The Children of Hamelin (37 page)

If I was honest about it, I’d have to admit that my objection was nothing more than gibbering paranoia. Fear of The Heat. Fear of paying nameless Dues. Fear of Fear itself, which, of course, is the scariest fear there is. I mean, how do you fight Nameless Dread?

Answer: by faking it, by walking straight into it, by acting as if it weren’t there.

I sighed and relaxed against the back of the couch. Once I had bored to the center of my navel it turned out that the right thing to do was what I had instinctively done for openers: told Robin to come on over. If only I could stop thinking and just act on instinct the way I told everyone else—

A knock on the door. An omen? Why not? What was an omen but a random event you used to convince yourself that the universe intended you to do what you were damned well going to do anyway...

And of course it
was
Robin at the door, looking so pure and tasty and ferally innocent with her big dark eyes and long loose hair and total certainty that total certainty was a drag that I felt a hundred years old just looking at her and not being able to simply groove with her and turn the word-garbage machine in my head off forever.

“You look kind of uptight,” were the first words she said. Feelings—she could read feelings as if she had absolute emotional pitch. And her only morality was the morality of flesh and gut. That was the way to be—if I could find some way of being it.

“Decisions, decisions, alia time decisions!” I said, leading her into the living room.

She sat down on the couch, and as I sat down beside her, she said: “I get vibes that you’re hung-up on more than my dealing. That Arlene chick and her cartoon freak-show?”

I nodded. “Don’t want to bug you with it,” I grunted.

“I don’t mind.”

“I know you don’t mind. That’s why I won’t bug you with it. If you
did
mind, I’d drive you nuts crying on your shoulder. Dig?”

“I dig. You’ve gotta make up your mind about me and you’ve gotta make up your mind about old Arlene. Poor Tom... You know what your problem is?”

“Yeah, I know what my problem is.”

“No you don’t. Your problem is that you’re all hung up on
like
problems. Where you’re at now is all mixed up with where you were and where you think you’re going. If you could shake that, you wouldn’t be uptight. Bummers happen, but you can’t do anything about them. Don’t worry about the future—it’s all bad anyway, I mean, look far enough into the future and you’re dead, so what’s the point? Life is now.”

“That’s another great theory,” I said. “If I believed it, it would be groovy. Probably I want to believe it. But I don’t and I can’t. So what can I do about it?”

“You can give your mind a good blow, man,” Robin said. She pulled two caps out of her pocket. “Five hundred mikes of good acid apiece. Let’s take a trip together and just let it happen. That’s how it all began between us...” Staring at the caps in her palm, I knew dead-certain that this was why I had told her to come on over, this was what I had secretly hoped for, this was what I needed. Magic. A leap into the unknown. Something to turn off the word-machine and let the universe speak. In my gut, Nameless Dread. The caps seemed to pulse in her hand. I was suddenly afraid to drop acid with my head in the state it was in...

Which was why I had to do it.

“Come on man, stop all that thinking! Do you—”

“Don’t waste the sales-pitch, baby,” I told her, taking a cap from her hand.

We held the caps up to our mouths, paused. Robin grinned. “To us, baby,” she said.

“To now...”

And we both dropped a cap dry.

Now:

Sitting on the couch waiting for the acid to hit and trying to remember what it had felt like last time it had started to hit and remembering that last time it had started to hit about the time I found myself wondering what it would feel like when it started to hit—

“I think I’m getting high,” I told Robin.

Robin smiled like glass flashing in the sun and said: “You’re not really high till you stop thinking about whether you’re high.”

“What I can’t stand about you,” I said super-pompously, “is your higher-than-thou attitude.”

A woods-elf smile.
“Now
you’re high, baby.”

Now I
must
be high: I felt like I was an impersonal viewpoint positioned in time a moment ahead of myself watching myself being high a moment in the future. But a straight part inside me kept saying “if
that’s
not high, what is!” which told me that I had not yet surrendered entirely to the wings of acid flapping my great bird of night.

Thing to do was surrender entire—so I’ve been told by gurus of acid wailing on half my LPs—that was it, the big flash ego-death consciousness-orgasm, a true death of the mind because the you that went in was not the you who came out. But looking into the vortex of the obsidian waters within, I didn’t quite feel ready to take that deep-six flying leap into oneness with the forces of roulette-wheel magic yawning hole into acid’s nuclear phoenix ultimate power of heaven and/or hell...

“Not quite ready for that trip yet,” I mumbled.

“What...?” Robin drawled from some other continuum.

“I—”

Suddenly I popped into a universe where I dug my feeling shining out from Arlene’s eyes. Saw that
my
fear was her fear was her desire was my desire—to flip her being through the void inside and die for a moment to be reborn on the other side. Her fear of orgasm that was a little taste of the big flash trip through the Shadowed Valley was what made her fuck in uptight frenzy—because she needed the taste like a junkie needs junk. But in the throes of The Surge just when it was hitting, fear of The Big Nothing forced her to hold back gibbering with fear and self-thwarted desire. And I was the cat with the karmic muscle to lean in and push her over if she let me get inside her skin; so she feared me and wanted me like a forty-year-old virgin locked up with a rapist-gorilla; and that prove-you-love-me-by-coming-to-San-Francisco bit was bullshit from the Arlene inside that wanted to shove my mind through the Foundation machinery so we’d be even, so I’d die my own kind of death, not of the cunt, but of the mind. Yeah, and that was acid: love’s ego-merging-death-orgasm-bottled, processed and transliterated to a solitary masturbatory come of the mind. And that was what I feared and desired. And that was why I hung around the Foundation sniffing the glue-fumes of blowing minds. And that was why junk. And Anne.

And Robin?

But Robin was Acid itself—the vortex inside brought to the surface in a storm of black clouds and bright lightning was all possibilities of good and evil from a continuum where good and evil merged into raw neutral power. And what I needed and what she was trying to give me was the courage to ride that black eagle of power to the far corners of wherever it went.

“You’re a witch,” I said. “You’re a witch, but that’s all right, I’m grooving behind it.”

“And I’m grooving behind—”

Came a rapping at our chamber door. “‘Tis the fuzz and nothing more...”

“Don’t freak!” Robin warned with ridiculous uptightness, not realizing that
my
uprightness was beginning to melt away like fog in the sun, seeing that one leap of courage could one way or another put it all behind.

Robin came back from the door trailing Terry Blackstone trailing a big blond decaying beachboy type: the All-American Boy after a thousand years of heroin and faggotry, wearing a white leather trench coat over tan buckskin pants and tooled cowboy boots. Clearly a crazed California-Gothic dealer with mad blue eyes like homing signals for the narcs. For the first time, I understood the cosmic truth of the New York saying: “California is where you go to get busted.”

Terry Blackstone managed a nervous nod at me, but there was a slavering behind his shaded eyes as if he were a
thing
the California heavy-bread man was leading on a leash. “Are you stoned, baby?” he asked Robin anxiously.

“We both just dropped five hundred mikes.”

“Oh shit!” His face grew so frantic I could see red-coal pig-eyes boring through the black glass of his shades. “Look Robin, you’re just gonna have to maintain. This is the chance of a lifetime, bottles of acid, we’ll be rolling in bread, you gotta—”

“Stop gibbering, you freak,
we’re
stoned, not you!” I suddenly snarled. Robin gave me a poisonous look, but the Creature That Ate California gave me a television commercial smile full of rotten Ahead teeth, and said in a rich-but-asthmatic voice: “You this chick’s old man? Blackstone here says the chick has connections—must be true, otherwise a thing like him wouldn’t be willing to split his cut, now would he? This is the deal. I got two ounces of acid on me—”

“TWO OUNCES!”
Robin and I screamed.

“That’s what I was trying to tell you, dig—”

“Shut up creep!” said the moldy Mr. America. “I’ll do the talking, if you don’t mind. Call me Tex—it’s not my name. I got reasons I gotta make it out of the country by last week which you’ll be happy to hear are none of your business and I need heavy bread fast. A syndicate’s getting up the bread for one ounce and I’ll have that by tomorrow. As soon as I get it, I’m on the plane. But between now and then I gotta deal a fucking ounce of acid. Things being what they are, I gotta deal fast, and fast means cheap. So this is the deal: your chick here takes us around to her connections and we sell the acid cheap and quick. Fifty percent of everything we get you three get to keep. How you split that up is your problem. Let’s move it. I got a car waiting outside.”

It finally got through to me that Tex was talking to me, not to Robin. Yeah, well wasn’t I the head of the household? Smelling bust all over it. But half the proceeds of an ounce of acid! More money than I could make in a year. And something else too whispering the voice of acid in my blood said was time to be The Man in Command destiny calls don’t be afraid can only die in flash of freedom...

“Two ounces?” I said again.

Tex opened his white leather coat, pulled two medicine bottles out of an inside pocket, each one filled with about an ounce of clear fluid.

“I believe...” Robin sighed. “Man, I believe!”

“Well come on,” Terry Blackstone said. “Fifty-fifty split, okay Robin? Ditch this square and let’s—”

“Hold it Fred!” I barked like a paranoid sergeant. “Nobody ditches me. Who do you—”

“Aw fuck off, you—”

I wrapped myself in the sinister cloak of The Man in Black. Shadows shifted perspectives in the room. Tex caught it, gave me a let’s-see-you-work smile, and waited like a carrion bird behind the blue ice of his eyes.

“I don’t see why we shouldn’t ditch
you,”
I drawled. “It’s Robin’s connections the man needs. Nobody needs you.”

Terry turned to the freak in the white leather coat. “I brought you here, man! You’re not gonna let this creep...”

Tex the Ice-Lizard laughed silently.

“Aw come on, Robin...”

Robin gave me a proud, glass-melting smile. “Talk to Tom,” she said softly, “he’s my old man.”

“All right, Terry, show you I’m a sport,” I said. “You’re in for a third of our end.”

“A third? Hey—”

“Take it or leave it,” said The Man in Black.

Tex smiled. Terry Blackstone wilted into a sullen dwarf with treachery behind his beaten eyes.

“And don’t think you can play games because we’re stoned,” said The Man in Black. “I killed someone for that once.”

Terry Blackstone didn’t seem quite ready to swallow the lie whole—but Tex turned to me and said: “Murder on acid’s the biggest flash of all, ain’t it?”—and Terry quivered in dread. Only then did I see what I was getting myself into: Tex had not been jiving and Terry knew it, was why he was scared shitless, takes one to know one, he figured.

“If you freaks have finished psyching each other out,” said the voice of I-Groove-Behind-Killing-On-Acid, “let’s get our asses into gear. We got a shitload of acid to sell.”

I didn’t even have to think about it; just made it into the bedroom to get my coat, Yassah, Massah. This Tex-thing was a monster cartoon-character out of Terry and the Pirates as rewritten by William Burroughs—The Man in Black, but actually standing out there in a white trench coat for real. And just for the dumbshit silly kick of mindfucking Terry Blackstone, I had gone and convinced this slobbering space-monster that The Man in Black was for real! Now I
had
to play it for real, and bombed out of my head on acid...

Which was the only light-bulb in the current comic strip: the acid said, groove behind playing it for real, dues you gotta pay suddenly come due, it’s the trip you’ve been sniffing after baby, and your only other choice leads to an even bigger dose of Condition Terminal—crucifixion on acid by the Thing That Ate California with me in the role of O.D.ed J.C.

So when I got back into the living room, I had my cloak of darkness furled around me—but better believe it, under it I was shivering.

“You been in there a long time, man,” said Tex California. “You wouldn’t have gotten a piece?”

“You wouldn’t be asking me if I had a piece unless you were prepared to find out in some unpleasant manner,” said The Man in Black.

The very air seemed to cringe. Robin looked at me wide-eyed, thinking maybe she had never seen me before; T. Blackstone looked as relaxed as a junkie in withdrawal; even Tex California looked a bit like he had run up against an unexpected wall.

“No need to get uptight,” he said. “I’ll remember that’s a bad question to ask. To show you how honest I am, I’ll even tell you up front that I
do
have a piece. There, now doesn’t that make you feel all warm and secure?”

The fucking Man in Black had done it again. Now I had convinced an armed berserker that I had a gun! Yet somehow, the trip hadn’t yet turned into a total bummer—with destiny in control, I found a new faith in the blind forces behind it all. I had to believe that Acid, if not God, was on my side.

Because if It
wasn’t
on my side...

Outside, double-parked and blocking the narrow street, Tex California had the car I knew he would have: an old red Cadillac convertible in mint condition. At least the top wasn’t down!