The Children of Hamelin (14 page)

Which, I supposed, not really being able to kid myself all the way, was as good a rationalization as any.

“Okay Doris,” I said. “We’ll see what happens.”

Doris smiled, and then diplomatically faded away down the hall as Harvey and Arlene came up to me.

“Ah... I don’t know if you realize it,” Harvey said, “but... uh... you did quite well for a newcomer today.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Er... if you’d like to give the Foundation a try....”

I drew out the suspense for Arlene’s benefit. She had a hungry look in here eyes, as if she felt she would cut time off her stay in Purgatory if she brought a convert into the fold.

“Fifty bucks for the first six weeks?” I said.

“Ah... yes,” Harvey said. “It’s... uh... only fair to give you a chance to really see what it’s like before you... uh... make a stronger commitment. We don’t want anyone heavily committed to the Foundation until they’re... ready for it.”

Uh-huh.

“And just what does the fifty dollars get me?”

“Uh... one group a week, attendance at all parties and meetings, a vote on... ah... anything we vote on while you’re a member... Plus a ten dollar a session discount on private therapy.”

Knowing what I was going to say, I still took one good last deep breath, looked at Arlene running her tongue across her lower lip, at Harvey just standing there holding out the dope but not really pushing, not hard—ah, what the hell, price of ten acid trips, is all! An extra five points a week for the next six weeks’d more than cover it.

“Okay, why not?” I said.

Arlene exhaled, smiled, took my hand.

“Leave your phone number at the office and I’ll get back to you next week with your group assignment,” Harvey said. “Probably keep you in this Friday group—” And up the hall he went, shrewdly leaving me alone with Arlene.

“Surprised?”

She smiled at me strangely, a nervous smile. What did she have to be uptight about
now?
“Not really,” she said.

What the hell? A muscle was twitching in her jaw. Her hand in mine was cold and stiff. She seemed a million miles away. I don’t know what I expected—maybe for her to leap into my arms—but I sure didn’t expect
this.
After all, I was doing this for her, wasn’t I? For Doris? For...?

“Look, why don’t we have something to eat and then... go down to my place?” I suggested.

Her hand went limp in mine; she studied the floor. “I don’t think so,” she said.

“Why not?”

She frowned, nibbled her lower lip, took her hand away from mine. “I just don’t feel like it,” she said.

“Not hungry...?”

“Oh come on... it’s not
that.
I just don’t feel like... you know... I mean after talking about it like that... I just couldn’t—”

Jesus! After all she put me through! “We could... just have dinner and then... talk... or go to a movie... or....”

She stared at me dead-on, her eyes at once knowing and a million miles away. “That’s not what you want and we both know it.”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “Look, I don’t understand... did I say something...? I mean, does having talked about it mean that we can’t... that it’s finished between us...?”

She kissed me briefly on the lips; her lips were cold and hard. “No, no, it’s not like that,” she said. “You’ve got to understand... it’s not
you.
A group leaves me... drained, you know? Decreases my libido, I guess. I just can’t stand being with someone I might want to have sex with after a session. If I refused you, I’d feel guilty. And if I didn’t refuse you, it would be...
awful...
just awful for both of us. You
do
understand...? Please understand!”

Yeah, I understood all right, and a lot better than she did. Anne and I had never made it when either of us was on smack or right after either of us had come down. Junk sucks you inside your own head and you don’t want company and sex seems just...
ugly.
Yeah, that’s where she’s at now; she’s right, it would be awful. And suddenly I also understood the real reason Ted wasn’t making it with Doris—he was going to two groups, a private session with Harvey and a Foundation meeting every week. He was either waiting to go up on Foundation-junk, on it, or just coming down all of the time. Poor Doris!

Poor me if I got hung up on a chick making the same scene.

Poor Arlene....

“Yeah, I understand,” I told her. “When you want me, just whistle.”

“Does that mean we’re through?”

Poor bitch! I smiled at her, squeezed her hand. “Just whistle and see what happens,” I said.

She smiled bravely, kissed me again, said: “Give me time. I’ll make it up to you... I promise.”

“Yeah, sure...”

Well, what the hell, I was committed to fifty bucks worth of Foundation shit; I could give her six weeks to get her head straight. After that, she would either split this scene with me, or I’d split alone.

And at least now I knew how I’d play those six weeks I let myself get talked into
—mano a mano
with Harvey, no holds barred.

“You’re a good person, Tom,” Arlene said.

“Yeah, baby. I’m the regular salt of the Earth. Regular saint, is all.”

Looks like a bummer Friday night, I thought, flopping down on the couch in my silent empty pad. I had tried to drown my sorrows in wonton soup and pork with szechuan hot cabbage at Sing Wu’s, but the soup went down like dishwater and the pork and cabbage tasked like Nedick’s leftovers and the whole thing sat in my guts, along with what had been shoved down my throat at the Foundation, in one indigestible lump.

Fact: I was out fifty bucks. Fact: I had bought six weeks’ worth of Foundation. But what had I
really
bought? A shot at straightening out Arlene? Okay, she was a good-looking, intelligent chick with a good heart. But she was trouble in spades: not only was she a bad fuck, she wasn’t even a
reliable
bad fuck. What was the point of being involved with a chick who would put me through changes every time I wanted to get her into bed and if and when I did, would throw me a lousy fuck?

Okay man, admit it, you’re not being as cynical about Arlene as you know you should be. You’re
involved,
the way you were with Anne, and logic has nothing to do with it. The chick deserves better of the world than she’s got and you want to give it to her.

Or was
that
just a rationalization for getting myself hung up on the Foundation? Had getting involved with Anne been a rationalization for getting myself hung up on smack? What was love? Five feet of heaven in a pony-tail...?

A neat little equation: Anne equals Arlene, smack equals the Foundation. I had thought I could save Anne from smack and ended up a junkie. I thought I could save Arlene from the Foundation, therefore...

Ugh!

Or peel another layer off the onion of reality: was I getting involved in another save-the-damsel-from-the-dragon number?

Oh yes. Harvey was right about the void inside, at least. Or was he? Or was reality
really
like an onion: peel off all the layers and you end up with a handful of nothingness, thank you Jean-Paul Sartre?

I’ll bet this is just the way old Harv’s shell game works: start you doubting your motives, then doubting your doubts, trying to find out which shell the pea of your essential core was under. But what if there was no pea at all? Shit, if
that
was the con, you could get sucked into the Foundation and never come out. Wasn’t that the way smack worked? Wasn’t The Answer always just the next fix away?

Or was
that
just my cruddy ego’s defense against groovy old Total Consciousness? Shit!

Maybe what I really needed to clear my head was just a half-bag of sma—Thought-crime! Man,
now
look where the bastard’s putting your head at!

A knock at the door.

It sounded like a girl’s knock. Had Arlene changed her mind...?

I got up, trying not to hope too hard, went into the kitchen, undid the police-lock, and opened the door.

“Hi,” said Robin.

She was wearing the peacoat and boots, but also a pair of tight blue Levis and therefore probably something north of her navel under the coat too.

“Hi yourself,” I said. “Come on in.”

As we went into the living room, it was a pleasure to realize how glad I was to see her. The knot in my gut seemed to dissolve: my mind shed its coating of belly-button lint as Robin brought me back into contact with a whole world out there where the onion of reality was just something that gave you heartburn and bad breath if you ate it raw.

I turned on the warm orange ceiling light and turned off the cold white pole-lamp light as Robin took off her coat, revealing a plain white man’s shirt under it. As the light in the room flipped over and we sat down on the couch together, simple good vibes washed away all the uptight convoluted pseudo-Germanic bullshit: here I was in my own pad with a chick I had had a good acid-trip with, a chick who had been there to give me the fuck of my life when I had needed it most, a chick who could reasonably be expected to give me a good honest fuck again, without hang-ups, or navel-probing discussions. There was nothing but good vibes between us, and Christ it felt nice! I didn’t feel uptight, or predatory, or even horny; I was ready for anything or nothing at all. Just sitting there digging a beautiful girl with wild black hair and huge dark eyes and already knowing her body, not a care or a scheme in the world.

“How’s your head?” Robin asked.

“Seems to be attached to my body now.”

“No after-effects?” she asked.

“No, my vital bodily fluids have never felt more unpolluted.”

“You looked kind of funny when you came to the door,” she said. There was simple non-Freudian concern in her eyes, nothing more. “Sometimes acid changes your head permanently, a little. Things look different and stay that way, even after you’ve come down.”

I had no eyes to go into what had happened to me since last Saturday, none of which had anything to do with our acid trip, and I certainly didn’t want to talk about Arlene. So:

“Things look any different to you?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“What?”

She put one hand on my knee—a perfectly unself-conscious gesture. “You look different,” she said.

“Oh?”

She smiled a nice warm smile. “It’s not you that’s changed,” she said. “I’m just seeing you differently. I think I’m deeper into you.”

Still keeping one hand on my knee she took hold of my hand with the other. “You know, that night I met you on the street, I was really stoned,” she said.

“No shit?”

“Dig, what I was grooving behind was the idea of picking up a nice cat who was kind of square and really blowing his mind.”

That stung a little. “So I’m your idea of square?” I said. But as I said it, I became more amused than hurt. I doubted whether this chick had paid the kind of dues I had and somehow her thinking I was unhip was kind of... well, touching. The notion that a young chick could see me as an innocent....

“No, dig, what’s what I
thought
you were. But man, you turned out to have the hardest mind to blow I’ve ever seen. You just grooved behind my Girl in the Rain number. I thought getting you to drop acid would be a big hassle, but it wasn’t. I thought you’d have a paranoid thing about me hustling you with all those cab rides. I thought it’d be a heavy scene being your guide on your first acid trip, and what happens, a cat who had never dropped acid before ends up pulling
me
out of a bummer!”

She cocked her head, stared at me with a little knowing smile, said: “Man,
you
were putting
me
on, weren’t you?”

“Who, me?”

“I mean, that wasn’t
really
your first acid-trip, was it?”

“You got my acid cherry, baby,” I said. “Scout’s honor.”

“Man, I guess I believe you, but... wow...”

“There are heavier trips than acid,” I told her.

She kissed me lightly on the lips. “You’re a beautiful cat,” she said. “I can’t figure out where you’re at, but you sure can put my head through changes.”

I smiled. “That’s the name of the game,” I said, feeling just great.

We stared into each other’s eyes. Looking down into her unknown depths, I got a flash of what she must be feeling, what
I
had felt that Friday night: the sense of something beautifully alien, mysterious, unfathomable behind another human being’s eyes. Ah, how sweet to be someone’s Man of Mystery!

“Know what?” she finally whispered. “I think it’d be a gas to smoke some pot with you.”

It sounded like a perfect idea, but I didn’t have anything around, and I was certainly in no mood to run around trying to score.

“I don’t have any grass around...” I said apologetically.

She laughed. “No sweat,” she said. “I know a cat who’s got some good stuff. He’ll even deliver. Can I use your phone?”

I nodded. “In the bedroom,” I said.

And off she went into the bedroom to do the thing. I just leaned back and relaxed. Ah, now this was more like it! This was the proper way for a chick to act: show up like Santa Claus when you’re really feeling crummy, tell you what a gas you are and how groovy you make her feel, and then go fetch some pot for the Lord and Master. No hassles, no talking her into bed, no Foundation scenes. I Tarzan, you Jane, is all. Why did I mess up my head with a girl like Arlene when there were chicks like Robin in the world...?

Robin came out of the bedroom, sat down on the couch beside me.

“He’ll be here in a little while,” she said.

“Look... ah, I’m kind of low on bread,” I told her. “I mean, I hope you didn’t tell the guy I was going to buy an ounce...”

“Don’t worry man, it’s all cool,” she said.

She put both of her hands on both of my knees; I covered them with my own. We dug each other’s eyes.

“You know,” she said, “he won’t be here for maybe a half hour.... Know what I’d like to do while we wait...?”

I looked at her looking at me looking at her, felt the warmth of her hands now slipping to the insides of my thighs.