Passing Through the Flame (87 page)

Gentry subsided into a slow, languorous rhythm, then gently let Paul’s detumescing cock slide out of his mouth. He looked up and opened heavy-lidded eyes, took a deep, convulsive breath. Paul’s body glowed with a sweet warmth. A black bubble of nausea exploded at the back of his throat. Smiling, Gentry rose to his feet, his lips beaded with moisture, his eyes smoky, exuding peace and contentment. “That wasn’t so bad, now was it?” he said.

Paul trembled, stared off at the light and sound and crowds of the People’s World’s Fair, his consciousness fleeing in pain and confusion from this twilight world of secret shame. Fleeing from the shadows into the light, but not escaping.

Glancing at his watch, an ordinary motion turned into a gesture of exorcism. “We’ve got a shot to finish.”

Gentry’s warm smile, a throb in his loins, a dagger of memory.

"I’m ready now, Paul. Now I’m ready."

Star walked across the empty courtyard of discarded cushions and abandoned speakers’ stand, omens of communal power set in motion and now out of anyone’s control, and stepped out of the People’s Forum into the reality of the people themselves.

People were crowded so seamlessly together on the main promenade of the People’s World’s Fair and the flow was so rapid and liquid that she felt she had immersed herself in a boiling sea of protoplasm, a single huge organism surging against the outer parameters of its own being, transmuting shape, emotion, and energy state in a continuous flux, never the same totality from moment to moment.

Singly, in couples, and in small troops and tribes, young kids wandered up and down the length of the fair in a daze of wonder and dope and discovery, goggling at the domes and wild psychedelic tinker toys, meeting and greeting each other, passing dope and wine freely around, stoned on the unreality of the high summer night.

Moving through this teenybopper matrix were the older heads who had been there before, for whom the festival was a Technicolor widescreen version of their memory of a Summer of Love that never was, a Haight Street of the mind, grander and gaudier than the reality had ever been—refugees from history’s shortest golden age nursing their lost causes and yearning to be a people again.

Bikers and low riders zipped through the crowd in wedges behind bow waves of black radiation. Golden surfers glided effortlessly from eddy to eddy looking good for each other. Speed freaks and junkies cut paths through the living flesh with their dead vibrations. Centers of meanness surged through the body of the people, and centers of love. Centers of pleasure and centers of pain. Centers of hope and centers of despair.

She was one with the sea in which she swam, her vibrations locked into the mandala of destiny, the ever-changing, always-constant standing wave pattern of fate, as it moved through light and dark, flesh and time, transforming and transformed.

Star walked on into the body of the people, seeking pivot points, moments large and small, that hovered on the interface between love and pain, hope and despair, that a hair’s weight could flip into the dark or into the light. Ali I can change is what I can touch, she knew. That’s all anyone can do. There’s no way to do more.

A young boy with a thin beard recognized her, looked away with guarded eyes. She touched his arm as they passed each other, caught his startled eyes, and flashed a ray of sunshine just for him, eye to eye, flesh to flesh. He walked away a little more open. A huge grimy man in Hell’s Angels’ colors offered her a joint as if it were a turd, waiting to be rejected so he could find a moment’s focus for the hate passing through him. She smiled, took the joint, puffed on it, and put it back between his lips with her own fingers, making it a friendly gesture received and returned. A furtive hand darted into her loins as she moved across a crowded current of San Fernando Valley Drive-In Grease. Instead of stiffening or drawing away, she rubbed herself against it, let it bring a moment’s warm glow to her cunt.

She drifted across the promenade, one more eddy in the currents, drawn randomly toward the Poster Palace, the huge day-glo snail shell swirled in bright reds, greens, yellows, and purples against the clear black shape of the night. She felt the people’s flesh as her own. Two lovers kissed beside her, and she felt their love. A speed freak couple clattered past like Frankenstein monsters on rails, and she felt their pain. Two girls smiled recognition at her, and hers as part of them.

A shaky hand thrust the neck of a bottle of Ripple into her face, spilling wine down her chin, her neck, and the front of her cloak. She laughed and dug it, guided the bottle neck to her mouth, and drank a good swallow down. Why not? It’s part of what we all are. All of it is in all of us and all of us are part of it. And no one’s in control. No one’s in control!

Oh, Jango, Jango, I see your trip now! Put us all on the trip you set up and then take your hands off the controls and watch us try to fly it ourselves. Do you want us to crash? Or do you want to set us soaring on our own? Do you know? Do you care? Or are you now just one more passenger yourself?

She reached the entrance to the Poster Palace and found a congested crowd gathered outside the entrance to the giant snail shell, an unbroken thicket of people. She drew her cape away from her body and let her vibrations shine forth, let them find their natural harmony with the vibrations around her. Energy leaped from the surface of her body, forming a sphere of psychic radiance around her, enhancing the people’s consciousness of themselves in relation to her being.

They noticed her.

A path cleared before her that closed behind her and around her as she passed through the crowd. She left no wake, no disruption of the communal aura. No one shrank from her nearness; no one barred the way; no one felt lessened by allowing her to move to the front. They passed her through them like a pearl falling through oil.

Inside the Poster Palace, three wild-eyed guys in old army shirts stood on the circular catwalk at the summit of the double helix of ramps that wove up the sides of the snail-shell dome. The interweaving ramps were thronged with people, the floor below was just as packed, and the design of the Poster Palace focused the attention of every eye on the three longhairs in army shirts. And they were sucking it up like smack.

“We’re gonna kill the fucking pigs, and we’re gonna burn this son of a bitch down!”

“We’re going to give all power to the people!”

“Right fucking
on!”

“Hey, hey, listen!” the most far-gone one said, a gangly freak with long, coarse blond hair and golden stubble on his face that cried to be touched. “Listen, tomorrow’s gonna be the day of victory! It’s all going to belong to us! We’re going to rip the pigs off, and we’re not going to give anything back. There’s millions of us and a couple hundred of them! Up against the motherfucking WALL!” He ended with his fist in the air and his face contorted in an eye-popping scream.

“Fuck the pigs! Cut their goddamn balls off!”

The people inside the Poster Palace seamed different from the people outside. Physically, they were the same mixture of young kids and old heads, surfers and bikers, lovers and junkies, gentle acidheads, and uptight low-riders. They were the same, but they were different, for in this place a cell in the body of the great black beast was forming. Hate called to hate, not love to love. Pain called to pain. Rage to rage. Dark to dark. And all of it is in all of us, she thought. We are what the changes make us become.

But we call the changes, all of us together. People in pain can call us to pain. If we let them. If no one calls us to love.

She opened herself up and gave that call. She could feel it rising within her, moving through her, the love inside the people summoning itself to wakefulness through her, as she surrendered to the wheel of destiny passing through her, transforming and transformed. The light drove the black beast back into the shadows, coughing and spitting.

“Stomp them into the GROUND!”

“Kill the exploiting bastards!”

“FUCK ‘EM ALL!!”

The men at the summit of the snail shell continued to scream with reddened faces and knotted veins, shaking their fists and giving the finger to the world, but now they were cartoon figures out of Zap Comics, R. Crumb revolutionaries waving their speech balloons like the clubs of Neolithic apemen. The focus of the people’s attention had been drawn back down to earth, to Star’s light, glowing not from some pinnacle of ego but from among themselves.

The presence of the beast faded as her vibes drove back the dark, as the people’s natural preference for life over death reasserted a thin membrane of harmony. The presence faded, but remained. For all of it is in all of us, she thought. If we don’t rise through the changes, we fall.

Now she was the center of the crowd, and the thing at the top of the dome was just a sideshow. Hands reached out to her; people called her name, touched her flesh, just smiled. Just let their own golden vibes meld with hers. Angry faces became happy faces. Some of them. Moments of pain became moments of joy. Some of them. Mellow vibes spread out through the crowd from her epicenter, chasing away the darkness. Some of it.

She walked out of the Poster Palace, and some let her pass and some formed a moving circle around her, a circle that perpetually transformed itself as people joined and people dropped away. No one impeded her way, and no brain-bombed psyche clung too close, pulling at the garments of her soul like a whining beggar. And so she opened herself to them all, moving like a comet through the night—sure as her destiny’s orbit through time and space, but flowing free on the cosmic wind.

Sandra Bayne stood far outside the shooting lights, ten feet behind Paul and the cameraman, her back practically pressed up against the solid wall of people held back by the security guards. But even as an observer way out here on the periphery, she could still taste the strange and somehow terrifying electricity between Velva Leecock and Rick Gentry.

“Isn’t it a wild night? I feel like the Fourth of July.”

“And I feel like Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Drunk as a skunk with a beautiful lady I met in the street.”

Their eyes met on every line of dialogue, they were reacting to each other miraculously; you could believe that they were two people who had just gotten out of bed together, instead of a fag and a pornie queen who hated each other’s guts.

Somehow, Paul had done the impossible, somehow he had overcome the situation, and what was terrifying was how whatever had changed between Rick and Velva had wrought a change in him. His intensity was unnatural, and the power he seemed to have over his actors was something Sandra had never seen before. Or maybe it was the power they had over him. Or both. The three of them were locked in a weird triangle. On two sides of it, Paul was drawing incredible performances out of Velva and Rick, but on the other side, they were focusing his total attention on them. He had hardly spoken to her when she arrived, and he was barely speaking to the crew, setting up the shot with grunted monosyllables, never letting his stars out of the center of his attention, like a lion tamer in a cage with a couple of big cats.

Velva laughed and wrapped herself around Gentry’s back, nibbling at his ear. Gentry sighed and writhed under her touch, his eyes half-closed, as if remembering the touch of her naked body on his. Incredible, unreal! How’s Paul doing it? How’s it possible?

Gentry turned around in Velva’s arms and kissed her unhesitatingly on the lips. Paul’s head bobbed up and down microscopically, almost imperceptibly, his lips pulled back slightly from his teeth, his eyes red-rimmed and staring. A muscle in the side of his jaw twitched.

“You’re a nice dirty old man,” Velva said.

“And you’re a pretty nice high school cheerleader.”

Gentry kissed her again. “And neither of us are hippies.”

Velva looked around the crowd of those self-same hippies gathered around the shooting area, smiling at them, delivering her line to the onlookers and Gentry both. “Aren’t we? We’re running around loaded and giggling just like everybody else.”

“Here’s to dope and sex then,” Gentry said, toasting her with a phantom glass.

“Here’s to Sunset City,” Velva said, toasting the crowd. They fell, drunk and laughing, into each other’s arms.

“Cut!” Paul shouted. “That’s it, that’s the take, that’s it for the night. I’ve had it. We’ve all had it.” Gentry and Velva disengaged from each other, but still stood there looking at each other very strangely, as if they had shared something... a secret, a communion, or even...
a bed?
No, that’s ridiculous!

But Paul suddenly reeled away from them like a man fleeing from the scene of a ghastly traffic accident, his face contorted with disgust and nausea, with a vision of awfulness burned into his eyes. He almost bowled over a sound man as he blindly fled toward the encircling crowd.

Sandra broke into a trot and stumbled across the shooting area after him, but before she could reach him, he had broken through the cordon of guards and disappeared into the endless crowd, into the chaos of the night.

Bodies pressed against Paul, flowed around him—warm, sweaty, smelling of the frenzy of the night. A sour, unfree sweat clogged the pores of his own body, making his flesh rank in his own nostrils. His clothes clung to his hot, wet skin like rotting rags in a jungle swamp. He pushed and elbowed aimlessly through the crowd, fleeing fruitlessly from the miasma that surrounded him like a man trying to swim his way out of quicksand.

His loins ached lingeringly, throbbed softly, as they had through the nightmare of that final take, the very perfection of Rick Gentry’s performance goading his memory, fixing the focus of his consciousness on his self-violated manhood. Gentry sighing under Velva’s touch, and he could feel those lips around him. The knowledge in Velva’s eyes, and its acknowledgment in Gentry’s. Her flesh on his flesh becoming their flesh on Paul’s flesh and Sandy hovering horribly in the background like some unknowing voyeur. Flesh goading memory, memory goading flesh.

Above the sea of heads, Paul caught sight of the huge electronic billboard. Quick strobing bursts of brightly colored patterns one right after the other—one! two! three! four!—captured the attention of the eye and focused the brain on a neurological level, just as the physical pleasure at the root of him had caused him to move to Gentry’s mouth as mindless flesh. Paul moved through the crowd toward the billboard, transfixed by the hypnotic patterns winking across the huge grid work of colored bulbs.