Boonville (12 page)

“He looked surprised,” Blindman said. “Like his sight had been returned to him when he hit the ground, a second or two before he died. He didn't know this was where he had been living, among rocks and shadows. I knew I couldn't help him, never could. I had to go to the car. Edna pulled him out of the river, called Cal, went to the questioning with me, and let me stay the night with her. She was a strong woman.”

John thought it would be ridiculous for him to try to console Blindman. He felt sorry for him, but wanted him gone so he could go to sleep and forget the image of this man merging with his grandmother. The codeine was making him woozy. He couldn't blink away the drowsiness. He pictured Grandma in his mind, the way her smile slid into a sneer. He knew she exercised the kind of influence over him that could only take place across a great distance, the space between youth and old age. There was
something in her worthy of respect and emulation, but this was where it had got her, Boonville. This was what she had become, a freak on a hill whittling squirrel sculptures, drunk, reading metaphysics, hanging out with Margaret Washington and Pensive Prairie Sunset, fucking Blindman, calling out to her grandson to follow in her footsteps.

“Sorry if you don't like hearing this,” Blindman said, and John heard him tapping across the planked floor. “But I wasn't put on this earth for you to like. Neither was your grandma.”

John's head sank into the pillow, a quilt of darkness spreading over him with the promise of sleep. The haunting was over. Everything was quiet except for the wind outside the cabin. Grandma's spirit trying to touch him, he thought, in the throes of the codeine. A breeze slipped through a crack to kiss him goodnight. He felt relieved, at ease with himself for the first time since he had left Florida.

Then Roseanne Barr walked into the bedroom wearing a Yankees uniform, a batting helmet and spikes, and holding a Louisville Slugger smeared in Vaseline.

“I'm ready, John,” she whispered. “Let's play hardball.”

“…H
oney, when everybody in the world wants the same damn thing. When everybody in the world needs the same lonely thing. When I want to work for your love, Daddy. When I want to try for your love, Daddy. I don't understand, how come you're gone, man? I don't understand why half the world is still crying, man, when the other half of the world is still crying too, man. And I can't get it together. I mean, if you got a cat for one day, man, I don't mean if you, say, say maybe you want a cat for 365 days, right? You ain't got him for 365 days, you got him for one day, man. Well, I'll tell you that one day, man, better be your life, man. Because you know, you can say, ‘Aw man,' you can cry about the other 364, man, but you're gonna lose that one day, man, and that's all you got. You gotta call that love, man. That's what it is, man. If you need it today, you don't want it tomorrow, man, 'cause you don't need it. 'Cause as a matter of fact, as we discover on the terrain, tomorrow never happens, man. It's all the same fucking day…”

Sarah stepped onto the deck of the main house and into the full deafening craziness of Janis Joplin's rant. As a child, she had heard Mom sing this song so many times that the two women's voices had become indistinguishable in her mind. It was Mom howling, Mom babbling, Mom on speed and whiskey. Mom close to death. Mom played Janis whenever she came home from dates alone. She would pour herself a drink, kick off her cork-heeled Cherokees, toss the cat onto the beanbag chair, park herself on the couch, and at the top of her lungs, rave after Janis, “It's all the same fucking day!” Sarah would listen from her bedroom, certain Mom would o.d. like Janis. And everyone would blame
her for not being a good enough daughter. That was Sarah's ball and chain.

Reaching the main house, Sarah expected to find Mom bumming, the way she had seen her a zillion times, drunk or stoned, waiting for Sarah to arrive to heave a rap into her lap like a lump of shit. Not even, Sarah thought, hot potato that one back to you. Unless Mom copped a whole new attitude, it was going to be a short conversation. Mom would have to join a peyote circle or find a self-help book she hadn't read for solace. But instead of finding her mother, Sarah encountered three Future Primitives crawling around the red leather Roche-Bobois, churning groin butter.

Of course they were naked, of course they were dirty, of course they were grunting; Future Primitives didn't believe in clothes, language, or standing erect. It was their way of getting back to the Earth, fulfilling their “true animal selves,” and creating a need for the main house to be flea-bombed. Filthy and foul, howling and humping, they were beyond gross; one had bitten a resident in the leg, drawing blood, and Sarah was certain they were responsible for the epidemic of lice. Not only was their society a farce, but they were a health hazard. She wished the residents of the Waterfall would give them their walking papers, literally. But it wasn't going to happen; people living in glass yurts don't throw stones. Everybody at the Waterfall was into something bizarre. And for a brief period, most of them had “gone primitive.”

The Future Primitives had come into existence when Mom's ex-squeeze Marty, now Aslan, Father of the New Children, wanted to screw a sixteen-year-old retro-hippie from Vacaville named Resa who wouldn't be seduced until the Poobah, as Sarah called Marty, created the concept of the Future Primitives. Then ninety percent of the Waterfall went primitive, following the Poobah's “DarJungian Philosophy” encouraging them to “renounce language, revert to all fours, and respond to your sexual instincts.” During this epoch, Sarah's sexual instincts told her to carry a marlin bat she had bought as a souvenir in Hawaii, letting everyone know she would use it if anyone so much as growled at her wrong. The men snorted an understanding, then orgied down, Resa and Poobah merging. Most of the residents abandoned the faith after their knees got sore, certain women refused to be mounted, and their children weren't testing well in their English classes. Five members
remained, including these three defiling the Roche-Bobois, sniffing and licking each other's butts.

“Hey!” Sarah yelled, shedding her Walkman because her music had been drowned out by Janis's wailing. “Get off the couch!”

But the music in the main house was too loud. The Future Primitives didn't hear her and continued their whiffing. Sarah stalked to the stereo and ripped Janis from the turntable. Startled, the Future Primitives looked up from their hind-nuzzling like a new breed of groundhog.

“Where were you raised?” Sarah asked. “In a dome?”

The Future Primitives piled off the couch, hairy, pale and unhealthy, the three cult stooges. In an act of uncivil disobedience, one of the males, Mancub, showed Sarah his privates. The other male, Jeremy Roth, too busy for anything that political, grappled and shrieked in a mock mating ritual with the female, Saffron. Sarah was set to get a bucket of cold water to separate them, but Saffron regarded her with such a savage smirk of superiority that Sarah had to take a step back.

These weren't dogs, Sarah reminded herself. Dogs smelled better.

The Future Primitives brought to Sarah's mind her favorite Saturday morning kids' show “Land of the Lost” gone porno; Marshall, Will, and the missing link Choco, getting it on in a prehistoric ménage à trois. The Future Primitives were the worst kind of experimental hippies, scraggly, sexual, and in-your-face.

Sarah had decided long ago that hippies could be filed into four basic categories: experimental, retro, bush, and associative. Experimental hippies were marked by their extremist lifestyles. They believed if you were going to do something crazy, it was best to do it in numbers. For example, the land adjacent to the northwest of the Waterfall was occupied by a cult of experimental hippies called the Spinners who believed God spoke to them through Jerry Garcia's guitar. To hear the holy word clearly, they took Ecstasy and spun in circles with their arms outstretched until they spewed. What experimental hippies lacked in common sense, they made up for in intensity. They were the most fanatical type of hippie, prone to jail, premature burn-out, and group suicide. They supported themselves through collective business ventures ranging from T-bill accounts to mass begging. The Spinners sold
the standard wannabe paraphernalia, marijuana, bootleg Dead cassettes, tie-dyed clothing, to retro-hippies who, in Sarah's book, were tourists of time.

Retro-hippies, young, white, and predominantly middle-class, saw the surface of the decade they were visiting and shopped accordingly. They littered the sidewalks of Haight Street in San Francisco and Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, bumming quarters for acid and pizza, acting as if they were homeless instead of bored, and packed the second-hand stores, paying top dollar for paisley vests and torn bell-bottoms, fringed leather jackets that were ugly and didn't fit. They showed up for demonstrations, trying to out-hip each other with their political erectness and stylishly unstylish garb. Their idea of a political statement was to hold hands, form a circle, and sing “Give Peace a Chance.” Sarah felt it was what happened when history was taught by MTV.

But maybe that was all that was left of the legacy, Sarah thought, all that had filtered through the ad execs who wrote the final fiction.

Either way, it was embarrassing to see people her own age that clueless; retros didn't know the difference between Che Guevara and Chez Panisse. People had died in the sixties, were beaten and imprisoned, movers and shakers were moved out and shook down. Sarah had seen the scars, dealt with the aftermath. Retros didn't have any idea what it meant to live in a revolutionary environment. Raised in the wreckage, Sarah considered herself a by-product of those times as opposed to waste matter. She had heard the bush-hippies babble, reaching for roaches, pipes, pills, bongs, a copy of
Soul on Ice
, anything that might ease the memory of their failed attempt to change the world. She had listened to them exhale the oral history of how close they had come to a bright new tomorrow, seen the vision of the better times that preceded the fall burned into their bloodshot eyes.

“You should have been there.” Unsteady hands struck matches for an encore. “It was cosmic.” The Band has played its last waltz, packed up and disappeared into the tranquility of a closing night. “It was like, wow!” Stragglers splayed on the dance floor with cigarette butts and crumpled cups, among dried sweat and lost earrings. “The music, the sex, the love, everybody knew we were winning.” A bulb has burned out in the marquee. “If I could do it all over.” The W does not flash. “You should have
been there.” The smell of smoked dope and dissipated dreams. “We were that close.” The anonymous odor of a dispersing crowd. “Everything almost changed.” A door closed, bolted, barred. “It was far out.” A building condemned. “Nobody will ever be that close again.”

Bush-hippies were the ones who headed for the hills after the sixties, dropping further out of society, looking to live independent of the world. They pretended it was perpetually 1969, the revolution was still coming, peace, love, and dope would carry them to the higher ground like Kesey's bus. Time was marked by the price of an ounce of homegrown. They didn't check publication dates when they picked up their copies of
The Nation, The Guardian
, and
The Socialist Review
from their P.O. boxes, and failed to notice any subtleties as they digested the leftist propaganda whole, substituting old bogeys for new ones. At political rallies the cameras zoomed in on them to discredit the event; dirty clothes, distrusting eyes, dusty FBI files. Same old freaks. Remember what happened last time? The confusion? Civil rights? Vietnam? “One, two, three, four, what are we fighting for?”

Naive, Sarah concluded. But they had been there when the heavy shit went down. Maybe that was too much for them. Too much for anyone. It was up to their security-starved children now, Republican-voting Democrats, video-game-gazing, second-generation dysfunctional, temp-employed whiners from an age without identity. At least the bush-hippies were on the right side. Sarah was certain her contemporaries would be responsible for the disappearance of any rain forest, ozone layer, Communist Party, or poetry that might have existed into the twenty-first century. With bush-hippies, you just had to look past their pretensions and realize they were as self-indulgent as anyone, good instincts but overly nostalgic and severely dependent on drugs. Compared to her set, bush-hippies would be saints if they wiped their asses once in a while.

“Arrrrgh!”

A Future Primitive jarred Sarah from her generalizations, leaving her lumped in the last category: associative-hippie. It didn't matter who she was, what she thought, how she dressed, how much she hated the people that populated her daily life, she was a hippie by association. Mom was a hippie, Mom's boyfriend was a hippie, she lived on a commune. Hippie, hippie, hippie. She
couldn't escape the scent of patchouli oil. Sure she had done her share of drugs, protests, Carlos Castaneda, astrological charts, and Ouija boards, but even if it was true, and Sarah felt falling into this fourth category left it open for interpretation, she hated to be reminded of her surroundings, to hear that stigma attached to her name. Sarah McKay, hippie. Not even.

“You better ease up with that shit,” Sarah said, recognizing the snarling Jeremy Roth, a child psychologist who worked the local institutions prescribing Ritalin and Thorazine to children five times more subdued than himself. “I'm in no mood to fuck around. Tell me where my Mom went, and I'll let you get back to that voodoo that you do so well.”

The Future Primitives, like everybody at the Waterfall, took it for granted that Sarah was in no mood to fuck around. It was a given. Even when she was in the mood to fuck around, Sarah took that seriously too, surrounding herself with friends and letting her hair down like torrents of cartoon rain. If someone suggested she needed to take a chill pill, she shot back, they didn't know what she needed. If they had a problem with her, tough shit. There was the door, don't bump your ass on the way out. So when the Future Primitives continued growling, Sarah knew she was in for confrontation.

“Unghhh!”

“Oh yeah?” Sarah responded, wishing she had brought her marlin bat. “Tell me where my mother went or I'm getting my camera and taking some pictures. We'll see how proud you are of your privates when they're front-page news.”

The threat had leverage. The editor of the local newspaper was an ex-marine turned radical who told Sarah if she wanted to contribute a column and photograph about the commune, he would publish them. Knowing he once fabricated an interview with a Congressman and punched out the county's superintendent, Sarah was certain that the editor would print whatever she sent him, the more controversial the better. But her allegiance to the commune ran deeper than she let on, not to these fawning creeps, but to some of the bush-hippies. Definitely to Mom. Anything she wrote for the paper would not reflect kindly on Mom. But it was a good threat. She knew the Future Primitives only did their thing at the Waterfall because when their dope money ran low they had to venture into the county to support their lifestyle. There were
standards to everybody's depravity. The Future Primitives weren't so out to lunch that they didn't understand that employers rarely hired sexually deviant, nonverbal dirtbags. They were susceptible to bad press. Pictures wouldn't affect Saffron's part-time position in the holistic health department at the Co-op in Ukiah, but Jeremy Roth had a Ph.D. from Princeton and was no doubt thinking about tenure, somewhere, someday, after his sex drive and field research slowed down.

“I'm going to count to three, mostly because I can,” Sarah told them. “If I don't get an answer, I'll see your picture front page.”

Mancub leered at Sarah and crawled to the couch where he humped the crease between the cushions. Sarah made a mental note never to look there again for loose change. Saffron fondled her breasts and did her best Clint Eastwood. Jeremy watched nervously. Sarah started counting.