Dan Wakefield - Home Free

If you walked north clear across Venice you came to Santa Monica, and Gene liked that a lot better but it wasn’t his thing. He liked to go to the shopping mall there and hit one of the health food stores for a celery shake and raisin on rye, natural nutbread or whatever special was featured. But that was about it. Santa Monica was stolid, secure, sleepy, established, Establishment. You saw a lot of middle-aged men wearing suits and ties, pale and serious, like they might have been accountants in Akron. Santa Monica was nice, with the beach and pier and palm-lined avenue that ran along the ocean, but Gene could never feel part of it, like he did in Venice.

It wasn’t that Venice was all hippie or all funky, it was a mix of that with middle-class and working people but there wasn’t any rich part, no fancy or pretentious stuff, and people of one kind didn’t seem to take much notice of people who were different, or care. Gene went to a little fair in a vacant lot by one of the canals—they had a little water now from the annual big rains—and there were some watercolors for sale, hot dogs, homemade cakes and pies, a local rock group, a girl selling pots she made. It was to raise money for some kind of Free School they had there. Little kids played in the dust, teenagers walked with arms around each other’s waist, ringlet-haired housewives, sunburned bald men, intense young guys with beards, a black man in a dashiki, another in slacks and a polo shirt, thirtyish long-haired women wearing leather sandals and minidresses. It was Sunday. It was Venice.

The idea of it Gene dug, too, of a dude trying to build a whole city that would be like the one in Italy. The one Belle called “The Other Venice.” Canals that never got used. They reminded Gene of the line in “American Pie” about driving to the levee but the levee was dry. Right on.

They played that at Uncle Phil’s a lot, the whole record by Don McLean, and it seemed to Gene like the perfect theme song for Venice, at least for his life and time in it. Everyone would also clap or shout approval at the part about taking the train all the way west, the last one, and that was the end of the music.

This was it, the Coast, the edge, the last stop, make it here or fall off the edge, and Venice was the perfect headquarters. Especially Uncle Phil’s place, where Gene had taken to hanging out a lot. There were always people coming and going, always some smoke, music, talk, or you could just sit and look out the window, that was cool, too, you never had to pretend or fake anything. Phil got named Uncle because everyone felt that way about him, like he was some kind of wise uncle who’d help you out, you could lay anything on him, he never got uptight about anything.

Uncle Phil wasn’t really all that older than most of the people who passed in and out of his pad, he just seemed like it, in a way he looked like it. His body was hard and youthfully lean, it was the face where the age was, the grooved lines and wrinkles, the pounded eyes. And he had a kind of rattling laugh, as if something was loose inside, and it often led to coughing spells. Gene had the sense of him sort of dying on the hoof. Of course we all are, he knew, but Uncle Phil seemed to be going about it faster, more relentlessly, not caring, much less worrying about it.

There were all kinds of different stories about him, Gene never knew which if any were true. Some said he once had killed a man. Or a woman. Or a woman had killed herself on account of him. Or a woman took a kid she had by him and went back to live with her wealthy parents in Pasadena and got a court order so he couldn’t even come and visit the kid. Some said he had killed a man but it was in a war, either Korea or Vietnam, and he got a big medal for it but then got sick of the whole scene and deserted. Some said he was the illegitimate son of Errol Flynn. It was certain he had grown up around Los Angeles, so it was possible. Those who held to this theory supported it by pointing out that he never went to the movies. He wouldn’t talk about it he just wouldn’t go, which to the Errol Flynn theorists suggested there was some terrible thing in his past connected with the movies or with someone who was important in them which embittered him to the extent that it created this peculiar aberration.

He was not a real pusher. He just used a lot of dope and he bought it in large quantities for economy’s sake and then sold what he couldn’t use himself right away. There was always somebody coming in or out who wanted to buy something. And Uncle Phil usually had it to sell. That’s all. It was all on a casual basis, rather than a business-type operation. More or less what you might call a community sort of thing. A service.

One day when Gene dropped by Uncle Phil’s he found him in the midst of snorting some white lines off a mirror. Gene figured it was coke, and wondered why he hadn’t been offered any. When Phil finished, laid the mirror down, and turned to Gene with a beatific smile, Gene asked, “Coke?”

“No,” Uncle Phil said. “Skag.”

“Oh.”

Phil didn’t offer any and Gene didn’t ask for any.

Another time, out of curiosity, Gene asked him:

“What’s it like? Heroin? I don’t mean what it does to you if you’re hooked, I mean how does it make you feel?”

Phil thought awhile and said, “Are you familiar with the term ‘peace of mind’?”

“I’ve heard it mentioned,” Gene said.

“That’s how it makes you feel,” Phil said. “Like you have that. Peace of mind.”

“Wow.”

Maybe he’d try it sometime. Peace of mind. That would be a new trip all right. He knew of people who’d just had a snort or so and never got hooked, and every once in a while he heard of some guy who supposedly was able to shoot up regular maybe once a week and still be able to take it or leave it. He’d never actually met the guy, though. But he figured with Uncle Phil, if he only snorted from time to time he probably wouldn’t get hooked because his body must be so confused by this time from all the different shit he put in it, heroin might not have the same effect it did on everyone else.

Well.

It was something to think about.

One afternoon at Uncle Phil’s he met a woman named Lottie. She bought a lid of grass and stayed to share a joint with Uncle Phil and Pepper and Gene. She was small and tan and angular with high cheekbones that gave a kind of Indian cast to her face. Her hair was short and she wore big hoop earrings, her only jewelry, a neat blouse and skirt and sandals. She sat very straight. Prim was how she seemed to Gene.

He was surprised when she stood up to go and asked him if he’d like to get a beer.

Why not?

They went to the bar on Washington Street with the free popcorn.

She told him she had been a housewife in Toledo and one day when she was taking out the garbage she realized someday she was going to die and nothing would have happened to her, so she packed one suitcase, took the $2000 some dollars out of her personal savings account and split. Now she collected unemployment, made pottery, and lived in a nice funky house with two other women, one who sold vitamins from door to door and the other a student at an unaccredited law school in Santa Monica.

“Why would anyone go to an unaccredited law school?” Gene asked.

“They can’t get in the other kind,” she explained.

There was something kind of flat about her, weary and drained. What the hell, she probably thought the same about him. Maybe they were well matched.

They went to his place and balled, perfunctorily, he felt. Which was OK, too.

Afterward, smoking a cigarette, she told him for a while she had a filing job in an office in Santa Monica, but one day when some strange man came up like men sometimes did and asked to buy her a cup of coffee, instead of just telling him to get lost she told him she didn’t have time for the coffee but if he wanted to spend some money they could go to a motel. They did. She charged him $25. After that she quit the filing job.