives a chance, but all knew they were ready for something new. Something different.
That this was their time.
And so Marion clamped down on the tension in her guts, telling herself it was unworthy of this great adventure, that worrying about where she was going to sleep was precisely the style of petty bourgeois bullshit she’d left Illinois to escape. Nonetheless, she was relieved when the girl next to her—a petite and serious-looking girl from South Dakota, wearing what Marion guessed was her grandfather’s waistcoat (over otherwise very straight clothes) in an attempt to look fashionably old-timey, a single layer of hippie on top of a hometown girl—turned nervously to her.
Her name was Katie, and she’d climbed onto the bus late the previous evening, in Montana. It had been pretty full, with many seats taken up with people crashed out full-length, and the girl had stood in the aisle, looking apprehensive.
Marion moved along her seat and smiled up at her. “There’s room next to me.”
Katie sat gratefully. The two girls had talked a little since, though Marion spent much of the night looking at the darkness out the window. Katie had slept, or read.
“Do you have somewhere to stay tonight?”
“No,” Marion admitted. She had enough money for maybe three nights in a cheap hotel, five if it was really cheap. After that she’d be putting herself in the hands of fate.
“So what are you going to do?”
Marion shrugged, glad of the chance to appear unfazed, cool, and finding that—for a moment at least—it made her feel that way too. “I don’t know. Ask around, I guess?”
“Can we do it together? Look for a place?”
“Sure,” Marion said, and smiled. She was aware this would make it harder, but she could tell that Katie needed reassurance, and a temporary friend.
“Don’t worry about a thing,” a voice said from behind.
Marion and Katie turned cautiously. A girl with a huge frizz of red hair was leaning toward them, elbows on the back of their seat. “My cousin,” she said. “Been here a month, got a place. He says there’s space for me. If we scrunch up small, there’s space for three, right? I’m Cindy, by the way.”
“Are you sure?”
The girl grinned, broad and crooked, the grin of a girl who was sure about pretty much everything. “My mom’s annoying as hell, but I don’t think she’d lie to me about my actual name.”
Marion laughed. “About the house, she means.”
“That too. Done deal. And it’s right in Haight. You’ve heard of Haight, yes?”
Of course they had. Haight-Ashbury, the wellspring of everything that was going on in the city—in the whole world—and the epicenter of cool. Marion nodded, her stomach relaxing. See? The world was on her side.
She was inevitable.
Forty minutes later the three girls got off the bus together, brave new spirits arriving in the promised land.
Five weeks later Marion moved out of the house. It was a Sunday, and she left in the late morning and tried to find Katie and Cindy before she went. Though she was tired and hungover, she was dogged, and eventually located Cindy under some guy in one of the bedrooms. Both were passed out, as were the six other people spread around the room. Thirty seconds of poking in the side from Marion resulted in the redhead eventually opening her eyes, one more slowly than the other.
“I’m leaving,” Marion said. “Catch you soon, okay?”
Cindy looked at her without apparent recognition, blinked, and then passed out again.
Katie was nowhere to be found. The girl had steered clear of anything stronger than pot since the disaster at the end of the first week, so Marion thought she was most likely fine, and at her waitressing job. Katie’s shit was pretty much together.
On the way out Marion passed the kitchen. She preferred to pass this room whenever possible, on the grounds that it was safer than actually going in. The place was a health hazard, as she knew to both her cost, and benefit.
Everybody was super-enthusiastic about experimenting with cooking—on very limited budgets, people who until recently had relied upon their moms to fill their plates, and who therefore had only vague and idealistic ideas of how you turned raw ingredients into something edible—but much less good about clearing up the mess afterward. That’d be too square, too obsessed with appearances, too much the way their appallingly unhip parents did things. And so the sink was piled precariously high with dirty plates, and the cold, murky water a minefield of silverware, while the counters, floor, and parts of the walls were encrusted with multiple layers of grime and spilled remnants of food.
Marion estimated that she’d lost seven pounds in weight since arriving in Frisco. Katie was holding steady, because she got one square meal a day where she worked and could actually cook a little, too. Marion had long-ago clocked the fact that Katie’s timid request that they find a berth together on that first day had been not a sign of weakness but indicative of a quiet, focused ability to judge the best way of achieving what she needed. Meanwhile, a diet of sex and drugs seemed to be suiting Cindy just fine.
There was a guy in the kitchen. At first Marion didn’t realize who it was, because everybody looked pretty similar. Denim. Layers of shirts and waistcoats. Long hair. When he turned toward the door, she saw it was Dylan.
“Hey,” he said. His voice was a croak, his eyes bloodshot. He peered at her face for a long moment, then at her backpack. “You, you’ve, like, got your bag.”
“Right. I’m leaving.”
“Cool. I mean, why?”
Dylan was Cindy’s cousin. The guy who’d opened the door when they arrived, already majestically high, and said sure, come join the party, step right in and pull up a joint. Which was basically how it had gone on—a tidal, day-after-day party, under the influence of one thing or another, or more often several things at the same time.
On that first night, and for the next week or so, it had seemed utterly exotic and far out and exactly what they’d come to the city for. Everybody was talking nonstop about the Revolution, and what they could do to help set the old ways on fire. Planning meetings for anti-war protests. Impromptu jam sessions, where an inability to play an instrument was no barrier. Long—freakin’ endless—discussions about how to get the message of what was happening from here out into the world at large. It was only as the second week wore on and the effects of consecutive hangovers began to take their toll that Marion began to get a clearer fix on her situation.
The house—though a tall, narrow, and dilapidated Victorian of approximately the same style—was not in the Haight district after all, but a fifteen-minute uphill walk away in a neighborhood that was far less happening and much more scary, especially at night. Each room looked like some other entire house had been upended into it: An ever-evolving chaos of guitars, art materials, half-finished canvasses—some of which had been used multiple times, shadows of earlier terrible paintings dimly visible under the current image—stained mattresses, dirty clothes, fliers and posters, discarded take-out food containers, and a screen-printing contraption that a number of very stoned people had tried to fix several times and so was destined to never work again.
And people.
God, yes, people.
When Marion and Katie arrived, there were already at least four sleeping to a room. Every day, though people came and went, that average had increased. Generally, newcomers knew at least one person in the hou
se, or had met someone before. It had been getting up in the small hours to take a pee—and don’t even try to imagine what the bathroom was like—to find a complete stranger passed out in there, his penis hanging flaccidly out of his pants, that made up Marion’s mind to leave. This was not the scene she’d come to be a part of. There was somewhere better, and she was the girl to find it.
“You know there’s some half-naked dude in the john?”
“I just talked to him. He’s okay.”
“So who is he?”
“I have literally no idea.”
He beamed. Marion liked Dylan, she really did. Though apparently incapable of turning down any intoxicant that was passed in front of him, he seemed solid in the core. Or relatively so. Some of the others . . . not so much. A few, not even a little bit. There were people who’d brought darkness with them, or an emptiness so deep and profound it was somehow even worse. She needed to spend more time in the city before unconditional acceptance of others was going to play for her, and preferably do it somewhere that didn’t smell of burned lentils and armpits. She knew there were houses where the cool/chaos balance was better. She needed to find one of those.
Dylan took a gulp of coffee, and winced. “So where are you going?”
“Met a guy in City Lights yesterday. He said he knew somewhere I could stay. Less crowded.”
Dylan raised an eyebrow. “Hot guy?”
She laughed. “No. Old.”
“They’re the worst.”
“Not this one. Or, I don’t think. He seems cool. If it’s a problem I’ll bail.”
“Cindy will be bummed you’ve gone.”
Marion wasn’t too sure about that. The primary message she’d been getting from the other girl in the last couple weeks was that she felt Marion wasn’t letting her hair down hard or fast or often enough, and that she was bordering on being officially uncool. “Tell her I’ll see her soon.”
“But you’re coming Tuesday afternoon, right?”
The event half the house had been preparing for. “Of course. And look, also tell Katie I’ll drop by in the next couple days, okay? Tell her especially.”
“You got it.”
Marion was pretty sure he’d have forgotten by the time she left the house, but she thanked him and walked out the door into the sunshine on a mission.
He’d said he’d meet her in the bookstore at five-thirty, but at nearly seven o’clock she was still in the poetry room upstairs, waiting. Wondering, too, if she’d made a mistake. It wasn’t unrecoverable: if the guy failed to turn up, she could simply hike back to the house and say it didn’t work out and people would shrug and pass a joint and that would be that.
But she didn’t want to. It would feel dumb.
It would be a big fail.
So she stayed there, as the day faded outside, watching people cooing over the books, explaining poems to each other, necking, hanging out. After a while the lights began to look strange to her, a souvenir of the disaster in the first week. After three days in the house she’d gone with Katie and Cindy to a big happening in the park—somewhat reluctantly, because though she totally wanted to go, her stomach had been feeling weird since breakfast. It was crowded and sunny and loud and fun, and The Dead played a set, and there had been buckets of Kool-Aid and friendly people encouraging newcomers to quench their thirst, and maybe some of the drinkers had known what they were getting into, but not all of them.
Sure as hell not Marion and Katie, and that’s why Marion had reason to be thankful for the unsanitary conditions of the kitchen of the house. It turned out her stomach gripes were the harbinger of a violent food poisoning episode that suddenly had her vomiting into the bushes—purging her body of a large portion of the LSD before it had time to kick in.
Katie had not been so lucky. She’d spent the next eight hours on a roller-coaster of alternating laugh-out-loud euphoria and catastrophic paranoia, including a long episode where she’d been convinced that the wide grass of the park was in fact a part of the bay. She’d infected Marion with this vision, and the two of them spent a period of unknown duration clinging to each other, trembling, convinced they were on an invisible raft slowly spiraling around a cove, while everybody else danced and sang and ran in circles.
Eventually Marion (who’d only been suffering about 20% of the effects, but was still intermittently barfing) managed to get the two of them back to the house, where someone far more experienced managed to plane them back toward normality with a regimen of herb teas, chocolate, and pot.
Marion and Katie decided the next morning that the doors of their perception were quite wide enough already, and had steered the hell clear of LSD ever since. There were times when Marion still felt affected, though that had to be an illusion, surely. It’d been a month now. But certain types of light still looked strange to her, as if the glow existed between her and the object causing it, rather than in the lamp or bulb itself. And once in a while she heard . . .
She could hear it now, in fact.
Music.
A faint single line of notes, which—though she assumed it was something she’d heard in the park that afternoon, and had become locked in her head—was unlike anything she’d heard before. Different from what she’d normally think of as music, in fact—though a lot of local musicians liked to explore those kind of sounds, to show how liberated they were from outdated conceptions of melodic yadda yadda yadda.
This was a little louder than she’d heard it before—so much so that she turned in her seat to look out of the window, expecting to see some guy with a flute (she thought that’s probably what it was, though she wasn’t sure, maybe a piccolo or something) busking on the sidewalk.
Fog had begun to roll in. The Broadway/Columbus crossroads was pretty crowded—this borderland between Chinatown and North Beach had become a mecca for both real hippies and buses of tourists who came to gawk at them—but there was nobody obviously playing.
After a moment, however, she spotted something (or someone) else, and got up and hurried down, out of the store.
The man was standing on the corner.
Short, half-bald, rather stooped and overweight. His nose was large, the skin of his face liberally sprinkled with moles, some disconcertingly large. Though his clothes looked as though they had once been well-tailored, they were now somewhat shabby. Not at all a hot guy, bottom line.
“Hey,” Marion said, diffidently, as she approached. “I thought you weren’t coming.”
“Aha,” he said. His voice was soft, with the trace of an accent. “There you are.”
“You said to meet inside. At five-thirty.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was hard today. I couldn’t finish in time.”
“Finish what?”
He shook his head. “It’s done. Come. Follow me.”
Twenty minutes later he suddenly stopped walking. Marion had been getting more and more confused—they were heading away from the places where people actually lived, the kind of people she knew anyhow—but for an older guy he walked super-fast, a relentless beetling motion that covered the ground quickly. She asked at one point if they could take a streetcar instead, but he just shook his head again.
“Why are we here?”
They were standing in front of a tall, weathered building in the Financial District, on a narrow side street at the corner of California and Battery. The structures here were tall, constructed of stone or sometimes brick, making the alleyway feel like a canyon. There was a sense of heavy permanence to the area, despite the excavations they’d passed farther up Market, part of the process of installing the new BART/Muni system. Everything in sight seemed to be either a bank or business, apart from a battered neon sign on the opposite corner for something called YUGGOTH wreathed in the fog coming in more and more thickly from the bay.
The old man didn’t answer. Instead he stood looking at her, head cocked to the side, his sharp blue eyes narrowed, as he’d been doing when Marion first noticed him, in City Light
s on the previous afternoon. “Do you see me?” he’d asked then.
She’d frowned. “Well, yeah.”
He nodded, and somehow from there they’d got to how she came to be in the city, and where she was living, and its insufficiency. He’d made the offer of somewhere to stay, and her initial reaction had been to laugh—she’d been hit on at least three times a day since she’d been there, though you weren’t supposed to see it that way because everybody (or the guys, mainly) were framing rampant promiscuity as “generosity of spirit,” something they were all supposed to have.
Cindy had discovered enormous generosity within herself, very quickly. The very first night, in fact. Katie was having no truck with the whole concept—you can take the girl out of the prairie, but extracting the prairie from the girl is a whole other thing. Marion was adopting a wait-and-see policy and trying to be open about it, but she was damned sure this elderly, foreign-looking guy wasn’t going to break the dam.
She realized he wasn’t looking salacious, however, or hopeful or even desperate. More thoughtful, even a little sad. Sometimes you’d see that in older guys—an awareness of how undignified and gross their lingering drives were making them appear—but it didn’t seem to be that either. If anything he looked paternal, and not in a weird way.
So she’d agreed.
The building they were now standing in front of looked even more ancient than the others around it. Battered, stained, stoic. As the old man got out keys, Marion noticed the name PENTIMENTO chiseled into the stone above the door.
“Italian?” she asked.
“I believe so.”
He opened the door and they stepped into a cramped vestibule. The old man flicked a switch and a pale, dusty bulb illuminated the space. Scuffed-up floorboards, stone walls. In the corner, rusted ironwork in front of a tiny elevator.
The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming Page 13