Summer of Love, a Time Travel (12 page)

“Professor
Zoom,” she said at last. “I’m sad we have to die.”

“The
spirit is eternal.”

“But
our bodies,
this
body.” She pinched the skin on her arm. “It
dies.
I saw my granma dying. She was in terrible pain. What will I feel? And then,
when the body dies, it’s cold. I mean, it
rots,
right?”

“That’s
why I want to be cremated.” Just the facts, ma’am. “Fire is purifying.”

“But
I’m afraid. It’s so awful!”

“Oh,
it’s not so awful. Think of it this way, Starbright. We live on the Earth, and
we kill things. You eat a cow or a carrot, it’s all the same. Everything is alive.
So when you die, you give your body back to God. You give a little of what you
took. I think that’s fair, don’t you?”

She
thought about that and, after a while, the pain in her heart eased. “Yeah.” She
dried her tears on her sleeve. They smiled at each other. Maybe Professor Zoom
was
a wise man. Sometimes. “I think that’s fair, too.”

*  
*   *

Rodge
the Dodg, Paul, and Mickey huddle in the back of the van. They’ve long since
finished the joints. Now they’re working on some splash. Up to the last minute,
they’re also working on three new songs they intend to play, but haven’t
practiced yet. Stevie snores, passed out. He rarely gets up before two in the
afternoon, so maybe he’s just tired, Susan hopes, and not stoned out of his
mind.

The
energy at the house has been strange, which hasn’t helped the band’s career.
Sarah split, after knickknacking some expensive things. Mickey got wasted, then
brought home someone new the next day. She wears a glittery pink boa clipped in
her hair, a leather vest over nothing but her olive skin, and jeans slung low.
Her stringy biceps are tattooed with a lightning bolt. Lady May, she calls
herself, which the guys get mileage out of. “Lady May I?” they say in wheedling
voices. Stella and Fawn, the other caterpillar-eyed girls, are freaked.

Now
Stan takes over the driver’s seat, ignoring everyone. He especially ignores
Susan, which fills her with sadness and a deep, nameless fear. He’s working,
she reminds herself, doling out ten thousand caps of LSD into single-serving
baggies. He’s decided to call this batch dragon’s blood after--he tells her--an
herb in some witch shop. The caps are bright red. Dragon’s blood. It fits.

Suddenly
things are happening. Everyone is jumping, piling out of the van.

“Starbright,
carry the mikes and tambourines,” Mickey says.

She
hops out, too. She is forever carrying the mikes and tambourines, or fetching a
wine bottle or a hash pipe, or passing out postcards of album covers. She’s
forever clapping her hands and cheering, admiring the men up on the stage. She’s
grateful for such a groovy place to stay, of course. They feed her and don’t
change her rent, but they do exact a price. She keeps thinking of Sarah’s
bloodshot eyes beneath her false eyelashes.

Susan
understands Sarah. She wants to do her thing, too. Her mother says her drawings
are not proportional, but Professor Zoom and Stan and
everyone
says her
drawings are far out. She went to Mendel’s Art and Stationery Supplies—a store
on Haight Street a lot like Mr. G’s but bigger and better—and bought a box of
pastel chalks. She drew two posters for the Double Barrel Boogie Band, which
Stan took to a graphics guy who knew how to print them up.

Do
her thing. She’s discovering it’s tricky doing her thing. While Stan the Man
labors over the calculating machine--a big metal monster that goes
ka-chunka,
ka-chunka-chunka-chunka
when he hits the Equals button--she works out the
numbers in her head. She says, “Um, Stan, at seventy cents profit per hit,
you’ll make seven hundred dollars per thousand. Um, that’s seven thousand
dollars per ten thousand. That’s a lot of bread, huh?”

And
he gave her a look. What you’d call a dirty look.

Susan
has seen that look before. Bernie MacKenna or Allen Weisberg stand at the
blackboard, working out equations or diagramming sentences and clowning around,
and they are popular, the cool kids at school. But when Susan works out an
equation or reads her poems—she doesn’t dare clown around--the girls whisper
behind their hands and the boys snicker or stare coldly. Even the
teachers
give her that look.

She
feels like a freak. Like something is wrong with her. Her school counselor told
her she is in the ninety-eighth percentile. What does
that
mean? What
good does
that
do her? The girls, the boys, the teachers, they give her
that look. So she stops speaking up, stops challenging the discussion. It’s
confusing.

Now
she wonders if the spooky girl with her face has something to do with it. The
encounter on Twin Peaks haunts her. Was the girl an awful omen? A prophecy she
will have to face herself one day and see some terrible truth? She shivers at
the memory and glances over her shoulder. Does she see black sparks?

And
there it is again: another Summer of Love change. What made her feel like a
freak in Shaker Heights gives her credence in the Haight-Ashbury. Credence with
none other than Professor Zoom, the resident shaman of the Double Barrel house.
When he wants to discuss his quest for the Final Expression, he seeks out Susan.
When he wants to discuss whether the U.S. Congress should ban consumer credit
cards, he seeks out Susan.

One
day last week Professor Zoom found a Sacramento TV station rerunning “This Side
of Paradise.” Susan had talked a lot about this
Star Trek
episode
.
The
Enterprise
touches down on Omicron Ceti III and discovers that the
colonists are really groovy. Mr. Spock reunites with Leila, a woman who once
loved him. Leila turns Mr. Spock on to spores that pop out of pretty pink
flowers and smack people in the face. Mr. Spock gets smacked in the face by
spores and becomes really groovy, too.

Professor
Zoom was impressed. Psychedelic secrets on national TV?

But
upon watching again, Susan was horrified. The spores turn the colonists into
silly, passive know-nothings who must be rehabilitated to a useful life under
the stern guidance of the Federation.

Professor
Zoom didn’t buy her interpretation. “Wake up, Starbright. The spores set Mr.
Spock free. The spores forced him to give up his intellectual games. I mean,
there he is, this uptight, supercilious robot--”

“Mr.
Spock is not a robot,” Susan said. “He’s half Vulcan.”

“This
uptight half-Vulcan schmuck--”

They
went at it like that until people started pouring in, looking for a party. Are
the pretty pink flowers opium poppies? Do the spores enlighten the colonists or
oppress them? In the climax, Captain Kirk insults Mr. Spock and goads him into
a fistfight. The fight releases Mr. Spock from the spell of the spores. Violence
restores him to his intellectual uptight self.

“That’s
a lousy statement about society and human nature,” Professor Zoom pointed out.

“It’s
confusing,” Susan admitted.

“Forget
it, Starbright. I really dug the beginning. The spores healed wounds and
bestowed physical perfection. Maybe LSD will cure cancer.”

Susan
doubts that and, after watching the episode again, she’s sure she’s not mistaken.
Star Trek
says the love spores from the pretty pink flowers are bad.

*  
*   *

Tam
Theater looks like an ancient Greek amphitheater: stone seats slope up from a
center stage, everything surrounded by the scenic mountainside and old-growth
trees.

Professor
Zoom, disinterred from the driver’s seat, takes out his corncob pipe. “Got some
Gold,” he calls to the tribe.

This
rousts stragglers out of the van. Stella and Fawn crowd around for a toke. Lady
May struts up and pushes them aside. Susan says she’s got a sore throat and she’ll
pass.

Professor
Zoom insists on giving her the first hit. He crooks his arm around her neck,
thrusts the pipe in her lips. “Hold the smoke in your lungs as long as you can,
Starbright,” he coaches irritably.

Lady
May is next, inhaling deeply. “I am
so
wasted!” she gleefully proclaims.
A nipple slips out of her leather vest.

“The
ego must die,” Professor Zoom whispers, eying Lady May.

Susan
slips away, looking for Stan the Man.

She’s
fourteen. She doesn’t want to die.

Changes
upon changes upon changes. Her awkward fourteen-year-old body has changed
overnight into a woman’s body. In the space of ten days, she’s become a sexual
being. Her mother’s constant criticisms—you’re too fat, your hair’s too long,
you’re not wearing
that!
—fade away before Stan the Man’s lustful gaze.
They’ve had sex every day--sometimes twice or three times—since the Celebration
of the Summer Solstice.

He jumps
down from the driver’s seat, lithe as a panther.

“Hi,”
she says and lifts her face for his kiss.

He
seizes her, wrapping her in his hug, his hands roving over her body, squeezing
her breast. He kisses her forehead, nuzzles her ear. He moves to her lips and the
motion of his tongue in her mouth suggests what he does between her legs.

“Say
hey, Starbright.” He slips a package the size of a suitcase beneath her arm. “I
want you to do something for me.”

“What?”
She’s still dizzy from his kiss, but an ominous feeling chokes her throat.

Other
than the sex, it’s not like things are all that great between her and Stan. She
woke one morning to find him rooting around in her overnight bag. He found the
hundred-dollar bill from Mr. G. When she asked what he was doing, he demanded to
keep the money. Just a loan, he told her. Front money for his new deal. He’d
pay her back after the deal went down. When she said no, he got all weird. He
said she’d be sleeping in the street if it weren’t for him. She got frightened
and silent. Then he came over to the mattress and climbed on top of her.

Afterward,
she let him keep the bill. When he was gone, she stuffed the rest of her cash
and her library card in the hidey-hole in her purse where the lining was torn.
Now she keeps the purse with her always. She even sleeps with it tucked beneath
her pillow.

“I want
you to deliver the dragon’s blood to my connection.” Stan’s eyes are cold.

“What
connection?”

“They’ll
be looking for you. Hand it over, that’s all you have to do. You can do
that,
can’t you, Starbright?”

Yes,
she can. She’s struck with guilt, giving him a hard time over the
hundred-dollar bill. She’s glad he doesn’t ask her to take money from the
connection. If a narc spots her, she’ll be in big trouble. Apparently Stan’s
got the money thing covered some other way. Cool.

Sizzling
with his kiss and her paranoia, Susan strides over to the face-painting tent
like he tells her to and waits. She watches and listens for anyone looking for
dragon’s blood. An electric guitar wails over the amps. That’s Rodg the Dodg.
The band is starting their set, and she can’t be there!

Half
an hour crawls by. Children and their mothers come and go from the
face-painting tent. No one pays her any mind. The Double Barrel finishes their
first set. One of the songs they were rehearsing in the back of the van turns
out better than she feared. She hops from foot to foot, trying to keep warm,
furious with Stan. She’s only getting her hundred dollars back, whereas he will
clear a year’s worth income, tax-free. Maybe she should get a piece of that.
She wonders if she’s got the nerve to ask.

She’s
about to call it quits when two men wander by.

A
child with a painted clown face bursts into tears, holding up her packet of crushed
green bean seeds.

“Didn’t
I tell you?” the child’s mother scolds. “Not everyone with long hair is cool.”

Susan
looks to see who crushed the child’s seeds. A man brushes past her. That must
be him, a guy in a stovepipe hat that says “L-O-V-E” on the crown jammed over
straggly black hair. Steely black eyes peer out from an unsmiling Buddha face
with a drooping mustache. His partner is a wiry little guy with nut-brown skin
etched by hard times and harder living. A yellow Happy Face button is pinned to
the lapel of his Hawaiian shirt. His psychedelic getup can’t conceal his
reptilian air. She can practically see a lizard’s tongue flick out and snag a
fly.

Even
on Haight Street, Susan has never encountered men like these. They operate on
some level of existence she knows nothing about. Violent and dangerous and
mean. They drift into the face-painting tent.

She
wants to turn and flee, but then she hears them murmuring, “Dragon’s blood. Got
dragon’s blood?”

“Here,”
she whispers. “I’ve g-got dragon’s blood.”

Stovepipe
is in her face in two seconds. “Got dragon’s blood?”

“Y-yeah.”
His eyes are so cold!

“Where’s
the dude?”

“Around,
I g-guess.”

“Who
is he?” the Lizard demands. “What’s his name?”

“Just
a guy,” she says, confused. They don’t know who Stan the Man is?