As crops in the sun grew fatter, flowered, more densely aromatic, as resinous breezes swept out of the gulches to scent the town day and night, the sky over Vineland County, which had allowed the bringing of life, now began to reveal a potential for destroying it. Pale blue unmarked little planes appeared, on days of VFR unlimited nearly invisible against the sky, flown by a private vigilante squadron of student antidrug activists, retired military pilots, government advisers in civvies, off-duty deputies and troopers, all working under contract to CAMP and being led by the notorious Karl Bopp, former Nazi Luftwaffe officer and subsequently useful American citizen. During these weeks of surveillance, helicopter and plane crews were beginning to assemble each morning in a plasterboard ready room out in the flats below Vineland, near the airport, waiting for Kommandant Bopp to appear in the full regalia of his old profession and announce Der Tag.
Up in Holytail, the growers hung around at Piggy’s Tavern and Restaurant, discussing, in an atmosphere of mounting anxiety, the general dilemma of when to harvest. The longer you waited, the better the crop, but the better, too, your chances of getting hit by the CAMP invaders. Storm and frost probabilities, and personal paranoia thresholds, also figured in. Sooner or later Holytail was due for the full treatment, from which it would emerge, like most of the old Emerald Triangle, pacified territory—reclaimed by the enemy for a timeless, defectively imagined future of zero-tolerance drug-free Americans all pulling their weight and all locked in to the official economy, inoffensive music, endless family specials on the Tube, church all week long, and, on special days, for extra-good behavior, maybe a cookie.
With surveillance farther up the watershed and over the ridge-lines quickening, so had the civic atmosphere down in Vineland taken on an edge, traffic downtown and in the lots at the malls grown snappish and loud with car horns and deliberate backfires, boat owners anxiously in and out of parts places several times a day, reports of naval movement, at least one aircraft carrier sighted on station just off Patrick’s Point, and AWACS planes in the air round the clock now, not to mention the Continental charm of Kommandant Bopp all over the local news, as he, often in Nazi drag, declared his “volunteer” sky force at maximum readiness. Something waited, over a time horizon that not even future participants could describe. Once-carefree dopers got up in the middle of the night, hearts racing, and flushed their stashes down the toilet. Couples married for years forgot each other’s names. Mental-health clinics all over the county reported waiting lists. Seasonal speculation arose as to who might be secretly on the CAMP payroll this year, as if the monster program were by now one more affliction, like bad weather or a plant disease. The cooking in the cafés got worse, and police started flagging down everybody on the highways whose looks they didn’t like, which resulted in massive traffic snarls felt as far away as 101 and I–5. A parrot smuggler in an all-chrome Kenworth/Fruehauf combination known as the Stealth Rig, nearly invisible on radar, swooping by law enforcement with the touch-me-not authority of a UFO, showed up late one Saturday afternoon, parked beside 101 just across the bridge in unincorporated county, and sold out his entire load before the sheriff even heard about it, as if the town, already jittery, just went parrot-crazy the minute they saw these birds, kept drunk and quiet on tequila for days, ranked out in front of the great ghostly eighteen-wheeler, bundles of primary color with hangovers, their reflections stretching and blooming along the side of the trailer. Soon there was scarcely a house in Vineland that didn’t have one of these birds, who all spoke English with the same peculiar accent, one nobody could identify, as if a single unknown bird wrangler somewhere had processed them through in batches—“All right, you parrots, listen up!” Instead of the traditional repertoire of short, often unrelated phrases, the parrots could tell full-length stories—of humorless jaguars and mischief-seeking monkeys, mating competitions and displays, the coming of humans and the disappearance of the trees—so becoming necessary members of households, telling bedtime stories to years of children, sending them off to alternate worlds in a relaxed and upbeat set of mind, though after a while the kids were dreaming landscapes that might have astonished even the parrots. In Van Meter’s tiny house behind the Cucumber Lounge, the kids, perhaps under the influence of the house parrot, Luis, figured out a way to meet, lucidly dreaming, in the same part of the great southern forest. Or so they told Van Meter. They tried to teach him how to do it, but he never got much closer than the edge of the jungle—if that’s what it was. How cynical would a man have to be not to trust these glowing souls, just in from flying all night at canopy level, shiny-eyed, open, happy to share it with him? Van Meter had been searching all his life for transcendent chances exactly like this one the kids took so for granted, but whenever he got close it was like, can’t shit, can’t get a hardon, the more he worried the less likely it was to happen. . . . It drove him crazy, though most of the time he could keep from taking it out on others, what muttering he did do just lost as usual in the ambient uproar of the day, often oppressive enough to force him out of the cabin on gigs like this, though it meant a long, intimidating drive upward through crowds of tall trees, perilous switchbacks, one-lane stretches hugging the mountainsides, pavement not always there—then a sunset so early he thought at first something must have happened, an eclipse, or worse. He nearly lost his way in the dark but was guided by its own pale violet glow at last to the Blackstream Hotel, which loomed up in an array of dim round lights that seemed to cover much of the sky. He’d heard about the place but had no idea it was this big.
Tonight all he’d brought was an ancient Fender Precision bass that he’d taken the frets off of himself back around ’76, when he heard about Jaco Pastorius doing the same to a Jazz Bass. Van Meter had seen in the act further dimensions, the abolition of given scales, the restoration of a premodal innocence in which all the notes of the universe would be available to him. He filled in the grooves with boat epoxy and drew lines where the frets had been, just to help him through the transition. Now, years later, with all but murky outlines of that epiphany long faded, he figured fretless at least was a good choice for this crowd, who, though they didn’t respond to much, seemed noticeably to perk up whenever Van Meter took long wavering woo-woo-woo-type glides on his instrument, something they could relate to, he imagined, though admittedly he didn’t know that much about Thanatoids.
They’re ev’ry . . .
Place that ya go,
Down ev’ry
Row that ya hoe,
Somehow, ya
Just ne-ver know, say it ain’t so,
Thanatoid World!
They’re ringin’
Sales at the store,
They’re standin’
Guard at the door,
They’re turnin’
Tricks on the floor, that ’n’ much more,
Thanatoid World!
They’ve got that,
Tha-natoid stare,
They’ve got that,
Tha-natoid hair,
They’ve, got, that,—there’s
A Tha-natoid, there’s
A Tha-natoid (where?)
Right There!
So if you’re
Desp’rate some night,
You never
Know but you might,
Just step on
In-to the light, clear out of sight,
Thanatoid World!
A kind of promotional jingle more than a song, and about as up-tempo as anything would get around here tonight, the ’Toids preferring minor chords and a dragged recessional pulse. Gestures in the direction of rock and roll were discouraged, though blues licks were allowed to pass. The band was a twist-era puttogether, two saxes, two guitars, piano, and rhythm. From somewhere mildew-prone and unvisited, the hotel staff had brought piles of old-time Combo-Ork arrangements of pop standards, including Thanatoid favorites like “Who’s Sor
ry Now?,” “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” and the perennially requested “As Time Goes By.” Van Meter had to keep forcing himself to slow down, not to mention the drummer, whose brightness of eye, wetness of lip, and frequent visits to the men’s lounge suggested a personality at best impatient, and who now and then liked to explode into these ear-assaulting self-expressive solos, hollering “All right!” and “Party Time!” Despite his enthusiasm, the beat, as the evening went on, only grew slower. It was to be an all-night rallentando. Van Meter had played reds parties, where a number of bikers and biker women got in a room, took barbiturates, and nodded out, this being, basically, the party, which compared to this gig were evenings filled with vivacity and mirth. After a while just getting through 32 bars took a whole set. The dancing, rudimentary to begin with, tended toward gig’s-end stillness, as conversation grew less and less meaningful to what few outsiders had blundered in, shunpike tourists who had only a dim idea tonight of just how far from the freeways they’d come. “Chickeeta, what’s with all these people?”
“See how slow they’re moving, Dr. Elasmo!”
“It’s Larry, remember?”
“Ups, rilly. . . .”
“Uh-oh, here comes one of them, now remember, it’s not the office, OK?”
“Evening . . . folks . . . you . . . seem . . . to . . . be . . . from . . . out . . . of . . . town. . . .” It took some time to get said, and both Dr. Larry Elasmo, D.D.S., and his receptionist Chickeeta began to break in more than once, mistaking for pauses the silences between his words. Because Thanatoids relate in a different way to time, there was no compression toward the ends of sentences, so that they always ended by surprise. “Wait, I think I know you now,” continued the slow-talking Thanatoid, who turned out to be Weed Atman in his eye-catching Spandex tuxedo, “we had appointments . . . kept rescheduling . . . years ago? Down south?”
“Maybe you saw one of Doctor’s commercials?” Chickeeta suggested, while the embarrassed Dr. Elasmo went “Larry! Larry!” out of the side of his mouth. These days he ran a chain of discount dental franchises called Doc Holliday’s, famous for its $49.95 OK Corral Family Special, advertising in all major market areas in the West—but back when he’d crossed Weed’s path he’d been a low-rent credit dentist known around San Diego for his stridently hypnotic, often incoherent radio and TV commercials. Somehow, in Weed’s deathstunned memory, Dr. Elasmo’s video image had swept, had pixeldanced in, to cover, mercifully, for something else, an important part of what had happened to him in those penultimate days at College of the Surf, but faces, things done to him that he could not . . . quite. . . .
It was right at the steepest part of his curve of descent into irresponsibility, or, as he defined it at the time, love, with Frenesi Gates, and he was spending a lot of hours out on the freeway, going through the empty exercise of trying to fool Jinx, who was having a relapse into anger and hiring private detectives to keep an eye on everybody. One day, as Weed was heading for a strip of motels in Anaheim, doing about seventy, palms aching and dry, pulse knocking in his throat, awash in thoughts of incredibly seeing Frenesi again, whom should he notice, first in his mirror, then slowly drawing abreast in the lane to his left, but the well-known video toothyanker himself, in a long chocolate Fleetwood, clearly on his own horny way to an illicit rendezvous—a deep glittering sideswung gaze, flipping away to check the road, then back to stare at Weed again, the two of them blasting along at dangerous speed, up and down hills, around curves, weaving among flatbeds and motorheads, Weed at first pretending not to see, then, tentatively, nodding back. But there was only that stare, chilling in its certainty that it knew who Weed was. Soon, in beach-town bars and country saloons, in rock and roll hideaways up canyons full of snakes and LSD laboratories, anyplace inside a hundred-mile radius that Weed and Frenesi tried to slip away for a quiet minute, there at some nearby table would be the silent, staring Dr. Larry Elasmo, or a person wearing, like a coverall and veil, his ubiquitous screen image, grainy, flickering at the edges . . . usually in the company of a tanned and lovely young blonde who might or might not have been the same one as last time.
In some way, as it developed, the lascivious tooth physician enjoyed a franchise to meddle in the lives and with the precious time of people he didn’t even know—one that Weed, beached these years beside the Sea of Death, still didn’t understand. Somehow the Doc had been authorized in those days to send people, Weed included, a form that required them to come to his offices at a certain time. No-show penalties were never exactly spelled out, only hinted at. The place was all the way downtown, in a setting of old brick hotels, sailors’ bars, aging palm trees towering above the streetlights—a stark sprawling maze of cheap partitions inside a gutted former public, perhaps federal, building, now stained and ruinous, its classical columns airbrushed black with fine grime on their streetward halves, except for the fluting, letters across the frieze overhead long chiseled away, no longer readable, ascended toward by a broad littered flight of steps that seethed with visitors on appointments, small business deals up and down at all levels and into the great echoing cement lobby, lined with geometric statues who loomed overhead, staring down like the saints of whatever faith this building had served.
Weed could have ignored the form in the mail, but he was haunted by that first gleaming whammy on the freeway, so he showed up on time and wearing a jacket and tie, but had to wait, as it turned out all day, in the bullpen just off the lobby, on a flimsy folding chair, nothing to read but propaganda leaflets and withered newsmagazines from months gone by, afraid even to go out and look for lunch. This was to happen again and again. Dr. Elasmo always ran late, sometimes days late, but each time he insisted Weed fill out a postponement form, including “Reason (explain fully),” as if it were Weed’s fault. Weed felt more and more guilty as he became an old bullpen regular, one of a throng of what should plainly have been dental cases but always proved to be something else, none of them smiling, who passed nervously both ways through the gates in the railing that stood like a bar in a courtroom, an altar rail in a church, between the public side and the office penetralia full of their mysteries. Sometimes Dr. Elasmo would be rolling a table carrying a tray of shining—why couldn’t Weed ever make them out clearly, was it the low-wattage light in the place?—dental equipment of some kind? “Welcome to Dr. Larry’s World of Discomfort,” he would whisper, going through the paperwork. There was a recurring message, one too deep for Weed, always about paper. “I can’t accept this form. This will all have to be renegotiated. Rewritten. You’ll figure it out.” It was some long, ongoing transaction, carried on, like dentistry, in a currency of pain inflicted, pain withheld, pain drugged away, pain become amnesia, how much and how often . . . sometimes Ilse, the hygienist, stood waiting by a door into a corridor, leading, he knew, to a bright high room with a tiny window at the top, impossibly far away, some blade of sky . . . she was holding something . . . something white and . . . he couldn’t remember. . . .
And Weed at the close of the workday would go back down the chipped and crumbling steps, back across a borderline, invisible but felt at its crossing, between worlds. It was the only way to say it. Inside, at that well-known address he could no longer remember, was an entirely different order of things. He was being exposed to it gradually during these repeated, required visits. Each time there he returned to PR3 less sure about anything—deeply confused about Frenesi, whom he loved but didn’t completely trust, because of gaps in her story, absences neither she nor anyone else in 24fps would explain. He was also being driven ever crazier by the swarm of disciples who clustered around him more thickly and frantically as days gathered and a feeling of crisis began to grow, all making the basic revolutionary mistake, boobish, cheerful, more devoted the louder he screamed at and insulted them. “Yes my guru! Anything—chicks, dope, jump off the cliff, name it!” Tempting, especially that part about the cliff—but even more seductiv
e were the seekers of free advice. “Weed, how about picking up the gun? We know it’s supposed to be wrong, but we don’t know why.”
Once he would have proclaimed, “Because in this country nobody in power gives a shit about any human life but their own. This forces us to be humane—to attack what matters more than life to the regime and those it serves, their money and their property.” But these days he was saying, “It’s wrong because if you pick up a rifle, the Man picks up a machine gun, by the time you find some machine gun he’s all set up to shoot rockets, begin to see a pattern?” Between these two replies, something had happened to him. He was still preaching humane revolution, but seemed darkly exhausted, unhopeful, snapping at everybody, then apologizing. If anybody caught this change, it was much too late to make a difference. They still came trooping up the alley to Rex’s place at Las Nalgas, like ducklings looking for a mother. Surf, somewhere hidden in the fog, didn’t crash so much as collapse on itself, wetly over and over. Though he lived there, Rex didn’t show up much at these gatherings anymore, having finalized his own plans to fly off to Paris and join whatever was left of the Vietnamese section of the Fourth International. “It’ll never work,” Weed told him, “you’re an Anglo, who’ll trust you?”
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