T. Boyle - Drop City

They sat there staring bleakly out the bug-spattered windshield on the fruits of life in the land of plenty, _Wonder Bread, Skippy Peanut Butter, Oleo Margarine,__ and while Marco sucked in his breath and idly traced a finger up and down the face of the glove box, Norm heaved a sigh and filled him in. The situation was worse than he'd suspected. Far worse. The county health and sanitation people had been looking to close up Drop City for over a year now, and the fire and building inspectors were close on their heels. Norm had been in and out of court all through the past fall and into the winter; lately, he'd been using the summonses to light the fire in the incinerator out back, because he was through with all that, fed up to his ears, so pissed off and rubbed raw he just wanted to give it all up and let the bureaucratic pencil-pushing bastards take the ranch and pave it over if that's what they wanted. And it got worse still: the county had ordered him to clear the property of all persons and all substandard dwellings or face a fine of five hundred dollars a day. “Like as if I was a slumlord or something,” he said, staring out the window of the van on a row of piggybacked shopping carts and the bold bright ads for detergent, meat and liquor that crowded the windows of the supermarket.

“What's so bad that we can't fix it?” Marco said. “The leach lines are in, aren't they? Shouldn't that make them happy?” He was talking just to hear himself, just to say something. He knew the way it worked. Nobody wanted a free-form community in their midst, because free-form meant anarchy, it meant a cordillera of trash a mile high and human shit in the woods, it meant Sky Dog and Lester and a guitar smashed like an eggshell-even if Drop City were on a mountaintop in Tibet the people in charge would steer their overworked yaks right up the face of the cliffs to shut them down. And maybe that wasn't all bad, maybe somebody somewhere had to put the brakes on.

“They've been garnishing my account at the B. of A.” Norm was watching a miniskirted blonde lift brown-paper bags from a cart and set them with soft precision in the trunk of the low-slung Cutlass in the next row over. She had two kids with her-a baby with its bare fat legs dangling from the slots cut in the cart, and an older kid of five or six who gave them an even stare and then flashed the peace sign. “Jesus, look at that kid, the baby, I mean,” Norm said. “He looks like Alfred Hitchcock, doesn't he? But I guess all babies look like Alfred Hitchcock. Or Mao. Maybe Mao. Maybe that's who he looks like.”

Marco didn't have anything to say. He was calculating, pluses on one side, minuses on the other. He'd gotten too comfortable, and he should have known better. He'd settled in, built himself a treehouse, dug the leach lines, found a girl-and here the image of Star, smiling as if in some faded yearbook photo, rose up to take hold of him-but it was all so ephemeral, and nothing lasted, whether you fought for it or not. Sky Dog was gone, that was a plus, and it was just a matter of time before Lester followed him. Alfredo he could take or leave, and Pan could be an irritant, but at least he could be controlled. Not that it mattered. Not with the authorities involved. It was over, and if he had any sense at all he'd dump what he'd accumulated in the past five weeks and hit the road.

Norm shifted around in the seat to face him. “People would say to me, 'Norm, you can't just let everybody in because that's going to ruin it for the rest of us,' but what are you going to do? Everybody wants out of this fucking consumer-freak society and I'm not going to stand in their way, I mean, nobody elected me God.” Norm pushed the glasses up the bridge of his nose, and they slid back down. It was getting hot in the cab. “Besides, and I don't have to tell you this, man, if you start to like _limit__ the community, then it becomes static, like the Shakers or the Amish or whatever. They die out. Just like that. You've got to have an open community, and in the purest Gurdjieffian sense you let God be the selector, you know what I mean?”

“What about Sky Dog? Or Lester?”

“What about them?”

“Oh, come on, Norm, are you kidding me? — they bring the whole thing down. And there's a million more just like them, and they keep coming till the county drives a stake through your heart or the whole scene collapses. Or even Jiminy. Or Star, or me, or any of us. It just doesn't work unless you have some kind of standards-”

“You want rules, go work in the bank. Which brings me to my point here-motherfuckers are into me for something like three thousand dollars already because of these ridiculous-do I want to say contemptible? Yeah, _contemptible__-fines, and all that money is from the insurance settlement. Get to the end of it and there's nothing left, see what I mean, man? It's over. All she wrote. Good night and goodbye.”

The moment drifted past them. On the radio it was nothing but bright little bubbles of pop trash, “I Got You Babe” filtered through a thunderstorm of static and speakers that were already rattling though the van couldn't have been more than six months old.

“That's why I bought this vehicle,” Norm said, as if Marco had been thinking aloud. “Spend some of my own money on something _I__ want-or we all want, not to mention we all can use-instead of just giving it up to the dickheads with the slide rules and the building codes they must've fucking committed to memory. But fuck it. This is the day, isn't it? Aren't we on a serious mission here to score cream soda?”

They were. And Marco hadn't just come along for the ride-he was building a corral for the horse, a pin-headed, wild-eyed, fat-flanked monster of a thing that didn't seem to appreciate concepts like two-lane blacktop and cement trucks with bad brakes, and he'd been planning on picking up a roll of barbed wire at the hardware store-on Norm's dollar-but that all seemed pretty useless now. He ducked his head, depressed suddenly, and scratched at his beard, wondering vaguely if he'd caught ringworm from the big orange cat that lived atop the refrigerator. He'd wanted to build something-he was twenty-four years old and past the age of butting his head up against the establishment-but it wasn't going to happen at Drop City. He felt heavy all of a sudden, immensely heavy, as if he could crush the car beneath him and plunge down through the blacktop and into the ancient rivers that ran under the earth. He wanted to kick something, wanted to get out and clear his lungs or maybe his tear ducts, and he had his fingers on the door handle when Norm grabbed him by the wrist.

Hot in that van. And Norm: the black clunky plastic-frame glasses, gold teeth flashing in his grin like a prospector's dream. He was holding up the thermos as if it were the solution to every problem they'd ever known, the key, the prize, the grail brought back home on a silver salver. Marco relaxed, accepted the smudged white cup with the screw tread worked into the rim. “One for you,” Norm said, pouring till the cup would hold no more. “And one,” he said, tipping the thermos back so that the white plastic aperture was swallowed up in the dark accumulation of his beard, “for me.”

On the way back, Marco didn't feel stoned at all, and then abruptly he did. There was no tingling in his extremities, no dislocation, no sudden infusion of light or loss of personality-it came over him as if he'd been draped in a blanket, swaddled and pinioned and laid out in a crib, as if it were night and he was dreaming somebody else's dreams for them. Norm, for once, was quiet. And Marco-he couldn't have spoken if he'd wanted to. He wasn't in the front seat of a VW van hurtling down a country road with the river trailing along behind him like a bright fluttering banner, but in a room, in a farmhouse or a rent-controlled apartment maybe, and the room was swollen with inherited and hoarded things, sideboards, stuffed chairs, a chest of drawers, quilts, antimacassars, bibelots, bric-a-brac. There was a bed in the room-a four-poster swamped with blankets-and in the bed, an old man, wasted and white, with a nose that climbed up out of his face as if it didn't belong to him. It was a conventional scene, a deathbed scene, somebody's future or past, utterly conventional, but for the single incongruity of a pair of snowshoes fastened to the wall above the bed. The conscious remnant of his mind drew him back: Was this a photo he'd seen somewhere? A scene from childhood? TV? Or was he outside of himself and powerless to get back in? That was the thing with acid. He didn't like acid, had never liked acid, even when he liked drugs a whole lot more than he liked them now.