Dan Wakefield - Home Free

“Care to join me?” she asked in that little girl lilt.

He cared to join her in anything, but he felt it would be best if he knew what it was, even though the question sounded so damn stupid.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Clear Light.”

“What’s that?”

“Acid, of course.”

“Acid?”

“The very best.”

He had sworn long ago he’d never do it. He figured he had just the right kind of a head for a bad trip. Only a couple days ago he had begged off dropping some acid with Ray Behr, who said it would be good for their business relationship as well as their friendship to do it together. Drop acid. He had turned down Ray Behr and now here he was sorely tempted to do it with this little girl he’d known for fifteen or twenty minutes. And knew nothing about her except she had come to the party because she knew Ray Behr. Shit! It might be a trap! Maybe Ray Behr commissioned her to come to the party and lure Gene into taking acid with her. The trouble with that was she hadn’t lured him. She had just sat there. Nor had she tried to persuade him. All she said was, “Care to join me?” That was hardly a powerful sales pitch.

Now she said with only the slightest hint of disappointment in her voice, “Don’t, if you don’t want.”

But he did want. He wanted to get all mixed up with her, no matter how.

“I do,” he said.

He put the little thing on the tip of his tongue, swallowed, and washed it down with some Bud.

She smiled.

Her name was Laura.

Nothing happened.

They kept on chatting and then after a while they got up and walked around the pretty little lakes. Gene even made so bold as to hold her hand. It gave him a tiny, thrilling little squeeze.

He wondered when the acid was supposed to start but he didn’t want to ask, he didn’t want to start sounding square again.

She wanted to ride back to town in the back of a pickup some friends of hers had so they could see the stars.

Gene said that was wonderful.

When they got to the parking lot he suddenly, without thinking about it, broke into an imitation Groucho Marx walk, doing it very fast, going around in circles. Laura laughed and clapped her hands together. Like a child, delighted.

Gene didn’t know if he did it because he was trying to keep her amused or whether it was the acid starting up.

The important thing was she came up to the room at the Marmont with him. He got her a glass of milk and him a beer.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He realized he wasn’t talking.

He realized he couldn’t.

But that was all right. He felt just fine. Nothing bad was happening, he just knew he couldn’t talk.

He wanted to reassure her, so he went to Barnes’s writing table and got a pencil and a piece of paper. He drew a large letter R on the piece of paper. He smiled and showed it to Laura.

“R?” she asked.

He nodded and smiled.

The R meant “I am all right.” See, the R was the first letter of “right” and it stood for the whole thing.

She smiled back at him. She stood up and walked around the room, slowly, picking up things, looking at them—pencil, pillow, paperback—putting them back down, laughing every once in a while. Then she came over and kissed him on the forehead.

“I’ll come back,” she said.

Gene was still smiling.

He woke up on the floor, his head resting on a large dishpan. He didn’t remember going to sleep, or getting a dishpan to put his head on. He ached like crazy. But so would anyone who’d spent the night on the floor with their head resting on a dishpan. He saw the R and remembered what it meant. That he was all right.

Evidently, he’d had a good trip. At least he could think of nothing bad about it. Except he hadn’t felt like trying to do anything about Laura, and he hadn’t even bothered to ask her last name or how to get ahold of her.

Then he remembered she said she’d be back.

She didn’t say when, though.

“Joshua Tree,” Ray Behr said thoughtfully.

“Who?” Gene asked.

“It’s a place. In the desert. I’ll take you sometime. It’s the best place in the world for dropping acid.”

“Why?”

Ray Behr looked at Gene intently and asked, speaking slowly and meaningfully, “Have you ever seen the sunrise in the desert?”

“No.”

Ray Behr smiled and walked from the room. Evidently his question was the answer.

Gene had told him about losing his cherry, acid-wise, and Ray Behr had been terrifically relieved, looking forward now to him and Gene doing it together so Gene would know him in a deeper way, find out where his head was really at.

But Ray Behr claimed he was unable to place this little girl Laura, he just drew a blank. He told Gene not to worry, there was plenty more where that came from. Gene started to explain how that wasn’t so, how fresh and incredible and wonderful this girl was, but he realized he’d only sound like a dreamy-eyed adolescent jerk. Which is exactly how he felt.

Belle said she didn’t know her either, and when Gene tried to describe Laura he evidently got too carried away and Belle turned up her nose.

“I know that type,” she said.

But not Laura.

No one seemed to know her.

A week went by. Gene went to all the parties but couldn’t find her.

But out of the blue, or the past, or both, came someone Gene had forgotten awhile, hadn’t really expected to see in this scene, and in fact he wasn’t quite in it. He was trying to crash it.

Flash.

Arguing with a security man at a party after a concert at the Santa Monica Civic. Flash had got into the concert by buying a ticket like anybody else could but anybody else couldn’t buy an invitation to the party, and that included Flash. He was trying to persuade the guard he was somebody. Gene could understand the guard’s skepticism.

Flash was wearing white buck loafers, gray flannel slacks, a Jefferson Airplane T-shirt, a red button-down sweater, and love beads. His hair was long and brushed down over his forehead in a bangs effect. He looked like he’d got his decades mixed up.

Gene got him in but after much clapping of backs and just one drink he wanted out again. He said he had just hit the Coast and he didn’t feel at home yet. He said a guy didn’t know “which way to go out here, hip or straight or God knows what else.” That explained the getup he was wearing. He was trying to go in all directions at once, just to cover himself. He kept looking nervously around the room and finally said, “Fuckin phonies. C’mon, man, let’s hit the Strip.”

Hit the Strip?

Flash had heard the Sunset Strip was something else (Gene figured he got that word somewhere around Sunapee, New Hampshire) and he was anxious to check out the famous go-go strip joint bars like the Pink Pussycat, the whole big gaudy neon strobe nude nooky but only for lookin at scene, so Gene went along though he told him it wasn’t much different than the Combat Zone in Boston and Flash just laughed and said, “Still a hick at heart, huh, man, defendin the old town.”

Gene just smiled, sat back telling Flash where to turn and which way, thinking how funny it was for him and Flash to be tooling along in L.A. in the night, who’d have thought it a year ago, and yet everyone was getting here, over the humps of the country like they showed on the geologic maps, over the humps and down into Southern California, Los Angeles, into the final slot of the American machine, the map of its playing board tilted southwest, to L.A., far out, the farthest finest final clink, the slot. Blinkers, buzzers, lights.

The Strip.

Strobes throwing jumpy stripes through the room, drums beating the ancient rhythm for bump and grind, so old it must have started on the Sodom Strip, a middle-aged woman wearing only blond wig and silver high heels, looks at row of hushed hypnotized faces upturned to her tits as she cups them, tantalizing, sweat on the foreheads of the middle-aged men mostly in suits and ties some sport shirts one a bull-necked crew-cut head of a brawny construction worker tanned and tattooed he holds up a folded bill and the woman nears, stops, mocks a question whether to come nearer, does, stands so her silver heels are close enough for him to stick the folded five-dollar bill into one, while his head is melting in perspiration, she turns, still moving to the ancient music, kneels, so she is squatting on the heels, moving the rump back and forth so near he can kiss it and does, his tongue flicks hungry out on the strobe-lit ass, gets a hint of it before she stands, moving back along the runway, the five secure in her shoe, looking for another, who?