Dreams (7 page)

A haze of blue-gray stonedness was floating over the crowd. I struggled to a place near the stage and plopped my
tuchuss
onto the grass and tried to get my head into the music. It was then that I heard the unmistakable sound of a female palm colliding with a male physiognomy and caught the wind-up of an angry exclamation that ended with, ". . . and your pitiful little weenie, too, you creep!"

That caught my attention.

I turned in time to see Frankie-Jimmy Kerr slinking away through the mob of stoned Tuna-lovers. And there was Vampirella decked out in black satin with opaque shades and her hair looking as if the sun had no other job than to make it look gorgeous.

"Del!" Vampie squealed. "Del, oh my gosh, I'm so happy to see you. You won't believe what that son of a something wanted me to do. Oh, Del, please, will you stay with me in case he comes back, or sends that louse of a brother of his."

We stayed together and Hot Tuna went on and on, the sky grew dark, the crowd thinned, the stars came out, the gray mist embraced us and we embraced each other and I had an inkling for the first time in my life of what love poetry is all about.

***

And sometimes the world, as they say, is too much with us. I mean, the next day I scrubbed myself down, shampooed a couple of times, scraped the bristles off my face, threw everything except the sweat suit on my back into a couple of pillow cases and headed down to the local Laundromat. I sat there reading a copy of
The Dharma Bums
while my clothes and the soap suds went 'round and 'round and 'round behind the little glass window.

When the machine stopped I transferred everything to a dryer and sat down again with my book only to feel a cool and gentle kiss on my freshly shaven cheek.

And there stood Laura Tomkins, ace girl shutter-bug. "You're looking chipper as hell, boss, how's about buying a lady a cold refreshing brew?"

And off we went to a nearby watering hole. There was a juke box in the corner and somebody had fed it with a bunch of coins and Grace Slick's voice was wailing. There was a TV set over the bar with the picture turned on and the sound turned off. In a totally bizarre way "Somebody to Love" made a perfect soundtrack for Karl Malden and Michael Douglas screeching up and down the streets of San Francisco in their mile-long Ford sedan.

And when Laura and I got back to the Laundromat some skunk had opened the dryer and made off with my personal wardrobe. I collared the dragon who made change and sold overpriced packages of soap powder to customers and demanded to know who had my belongings. She said it wasn't her job to play policeman and couldn't I read, didn't I see all the signs that said,
Keep an eye on your belongings, Management is not responsible for lost or stolen property.

Jeez.

Laura tried to cheer me up, invited me to join her and Gordon for a pizza and a movie, but I was in no mood. I just went home and sulked for the next several hours. When the walls started to close in on me and the only choice on TV was Lawrence Welk or Art Linkletter, I grabbed my Commander Cody baseball cap—at least I'd left that at home—and headed for North Beach. There's always some kind of distraction in North Beach.

The flashing lights and pathetic barkers and moronic thrill-seekers didn't do it for me. Not tonight. They just depressed me. I walked down to City Lights and looked at the books in the window and decided maybe I'd find something to read. I wandered around picking books up and putting them down. I finally settled on
A Coney Island of the Mind.
I stood in line to pay for the Ferlinghetti until I got to the cashier's counter.

All right, guess who was working the register.

I don't have to tell you. Oh, boy, did she look good to me!

"Vampirella!"

"Yes, sir. You want that book? A great book, great book, excellent choice." She told me the price. It was right there on the cover but she told me anyhow.

"Vampirella, it's me, Del."

She told me the price again and held out her hand.

I slapped the book into her hand and walked out.

All right, all right, why didn't I just write her off as a flake and go look for another lady fair? Right. Try telling that to somebody who's so crazy in love he can't figure out which way is up.

***

For the next couple of weeks I managed to avoid Vampirella. I started getting up early, showering and shaving regularly, working long hours, even freelancing to supplement the meager salary that the East Coast mobsters who owned
Rock! Rock! Rock!
paid me whenever I called up and whined that I was starving.

I got an invitation to a literary conference in Southern California. A library association had decided that the popular music press was worthy of a panel discussion and offered me a cheap ticket on a PSA jet, a rental AMC Gremlin, and a room at the Motel Five-and-a-Half directly under the LAX flight-path.

Strangely enough, by the time my jet touched down I had a hearty appetite so I headed out in my Gremlin, looking for a place to eat. I must have taken a wrong turn on the Hades Freeway because I wound up in an ugly town in the Valley. While I tried to find my way back to LA I spotted an eating establishment with the unlikely name of Uncle Hoggly-Woggly's Tyler Texas Home Style Barbecue. There was a big sign over the door, a painting of a bright pink pig in a chef's hat holding up a plate of barbecue and saying, "Bet You Can't Top This!" surrounded by the name of the establishment in glowing incandescent letters. People were lined up to get into the joint and the ones going in looked happy and the ones coming out looked happier so I figured this was a find.

It was. If I ever get to Texas—God forbid!—I will head straight to Tyler, wherever that may be, and wallow in barbecue until I can't stand it any more.

For now, though, I just feasted on ribs in sauce so hot it hurt but so delicious I couldn't stop eating, and potato salad, and coffee. That was all that Uncle Hoggly-Woggly sold and it was paradise enow as far as I was concerned.

That was the high point of my trip. As for the low point . . .

The conference was a nightmare. My panel was attended by about three bedraggled-looking spinster librarians. Turned out that everybody else was at a cocktail party in honor of the hundredth birthday a professor of medieval
ballades
from some local community college extension branch. The moderator of the panel must have been that professor's mother. She thought my magazine was a journal devoted to the study of petroglyphs. And my fellow panelists—there were two of them—were none other than my old buddies Frankie and Jimmy Kerr. Who of course proceeded to beat up on me verbally for forty minutes while our moderator sat there, open-mouthed and horror-stricken.

I spent the evening sitting on my bed at the Motel Five-and-a-Half eating a stale chicken salad sandwich, drinking warm, flat beer, and watching
The Brady Bunch
in fuzzy black-and-white. I would have headed back to Uncle Hoggly-Woggly's if I thought I could find it again, but the first time had been strictly a lucky strike and I wasn't going to risk those freeways again.

In the morning I packed my minimal luggage, checked out of the Motel Five-and-a-Half, and started across the parking lot, looking for my avocado green Gremlin.

Other people were checking out. I saw a woman pushing a double-width stroller from the office. As she reached the middle of the parking lot some kind of muscle car came screaming around the corner, headed straight for them. I don't think the driver expected anyone to be there and he mashed on his brakes and the car started to skid but there was no way it was going to stop in time and no way that poor mother was going to get her little ones out of its trajectory.

I want to emphasize, I'm no hero. I didn't decide that I was going to do what I did. I didn't even think about that,
When you see somebody who needs help,
business. I just—well, something clicked in my brain, and without thinking I launched myself into a flying tackle, slammed into the woman with my shoulder, grabbed the handle of the stroller with my other hand and yanked it after me. I hit the pavement hard with the woman in one hand and the stroller, complete with a pair of shrieking toddlers, in the other. I was scraped all to hell and gone and bleeding in a bunch of places but the mom and her tykes were untouched.

The driver of the muscle car had stopped and he and his passenger came trotting back to see what had happened. It was, all right, you got it, Frankie and Jimmy, and give them credit, lousy creeps that they are, they were concerned for the woman and her toddlers and remorseful for their carelessness and the tragedy that had almost caused, and one of them even looked at me and said, "Oh, Del Marston, sorry 'bout that, see you back up north."

And they climbed back into their muscle car and went tearing out of the parking lot.

The woman was hugging her toddlers and crying. After a little while she stood up and held me, her hands on my arms. She actually cried into my jacket. Then she brushed off the cloth and said, "Oh, I got you all wet."

In a minute we both started laughing at the incongruity.

She let go of me and leaned back and looked up at me. Her eyes were a color I'd only seen once before in my life. She said, so softly I could hardly hear, "You will be rewarded."

***

I got back to San Francisco without further incident. I was too pumped from the excitement to go home so I opened the crummy little West Coast office of
Rock! Rock! Rock!
and started through the usual accumulation of mail, LP's for review, press releases, invitations to music venues, and promo gifts.

There was a jiffy bag with no return address on it but there was a Los Angeles postmark. I opened it and extracted a tee shirt. It was gorgeous. It featured a picture of a pig wearing a chef's hat, holding up a plate of barbecue, grinning and saying, "Bet You Can't Top This!" Big, clear lettering around the artwork spelled out the name of the establishment,
Doctor Hoggly-Woggly's Tyler Texas Home Style Barbecue.

Tha-tha-tha that's all, f-folks!