The Children of Hamelin (5 page)

“Never mind the menus,” I said. “We know what we want.”

“He knows what he wants!” the waiter sighed. “Listen, you maybe
think
you know what you want, but believe me, if you should make the mistake of ordering the herring today—”

“Eggs,” I insisted loudly. “Two orders of scrambled eggs with lox. Two toasted bagels with cream cheese. Two coffees.”

“With the eggs, you want in it onions, of course. And take it from me, today the bialys, the bagels this morning—feh!”

“No onions. It’s too early in the morning.”

He shook his head primly. “Twelve-thirty is by you too early in the morning for onions? Okay, okay, no onions. Toasted bialys.”

With a Rappaport’s waiter, you accept a negotiated settlement. I nodded, he nodded, and he split.

And I was alone with Robin who certainly was no Girl in the Rain. She stared across the table at me as if she were a female Dondi and I were the provider of the American Chocolate. It bugged the ass off me, made me feel like I was paying for it, made me feel old.

“Don’t look at me like that!” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like buying you breakfast is some kind of pay-off.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Christ, no!” I snapped.

“Then why are you doing it?”

“Why last night? Did you go home with me so I’d buy you breakfast in the morning?”

A wounded “Of course not! I just grooved on you.”

“All right,” I said, making it with a warm smile, “So accept this in the same spirit I accepted that, dig?”

She smiled back. “I guess I just can’t figure out where you’re at,” she said. “You don’t seem all that, you know, straight, but I can’t tell if you’re...”

“A head?”

“Well... yeah...” she said nervously. The boxes people put themselves in!

“If it’ll make you relax,” I said, “I was a junkie for a year or so.”

“I don’t groove very well behind smack,” she said, genuinely apologetic.

“Two points for you,” I said.
“Was
a junkie—emphatically past-tense.”

At that point the waiter arrived, set down plates of eggs and lox, buttered bialys, two cups of coffee. She began wolfing it down like there was no tomorrow. Maybe she knew something.

And then the question came,
the
question, in caps with tambourine bells on it: “Does this mean you’re down on drugs?”

“I’m down on smack and speed and downers and anything else you can get really strung-out on. A steady habit is bad news—ask the man who owns one.”

“But what about grass and hash and... you know...?”

I smiled, gave her a “paisan” look. “It’s a nice place to visit,” I said.

I could tell that what was coming was going to be make or break for us as far as she was concerned, because she paused in her gobbling of lox and eggs and stared at me dead-on.

“Acid?” she asked, all too solemnly.

Well, I knew where
that
was at, what answer would turn her on and what would turn her off, but who wants to start a thing with a chick on the basis of an easily-exposed lie? So I opted for the third alternative: truth.

“I’ve never tried it,” I said.

It was as if I had told her I was a virgin. She got
that
kind of gleam in her eyes.

“Really?” she said.

“Really.”

“Are you afraid?”

I tried to let my true feelings speak for me: “I don’t know. Seems like acid can turn a groovy situation into something beautiful and a mild bummer into a king-sized horror show. It’s all in how you feel at the time deep inside. You’ve got no control. I’ve never had the opportunity to take it in a situation where I could be
sure
I wouldn’t have a bummer.”

“Was last night a bad trip?” she said.

“You mean...?”

“About 800 mikes worth.”

Spasms boiled up my arms turning my hands to fists. I wanted to kill her. A fucking acid-head!
Literally
a fucking acid-head. The whole night had been a lie... all it had been for me... And what had I been for her? A goddamn zonk, a sexual kaleidoscope, an electric stereophonic dildo!

“You... you...” My throat was constricted with fury. “Last night... that wasn’t even you—”

“If it wasn’t me, who was it?”

“You know damn well what I mean!”

“But do
you
know what you mean?” she said softly. “Was it good? Was it beautiful? Did it take you someplace you wanted to go?”

“But it wasn’t real. It wasn’t really you... it was the acid.”

“Of course it was real; it happened, didn’t it? The Girl in the Rain—that’s me the way I
want
to be. That’s more the real me than the me you’re seeing now. So I use acid to make me more me... Be honest, which me do you prefer: me now, or the Girl in the Rain?”

She had me there. She had me cold, and we both knew it. Softening, I said: “Maybe I don’t have all the answers. I guess I really don’t know where you’re at.”

“Would you
really
like to dig my reality?” she said.

A cold chill foreshadowed what was coming next; still I said: “Yes.”

She reached into her coat pocket, palmed two sugar cubes. “Take a trip with me,” she said. “Let’s get inside each other’s heads. Let’s make it all the way together. Trust me. Trust yourself. It won’t be a bummer—you’ve got a good soul.”

I felt myself paused at the brink of an abyss. Okay, I’ll admit it, acid scared me. You get so high you don’t know you’re high, you’ve got no control. And all that ego-death stuff—that was Harvey’s bag, and I knew where
that
was at. No thanks, baby, I was about to say.

But... there was something very much like love in her eyes as she held out the sugar cubes. And I suddenly realized that I was about to make another safe, cagey, negative decision. I was going to throw away a possibility. A berserker impulse came over me—for once, if I was going to have regrets, it would be over a chance I
had
taken.

If you want to walk through the fire, you’ve got to step into the flames.

I smiled, a kind of forced-bravado smile, took a cube, and without a further thought, swallowed it. I raised my cup, clinked it with hers, said: “Take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship,” and took a long warm swallow. And another.

And began eating lox and eggs again, waiting for it to hit, afraid of what I would see if I looked back.

“How much money do you have?” Robin said as we stood outside Rappaport’s on what was turning out to be one of those rare warm New York November days.

I didn’t like the question. “What do I need, a Dun and Bradstreet to qualify as a trip partner?”

“Come on, how much money do you have in your pocket, on you, right now?”

There I was, one o’clock in the pm standing outside Rappaport’s with god-knows-how-much acid in me winding up for the pitch, and this chick was already hustling me for bread. Asshole that you are, I told myself, you’re gonna get the bummer you so richly deserve for getting yourself into this.

“Come on, come on, I don’t want your bread, just want to plan ahead, now, while we can.”

I checked my wallet: a ten and three ones. In my pocket, a quarter, two nickels, a dime and a penny.

“Grand total of $13.46.”

“Groovy,” she said, doing some kind of calculations in her head. “Look, it should be hitting soon and we’ll have maybe eight hours. Are you willing to blow ten dollars, I mean throw it around and don’t look back, to have a super-trip?”

What the hell, ten bucks, I thought, about what Ted spends in one day on his therapy. And acid’s going for about $5 a cap on the street, and I’m getting high free. Live a little!

“Girl,” I said, “you are talking to the last of the big spenders. Ten bucks is a mere pittance. Consider the vast resources of my entire fortune of $13.46 at your command.”

“Okay, man,” she said, “let’s ride the magic carpet.” And she stepped out into the gutter, waved her hand, and hailed a cab like an uptown fashion model out slumming. Something about the authority with which she did it gave me a funny flash: one way or another, my Girl in the Rain was fully capable of taking me for a ride.

Five minutes and 75 cents including tip later, we were standing behind an iron fence overlooking the East River in the long, narrow strip of park that runs along the bank across the East River Drive from the big low-rent housing project that parallels the river along Avenue D. Uptown from us on the concrete path along the bank, a gang of kids from the project were doing their thing; we walked a few dozen yards further downtown and found an empty wooden bench facing the river in a section of the park that seemed deserted. It was well up into the fifties now—I felt it was a good omen—and warm enough to sit down on the bench, even though it was November.

“Feel anything yet?” Robin asked. She studied me with eyes that seemed to pick up a misty sheen from the gray water lapping at the stone embankment no more than a dozen feet in front of us.

Turning my attention inward, I seemed to discover a not-unpleasant vagueness in my stomach, a slight tension in my jaw muscles, maybe the hint of a light-headed buzz behind my eyes.

“I’m not sure—”

She laughed, her face seemed to crinkle, said: “Don’t worry, when it hits, you’ll
know.”

I stared out across the river where the smokestacks of Brooklyn were pouring gray smoke into the clear blue sky; digging the chugging factories far away across the flat graygreen water, and the two of us sitting alone on a bench in a thin strip of non-city without another human being in easy sight, I had the damndest feeling of being on the stern of a cruise ship slowly pulling out of the harbor, its bow pointed to the far horizon, slipping out to sea real peaceful and groovy.

“This is just about the grooviest place in the East Village to go up in,” Robin said. “Of course if we were blowing heavier bread, we could’ve gone up to the Cloisters and gone up digging the Hudson... No, we’d never have made it up there in time, and going up in a cab can be a real bummer, especially if you get stuck with a cab driver who won’t shut up....”

I was beginning to see deeps in this girl: she knew what she was doing, she had an esthetic, and any chick who could get a cab to stop for her on Second Avenue wearing nothing but boots and an old peacoat had to have style.

“Did anyone every tell you you hail a cab with class?” I said.

A groovy little laugh like lips on my body. Her eyes were really starting to shine, huge and glowing. One of us was starting to feel something.

“It’s all in the fingers and wrist,” she said. She waved her right hand limply in the air. “Now who would stop for some dingy chick waving a dead fish?” She straightened her wrist and snapped her fingers once, imperiously. “Dig—
there’s
a princess in a plastic hippy disguise!”

I took her hand, kissed it like a Transylvanian nobleman, ran my eyes slowly up her smooth white wrist disappearing into the floppy sleeve of her peacoat, along acres of midnight-blue felt parkland rippling and folded geologically over her hidden flesh like the frozen time of a Greek statue’s concrete drapery, and met the cool black pools of her eyes phosphorescent surface sheen over wells of mysterious female darkness.

Time stopped. I swan-dived into the universe of her eyes, deep down, way down, all the way to a velvet-black grotto that seemed to go all the way through her, to open into an infinite void that was the same void behind my eyes too, where some essence of me mingled with the essence of her, and when I came bubbling up to the surface again, there seemed to be a tiny spark of her inside my head and from the now-hidden depths of her pupils, a piece of me seemed to look back.

“Hello,” she said softly—a confirmation.

“Hello.”

Silently, we looked out over the waters together, the rolling gray waters of the East River redolent with the wasted substance of New York, carrying its rich soup down to the ocean, there to nourish the amnion of the primal womb of all life. There the very shit and sewage of civilization would feed pure feral life; we were all part of the pattern of nature, down to our lowliest turd. We couldn’t be anything but nature’s own creatures on a planet that cherished our very foulness and loved the very ass-end of our dead residues back into life.

“Thank you,” I said, not knowing if it was God or Robin or the universe I was thanking, seeing them all as one with myself in the rolling vastnesses of our mind.

“I told you, didn’t I?” Robin said, ever young, ever old, preternaturally wise. “Acid is love.”

Could she be right? Could acid be the universe’s
aqua regia,
the Universal Solvent of souls in whose deeps all merged into One? Had I been given the Gift for which all life yearned?

Robin stood up, pulled me up with her. “Yes, this is a groovy place to go up in,” she said. “But now it’s time for another magic carpet ride.”

“Here?”
I said when Robin told the cabbie to stop on the corner of MacDougal and Houston. Clown Alley? The MacDougal Street freakshow? Honkie-tonk mockery of the best year of my life?

“Here,” she said definitively. “You haven’t seen what you think you’ve seen till you see it with kaleidoscope eyes.”

A squeeze of her hand said
trust me,
how could I argue with that? My Magical Mystery Tour Guide hadn’t made a wrong move yet. So I paid the cabbie $1.40 and there we were on fabled MacDougal Street, a block below Bleecker, where it was just a quiet brown little Italian Village street sleeping in the soft shadows south of where the Freakshow begins.

“Look, I don’t mean to be an old man,” I said, “but MacDougal Street has worn some bumpy ruts in my mind.”

And just thinking about it caused dopplering waves of memory to whistle hollowly down the narrow brownstone canyon from the flash and color of the MacDougal main drag I could dimly see a block away.

That long golden summer when I had kissed Flatbush and college goodbye and hadn’t yet kissed Anne and smack hello, first and last time of total freedom in my life, my Golden Age, when I knew every face on The Street and Saturday afternoon was a walk down MacDougal from the Park to Ted’s old loft on West Broadway and then a choice of the best party of the night—