Off the Rack

by Paperback Rack

Tim Buckley was living there then and he invited me to his room one time to get high. I made an excuse because I knew that the stuff he was into was way too heavy for me, but I did smoke dope a couple of times with Woody Guthrie’s daughter, who was staying on my floor at the time. Nora and I used to hang out.

  At that point, I fell asleep, dreaming about Mongolian religious chanting, which I have never heard. When I awoke I was still languid and drowsy. My covers were more mussed than usual and the notebook had fallen to the floor, pages awry. I got up to use the bathroom but afterwards, instead of getting my cereal and coffee, I got back into bed and picked up the book.

  I was not scheduled to work that day in the bookstore and I had no classes. To tell you the truth, I had not even enrolled in school that semester, although I told Lisa that I was taking classes in computer science. I don’t know why I lied to her. I don’t even know why I hadn’t shown up for registration. Unlike Holly, I didn’t have any talent or ability that ached to escape into the world. Maybe I would get up later and go grocery shopping or check the mail or watch the stories on TV. Not right now, though. I opened the book to the page I had fallen asleep to the night before and began reading again.

  I learned that the Albert Hotel was in the heart of Greenwich Village—very hippie, very musical and artistic. Holly was able to get a job playing piano and singing at a fairly jazzy bar several nights a week—mostly torch songs with a little Etta James and Bonnie Koloc thrown in for good measure. She didn’t like the cigarette smoke, but the tips were good. She mentioned that some of the patrons would comment on her black-silk hair and milk-white skin, would tell her that she looked like an American geisha.

  A month passed. Then two. She was meeting more people from the neighborhood and some of them would come to the bar where she worked. They said they came to hear her play, but she suspected that they just came to borrow money. When she told them she had to spend every penny on rent and food, they drifted away and Holly became, by default, more reclusive.

  Then came the accident. It was wintertime and Holly was trying to light the rusty old gas heater in her room when it exploded. Evidently she was not hurt badly and nothing caught fire, but Holly was knocked unconscious and most of her hair was singed off. One of her hands was burned and her throat was raw from inhaling fumes. She had to quit her job. Before she quite recovered, her room was broken into and Holly was attacked sexually and robbed of the spare cash she had kept in one of her dresser drawers. She felt like she had been thrown into a wood shredder and confesses that during the next few weeks she was disoriented; her whole concept of herself in the world had changed. I can never hope to understand it. I hope I never have to understand it.

  She had to write her parents for money, but they had never wanted her to quit school in the first place and demanded that she move back to Sarasota. She refused and stopped taking their calls. For a while, she lived on the charity (and the dope) of Nora Guthrie—one of her few remaining friends at The Albert. She had indiscriminate sex with pretty much whoever would ask and kept putting off trying to get a job. Somehow her parents got wind of how confused she was acting and gave her ultimatum: either come home or they would have her committed to an institution until they were satisfied that she was in her right mind.

  So she decided to retreat for a while, to leave New York to lick her wounds, get healthy, then go back stronger and more determined. But not to Sarasota—not to her upper-middle-class Jewish neighborhood and all her “uptight” friends. But where else could she go? By some weird chance, she got a letter from Grim Hosford. Evidently —although she doesn’t say so—they had been writing each other every so often. Although they had never been great friends, she remembered him as nonthreatening, and that was what she badly needed at that time. She called him long distance and told him about her mishaps and about her parents. Grim invited her to come to Tallahassee and stay with him until she figured out what to do. She agreed, thinking, “Why the hell not?”

  He picked me up at the airport in a 1955 Cadillac El Dorado and drove me to his apartment, which turned out to be just a room in a boarding house near the university. He had two twin beds with a desk between them. The desk, one of the beds, and much of the floor next to the second bed were covered with books. He was reading, like, six books at the same time. He hastily but carefully took the books off the bed and put my little suitcase next to it.

  “You ought to open a bookstore,” I told him. It was one of the first things I said to him since I landed.

  He looked at me with surprise. “Yeah?”

  For dinner, we walked to the university cafeteria where we met his girlfriend, who lived in the dorm nearby. She greeted me with a huge smile, but I could tell she hated me at first glance. She was an aspiring hippie and would probably achieve nothing else in her lifetime. Her name was Karen and she was the leader of a small gaggle of dorm geese, who all joined us at the table. They talked a lot about “narcs” and” heads” and how they were going to hide me from “the man.” Grim looked a little abashed, like maybe he’d been caught whacking off, but everyone put a good face on it and, in fact, they did try to help me. I made it plain that I had no intention of staying in Tallahassee more than a day or two; all I needed was a place to travel where no one would find me. We all sat in that cafeteria for three hours and talked about cheap and interesting cities. Faraway cities. It was decided that I would go to Seattle, which was just about as far away as I could get from Sarasota. I had almost no money, but everyone at the table chipped in for my fare. Anything to get me far away.

  On the way back to Grim’s room, I stepped into the road right in front of a speeding car. Karen screamed and her friends let out loud gasps. I would have been thrown fifty feet had Grim not grabbed me around the waist and jerked me back out of harm’s way. It was like he had been expecting me to do something like that. I laughed it off.

  It was crowded with all of us in Grim’s small room and the others soon left, but not before I noticed that Karen satisfied herself that the two twin beds had not been pushed together. Well, as for that . . .

  Holly left Tallahassee for Seattle, where she holed up in a hot, slummy hotel with a 300-pound professional wrestler named Ratsnake, making no plans of any kind.