Passing Through the Flame (80 page)

“I said I’ve decided to ball Barry,” Ruby said.

“I don’t understand you. I thought we had a thing going.”

“We do.”

“Do we?”

“We’re friends, Chris,” Ruby said. “Friends don’t own each other. I’m not your old lady. I’m not anyone’s old lady. I ball who I want.”

Sargent glared at the two of them. Stein didn’t have the guts to look at him, but Ruby was challenging him with her eyes, looking up at him defiantly with her hand on Stein’s knee. What do I do now? Sargent wondered. Beat the shit out of Stein? But this is
her
trip, she’s just using him. Beat the shit out of her? But I think maybe that’s what she expects. What’s she trying to prove, that I can’t tell her what to do? Okay, I can’t tell her what to do. But I don’t have to let her rub my nose in it....

“I can dig it,” Sargent said slyly. “You two go get your rocks off. I don’t mind. Like you say, nobody owns anybody.”

He sat down again next to Ivan Blue, expecting her to be pissed off at not getting the show of jealousy she was obviously angling for. Instead, she got up, gave him a big smile, and kissed him on the lips. “You keep surprising me,” she said softly in his ear. “You’ve got a good head. I really dig you.” Then she grabbed Stein by the hand and led him off with a glazed expression on his face.

“Women,” Sargent said, shaking his head.

“They
have
gotten weird, haven’t they?” Blue agreed. “It’s getting to the point where an honest ego-tripping male chauvinist pig like myself can hardly get laid anymore. Thank God for groupies.”

“I don’t know,” Sargent said, “lean sort of see what’s going on in their heads. I mean, I wouldn’t want some chick telling
me
I couldn’t screw anyone but her. At least Ruby isn’t a cunt, if you know what I mean. She’s like a guy with a pussy. Maybe that’s not so bad.”

Blue looked at him sadly. “Man, I sure didn’t expect to hear that kind of stuff from
you.
”

Sargent took the joint from his hand, took a long drag, held it, pondered the situation, examined his own feelings about Ruby balling the poor nerd Stein, and found to his own amazement that there was no pain, no jealousy, that he didn’t really even feel pissed off. He exhaled. “I didn’t expect to hear it from myself,” he said.

Down below, on the stage, the group finished its formless number and started screwing around, retuning its instruments. Sargent looked down at the recording shack built into the base of the stage tower, the recording shack where all the album tapes were stored, the object of this whole crazy action, the thing that had brought him into contact with Ruby and these jerks in the first place. Maybe this is a good break after all. Blue here is the boy that’s going to be making the speeches; he’ll be fronting the whole thing. The word has to come from him, why have Ruby and Stein even know about it?

“Hey, Ivan, there’s a thing I’d like to suggest for your end of this action....”

“Yeah?” Blue said noncommittally.

Sargent pointed to the stage. “See that shack built into the base of the stage?”

“The recording shack?”

“Yeah. I’ve had my boys check things out, and I’ve found out that all the tapes that are being recorded for record albums are stored in there.”

“So?”

“The way I see it, that gives us a chance to hit Jango Beck where he lives.”

“You mean trash the tapes?” Blue said. He eyed Sargent suspiciously.

“Yeah, it’ll cost that bastard Beck a fortune.”

Blue continued to give him the old fish-eyed stare. “You wouldn’t be involved with Chick Day, would you?” he said.

“Who?”

“Rubber Duck.”

“What the fuck’s a rubber duck?” Sargent said. What the hell is this guy talking about? “Look, all I want to do is burn those tapes. It would be a kick in Beck’s nuts, and it would show you guys really mean business. You’re gonna be making the big speech, so I thought you should give it what you’d call a political justification.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” Blue said. “And I think we should trash the damned film, too. The film is a bigger rip-off than the record albums.”

Oh-oh, Jango wouldn’t like that, I think he’s figuring to get his bread back off the film, after we liven it up with a little revolutionary action. How am I going to talk this guy out of it?

“But the film is scattered all over the place,” Sargent said. “We don’t have the personnel to trash it.”

“Sure we do. We’ve got three hundred thousand people. Let the people trash it. It’ll give them something physical to do, a genuine revolutionary action.”

And Jango’s cops will for sure start shooting to protect it, Sargent thought. In which case anything can happen, and we’ll be exposed as hell up there on the stage. Sargent studied Blue, his theatrically long blond hair, his prima donna smile, the way he used who he was with the chicks—a showboater all the way.

“Did you ever stop to think that we’re going to be the stars of the film?” Sargent said.

“Huh?”

“Sure. The take-over is going to be
the
big event of the festival, and you and me are going to be stage center, right? We’re gonna be movie stars.”

“I never thought of that!” Blue exclaimed. He dragged on the joint, blew out a cloud of smoke. “Son of a bitch! You know, you’re right. Hmmmm.... As long as we’re going to be stars of the movie, why not go all the way?”

“All the way?”

“Instead of trashing the film footage, we demand that Beck turn the raw footage over to us,” Blue said. “Then we have some Movement people cut it our way. Make sure we look good, make sure the final version gets our good sides, as it were. I mean, if we’re gonna be stars, we should damn well have approval of the final cut, right?”

“Man,” Sargent said, “your ego is
too much!”

Blue turned his right profile to Sargent, then twisted around and showed him the left. “Which do you think is better?” he said, laughing.

Sargent shook his head. What a way to run a revolution! Imagine assholes like this thinking they can get away with ripping off Jango Beck!

Barry Stein lay panting on his back, physically satisfied, psychically wasted. Ruby’s weight atop him seemed so much dead meat. She propped herself up on his chest, looked down at him with those hard, tough eyes, and said, “What’s the matter, wasn’t I good enough for you?”

Stein looked up at her—exactly the position she wants me in, he thought—and sighed. “Why did you do this?” he asked. “Because you asked me to. Remember?”

“You were proving something to Sargent, weren’t you? I could feel it. You weren’t making love to me; you were running a number on him.”

Ruby eased herself off of him, searched the tent for her clothes, found them, began putting them on. “Maybe I was,” she said quietly. “But I thought you wanted me.”

Stein sat up, put on his shirt, began buttoning it. “I did,” he said. “But not this way. You treated me like a thing.”

With her shirt still unbuttoned, Ruby sat down on the cot beside him, put a hand on his knee. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Really I am. I guess I’m kind of confused... sometimes being liberated isn’t so simple....”

Stein finished buttoning his shirt, put on his shorts. “I wouldn’t call what you did being liberated. I’d call it being a shit.”

Ruby looked at him with softened eyes. “I like you,” she said. “I really do... I don’t want to hurt you....”

“But you like Sargent better.”

She began buttoning her blouse, carefully studying the movements of her fingers. “Maybe I do...”she said. “But I don’t want to be anyone’s old lady.... I guess I wasn’t trying to prove something to Chris as much as I was trying to prove something to myself...”

“And... what did you prove?”

Ruby finished buttoning her shirt, stood up. “I don’t know what I proved,” she said. “That I’m free... that I could make Chris accept the fact that I’m free... that... I don’t know, Barry. Maybe that I can be as big a shit as any man.”

Stein stood up and felt his anger receding. She’s probably hurt herself more than she’s hurt me, he thought. My ego’s just a little scraped, is all. He took her hand. “Forget it,” he said. “We live in confusing times.”

She smiled wanly at him, pecked him on the lips. “You’re a good guy. Barry,” she said. “Let’s be friends, can we?”

“Sure. Friends.”

The sunlight streamed in through the tent flap; outside was the tumult and hubbub of the People’s World’s Fair and a beautiful day. Stein felt like a pile of crap.

“Oh, Barry, don’t look so sad,” Ruby said. She came to him, put her arms around him, kissed him long and deep. Stein felt the sincerity of it, a sincerity he simply couldn’t comprehend.

“Once more with feeling?” she said, pulling down his shorts. “One friend to another?”

“I don’t understand you. I don’t understand you at all.”

She sighed as she pushed him back on the cot. “See, we have something in common after all,” she said.

Velva Leecock sipped at her iced lemonade as the makeup girl mopped sweat from her forehead and repowdered her face. It seemed at least ninety degrees to her, and for a moment she found herself wishing that this were another porny, so that she could take off her clothes and cool her body as so many of the hippies in the crowd had already done.

But Paul seemed determined to go for a PG rating—none of the girls Emmett had rounded up for extras were permitted to show tit, and all of the guys had their pants on, even though there was plenty of nipples and pubic hair visible outside the shot.

In fact, the whole shooting area was like a little island of Hollywood in a sea of Woodstock. The guards had cordoned off a hundred-yard circle of the natural amphitheater, and all the speakers in the area had been disconnected, so that the music to which the thousands of people were swaying like a Nebraska wheatfield on a windy day was only a background murmur within the uncharmed circle, like airport Muzak.

Outside the circle, thousands upon thousands of joints were being smoked, and the pot cloud was as thick as the smog hovering over the San Fernando Valley on a bad summer day. Inside the circle, there was no dope at all, though Paul had let all the extras get as stoned as they wanted to beforehand. Outside the circle, half the girls were at least bare-breasted and a lot of the guys were bare-ass too, but there wasn’t anyone inside the circle who couldn’t have appeared on network television. Outside the circle, the sun turned the bowlike meadow into a solar furnace; inside the circle, the shooting lights made the heat even worse. The shooting area was like a denatured Disneyland version of the festival inside the festival itself.

When the makeup girl had finished the touchup, Velva swiveled half around in her chair, searching the area for Paul. She located him between the camera dolly and a metal equipment crate talking to Rick Gentry. At this distance, she couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she didn’t like the way that faggot Gentry was looking at Paul, the way Paul let the creep touch him on the shoulder, on the hip, on the arm, as Gentry punctuated every other word with his slimy hands, like some octopus of an agent talking to a young starlet.

Gross things were going on between Paul and Rick Ick, she knew. That crotch-grabbing scene I walked in on yesterday, so disgusting! Nothing wrong with a guy being bi—some really good studs are bi—but Paul
isn’t bi.
I
know
he isn’t. He’s letting Gentry run this number on him for some other reason I don’t understand. It’s really getting horrible.

Paul and Gentry walked back toward her. Gentry with that awful, smug, contented smile that had been plastered across his face so often since yesterday, and Paul’s face looking hard and controlled, as if he were hiding something. My God, has Gentry balled him? Or sucked him? Or whatever disgusting thing he does in bed with a man? Is
that
why I can’t get Paul alone? Has he been
making
it
with Rick Ick? The thought was so appalling that Velva tried to blot it out of her mind by an act of will, but it was so perversely compelling that she couldn’t keep ghost images of Gentry and Paul going down on each other, buggering each other, from flitting around the periphery of her consciousness.
Eeech!

“All right,” Paul said, “let’s try for a take on this shot now. Emmett, get the extras in position. Velva, Rick, take your places, please.”

Velva got up and sat down on the blue motel blanket that had been spread on the grass, while Emmett Francis moved extras around and Paul talked to the cameraman. Gentry gingerly stepped around a couple of tough-looking guys in black pants and denim vests who were positioned among the gentle-looking kids in the foreground and sat down on the blanket beside her. He never even looked at her; he never took his eyes off Paul.

Velva began to get a queasy, hollow feeling in her stomach. She could all but see the dotted lines connecting Gentry’s eyes with Paul’s crotch. She turned away and smiled at the extras arranged by Emmett on the slope of the hill behind her. They were nice-looking kids for the most part. Three or four of the guys with smooth naked chests looked good enough to eat, and one of the girls was really striking in a plain T-shirt and bright patchwork jeans that seemed painted on her full body like a second skin. But they all looked somewhat sullen and bored in the hot sun, unable to really hear the music or to smoke dope, while everywhere else their friends were moving in time to the beat, passing joints, and drinking wine. But when she paid attention to them, pantomimed mopping her brow, a number of them smiled back, a few mimicked the gesture, and two sweet young boys flashed her the peace sign. They really seemed to dig her, and that made things seem a little better.

Paul diddled around a little longer, adjusting the boom mikes, moving the girl in the tight patchwork jeans over into a corner of the frame where she wouldn’t draw attention away from the stars, then walked up to the blanket where they sat.

“Okay now,” he said, “remember, Rick, this is your first gentle little try at making Velva. Don’t come on like the Big Bad Wolf, but I want to see a little wolf lurking in the background.”