Passing Through the Flame (82 page)

“Stop worrying about people seeing,” Velva said. “I’d fuck you at high noon in the middle of that stage. I’d fuck you straight from Gentry’s ass, I’d lick the taste of him off you and fuck the memory out of your head. Would Sandy do that? Would Sandy do this?”

She leaped at him with all the force in her body, knocking him off his feet, slamming him down on the hard, rough ground, landing atop him. Unceremoniously, she unbuckled his belt, unzipped his fly, started tearing his pants off.

“Jesus Christ, stop it!” he yelled, pulling her hands away.

She yanked her hands out of his grip. “No way,” she said, “no goddamn way.” She ripped his pants down, hugged his head with both hands, thrust her tongue deep, deep into his mouth.

He struggled for another moment, but the taste of her filled him, first with fire, then with a slow, delicious, smoldering warmth. He felt his own arms slide around her, the touch of her warm, smooth skin. He felt like the stereotypical girl in the classic rape sequence, who starts with resistance, beating at the back of the hero, then melts in mid-kiss. And found the very image turning him on.

“Look at it this way,” she purred in his ear, “you’re willing to cocktease a faggot for the sake of a movie, you should at least be willing to ball your leading lady.”

“Velva—”

“Trust me, Paul. It’ll make you feel so good. I know about Gentry, I know what’s going to go on in your head now. Don’t worry about it, let yourself go into it....”

“
What are you doing to me?”
Paul shouted as he summoned that ghastly smug face from the tar pits of his memory, those knowing eyes, that awful commingling of nausea and lust.

“Close your eyes, and just feel it,” she said. She kissed him, reaching down at the same time, her fingers around his cock, Gentry’s fingers, kneading, demanding, coaxing—”Let me take care of that for you.” He rolled his head and groaned in black agony, then felt her lips leave his as a woman’s warm cunt, tight and unmistakable, replaced the obscenity of fingers around the root of him.

Hands like butterfly wings against his cheeks. A soft voice: “Open your eyes, Paul. Come on home.”

His eyes opened. Velva was straddling him, sunlight streaming through her golden hair, painting her left nipple bright scarlet, dappling the upper right quadrant of her arced body with a zebra pattern of light and shade. Slowly, she rotated her hips, massaged away those twisted and sour images with her secret inner muscles, looking through his eyes into the core of him, smiling a close friendly smile.

She shivered deliciously and threw up her arms to embrace the sun. She was very beautiful, and all of him was there with her, making love with his eyes open, on the bare earth, in the cool shade.

After a while he gently tumbled her over and took his pleasure atop her, meeting her gaze as they came together, eye to eye, belly to belly, alone and together, with no mocking ghosts looking on from the secret darkness.

Afterward they lay in each other’s arms, still drinking from the depths of each other’s eyes. “Now you’ve balled your leading lady,” she said. “Was it so bad?”

Paul just stared at her, not knowing what to say, not knowing what he felt. This was not the Velva he remembered from their time together before.

But then I’m not the same Paul.

Voices behind them suddenly made him roll away from her. A young blond man and a small dark girl were standing in the sunlight just beyond the trees, looking at them in smiling tranquillity. Paul flushed, looking around for his pants.

The girl laughed a little musical laugh. “That’s all right,” she said. “You look beautiful.”

“You look beautiful, too,” Velva said unselfconsciously.

The blond man smiled, nodded, and led his lady away around the bottom of the hill, waving once before disappearing from view.

Velva stood up. Twigs and leaves clung to her reddened back. Paul began brushing them off. “How do you feel?” he said.

“Like I’ve just balled my director. Like nothing can get to me now. Like I can even face Rick Ick.”

Paul glanced at his watch—twelve twenty-six. “We’re late,” he said. “People will wonder what we’ve been doing.”

Velva laughed. “Oh, I don’t think they’ll have too much trouble figuring it out.”

Paul flushed, then found himself viewing the scene from the outside with his director’s eye: there he was, pulling on his pants in the open air, having just sneaked a fuck with his leading lady. It looked good, and it had felt good, and screw anyone who thinks otherwise!

“Put yer clothes on, lady,” he said in mock belligerence, “we’ve got a movie to make.”

Bill Horvath stepped up onto the stage into the blaze of the crowd, the roar of noon. The sun bounced heat waves off the metal floor of the stage, enveloping him in dry desert heat and shimmering the air into miragelike unreality. The cheers, applause, and shouts of the crowd merged into a jagged sound like the world’s largest sound system turned on full blast and tuned to an empty channel a The sound reverberated from the high circular rim of the natural amphitheater, feeding back on itself, echoing, feeding back its own echoes, transforming itself into an enormous sustained shout of white noise.

The huge crowd seemed part of the unreality, at once less than human and more. Everything was energy—the dry heat, the shimmering air, the monstrous static roar of the crowd, the universe of eyes focused on his person. He felt the energy pouring in on him from every point of the compass, overwhelming his own life-force, yet enhancing it. He stood at the center, at the focal point of tremendous human energy. There was exhilaration in that position, and terror. It took real psychic effort to step back from that hyperreal perspective and into the skin of his own personal humanity.

Bobby sat down at the organ, Jerry and Mark began adjusting their instruments, and as Horvath plugged his guitar into the amp system, the great noise began to gutter into a more normal audience murmur, and it began to feel more like the Velvet Cloud tuning up in front of an audience than the center of an explosion. A gigantic audience to be sure, but just a whole lot of people gathered together to boogie on a hot summer’s day.

Susan turned slowly around and around beside him, looking at the audience, counting the house. She wore a plain pair of black satin bell-bottoms and an open white suede vest laced together by thongs across the strip of naked flesh between her breasts. None of the fancy Hollywood costume and special effects bullshit that Jango had insisted on for the first performance.

When she turned to face him, she was smiling, and if her eyes seemed a little weird, a little feverish, a little distant, well, he could imagine how he looked himself. The electricity in the air was so thick you could honk it like coke, and like coke, it gave you a high-energy boost, a magnified sense of your own power.

And today we’re going to start turning some of that energy back to the people. It’s really their energy anyway; we’re just the focus, the mirror of their own power. It’s not the singer, it’s the song, and the song belongs to the people.

“Ready, babes?” he said. “Let’s start off with ‘Lazy Saint.’”

You can ride the fire, baby, you can ride the cloud

You can be the phoenix, lover, you can live out loud

You can ride the bird of night to the mountains of the sun

You can be anything as long as you don’t run, run, run....

The words seemed to emerge from her like rainbow soap bubbles formed by the contours of her mouth and lips, then released into the air where they burst into crystal butterflies of song. Bill’s guitar generated the song deep within her, and it bubbled up through her, a thing alive. She wasn’t singing it; it was singing her.

Bill led Bobby off into an instrumental riff, guitar winding around organ, organ rolling around guitar, and she let her body flow with the music, becoming one more cell in the organism that was the audience. Her knees rolled, and her body shook, and she felt the power moving through her, a circular wave front of golden light radiating from the stage to the far reaches of the meadow, bouncing back off the hills, off the souls of the people, returning to its focus redoubled, a feedback of love.

Looking out over the multitude, over her people, she saw shimmering beams of violet energy revolving around the pivot of the stage, each sweep whooshing silently on some cellular wavelength. And it carried her back to a moment long ago, in San Francisco, in the Summer of Love, ripped on acid, high on a hilltop overlooking the city, watching those same energy waves of the universe rotate around her being. A moment, a feeling of oneness with all creation, that she had all but forgotten, that had seemed lost forever. But now, once again, she felt her body dissolve into its constituent atoms, and the atoms dissolve into configurations of pure energy, and the energy spreading out from the physical center that was the locus of her body standing on the stage to merge with the violet aura of the audience in a velvet-soft embrace. And that was the Velvet Cloud. That was where they had come from, that was where they were returning.

When Bill’s guitar drew the song from her again, the words seemed to come from the sea of faces, from the people-covered hillsides, from the sun above and the sun within, aspects of the oneness of that magic moment of homecoming.

As long as you don’t try to grab the water in your outstretched hand

As long as you can’t turn it on or try to understand....

The music flowed sweetly and smoothly out of his guitar, Bobby and the boys were bang-on, Susan was clear and clean and strong, and the sound system was working beautifully. Horvath could see the good vibes coming up out of the audience.

A whole section of people immediately in front of the stage were dancing in place, shaking their bodies, waving their arms, really grooving. And it didn’t seem forced, the way that kind of dancing had always seemed to feel these past few years; it was 1967 again. There were more dancers, singly and in small groups, scattered throughout the big crowd, so that the whole vast saucer of people rippled with rhythmic motion. The smoke of thousands of joints rose above the crowd like incense, and he could even smell the grass up here on the stage, hot air rising, high air rising.

Bobby’s organ leaned out, Jerry’s drum softened, and Horvath could hear the happy clapping of thousands of hands beating time. Oh, yeah, this was a mellow audience on a mellow Southern California summer’s day, and everything was feelin’ groovy.

That all that shit is may a, flyer, and you are just a dream

That life is such illusion, daddy, that you’re just what you seem....

Susan sang it out, rolling her body with the music, opening to embrace the crowd, the blue sky, the high hot sun. Ah, she looked so good, she looked so fine! It was the good old days, the Summer of Love come home again, another sunshine time.

And when they chanted the first line of the final chorus—”Lazy Saint! Lazy Saint”—hundreds of voices came back with the counter. “Well, sometimes you got it, baby, sometimes you ain’t.” And the audience burst into happy applause, as much for its own good feelings as for the performers up on the stage.

As it should be, Horvath thought as he strutted around in little circles, grinning, waving his guitar at the crowd, feeling their power, feeling his power, basking in the shared moment of appreciation. As it should be.

Beside him, Susan waved to the people, her eyes lit up like great big Christmas tree ornaments. As it should be! As it should be!

Circular waves of rosy energy came off the people, pulsed up at her, caressing her flesh, filling her with a boundless love. The world was all blue and rose—the bright vault of the sky, the rosy glow of the people, and a shimmering aurora of deep purple rimming the horizon where sky and flesh melted into each other to form a ring of love’s fire enclosing this universe, a circle of pale fire keeping out the demons of the dying world outside and binding together the children of light. It was the old days, the old dreams, the old hopes reborn.

As Bill grinned and waved his guitar at the meadow of glowing flower faces, she spread her arms wide to embrace them all, spread her legs wide as if she could take them all into the tenderness and safety of her cunt. She arched her back, bent her knees, wanting to fuck them all, the lips of her vagina glowing like that ring of purple fire enclosing this magic reality, sucking all that love inside of her, waves of rose pleasure coursing through her.

She rolled her head in the air, closing her eyes, and felt orgasmic bolts of rose-colored fire surge through her and out of her; lightning flashes of love that marbled the crystal blue sky, voiceless cries of ecstasy.

The audience continued to jump and shout, and Horvath saw that Susan was rocking up and down from her knees, rotating her head, fanning her reddish black hair through the air in a cloud of glory, breathing in long, ragged pants, playing to them, egging them on, practically doing a bump and grind.

A cold fear gripped Horvath’s guts, a fear tinged with unstable awe. He sensed that she was where she had been at this morning; that transcendent, mad presence seemed to hover around her, to permeate the vast audience as it had moved the people in the awakening campgrounds. Jeez, is she flipping out? He unhooked his lavaliere mike, went to her side. “You all right, babes?” he whispered in her ear.

She turned her face to him like someone rising up out of a dream, her eyes focusing on him with visible effort, as if drawing back from some incredible acid vision. She blinked. She nodded. Instinctively, Mark began tuning his guitar, squeezing out harsh, piercing feedback to distract the audience. Bobby pounded random notes on the organ as if searching for the lost chord. Susan’s breathing slowly became slower, more regular.

“I’m okay, Bill,” she said quietly, smiling a private smile just for him.

The audience was getting quiet, too quiet, squirming at the sight of this private moment being enacted on stage, this bit of ordinary reality shattering the magic of the performance. “Really I am,” she said. She kissed him—a public kiss, a kiss for the crowd, who giggled, and cheered, and laughed, snapped back into the hyperreality of the performance. But Horvath burned with a jealousy twinged with dread.