Summer of Love, a Time Travel (11 page)

“Of
course not.” Offended, he pushes up the sleeve of his shirt and shows her his
milk-white arm. No tracks. Nothing but that smooth white skin, completely
hairless. Not even the fine down a baby girl’s cheek has.

“A
hemophiliac?” she ventures.

“Do
I seem unhealthy?”

“I
don’t know!” She caps the calamine, suddenly struck with concern. “You’re so. .
. .
pale.
”

“I
sunburn easily. I stay away from the beach.”

“Yeah,
right, but excuse me, you don’t have any hair.”

“Sure
I do.” He tosses back his beautiful long red hair from his milk-white face.
Clean-shaven? In the bright morning light, Ruby sees no hint of stubble on his
jaw. Not even a whisker. He stays away from the beach? Uh-huh. His masculine
face is a mask of alabaster.

“Well,
I mean on your body.”

He
shrugs, like he won’t answer even if he could. “I like your cats, Ruby, but I
can’t risk flea bites. There must something you can do.”

She
thinks about it. “I don’t believe in commercial flea collars. They’ve got too
many poisons for a little cat. The poisons wouldn’t do
you
much harm,
though, I suppose. I’ve seen kids on the streets, the ones who sleep with their
dogs? They strap flea collars around their ankles.”

He
frowns. “I’ll pass on flea collars.”

“Myself,
I rub my ankles with eucalyptus oil. That keeps the fleas away pretty well.”

“Eucalyptus
oil sounds fine. May I try some, please?”

May
he try some please.
She ties her robe tight against the chill,
runs downstairs to the shop, and fetches the oil.

Never
saw
a man that pale and smooth. Ruby’s seen a lot of odd things in her thirty-five
years, but she
never
saw anyone like Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco.

He’s
like a. . . .stranger. A stranger in the very strange land of the
Haight-Ashbury. The unexpected glimpse of his smooth manly leg is as startling
as if he’d extruded antennae from his ears. What is he? Who is he?

These
are strange and wondrous days.

Ruby
runs back upstairs, bearing the eucalyptus oil, wondering what on earth she
should cook him for breakfast.

July
1, 1967

Festival

of

Growing Things

4

Foxy Lady

Days
vanish, and nights last forever. Reality unfolds, an origami of dreams. The
tribe takes Susan in, with love. Magic manifests. The party never ends.

She
crouches behind the driver’s seat in the Double Barrel van, clutching a map of
Marin County in her right hand, the side door handle with her left. The band is
playing the Festival of Growing Things at the Mount Tamalpais Outdoor Theater.
High atop the Tam, they’ll jam with Quicksilver Messenger Service, the
Charlatans, Big Brother, the Fish, everyone who’s anyone except the Dead and
the Airplane, who’ve got gigs out of town.

Susan
is terrified and thrilled. Over the meadow and through the woods, beam me up,
up, up. She’s been tripping with the Double Barrel for what seems like an eternity
but, in fact, has been only ten days.

Things
are not entirely a groove this Saturday morning. For starters, it’s freezing
outside. How did anyone get the idea California is some tropical paradise? She
shivers and wipes her nose on the back of her sleeve. Little needles of pain
stab her sinuses in the middle of her forehead and behind her eyes. In those ten
eternal days, she’s shed some baby fat on a diet of dexies and occasional bowls
of brown rice. That’s cool. But her throat is sore, her cheek dappled with an
itchy rash. She’s got to pee for the tenth time this morning.

Professor
Zoom mans the driver’s seat. Hunched over the steering wheel, he is constantly
in motion, finger-combing his hair, fiddling with the radio, kicking at the gas
pedal, the clutch, the brakes, slapping the stick shift, thrusting through
gears the van may or may not possesses. The engine groans
hunnh-hunnh-huh!
He cackles in his deadpan way and mutters things like, “Seek new life, new
civilizations,” and “Grok it, chief,” and, “Thou who did with pitfall and with gin,
beset the road I wander in; thou will not with evil round enmesh, and then
impute my fall to sin.”

Wow.
Professor Zoom, a wise man? Susan may be only fourteen, but she suspects he’s a
raving lunatic.

When
they approach a freeway on-ramp or confront an intersection or sometimes merely
mosey up a road with no turnoffs on either side, he calls out, “Hey, navigatrix
.
Which way, navigatrix?” Pretty soon he’s calling her Trixie, and that makes her
mad.

“Hey
Trixie, hey Trixie.”

“I’m
Starbright, Professor Zoom.”

“Which
way, Trixie? Wake up, Trixie.”

“Why
don’t you slow down, Harold?”

“Don’t
call me names.”

“Don’t
call me Trixie.”

“Which
freakin’ way, Starbright?”

She
wins. Five points for Susan.

Professor
Zoom is banged on acid, which is no big deal since he drops some cap, barrel,
or blotter almost every day. But he’s driving and that, to Susan,
is
a
big deal. Though no one else in the van seems to think so.

The
van climbs Route 1, a winding seacliff road. One shoulder is no more than a
foot of gravel, beyond which the mountain drops away to a foggy valley far
below. The morning is nearly as murky as night, worse really, since they cannot
see more than six feet ahead with the headlights on, when there
is
six
feet of straight road. Yet the sun somewhere above suffuses the fog with a
hellish glare, dim and bright at the same time, revealing nothing and giving
Susan a blinding headache.

Thank
God they can’t muster more than thirty miles an hour uphill. She’s been
appointed custodian of the map and navigatrix since no one else is fit or
willing for the task. Stan the Man and the band pass around joints in the back,
and she’s too young to drive the van herself. Too young? Driving was easy,
actually, the time Daddy took her out on Christmas Day and let her spin the Cadillac
around the May Company parking lot.

But
Daddy’s Cad is an automatic, and this funky old van painted with blue clouds
has got a stick shift as intimidating as an algebra equation. Susan forms a
plan. If Professor Zoom blows a curve and plunges them off the cliff, she’ll
pop the side door open and jump out before she tumbles into oblivion.

“Fare
thee well, oh world of illusion,” Professor Zoom mutters. It’s not the first
time he seems to read her mind when he’s tripping. Does he really possess
telepathy when he’s tripping or does he only appear to because he claims to?
It’s confusing.

Professor
Zoom trips relentlessly. He believes tripping furthers his quest to find the
Final Expression to his Equation proving that God is a hit of blotter. On one
rare day when he wasn’t tripping, he spoke seriously with Susan about his
quest. He told her he saw the whole equation written in the sky one afternoon
while he was tripping. But when he came down, he couldn’t remember what he saw.
Tears brimmed in his eyes.

So
he must trip, trip, trip until he finds the Final Expression. All who trip are
on the verge of a New Consciousness, he says. The New Consciousness will save
the world from greed, military ambition, exploitation, and all the evil
propelling the Earth to the brink of destruction.

Turn
on, Starbright, Professor Zoom tells her. Change your life.

*  
*   *

They
climb the last switchback to Tam Theater, and Susan sighs with relief. Wow, they
made it. How high will Professor Zoom be when they drive back down the
mountain? She shudders. Maybe she can persuade someone to show her how to use
the stick shift.

The road
is jammed with vans adorned with eyes, flowers, hearts, and peace signs, VW
bugs, flatbed trucks, a sleek Jaguar in racing green. The Double Barrel van
swings around the traffic, smug as royalty. They’re waved through barricades to
the stages.

Susan’s
life
has
changed. In the days after the Celebration of the Solstice, a
transcendent awareness lingered, more from leaving home than from tripping. Sitting
on the stoop of the house, she’s mulled things over.

Her
life in Shaker Heights, for starters: what a treadmill fraught with fear, frustration,
guilt, and insecurity. Why? Her parents are lapsed Catholics. Daddy says
religion is the opiate of the masses. He dispenses opiates in his dental
practice when he extracts people’s wisdom teeth. What wisdom is he extracting?
Why are her father and mother always so troubled?

What’s
the purpose of her parents’ lives? What do they believe in?

They
believe in:

Grabbing
as much money as possible, no matter what gross thing they have to do to get
it.

Paying
the bills, but complaining loudly.

Dial
Soap with AT-7.

Getting
drunk Friday and Saturday nights.

Arguing
about everything.

Hassling
Susan about everything.

The
Vietnam War, because LBJ says we’ve got to stop the spread of Communism in
Southeast Asia.

What
don’t
they believe in?

They
don’t believe in:

Love.

Magic.

Happiness.

Truth.

Beauty.

Freedom.

Star
Trek,
which they threaten to turn off whenever they want to
punish Susan.

Then
there’s school. Susan burns with anger when she thinks about school. She
recalls the time when she was eight, coming inside after recess. The sun was
shining, the air fresh and sweet, and she was skipping down the hall. Her third
grade teacher caught up with her and seized her arm in a grip like the band
they wrap around when they’re taking your blood pressure. That teacher forced
her not to skip.

Why
did the teacher do that?

That
teacher was trying to break her spirit.

But
why would the teacher try to break her spirit? So she would become someone like
her parents and believe in the things they believed in. And
not
believe
in the things they
didn’t
believe in.

That’s
why.

Mulling
over life has led Susan to mull over death. She remembers how tripping
unleashed her grief, a raw outpouring of horror and sorrow over Granma’s death
two years ago. Mom and Daddy took Susan to see her at the hospital. The visit
was horrible, the worst thing that ever happened to her. Seeing her sweet,
pretty Granma in that bright, garish room, hooked up to tubes. Her little body
so frail. Her face sunken and contorted in pain, gazing at Susan, tears
streaming, saying, “So beautiful, like an angel.”

Then
one afternoon after the hospital visit, Susan returned home from Bexley Park
with her new butterfly collecting kit. The saddlebags on her Schwinn were
filled with frantic butterflies she’d caught with her net. She was going to
chloroform them and pin them on a corkboard, spreading out their wings beneath paper
strips. She was parking her bike in the garage and taking out the killing jar
when her mother flung open the door.

“Granma
died,” her mother said. Then she burst into wild sobs and slammed the door.

Susan
sat down on the garage floor. She must have sat there for an hour, but her
mother did not reappear. Finally, she opened the saddlebags, intent on freeing
the butterflies, but they were all crushed. She took the net and the paper
strips, the corkboard and the killing jar, even the saddlebags, and threw
everything in a garbage can. Later, Daddy yelled at her. The butterfly
collecting kit had cost him twelve bucks.

Susan
realizes this now: she is going to die.

Sometimes
she cries, lying on Stan the Man’s mattress. She’s going to die; it’s
terrifying and strange. One morning, she woke up with the birds. Stan snored
beside her, but everything else in the house was quiet. She padded downstairs
and went out to sit on the stoop, tears drenching her face. Professor Zoom
materialized. He sat beside her without a word, puffing on his corncob pipe
with smoke the scent of burnt chocolate. He handed her the pipe. She pretended
to take a drag, passed the pipe back.