Chester Anderson: The Butterfly Kid

“Butterflies, you say?” Mike had now said four complete sentences, using a different voice for each, and the kid was growing nervous, very carefully keeping both hands open and fingers widely separated.

“Hey,” I blurted, “that’s right! I haven’t even introduced myself yet.” It was a clumsy non sequitur, but it just might turn the tone back toward casual and comfortable conversation, I hoped. “My name’s Chester,” I drove on. “You,” an enormous concession, “can call me Chet.” We shook hands formally. “Where are you from?”

The butterfly that fluttered where our hands had met was extravagantly baroque, and Mike, his cool now wholly blown, overtly goggled.

“Howdy, Mister Dillon,” the kid drawled. Every Chester in America hates that line. Usually when I hear it, I deliver a short prepared speech on the evils of TV and memorized wit, but I had other fish to fry at the moment, so I let it pass.

“Yeah,” I sighed. “ Where did you say you’re from?”

The ornate handshake butterfly was perversely circling Mike’s head, he swiveling pompously about to keep it in view, and I hoped it’d go away and he’d follow it. From the look on his face, if it did he would.

“I’m from Fort Worth,” said the kid, forgetting about Mike. “I just got here Saturday, last Saturday. I’m a lead guitar player.”

Fine. A bull teenybopper with butterflies. Just what the Village always needed. Great.

“How do you like the Village?” I asked politely. Mike was still occupied with that butterfly, and his antics (twirling about like a dignified top to keep it safely in front of him) were attracting some attention. A small herd of tourists was developing about us. I tried to keep the kid from noticing.

“It’s funny,” he said. “I mean, well, the people are kinda funny. You know, strange.” The herd was increasing, but the kid went on. “I mean, well, I went to this Party last night and, well…” He made a sweeping gesture and the air was thick with butterflies.

That’s when it hit him. He gaped at the butterflies and the crowd, dropped his jaw, then turned back toward me with panic in his eyes: precisely what I’d been trying to avoid.

People don’t make butterflies! It was a truth so basic it had never needed stating, and now Sean’s universe was crumbling in lepidoptera.

“And what else can you do?” breathed Mike at this worst of all possible moments.

And all the stunned while, the sentence Sean had been working on, impelled by its own momentum, dribbled out one word at a time. “I went to this Party and they gave me this Pill…”

Phuip! Where he’d been was just a kid-shaped heap of butterflies.

There was scattered light applause. Somebody threw us a copper quarter. Then the butterflies and tourists drifted off. A mixed bag of teenyboppers wafted past us unawares. In the distance a Good Humor man plaintively cried his wares.

“Hmm.” Mike stared at me with his very best hurt look. A plaid butterfly landed on his knee and he slapped at it petulantly. I hate to see grown men petulantly slapping innocent plaid butterflies.

“Coffee?” I suggested. No response. I stood up, rescued the debased quarter from an approaching wino, and started toward MacDougal Street. Michael came along, still looking hurt. Whenever a butterfly approached, he ducked. He seemed to be dancing Swan Lake.

At last, “You gave me your Solemn Word,” he said earnestly, “that you weren’t going to doctor my orange juice anymore. In fact, you Promised.”

So that’s what was bothering him. “No, Mike,” I swore. “That was all real. Honest.”

“That kid? And all those…”

“The whole bit, baby.” My public image at the time involved a cultivated smattering of hip jargon, which I undertook to speak with a distinctly Liverpudlian accent. The tourists expected it.

Mike brooded a little. Then, “No LSD?” he asked.

Just once I’d spiked his orange juice, just once.

“Not a bit.”

“You really saw it, too?”

“Everybody saw it. Honestly, Mike, it really happened.”

But he wasn’t convinced until he overheard two nuns talking about the strange butterflies and one ancient chess player named David explaining how freak air currents sometimes blew migratory butterflies off course, and even then he had reservations. I’d played a regrettable series of complicated jokes on Mike a few years back, and he wouldn’t put it past me to be in collusion with a brace of nuns and old David.

However, as we strolled down MacDougal toward West Third, Mike’s expression moved slowly back to the bland malevolence that passed for normal with him. By the time we reached The Garden of Eden, the coffeehouse our people frequented that year, he was chattering animatedly about an elaborate joint deception we were working on.

We peered past the awful paintings in the foggy plate-glass window to see who was there. Everybody does this — even the Law — even though he’ll be inside in a few seconds.

Moving toward the door, Mike said, in total explanation, “Contact high?”

“Right.”

“Obviously.”

It had been that kind of summer.

CONTACT HIGH!

We heard those words at least ten times before Bonnie-Sue, the day girl, brought our coffee. Ever since last May, when an anonymous philanthropist had distributed magic mushrooms free to everyone in the Village who’d accept them, imposing on Lower Manhattan a whole week of psychedelic fun and chaos… ever since then, contact high had been the standard explanation for all impossibilities, and the impossible had lately grown quite common in the Village.

Not that this explained very much. A contact high was only the subjective response to someone else’s real high, and we had no proof that there actually was such a thing. No matter. We were able to make do with precious little explanation in those days.

“…and then man (dig it) this cat starts whistlin’ Bach, man! Like, I’m thinkin’, ‘da Di — pa-ba Diddilly…’ you dig? An’ this cat’s inside my Head, man! An’ he’s got this like Orchestra! Oh WoW!” Little Micky was on the customary verge of hysteria.

“Contact high,” M. T. Bear and I chanted in jagged unison, and Little Micky donned his shades and said Oh WoW again and split. We’d met him at the door.

The Garden of Eden was a long, dark, ostentatiously air-conditioned cave with black walls, and our group’s table was the big round one halfway to the rear. We greeted Joe at the cash register (“Hey, you know what? Guess who had one of them contact highs last night. Me! Yeah, me. Honest to God! I musta been outta my skull: givin’ everybody free coffee onna house! Nin’y t’ree dollars ’n’ change, Christ!”) and journeyed tableward from greeting to greeting, eavesdropping here and there en route (“I had the nicest contact high last night and I don’t even know who it was !” ), moving with all the cozy pomp of celebrities in a gathering of celebrities. The Garden of Eden, as a Gestalt, treated everyone like a celebrity that year, which might as well explain its popularity. The trip from door to table was wearying but wondrously flattering, a potent drug on which, we’d neither of us admit to being hooked.

“I’m getting tired of this place,” Michael muttered as we sat down.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Same old faces, same old talk.” We were lying.

We were the first members of our circle there that morning, so Mike pulled a paperback mystery out of his right hip pocket, I took a spiral-bound notebook out of my briefcase, and we settled down to kill a little time. Neither of us mentioned butterflies.