Dan Wakefield - Home Free

Several joints and several Wild Turkeys later a slim, cool-looking guy came in, handed something to the typist, took some message notes she gave to him, riffled through them, slipped one in his pocket, crumpled the others, and dropped them on the floor beside him. He came out to the other room, poured a Wild Turkey, but just before he brought it to his mouth grimaced, looked around the room, then at Starkie, asked, “What kind of shit is that you’re playing?”

“Stone Hinge,” Starkie said.

The guy shook his head, then sighed.

“Well,” he said, “at least it’s a challenge.”

He closed his eyes and knocked down the shot of Wild Turkey.

Starkie said, “Gene’s here to see ya.”

Gene stood up.

“Belle sent me.”

Ray Behr gave a small grin, looking him over, taking him in.

“Of course,” he said.

He was brisk again, occupied.

“See you out there,” he said to Starkie. “Gene, come with me.”

Ray Behr drove a vintage silver Oldsmobile sedan, probably 1940. It was high up off the ground, and the engine sounded like the motor of a small airplane. It was hard to talk, which Gene was just as glad of. He didn’t know what to say to Ray Behr, though he already thought that he liked him. He was one of those guys who you might miss his age by ten years. You looked at him one way, he might be a very hard-living thirty. From another angle, you’d swear he was a well-kept forty. He was always moving, even standing still—tossing a key ring or fiddling with coins. He wore tight jeans, ankle-high boots, an expensive buckskin jacket, slightly fringed. Brown hair razor cut, face on the ashen side. His laugh was not funny. Amused maybe, in a distant kind of way.

They were booming around these curving roads, high up, and turned onto a dirt job, almost a path, with bumps that were jolting them around like pinballs. On a hillside, Gene saw tents. Definitely not pup. Ray Behr skidded the car up alongside some other cars and vans and a truck in a sloping meadow. They got out and Gene looked across at the tents on the hillside. There was one huge one and three or four smaller ones ringed around it. The tents were of multicolored stripes. Flags flew from them, trim little pennant jobs, whipping in the wind.

Gene looked and said, “Wow.”

“Well,” said Behr, “it’s not Camelot, but it’s better than somebody’s living room. C’mon.”

The party was to get publicity for the first album of a Group called Epidemic. Half the musicians in it looked like they’d been in one. There were six of them, playing on a raised platform in the main tent. Their own appearance didn’t match the party motif. They looked scruffy and dazed, like a juvenile gang apprehended in the heist of a truck full of Ripple. Gene figured the exotic tone of the party was maybe to take people’s attention off the Group. The tent was strewn with gaily colored pillows and long divans. A woman with dark hair, a gold headband, and a gold belt around the waist of her short white dress reclined on a purple divan, sipping champagne and examining her outstretched toes. The nails were painted gold. Every so often a man wearing a cloak, a monocle, and a top hat came to the divan and fed her a grape. She ate it, not seeming to notice the man in the cloak. Gene wondered if they were just guests, or part of the rented decor. It was hard to tell—not just about them, about anyone. He had never seen so many people in costume outside of Halloween, but this was different. Except for the hired harem serving girls, the costumes people had on were real. That is, it was what they would wear to a party, or maybe to lunch. With friends, or in public anywhere. There was an Indian princess, a pair of turbaned twenties flappers with strings of pearls and long cigarette holders, a paratrooper, motorcyclists, beachboys, swamis, and more cowboys than you’d care to count. And even real stars, famous people Gene recognized. Mama Cass! Right there, walking right by him, the real Mama Cass, in the abundant flesh. Some he didn’t recognize till he was told. A tall, pleasant-looking fellow who seemed out of place, wearing only an ordinary sport jacket, open-neck shirt, slacks, waved to Ray Behr. That was Paul Morrisey, Andy Warhol’s movie director. Gene figured looking ordinary must be his costume.

Ray Behr had to get moving now, he set Gene loose amid the marvels of the tent. Young girls in harem costumes passed silver trays with hot hors d’oeuvres, some with cold, some with neatly rolled joints, carefully arranged in patterns that harmonized with the shape of the tray. Gene took a tiny grape leaf stuffed with lamb, and a glass of champagne. After he did the grape leaf he took a joint, settled on a purple pillow, lit up, enjoyed, all of it swimming around him in the noise, the blare of Epidemic, which, if nothing else, added to the sense of disorientation. He dug it.

Every so often he caught a glimpse of Ray Behr nodding and bobbing through the crowd, giving his wry grin, laughing but looking somewhere else, then he was coming right toward Gene, a woman beside him shaking her finger, lecture fashion. Unlike most of the other women she looked quite ordinary, wearing a plain kind of baggy brown pants suit, serious black-rimmed glasses, carrying a bulky straw bag. Maybe the anonymous outfit was just her costume, maybe she worked for Warhol, too, maybe his latest star, who knew?

“Edie, this is Gene,” Ray Behr said. “Gene, will you look after Edie a moment while I attend to some matters?”

“My pleasure,” said Gene, uncurling from his pillow to stand. The woman plopped down on a gold pillow. Gene sat down again beside her.

“I’m tired,” she said. “And I don’t want any more double-talk from you people. This whole thing, it’s ridiculous, and if you call this a buffet dinner, I don’t. And what’s the point of a tent , for Godsake? It’s hot in here. And the smoke. You can hardly breathe.”

Gene didn’t know what her problem was or what he had to do with it, but he knew she was feeling lousy and mad at the world and since he was in a marvelous high feeling wonderful and at peace with the world he thought everyone else should feel that way, too. It seemed a shame if anyone didn’t feel just as good as he did, and anything he could do to help them he would.

He offered her a toke from his joint but she screwed up her face like he’d offered her a rancid prune.

“Hate that stuff,” she said.

“Then may I suggest the champagne. It’s quite excellent, and very cool.”

She looked at him suspiciously, like he was trying to trick her, but he just smiled and got her a glass of champagne.

“I noticed you before,” he said.

That part was true.

“Oh?” she asked.

He had her interest.

“You looked real. Like a real person. Not like one of these cartoon people, pretending to be something else.”

“You mean you’re not taken in by this cheap display of glitter and half nudity?”

“It’s not my scene,” he said.

That was true, too. He only wished it was.

“It’s really kind of—childish,” he said.

“Well, that’s a refreshing point of view.”

He kept feeding her. Champagne and flattery. He fed himself champagne and grass along with it. It was easy.

Suddenly a man in a French Foreign Legion uniform ran up to Gene and said Ray Behr wanted him right away.

He was put with some others in the back of Ray Behr’s mighty Olds. He didn’t know where he was going or why. He closed his eyes, smiling.

He woke on a living room couch. There was pleasant soft music, a few people talking. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. The girl he’d watched being tickled in the office came over and asked if there was anything he’d like.