The Children of Hamelin (24 page)

Light merging into flesh into darkness into In, out and around into flashing wave of neon-colored flesh into Flash in Flash out Flash-flash whirl Hash-flash whirl Flash-flash-flash-flash—

Lights-sound-feel-flesh all coming together: FLASH! FLASH! FLASH! FLASH!

And the universe melting down into a long smooth tunnel into total sweet black velvet void....

.... my head felt like a basketball balanced atop a baseball bat: huge, hollow and wobbly on the end of my neck....

Which was the first thing I felt on Saturday morning. Lying in bed with my eyes glued shut by morning-after mung; the sheets rumpled beneath and above me; a vague kaleidoscope of impossible memories and no sense of time.

Not that I had what you’d call a hangover—my head didn’t hurt, it just felt strange. Going to bed really stoned and waking up straight is a peculiarly disorienting feeling, especially if you’ve O.D.ed in bed.
Had
I O.D.ed in bed? Hard to remember. We had sure smoked an awful lot of hash. We had balled, I think.... Yeah, I think that’s the last thing I remembered. WoW. I felt like the mythical debutante into whose drink an unscrupulous degenerate had secreted a peyote button.

I fumbled around in the bed, my eyes still closed. Knock, knock—no one there. Well, there was no getting around it: I rubbed my eyes open. Sunlight was streaming in around the edges of the green window-shade. Even that dull green light was a bit too much for my taste at the moment. The clock said one. The mouse ran down....
One o’clock?

“Robin!” I yelled, “you still here?”

“Coming right in, man,” her voice said from far away, from what sounded like the kitchen.

A moment later, Robin walked into the bedroom—wide awake, dressed and smiling—with a cup of coffee in one hand and the hash pipe in the other. She kissed me lightly on the nose (my mouth tasted like the Black Hole of Calcutta), sat down on the bed next to me and handed me the coffee.

I took a long drink. It was just this side of scalding and had cream and sugar in it the way I like it, and it cut through a lot of cobwebs on the way down. I was beginning to feel almost human.

“Very domestic,” I said. “Somehow I didn’t make you for the type.”

“Oh, sometimes I groove behind that trip,” Robin said. “Got scrambled eggs ready to go in the kitchen, too.” She smiled and held the hash pipe up to my lips. “Not only that, I brought you your pipe. Couldn’t find any slippers, though.”

I eyed the hash pipe dubiously. “Isn’t it a little early in the morning?”

“Early in the morning? It’s one o’clock!” She took out a pack of matches, lit one, held it over the pipe bowl and took a drag. She blew sweet-smelling smoke in my direction. “Tasty...” she said. “I’ve been stoned for an hour already waiting for you to wake up. Try and get out of bed without it, baby!”

I propped myself up against the headboard. Blecch!

“Man, it’s a groove getting up stoned,” she said. “Think I’d be making breakfast if I were straight? Come on, have some hash and dig the day.”

“Well... maybe just a little one...” I said, letting her put the pipe between my lips.

Something to be said for a little hash before breakfast as an aperitif. By the time I was dressed, I had had three medium-sized tokes (no sense in pushing my lungs too far) and my head felt firmly in contact with my body (if not much of anything else) and my body felt like a loose, well-oiled machine, and by God, I had an appetite, which somehow seemed like an amazing feat of prestidigitation. Robin served me toast and eggs and more coffee in the living room which I devoured like an Iowa farmboy. After a post-breakfast passing of the peace-pipe, I felt like a fat and happy suburban hubby; all that was missing was the morning paper and I was just as happy to pass on that.

“See?” Robin said, laying the pipe down on the table and smiling domestic tranquility. “It’s groovy to blow some hash first thing in the morning, once you get past the idea.”

I nodded. “Like most of the best things in life,” I said, “it’s immoral, illegal and (patting my stomach and faking a belch) fattening.”

Robin laughed. “That’s why you’ve got to be poor to cut it as a good stoned chick,” she said. “If I were rich, I’d own my own candy store and just smoke dope and eat till I blew up to about three hundred pounds.”

“And here I was about to tell you I was a millionaire playboy in a clever plastic disguise....”

“I’d almost believe you,” Robin said. “You’re a cat with hidden resources. Like that crazy job you have reading all that... Say, you
do
have a job reading freaky stories? We weren’t
that
stoned?”

I gestured toward a pile of fee manuscripts on the table. “Would that we were, girl,” I sighed. “Would that we were.”

“Yeah, you’re a strange cat,” she said. “AC-DC.”

“WHAT?”

She laughed. “Don’t get uptight. I mean, you groove behind stoned trips and I’ll bet you groove behind square trips, too. I’ll bet you even have some little college chick balling you on the side.”

She gave me a look that said she meant it, and a smile that said it didn’t matter. Which didn’t keep me from getting uptight. How did she...?

She kissed me lightly on the lips, her mouth tasting of coffee and hash; not a bad combination. “Relax, baby,” she said. “I trip in and out of your life and you don’t bug me about what I’m doing the rest of the time, and that’s the way I gotta have it. I dig you for it. Why should I mind that you’ve got some other action going? It keeps you interesting. I dig a man of mystery.”

“What makes you think...?”

“Come on man, we’ve gotten too high together for me not to be tuned in on your vibes. I can tell you’ve got another chick in the closet and it doesn’t bother me.” She grinned evilly. “But I bet it’d blow
her
mind if she knew about me!”

Thinking of Arlene and what material this would make for the old group, I couldn’t help flashing an evil grin back at Robin. Caught! Well, what the fuck, maybe I needed someone to talk to....

“From here to Pluto,” I said.

“A real straight chick?”

“You’re really not jealous?”

“Does that hurt your ego, man?”

“Well maybe... But man does not live by ego alone. I almost wish you’d make an evil scene so I could make up my mind—”

“This chick has really been putting you through changes?”

“You... you really don’t mind talking about this...?”

“Hey, you really
are
uptight about this...?”

“Arlene.”

“Yeah, it figured to be an
Arlene.
Dig baby, you can talk about it to me. Really. I want to dig the inside of your—”

A knock on the door. Shit!

Instantly, Robin was on her feet. “I’ll get it,” she said, and whoosh, she was out of the living room and into the kitchen. I heard her opening the door. A few minutes’ mumbling with a male voice, and then she was back. “Just a customer,” she said. “A couple of people’ll be coming by to cop some hash. You don’t mind...?”

Of course I minded—but how could I say so to a chick who was being so beautiful about my extracurricular activities?

“Just as long as they’re not traipsing through the pad all day,” I said.

“I’ll cool it, do my things at the door, okay?” she said, fishing a cube of hash out of her coat pocket and leaving the coat on the floor where it lay. “Just take a minute. Why don’t you refill the pipe in the meantime?” And she tossed a second cube onto the table.

Why not? I thought. Some huge idea seemed to be lurking just around the corner of my mind. Maybe a little more hash would smoke it out into the open...?

“Man, this Foundation trip’s gotta be the world’s evillest mind game,” Robin said. I breathed out a lazy feather of hash smoke. Between tokes of the peace-pipe (and two more business trips to the door by Robin), I had riffed out just about everything. Had slid quickly and smoothly from telling her about someone who was making a scene called the Foundation for Total Consciousness to rapping on the Foundation itself, which seemed to be a safer subject.

“That’s were it’s at,” I said. “I wonder sometimes why I’m making it.”

“It’s not just this Arlene chick?”

“Naw... I could probably never go back to the Foundation and still have something going with Arlene if I wanted to.”

“But you
are
going back?”

“I suppose so... got two good friends of mine hung-up there and I can’t leave ‘em in the lurch—”

Robin exhaled a cloud of smoke. Big black eyes laughed at me. “Bullshit,” she said. “I know where you’re at. You’re grooving behind the game.”

“Behind Harvey Brustein’s mind-game?” I said. “That’s crap, girl. Harvey isn’t putting anything over on me.”

“No man, you’re grooving behind
your
game.”

“My
game?”

“Don’t you see the game you’re playing? Ever been heavy behind bikes? Ever know a cat who likes to fight? Dig the bullfighter’s thing. Or cats that jump out of airplanes for kicks. Same game.”

“You lost me around the first bend.”

“Catch up, baby,” she said, sticking the pipe in my mouth. I took a deep drag. Held it. “Natural male game,” she said. “Playing chicken with death.”

“Death? Come on!” Around a cough of smoke.

“No dig: there are all kinds of death. Rack up a bike kind of death. O.D. yourself on smack kind of death. Blow your mind kind of death—ego-death, dig? That’s an Acid game. That’s your Foundation game, too.”

Ah, she just didn’t understand! That was Harvey’s trip, not mine. “I assure you, I’m not the ego-death type,” I told her. “In fact, ego-death is my idea of the ultimate cancer-hole.”

Robin bobbed her head up and down like a stoned rabbi. “Yeah, yeah, yeah!
That’s
the game. Bike-freaks don’t want to smash themselves up. Junkies don’t want to O.D. The idea isn’t to kill your ego on Acid. The game is to come as close to death as you can. Closer and closer and closer all the time. Till you can taste it. Till you don’t know if you can pull your bike out or pull your mind out. Death is the grooviest trip there is.”

“The only trouble is it kills you.”

“You dig, you dig! That’s the whole thing: to come as close as you can to death without dying. Man, that kind of fear is a trip! To go right into total fear and not know whether you’re coming out or not. And then when you do—Oh wow. That’s why Acid is such a groove—sometimes you can taste death, but you don’t die.”

Eyeball to eyeball: her eyes so huge, so ferally alive I felt myself sucked into them and something at the dark bottom of the wells spoke to itself inside of me, smiled a dirty smile at itself a billion years old. This girl was alive, alive-o! Deepest thing inside us all was up front on the surface of her mind.

Oh Christ, yes: “...into the valley of death rode the six hundred...”...Harvey Brustein, Prince of the Final Darkness... the universe-shaking rumble of the H-bomb, so groovy... wheels screaming around a curve... the long free-fall from the sky... flash of nothingness of The Big Orgasm—”...fuck me fuck me fuck me to death—”...Total Consciousness of the Total Void....

“...break on through to the other side—”
“one moment of agony,” said Count Dracula, “and then—eternal life!” OM... OM... OM... Blow your mind. BLOW YOUR MIND. BABY, BLOW YOUR MIND!

Robin gave me the old Mona Lisa smile. Did old Mona know what we knew?

“You’re a scary chick,” I said.

Robin laughed a cosmically dirty laugh a million years old. “That’s why you dig me, baby,” she said.

A knock on the door.

“Another one,” she said, fumbling in her coat for a dub of hash. And over her shoulder as she went to the door; “And that’s why your Arlene doesn’t uptight me. Like the song says, man: ‘Your debutante just knows what you need, but I know what you want.’”

“Hey,
how’d you like to see the old Foundation in action?” I asked her when she got back. “Get a taste of the surge yourself, see how the other half dies.”

“Mmmm, you are a groovy evil cat,” she said approvingly. “Yeah, I’d like to take the whole Foundation trip with you. When?”

“There’s a party there tonight...”

“Okay baby. Just one thing: we get good and stoned before we go, right?”

“This isn’t stoned enough for you?”

“Oh baby,
nothing
is stoned enough for me! Just too bad we don’t have some acid.”

A strange thrill went through me. I had felt that thrill before, oh yes, but now I knew what it was and I could groove behind it. Harvey Brustein, meet The Man in Black.

“We gonna blow us some minds,” I said.

“Do some evil numbers....”

“I never really grooved behind evil before.”

“You’re gonna groove behind it tonight. Worried what it’ll do to your debutante?”

“Yeah...” I said. “But I’m also kind of interested... mmmmm....”

Robin leered at me. “You can get pretty scary yourself,” she said. She handed me the pipe. “Have some hash, baby. We’re gonna blow us some dirty square minds tonight, oh yes!”

“That’s the name of the game, isn’t it?” I said. And sucked the breath of the Assassin deep into the bowels of my blood.

Black night and windy, dank and cold and suitably atmospheric, something out of Lovecraft. The Man in Black and his Lady getting out of the cab down the block from the Foundation: Robin wearing her peacoat, Levis, black plastic boots and an old black shirt which I’ve laid on her, her long black hair blowing wildly over her shoulders; me in black chinos, my new black shirt with black tie and my black toggle-coat with the hood up around my face and black shades I can hardly see through.

I was really stoned, but not
that
stoned—it was a calculated effect I was after and I wasn’t so stoned I had forgotten that, but I was stoned enough to be grooving behind the image I was wearing. I was playing it from the inside out, a kind of Method put-on, and I felt cool and black and crystal-clear inside The Man From Deep Space.

The dry-run on the cabdriver had shown all systems at go: the poor slob had been mightily glad to get us out of his cab, which I had filled with heavy black vibes. Had I really sucked him into the spirit of the number or was he simply a pragmatic New York cabbie worried about being knifed by crazy junkies? Was there a difference?