Dan Wakefield - Home Free

“Nah, I’m all tied up, man.”

“Well, sure, that Lou is somethin else, but you ought to share the wealth.”

“Huh?”

“What I mean is, socialize a little. Like I was thinkin, I got this girl flies in from Atlanta every week or so, a real peach. Thought we could make it a foursome.”

“The four of us go out, you mean? Have dinner?”

“Uh, well, sure, that might be good, sort of as an icebreaker. But what I had in mind was then when we all get to know each other we could trade off. Me with Lou and you with this delectable, exquisite peach. Then back again. You dig? Sort of a round-robinish sort of thing.”

Gene thanked Flash but said he and Lou weren’t into that kind of scene. He tried to make it sound casual, just something they didn’t enjoy, like watching “The Brady Bunch” or eating Armenian food.

Back of the counter, his legs were trembling.

Finally Flash believed there was no way to get the round robin on.

He shook his head.

“You and your middle-class hang-ups,” he said.

When Gene got home that night he discovered he didn’t quite have it together enough to laugh and tell Lou about Flash’s proposition for getting on a round-robinish sort of thing.

On the other hand, he didn’t get bugged at her because he knew Flash wanted to ball her.

He figured all together it was some kind of progress.

Lou was right that you shouldn’t just shut yourself off from people. Hell, it felt good to know they’d brought Barnes and Nell together, and besides that it was a trip to figure out how it happened, how it worked.

Lou said the differences did it—not just the fifteen years difference in age, but their personalities. Nell was the kind who wanted to Help people, for Barnes the word Help was a personal plea. See? They fit. She as his personal social worker, him as her one-man emotional slum.

Besides, it was good to have another couple like that to boogie with. Like Gene and Lou would have just sat back and missed the best two ticket-bought nights of their lives if it hadn’t been for Barnes and Nell.

And the coke.

Barnes went down to New York to see the literary agent who sold his mystery and told him about a new one he had in mind, setting the story at Harvard, he would hang around there awhile and take notes. The agent was so turned on by it that Barnes before coming back saw a friend of a friend and bought $100 worth of coke to celebrate the triumph of the book he had just thought of trying to write.

It came in a tinfoil package, astonishingly small.

“Don’t anyone sneeze for Chrissake,” Barnes said as Nell tamped a little mound of it out on her tortoiseshell hand mirror. On Barnes’s instructions she separated the mound out into slim lines with a razor blade, while he rolled tight a ten-dollar bill for sniffing it up.

“Bill should be a hundred,” he apologized, “if you do it right.”

“We’re just folks,” said Gene.

They sniffed, in turn, sitting back awhile and waiting for it to happen, coming on suddenly giggly, funny, everything anyone else said was funny to the rest, and Nell asked who was best, Joni or Janis. Gene said each was best of who she was. Lou asked why. Nell said both were coming to Boston to give a concert and who should they hear? Everyone yelled and argued, happy high confusion till Barnes said the solution: “Both.” Clapping, cheers, cheer, till down again, a drag, the trouble with coke was being over so soon and then you wanted more to get back up; product with built-in sales pitch.

But even after being down from the coke Barnes said they all had agreed, all had to see both Joni and Janis, he’d get tickets if Gene made stew.

Dinner and the theater!

None of the four of them ever forgot. The stew maybe, the concerts not.

Joni all light, on a bright stage, nice light airy fluffy feeling, the feeling you got from hearing her “Clouds.” The audience buoyed, buoyant, bouncy, behind her, with her, all the way, wanting to show, make her know, how they loved her—once she forgot the words to a song and everywhere were smiles, sighs of sympathy, a feeling through the hall that everyone wanted to run to the stage and feed her some special warm homemade chicken soup. Sad songs she sang them, yes, too, but sweet, sincere, soulful, soft as a breeze. Yes, yes, yes, Joni! This was the bright warm milk of the world.

Janis all dark on the stage before a spot struck sudden on her, she in a deep purple satin outfit, cut sexy-crazy, sight of her set off screams and some fans scrambled out of their seats to run down the aisle and get near the stage get near Janis, source of that painful power pulsing out through the wiry little body, the sing-shout plea to “Take a little bit a my heart now, bay-bee …” and they would if they could in a way they did, the hungry audience hot and mean in a heavy atmosphere of smoke from joints the management gave up trying to stop, the smoke thick, everywhere, electric roar of the band a blare but her voice going over it, beyond it, guts wrenching but making it music. This was what it was to be alone in the dark and not be afraid to be afraid.

After the Joni Mitchell concert they all went to Barnes’s, built a fire, drank wine, played her records.

After the Janis Joplin concert they just went home, not saying anything.

But that brought them closer, too, knowing they all understood things they didn’t have to say.

For the first time Gene could remember he really had it together, doing things he usually didn’t but wished he had later, living and loving and having friends. He had the nice sense he and Lou were settling— in but not down . Settling down sounded stodgy, settling in sounded warm.

He didn’t even mind the holidays coming, he figured he might even send a few cards.

Greetings .

They were for him, but not from Santa.

Uncle Sam.

He had got the message before but always been safe with a student deferment. At the rate he was going through college—colleges—he figured there was no way the war would still be on when he graduated. But it seemed like they couldn’t turn it off. It was part of life now like college and marriage and kids and career and retirement. They had quietly added Vietnam to the list. Like adding a new sand trap to the course just in case it was getting too easy.

Mainly he had tried to forget the whole thing.

But it had not forgot him .

“There’s got to be a way,” Lou said when he showed it to her, “out of it.”

“There is,” Gene said. “Canada. Jail. I can take my choice.”

Lou shook her head. She said there had to be others, at least another.

She went out and got a copy of the Cambridge Phoenix . That was a weekly paper that had stuff in it for students and hippies like the regular dailies mainly had stuff for housewives and guys who sold insurance and followed the Red Sox. The Phoenix had classified ads for everything from secondhand stereo bargains to getting laid, from how to get abortions to help for kicking heroin. They had a whole column just for draft counseling, and Lou and Gene went over the list and picked out what sounded best.

At the Draft Counseling Service in the basement of the Arlington Street Church, Gene talked with a hip-looking young lawyer, or maybe he was still just a law student, who had muttonchop sideburns and wore a corduroy suit with a sweater underneath the jacket. He looked like one of the young lawyers on a TV series who shun the offers of big corporate firms to help the oppressed and live on containers of black coffee and takeout sandwiches. He said to call him Pete.

“Tell me, Gene,” Pete said, tapping his pencil, “do you have any strong religious background?”

“I was baptized,” Gene said, “a Methodist.”