Passing Through the Flame (84 page)

Take this body, ease your pain

Let me take you on a trip

Back to yourself again....

She forced the words up from the void at her center by sheer act of will, and she could see the serpent cringe a bit down there in the outer darkness, and a tiny mote of light flickered in the depths of the darkness within. Take me, oh, please take me this one more time, don’t turn away from the light! Ah, she could hear the ghost of feeling coming back into Bill’s guitar; and they were moving toward home, toward recapturing the spirit of the Velvet Cloud.

“Take this body, I am yours,” she sang, and she undid the thongs of her vest, letting her breasts fall free in the open air, arching her back and offering them to the people down there, struggling in the coils of the beast within them.

“I will warm you....” Some nuclear threshold was reached and passed—the mote of golden light flickering within her caught, held, and grew, driving back the blackness within her.

“I will love you....” She could feel the burgeoning power within her now, sure and strong, and her voice strengthened, and yellow sparks of energy seemed to crackle off her nipples and fingertips as she became a sun glowing in the void.

“I will flash you through the fire of my flame.” Now the song flowed forth like a golden fountain, and Bill’s guitar wrapped itself around her voice as it always had, and they were the Velvet Cloud again. The darkness shattered in a shower of obsidian fragments, and there below her, spread to the far horizons, were people, beautiful living creatures of flesh and hair. Just human beings swaying and smiling in the golden sunlight under a high blue California sky.

A few tears misted her eyes, and then she laughed and opened her arms to the multitude, embracing them all, the people, and the sky, and the warm sun.

I love anyone who needs me

Love is the holy food that feeds me

Take me, make me, hold me, feel me....

The people were moving to the music, and Bill’s guitar was once more the lover of her voice, the second skin of her soul. We’re back! We’re the Velvet Cloud, and everything’s gonna be all right!

Take this body, leave your pain

Let me take you on a trip

Back to yourself again....

The music went on for long moments after her song was done, filling the world with sunshine, and when it finally ended, the applause was a massive release of tension, a great big welcome home.

Bill Horvath took Susan’s hand, looked into her eyes, eyes that now seemed to be looking back at him from a shared reality, returned from that place into which he could not follow. “Are you all right, babes?” he said.

She kissed him gently on the lips, and the taste of her told him that it was
Susan’s
kiss. “I’m okay now,” she said. “But we shouldn’t have done that. That’s an evil song. We’re the Velvet Cloud, that’s what we’re meant to be. That’s what they want us to be.”

Horvath looked out over the smiling, happy audience. The sullen, older, questioning vibes were gone, and they could have been a meadow of the Flower Children of years ago; that sweet innocent sunshine was in the air.

But Horvath couldn’t share in those sunshine vibes. The price he was paying for them was too high, and he could no longer believe in their innocence. Those happy, smiling faces were feeding off Susan’s substance, forcing her to be Star, forcing her further and further into that place from which there might someday be no returning.

The stage on which they stood was high and narrow, and it was beginning to look as if there was no way down.

“Got it, Paul,” Velva Leecock said, giving him a little heavy eye contact, playing to the big crowd of curious festival-goers who had gathered around the cast and crew. The bright white shooting lights that washed out the setting sun and the strobes and colored display lights of the stands and exhibits had drawn them to this section of the main promenade of the People’s World’s Fair like moths to a flame. Or like would-be movie stars to a searchlight premiere on Hollywood Boulevard.

Everybody is turned on by a chance to even walk through a movie, Velva thought, favoring the surrounding onlookers with a series of little smiles, little public intimacies between herself and her fans. She patted Paul’s ass affectionately and openly and stepped back inside the circle of shooting lights, where Gentry stood like a little fat kid surrounded by bullies, nervously tapping his right foot on the ground.

Paul couldn’t hide the response in his eyes, even though he was doing his best to be the distant, professional director, and the electricity between them created little ripples of response among the spectators that made Gentry’s face lose another degree of color, one more twist of the knife. Velva could hardly keep from giggling out loud. Things have been so much better since Paul and I got together, she thought. I’m
enjoying
it now.

Paul turned away and gave final instructions to the crew—for this sequence, just a single cameraman with a hand-held camera, a sound man with a portable boom mike, and a grip holding the bank of shooting lights. “Just keep running all the time; we’ll fill in what we blow with close-ups later.” He spoke to the crowd a large. “We’d like to make this look as natural as possible, folks, so try to ignore us, and just be yourselves.”

The crowd tittered sullenly; Velva gave them a beseeching look, and they seemed to mellow out a bit, picking up on her good feelings. Rick Ick looked as if he had bitten into a turd.

“Velva, Rick, remember to keep looking around you, react to the background. Okay... roll ‘em.”

“Sunset City
, Scene Fifty-A, take one.”

“Speed.”

“Action.”

Velva and Gentry began walking slowly east together along the crowded main promenade of the People’s World’s Fair, past the Ecoenvironment Dome, a green jewel with orange highlights flashing off its facets in the light of the setting sun. Paul and his crew tracked with them, sidling crab wise through the mobs of colorfully dressed people.

It seemed like a huge county fair at sunset to Velva. Although the people were bearded, long-haired, half-naked, dope-smoking freaks, and the exhibits were geodesic domes, weird futuristic buildings, and hippie-style outdoor headshops, the essential mood was pure county fair to her, and she felt like a kid again, digging the sights and anticipating a warm summer night. Just like Peggy Greene—and with her lover moving along with her behind the camera. The good vibes filled her and bubbled out of her, and even Gentry couldn’t bum her out, especially now that she had put him in his place.

Paul made a talking mouth with his hand, cuing her opening line. “This is really neat,” Velva said. “Just like a county fair back home.”

“I didn’t know they had all this dope in Kansas,” Gentry said sourly. His sullen mood was a tonic to her; he couldn’t keep his own defeated feeling from creeping into the character.

“Oh, don’t be a party poop, Doug,” she said girlishly, taking his hand as prescribed by the script, feeling him squirm inside. “People having a good time are the same everywhere.”

They walked on in silence, past a series of colorful stalls, and a big crowd under a canvas awning being harangued by a speaker in an American flag T-shirt with long, flowing blond hair. Like sour-faced Rick Ick, the people seemed resentful as the crew pushed through them with their equipment and bright lights, but Velva flashed smiles from deep inside her at everyone—the smile of Peggy Greene having a simple good time, the smile of Velva Leecock sitting on top of the world—and they seemed to melt in the warmth of her star quality, her inner glow. Ah, I could turn on the world tonight! she thought. And ball them all afterward. Warmth spread from her loins down her thighs and up into her stomach.

Paul cued more dialogue, and Velva responded with an easy confidence she had never felt in front of a camera before. “Smell the air, Doug! It’s like cotton candy and buttered popcorn!” She giggled, squeezed his hand, swung their arms like a pendulum. Around them, beyond the shooting lights, people smiled and waved, sharing the joy she felt.

“You’re a poet,” Gentry said woodenly, drawing her to him as the script required, but putting out hunched-over bad vibrations. “I wish I could see through your eyes tonight.”

She laughed—Peggy Greene laughing
with
Doug Winter, Velva Leecock laughing at Rick Gentry. I’ll bet you do, she thought. I’ll bet you’d like to be inside my body right now. “You can,” she said. “Just imagine you’ve never been anywhere, never done anything. Imagine you’re a farmboy at the county fair with your best girl.”

“I’m afraid that’s one of the few things I’ve never done,” he said morosely.

“Well, there you are!”

“Where is that? What I see is a lot of stoned hippies kidding themselves into believing that they’re the same kids they were in 1967.”

“Oh, Doug, kids are
kids.
”

“I don’t think anyone’s been a kid since Timothy Leary got loose with his magic instant old-age pills.”

“I’m still a kid.”

Gentry looked at her, but the sweetness that was supposed to appear on his face came out dripping sarcasm. “So you are, Peggy,” he said. “But you’re from Kansas. Just like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz.
”

He made it sound all nasty and crawly; as if what he had in mind as he said it was Judy Garland ODed on reds. If you only had a heart, Velva thought. The sun sinking behind the western hills painted the sky with streaks of purple and orange, and the brightly colored domes and buildings of the People’s World’s Fair seemed no less phantasmagorical in this light than the shimmering towers of Oz. If you looked at them the right way, all the hippies in their weird clothing were as cute as Munchkins, and the circle of bright shooting lights was her very own yellow brick road. Hadn’t
The Wizard of Oz
made a star of Judy Garland? And Jango Beck, unseen behind it all, was the wonderful wizard himself!

She smiled wickedly at Gentry. And you fit in, too, she thought. You’re the Wicked Bitch of the West. And you’re coming to the same rotten end.

She squealed happily and took three quick little skipping steps, her breasts bouncing like playful puppies. Paul’s stone face broke into a little grin, and the Munchkins twinkled at her through a haze of pot smoke. “So let’s follow the yellow brick road,” she adlibbed. The grimace that got out of Gentry only added to the fun. I’m Dorothy! she thought. I’m Judy Garland in the picture that made her a star. This is
my
movie, mine and Paul’s, the pot of gold over the rainbow!

“Cut!” Paul Conrad shouted. “I want to set this up as a static shot.”

Before him was an utterly bizarre scene, a shot simply not to be thrown away with a walk-by, especially not now, with Gentry acting like a cigar-store Indian. Perhaps as many as two hundred and fifty people were seated on the bare earth, staring up like zombies at the huge computerized electronic sign, mesmerized by the ever-changing patterns of light transmuting into each other on the grid work of bulbs. Mandalas. Chevrons moving across the great sign from the four corners, then through each other in multicolored hypercomplex interference patterns. Whirling pin wheels like spiral nebulas. Stylized breakers cresting in electric foam. Sunbursts. It was like some enormous Las Vegas billboard advertising a series of total abstractions.

Paul framed the shot, positioning Velva and Gentry so that the electronic billboard would fill the entire background behind them, with the worshipers at the shrine of the electric god blocked entirely out of the shot by the low angle. He instructed the light man to narrow down the focus of the lights so that Velva alone would stand out strongly against the flashing patterns of light, with Gentry’s face turned into a semi-abstraction, outside the cone of the shooting lights, backlit only by the computerized billboard.

By playing this lighting game and centering a tight two-shot squarely on Velva, maybe I can make this work without getting anything better than what I’ve been getting out of Gentry.

“Okay, we’re ready. On action, we’ll pick it up from ‘Is it true that blondes have more fun....’” Velva nodded, and flashed him a personal, yet public smile that sent waves of heat to his loins, that seemed to outshine the whirling spiral mandala that coruscated behind her head. She glowed with an inner light. That “star quality” she was always talking about for once was something he felt would come through as image on film. Am I that great a lover? he thought sardonically. Or did I just give her the excuse she needed to turn this on?

Gentry, on the other hand, stood there like a piece of dead meat, a sullen, pouting child. How can I get both of them to turn on at the same time? Paul wondered. A chill blew over him in the warm evening air, for he could not entirely avoid the realization that his wonderment was a fraud, that he knew the answer, and the only real question was whether he was willing to pay the price....

“All right, lights... roll ‘em....”

“Sunset City
, Scene Fifty-B, take one....”

“Speed.”

“Action.”

“Is it true that blondes have more fun?” Gentry said hollowly from the shadows.

Velva laughed, shaking her head, beautifully emphasizing her golden hair as it fanned in front of a series of red, blue, and green starbursts. “We try,” she said. “We do our best.”

“I wish I could feel what you feel now,” Gentry said woodenly, his face an expressionless mask. But the shot would play this way, with Velva the visual center. I can even overdub his lines later... if I can get anything better than this out of him later.... And you know how,
don’t you?

(
“Oh, Doug, you’re so solemn, you’re such a sourpuss.” Hundreds of winking stars danced behind Velva in an electronic desert night as she looked at Gentry with the nymphet eyes of a Kansas drive-in queen, innocence inside heat inside innocence.

“Maybe you could make me smile,” Gentry said in a dead-ass faggot voice. This is going to
have
to be overdubbed. “Would you like to try?”