Chapter Eighteen Ocean Beach Not long after our chat in Mrs. Rousseau's parlor—and a week or so before Ginny finally just went ahead and had the abortion—Elliot's father killed himself. I don't even remember his name. I always just called him Mr. Felton. His father killing himself knocked Elliot for a loop, another loop. He was always getting knocked for loops. Elliot's parents had finalized their divorce before he got back from Vietnam. There had been lawyers and private investigators digging through twenty years of dirt with a backhoe. His father knew all about the Lebanese real estate guy by then—and the Nicaraguan plumber and the Irish roofing and siding salesman and the Italian maitre d' at Westlake Joe's. They were separated when she took up with the stockbroker, but I'm sure he was on Mr. Felton's list of guys who'd fucked his wife, as well. Elliot's mother got the car and the house and everything in it, right down to whatever was left of the bottle of Lemon-Scented Joy under the kitchen sink. His father got nothing but the furniture that had been his mother's furniture before the marriage. Mr. Felton also got nothing but sadder and sadder with each passing day. He was too sad to work and had to take early retirement. He was too sad to do anything. He didn't have a house or a car or a wife or a job, and he had always been the kind of guy who only knew who he was by what he had. Now he had nothing. Now he was nobody. Even I felt a little sorry for the guy, and I'd always thought he was exactly the kind of cocky, brittle, know-it-all, authoritarian asshole who deserved to get shattered. When Elliot got out of the military, his father was living in a two-bedroom duplex out in the Avenues, a block from Ocean Beach. After he got the job at Dean Witter's, Elliot moved in with his dad and took the N-Judah downtown before dawn every day in order to get to work by six in the morning when the stock exchange opened in New York. The first time he caught his father crying, they pretended it wasn't happening. Then they got used to it. They had no choice. His father cried all the time. He stood by the living room window and looked out at the fog with long tears rolling down his face. Elliot felt like they had traded places. When Elliot had cried when he'd been a kid, his father used to take off his belt and give him something to cry about. Now Elliot understood why. It drove a person nuts after awhile. He wanted to grab his father by the shirt, to shake him, to slap him, to take off his belt and give his father something to cry about...but Elliot knew it hadn't really done him a lot of good, so he didn't. Later he mentioned that maybe he should have. Besides look at the fog and cry, Mr. Felton went surf fishing and read Anna Karenina. One morning, toward the end of the book, Elliot found his father on the back porch with his head blown half-off. He was holding the shotgun like an Easter lily. His body was stiff. His shoulders were stuck to the planks of the porch with dried blood and brains. They had to be pried loose with a fancy chrome-plated crowbar the coroner kept handy for such occasions. Elliot stayed in the duplex and took up surf fishing. He quit his job. His plans went awry. He never took his new suits out of the closet again. His mother paid the rent. She was selling real estate by then. Elliot finished Anna Karenina from where his father had left off. The fringed bookmark that had belonged to Elliot's grandmother was still marking the place. There were only around twenty pages left. When he was through reading it all the way through to the end, Elliot started from the beginning. On particularly blustery days, Elliot put on his father's rain gear, trudged down to Ocean Beach with his father's fishing rod and his father's fishing tackle, leaned into gale force winds blowing salt spray into his face and fished his heart out. Sometimes Elliot even caught a fish—usually some bony, bottom-dwelling scavenger fish, not fit for human consumption—but once he caught a pretty good-sized sea bass and invited Ginny and me over for dinner. His duplex was like walking into 1942. It was an oasis of middle-class Mormon restraint. Elliot's grandmother's furniture was arranged the way Mr. Felton had it arranged before he killed himself. There were rugs with fringe at the ends and crocheted doilies on the arms of overstuffed chairs and fringe hanging from dim yellow lampshades. Dust puffed up when Ginny and I sat on the couch. We watched it disperse up through the soft light being shed by one of the lamps and settle back down onto the ornate walnut end table. She was subdued. So was I. So was Elliot. We were all pretty much just going through the motions. His father's old room was stern. There were government memorabilia on a mahogany chest of drawers—pictures of his father standing next to J. Edgar Hoover and General MacArthur and a picture of a young Mr. Felton in a crowd of people behind Eisenhower when he was still a five-star general. In the closet there were four pairs of black wingtips, each with a separate set of shoetrees. The thing that Elliot couldn't seem to get over was that his father had managed to get through the ordeal of being held captive in a Japanese prisoner of war camp for more than a year. Elliot thought that if a person had survived that, he could survive anything. Not true, it turns out. His father couldn't live with the fact of not having a car or a house or a job—or the inescapable conclusion that his wife did not love him and maybe had not ever loved him. Elliot still made art out of anything he touched. Walking into his bedroom in the duplex was like walking into the sky. There was no furniture. He slept on a pile of pillows and down comforters on the floor and there were great heaving gobs of urethane foam all over the walls and ceiling that Elliot had airbrushed different shades of white and foggy shades of gray, like huge cumulus clouds. Ginny and I went into the dining room and sat down at the table. Elliot had built a centerpiece out of pinecones and seashells and driftwood. We were ill at ease. He served baked sea bass on one of his grandmother's silver serving trays. He would have looked more at home in his quilted smoking jacket, tugging at his meerschaum pipe, but he looked at home enough. It was sad. I don't know why. It just was. When we were through with dinner, which amounted to not much more than the three of us picking the bones out of the sea bass and leaving most of the meat on our plates, we drank a bottle of wine and talked about Tolstoy. Elliot showed us a picture of his father that had been taken a couple of days after he'd been liberated from the prison camp. He just stood there holding it, looking at it. His father was nothing but skin and bones. Elliot went over by the window and looked out at the fog. It was too sad for words. Ginny and I didn't know what to say. We didn't say anything. Then we said we'd better be going. Elliot didn't say anything. We left. And Elliot pretty much dropped out of the picture for another couple of years or so. Ginny and I were having troubles of our own at the time. It would not have been practical to have a kid; it would have been cool, but it would not have been practical. She and her father's lawyer talked on the phone a lot. He arranged for her to get a letter from her shrink who arranged to get another letter from another shrink—which was what you had to do to get an abortion back then—and Ginny went into the hospital and had an abortion in the middle of February. I waited in the lobby. It didn't take long. At the beginning of March, Ginny and I moved into the biggest apartment in Mrs. Rousseau's building. It was huge, with all kinds of Queen Anne windows and nooks and crannies and more of her fancy furniture, but it still only cost a hundred and fifty bucks a month. We lived there less than three weeks. Ginny went off on one of her irresistibly deranged, drunk, blacked-out binges sometime toward the end of the month. Her Christmas troubles were winding down, but she still had another humdinger of a fling left in her. She ended up at a pizza parlor on Fillmore Street and picked up some guys in one of the local fledgling rock-and-roll bands who used to hang out there—some of the Charlatans is my best guess, but it could have been Jefferson Airplane guys. I think the pizza parlor was the one that got turned into a neighborhood rock-and-roll club called The Matrix a year or so later. It could have been most anyone, though. Sopwith Camel? Sons of Champlin? Moby Grape? I don't know. A bunch of fledgling rock-and-roll guys used to hang out on Fillmore Street back then. All I know is that at around two in the morning there was a lot of noise coming from the kitchen. I got up to see what was going on. Ginny and two scruffy guys were drinking wine, smoking dope and yucking it up at our new kitchen table. I kicked them out. Ginny threw a fit—a bigger fit than usual. She broke two of the big bay windows overlooking California Street, wrecked one of Mrs. Rousseau's Japanese silk screens and smashed my new electric typewriter. We had to move out. Ginny stayed with Tom Piper. I went up to my parents' house in Oregon. The only reason I was able to put up with Virginia as long as I did was that I always had somewhere to go to get away from her when she went completely crazy for too long. That's how I have the little stack of letters I still have. She wrote them to me while I was up in Oregon. In early May of 1965, I hitchhiked back down to San Francisco. The Christmas stuff was pretty much over—well, you know, until the next Christmas. She was the picture of health, happiness and good cheer. While I'd been in Oregon, Ginny had taken acid with one or another of her rock-and-roll buddies. I was jealous. The last thing I wanted was my god damn girlfriend taking LSD with some scruffy rock-and-roll asshole—especially when I hadn't taken acid with anyone, and even more especially when it was all she could talk about. I absolutely HAD to take acid. It wasn't just a matter of popping a pill, either; no, no, you had to prepare. There was a whole catechism. You had to read Doors of Perception, Joyous Cosmology, King Solomon's Ring, and a bunch of other books: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones—I can't begin to remember them all. There was a whole bibliography. Then you had to go somewhere, to the ocean or the woods, and finally, on top of everything else, it had to just, like, happen. Jesus. It sounded like a lot of trouble to go to just to get stoned, but, hey, I'd never taken acid before. Who was I to say? She had, like I said—with one of her scruffy rock-and-roll buddies. La dee da. We picked the woods. We went to La Honda.

Chapter Nineteen (Listen) La Honda In the spring of 1965, La Honda was a sleepy little backwoods mountain town halfway between San Francisco and Santa Cruz. Except for the main, two-lane, blacktop highway, there were nothing but one-way dirt roads leading down to secluded houses. We rented a cabin. We had our pick from among six of the boxy, dilapidated, one-room structures. We took the one farthest away from the rental office that doubled as a grocery store. Across the street there was a vast, inviting, redwood forest. Ginny took the key to the cabin while I bought stuff to eat later. Her black Buick was the only car in the lot. I knocked on the cabin door. She let me in. Overhanging fir trees filtered what little sunlight came through the dusty windows. There was a hooked rug on the floor. I put the groceries on the stand beside the bed. We looked at one another and both swallowed a single, small, speckled orange pill at the same time. It was late afternoon. The sun was about to go down. Nothing happened for a while. The bed in the cabin was soft and springy. We lay down next to each other. She put her head on my chest. I put my arm around her. She was contrite. We didn't talk. The first thing I noticed was a tingling little itch in my throat, but deeper, like somewhere down inside the autonomic nervous system of my esophagus. We got up and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at each other again. She must have been feeling the same tingling itch. Then not much else happened for another little while. We went outside. When we got to the edge of the steamy blacktop road, we stopped, looked and listened—then we held hands and ran as fast as we could across the street and deep into the redwood forest. It was still warm, the tail end of a day that had gotten up into the mid-eighties. Insects had started to become more noticeable, I noticed. That was about it. Flies and gnats had always left little vapor trails in the air, but the vapor trails I was beginning to see seemed to be lasting slightly longer than usual. The itch in my esophagus had extended into my chest and was working its way down into the pit of my stomach. The last of the sun's rays showed spiders' webs covering everything. That wasn't particularly unusual, either. In the woods, just before the sun goes down, spiders' webs do cover everything, but these spider webs were thicker than usual. They were, like, replicating themselves as I watched—and pretty soon the whole forest floor was half-an-inch deep with spider webs, sparkling like snow. That was unusual. The floor of a forest on a warm day in May doesn't sparkle like snow. Something was definitely going on. The tingling itch had settled in my groin. I could taste the fillings in my teeth. A fly circled my head, but slowly—so slowly, he almost stopped in midair. His huge hairy body was luminous green. The veins in his wings had black, insect blood coursing through them. Then he flew away, leaving a bright, phosphorescent green stream of light behind him in the air. The stream of light stayed in the fly's wake until it began to sort of...melt. Another bright fresh trail from a smaller insect cut through the air and stayed there, then another and another. Insects were leaving bright vapor trails everywhere—pretty soon the whole volume of plain old-fashioned, otherwise empty midair was all scribbled up like a great big Etch-A-Sketch. I wanted to tell someone what I was seeing, but who? Ginny? Where was she? Was she seeing stuff like that, too? The questions didn't stay in my mind long enough for me to actually go seek her out and find her and ask her. Then I looked down at the ferns by my feet and forgot all about telling Ginny what I was seeing. I couldn't move. My legs were surrounded by delicate, brittle, lacy structures that would be utterly destroyed if I so much as took a single step. I crouched down carefully—and whoa! A big shiny deep maroon carpenter ant was climbing up one of the stems of the fern, bearing the heavy burden of some ant version of an albino watermelon on his back, juggling it from one side to the other while he tried to walk. The ant was following the filigree of an emerald-green fern frond to its logical conclusion. He felt things out with his feelers, stopped, turned around too quickly, and tripped over a glistening follicle of silky hair growing from the fern. It was like there was a tiny silky hair factory deep inside the body of the plant, turning out tiny silky hairs for the express purpose of tripping wayward carpenter ants, making life all that much more difficult for the poor struggling buggers—and it dawned on me that that was why plants were called plants, because they were factories, turning sunlight into green cells shaped like emeralds, turning emerald-shaped cells into silky hairs no thicker than the filaments of a spider web. The carpenter ant regained his balance and continued on. He looked drunk, disoriented, confused. The weight he was carrying was too huge. He couldn't see straight, he could barely walk, but he had to keep trying to get to wherever it was that he was going. He was wobbling from one side to the other, catching his balance, taking another tack, frantically trying to get...God knows where. I wanted to help him out, to steer him in the right direction, but I couldn't figure out where the heck he wanted to go any more than he could figure out where the heck he wanted to go. I looked at the ground under the fern plant. A huge volcano was erupting a steady stream of shiny maroon carpenter ants. Next to the anthill there was a decayed pinecone crawling with even more carpenter ants. That must have been where the ant on the fern frond was trying to go. He needed to find his way to that pinecone...but why? I picked it up. The ants clambered off like they were jumping from a burning building. One of them landed among the thick hairs on the back of my hand, and wow! I had a factory inside me! The factory inside me was making thick hair follicles, one at a time. I was a plant! Cells like molten iron were stretched into strands of iridescent hair ten times stronger than steel—and that was just one of the products from one of the factories. I had all kinds of factories in me, making all sorts of different things, all at the same time. How could you possibly keep that kind of complexity straight in your brain? How could anyone? It went on forever, asleep or awake, nonstop, every minute of every day and every minute of every night; from the instant you're conceived it goes on and on, mindlessly, thoughtlessly, second after second, tick-tock, tick-tock, to the day you die—and even after that it goes on. New factories take over, the factories of death, putrefaction, decay and rebirth. The ant that had landed in the hair on the back of my hand made its way like Tarzan; swinging from one hair follicle to another like they were vines in a jungle. Then he took one last mighty swing and jumped off into thin air. But even thin air wasn't just thin air; it was something into which an ant could hurl himself without getting hurt—and if an ant could do it, why couldn't I? I could. It would be easy. I'd end up unscathed. I could climb up the side of an ancient redwood tree, walk out onto one of the branches and fall, slowly, just let go. That was when I noticed my thumb. It was huge. I used my thumbnail—this thick, slightly nicotine-stained, translucent tool with which I had miraculously come equipped—to peel away one of the outer scales of the decayed pinecone in a conscientious effort to find out what in God's name the ant on that fern frond might have been looking for. It had to be something pretty good, whatever it was. The thick, hard, dusty brown scale I was trying to rip away from the body of the pinecone was straining with every fiber of its being to remain attached. It was making tiny creaking noises, little squeaks and squeals like I was tearing it out from its mother's womb, but I didn't care. I was transfixed. I was obsessed. I had to find out what the fuck was going on in there. I needed to know why that ant from the fern frond wanted so desperately to find his way back to that pinecone. What was so important? What did he want? What the hell was happening in there? I had to know. Then—CRACK! The scale broke off at its root, deep inside the body of pinecone. And—POUF! There was an explosion. Thousands of microscopic little paratroopers landed on my forearm and attacked a pretty good-sized army of quivering hair follicles. The bravest of the paratroopers aimed for my eyes. I ducked just in time and felt a sprinkling of vicious, single-minded, suicidal commandos settle into the thick brambles of one of my eyebrows. A short-lived battle ensued. Who won or lost didn't matter. The dead buried their dead; the living went on about their business as if nothing had happened. I resumed the task of tearing apart the pinecone. By this time I was sweating. It was mortal combat. Man against nature; survival of the fittest. I was a human being, after all. A pinecone was no match for a human being, for God's sake. Ha! Wasn't it God, in his infinite wisdom, who made mankind to lord it over all of nature? Yes. It was. Surely a lowly rotting pinecone must have had better sense than to think it could trifle with a MAN. By then I had forgotten why I was taking the pinecone apart; by then I was just doing it because I was doing it. I tore another three or four scales off the pinecone indiscriminately, brutally, ruthlessly, like I didn't give a shit how many babies I was ripping from their mothers' wombs or how many brave armies of microscopic paratroopers I was exterminating. I was a machine, a heartless, mindless, brutal killing machine. Nothing could stop me. I tore off another layer. And—YEOW! The hugest, meanest, most menacing, sharp-nosed, big-toothed, hairy-legged, black—SPIDER! LEAPED out at me! From its LAIR! It was grimacing its fangs at me like straight razors, threatening to slash slits in my bare eyeballs. It was intent on eating my brain, boring through my skull with all eighty-five moving parts of its salivating mouth and feasting on the deepest recesses of the warm, sticky gray matter of my mind. I threw the pinecone away, jumped back and yelled. "AAAHHHAAAH?" "What?" I heard Ginny ask. There was a frown of apprehension in her voice. What could I answer? I'd been attacked. "What happened?" She sounded far away. "Nothing," I said. Her mind, I presumed, was in as fragile a state as mine was by then. I didn't know how to tell her without upsetting her that a spider had leaped at me from the inside of a pinecone and had tried to bore through my skull and eat my brain. "Why did you yell?" "I saw a spider." "Oh," she said. "I saw moss." I made my way gingerly over to where Ginny was seeing moss. It was past dusk by then. The sun was long gone. It was almost dark. We were like ghosts. All we could see of each other was the long-sleeved cotton pullover shirts we were wearing. Hers was baggy and gray. Mine was yellow; there were three small buttons at its throat. I never bothered to button any of them. It was too dark to see our pants. "Let's take off our clothes," Ginny said. "How will we ever find them again?" I was still a little worried about that spider—a trifle paranoid, perhaps. She'd been seeing moss and wasn't worried at all. "Let's make them into scarecrows." "There aren't any crows. Who would we scare?" "Wraiths," she said in a spooky voice. "Ring Wraiths. The Black Riders." "Ring Wraiths won't be scared by T-shirts." "Yes they will. Come on." Ginny pulled her shirt off over her head and draped it onto a bush. She steadied herself with her hand on my shoulder while she took off her shoes and her socks and her pants and her panties. My shirt was the brightest. I took it off and spread it across the bush to give us the best chance of ever finding our clothes again, then steadied myself with my hand on her shoulder. There was barely a hint of daylight left in the sky. Vague, looming shadows that had been nothing but giant redwoods felt more sentient now—like they might have been a little put off by our presence. Usually they had the forest all to themselves at night. God only knew what they did then. They reminded me of those Ent guys from the Tolkien books, like any minute one of the big, hulking things was going to open its eyes and start talking to us in a really deep voice. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings had been mostly what we'd been reading since I got back—well, except for all that cosmic consciousness crap Ginny made me read. I liked the Tolkien books way better. They were like The Alexandria Quartet, but easier to read. Ginny had a hard time deciding which character she was. Justine had been simple. Who else could she possibly have been? But in the Tolkien stuff, she went back and forth among Arwen, Eowyn and Galadriel. She wanted to be all three. The forest had become otherworldly; I couldn't tell where it ended and my imagination began. The redwoods around us sounded like they were talking, snickering among themselves at the two foolish naked humans who'd taken a notion to cavort in their forest—or was that just a gust of wind whispering through their ancient branches high, high above our wee little selves? Unseen ferns and bushes brushed my bare hand. They could have been Elves. We might have been in Rivendell. There didn't seem to be a moon anywhere and what stars we could see, we could see but fleetingly behind the swaying branches of the trees—a twinkle here and there, that was it. We took a few steps deeper into the forest and touched each other's hands. Then we stopped and put our arms around each other and hugged each other in the dark. We were both still a little shaky. The night I'd kicked the scruffy rock-and-roll assholes out of Mrs. Rousseau's apartment hadn't been all that long ago—and a lot more had happened since then. I'd been gone. I'd come back. She'd been filling me in, little by little, but she had definitely gotten herself fucked a significant number of times while I'd been up in Oregon—by the guy with whom she first took acid, for one. I'd wanted to hear the whole story—I always wanted to hear the whole story—what he was like, what it was like, where he fucked her, how he fucked her, everything. She told me as best she could, as much as she could remember, especially the part about taking acid. It was scary stuff—and now we had taken acid, and we were out in the woods with no clothes on, and there were the Black Riders of Mordor and brain-eating spiders and goblins and giant talking trees to worry about. "Hugged" is too strong a word. We just stood really close together with the tips of the hairs on our bodies brushing against each other. Tiny hairs on the front of my body brushed against tiny hairs on the front of her body, but our skin didn't come into contact. Some of the hair on my chest knew the feel of the nipple of one of her breasts, and the tingling itch that had settled in my groin seemed to swell some. I couldn't be sure. It wasn't distinctly sexual. It was more like a flower opening up in the morning sun. We were sharing each other's warmth, sharing each other's metabolism, feeling the energy our bodies created by being alive. We stayed like that for a long time, enveloped in affection and the living, breathing, heart-beating heat generated by the humanity of each other's separate being. Now was not the time to try to talk, no, but if she wanted to know what I'd meant when I'd said, "I love you," that night on the floor of her apartment on 45th Avenue with all those candles blazing, this was it: Love—the thing itself, unexplained, unspoken, unadorned. "Let's explore," she said and took my hand. We walked deeper into the woods, feeling our way more than seeing our way, until we found a sort of cavern under the burnt-out stump of a huge ancient redwood tree and climbed down inside. It was like one of the underground forts I used to make when I was a kid. The opening was small, but once we got inside there was plenty of room for both of us to move around. The walls were damp and sinewy and cool to the touch. It was absolutely pitch dark black. There was no moon or stars. It was blacker than black. There was no light at all, not the slightest illumination coming from any conceivable source whatsoever—and yet we started to glow. We could see each other. We were glowing in the dark, brighter and brighter. Now, whatever else I may be, I've always at least been logical. I don't accept stuff on faith. I don't believe anything I haven't seen with my own eyes—and even the things I have seen that seem to stretch credulity, I can usually figure out some reasonable set of circumstances that explains them...but this! Not only was it incredible, it was unexplainable. And yet I saw it. We were luminous. Deep down inside that utterly dark, burnt-out old stump of a redwood tree, Ginny and I generated our own light, and it grew stronger, brighter. We were angels or fairies or lightning bugs or ghosts. She couldn't believe it or explain it either, but we both saw what we saw, and in exactly the same way. We couldn't have made it up if we had tried. Our hands danced together. Her small pale glowing greenish-white hand knew when to move away and when to move closer to my glowing greenish-white hand like our hands were puppets. We put on a whole Punch and Judy show with our glowing hands. Our fingers left phosphorescent vapor trails, like the insects had left in the air. It was like that Kirilian stuff. Our whole bodies glowed. The auras of our small glowing bodies commingled. We were like Tinkerbell, like two Tinkerbells—a boy Tinkerbell and a girl Tinkerbell, naked, cavorting with each other deep inside the root system of a redwood tree that had been there since before Columbus discovered America, since before Leif Eriksson discovered America, since before Guinevere and Lancelot and King Arthur cavorted in Camelot, since before Mohammed ascended from the Temple Mount into heaven, probably since around the time Jesus calmed the storm and fed the multitudes and walked on the Sea of Galilee. We'd been thrown into a storybook, somehow—a real storybook, a history book, a fairy tale, a book of revelation and remembrance and reevaluation, a visceral combination of fact and fiction and fantasy. We weren't making this stuff up. It was happening. There were elves and dwarves and sprites and wizards and leprechauns and druids drinking magic elixir in the forest above us. They were dancing around a gigantic bonfire shooting sparks at the stars in the Andromeda galaxy. Or maybe we were in heaven; maybe this was how we would be if we were in heaven together. We'd been given a glimpse. These were our immortal souls. We were momentarily in heaven on earth. After we had somehow finally managed to extricate our immortal souls from the cavern under that huge redwood stump, we made our way back toward the highway. There was no bonfire. There were no trolls. We could see better than we could see before. More stars had come out. There was a sliver of moon. We found our clothes. I started to put on my shirt. Ginny wrinkled up her nose. I got the key out of my pants' pocket and we gathered our clothes into bundles in our arms. We crept through the bushes by the road, peeked out to make sure no cars were coming, then ran lickety-split across the still-warm blacktop and slipped unseen through the door of our cozy cabin. When we got inside I locked the door and lit the dim lamp next to the bag of groceries on the table beside the bed. Ginny dumped her clothes onto a chair against the far wall and did a pirouette over toward the foot of the bed like she was free at last. I put my clothes on top of her clothes. We sat on the edge of the soft, springy mattress. She reached over toward the bag of groceries. I ran the palm of my hand up her stomach and closed my fingers around one of her breasts. She stopped reaching for the groceries. I leaned over and sucked her tough, perky little nipple into my mouth. "Aren't you starving?" I heard her ask. I nodded my head. The bag rustled. I smelled oranges. Then I got a whiff of the big kosher dill pickle I'd picked out from the big kosher dill pickle jar by the cash register, and suddenly I was so starving to death I was going to die. My brain had burned every calorie my blood had in it to burn. I looked up. Ginny was taking the peel off one of the oranges. "Wait, wait," I said. "Let's do it together." We moved into the middle of the bed, facing each other with our legs crossed, and took the skin off, then kept taking the whole orange apart, membrane-by-membrane. It was like taking apart the Taj Mahal. We were awestruck by the magnificent structures, things no architect ever dreamed of building, chambers and antechambers, rooms and anterooms and inner sanctums and nurseries with little baby orange seeds rocking themselves to sleep in elaborate cradles. "God," Ginny said. "Yeah," I said. Then we ate them. Ha! We ate the chambers and the antechambers, the rooms and the anterooms and the inner sanctums and the nurseries and spit the babies out into the palms of our hands and dumped them into an ashtray. Orange juice dribbled down our chins and onto our chests. We licked orange juice off each other's lips and kissed each other's mouths and ate the little pieces of orange pulp on each other's tongues. When we were through with the first orange, we ate the second orange the same way. Then we started in on the pickle. We slowly bent that giant green kosher dill pickle until its skin ruptured. Then we watched each tiny pickle seed emerge slowly, painstakingly, from the body of the former cucumber as if it were being born, as if the pickle were giving birth to one baby pickle seed after another—twins, triplets, quadruplets—creating slimy, succulent afterbirth, which we then stuffed voraciously into our mouths. We crushed newborn baby pickle seeds between our teeth and looked into each other's eyes and knew exactly what we were doing as we chewed them and swallowed them into the churning gobs mixed with sulfuric saliva, which seared and burned into newborn baby pickle seed brains all the way down to our churning, sulfurous stomachs to fuel the factories inside us. "Blows the mind," Ginny said. I didn't want to hear that. I didn't want to try to talk, period; but I especially didn't want to hear that particular phrase. It got me all screwed up. Our recent abortion was already on my mind—all those innocent orange seeds in their nurseries and the pickle seeds being so miraculously born and so viciously killed, so brutishly devoured, didn't help—but what really screwed me up was that it didn't sound like anything Ginny would have said on her own. "Blows the mind." She didn't talk like that. It sounded like something she'd heard, something she was repeating, something the guy she'd taken acid with the first time had said. "Blows the mind." The phrase kept reverberating. Had it been after he fucked her that he'd said it? Before? During? Was she on her hands and knees in front of him when he said it? Was he squeezing the cheeks of her perfect ass when he said it? Was he pulling her cunt onto his cock when he said it? Were the juices from her pussy puddling up around his dick when he said it? Was he watching his cock fuck her? "Are you okay?" I heard Ginny ask. "Yeah. I'm fine." "We're all icky and sticky," she said. "No, we're not. We're okay." "Yes we are, dodo. Look at us!" She laughed. We looked at each other. She was glistening with dried pickle juice and orange pulp. I was too. "Come on, let's get in the shower." She stood up and took me by my hands. Jealousy was an aphrodisiac. Jealousy had always been an aphrodisiac, even when I wasn't stoned on acid—I'd been jealous of Ginny and other guys since the night Elliot and I met her; I'd been jealous of her two dates; I'd been jealous of her boyfriend in high school, the one who dumped her after she got raped by a cop; I'd been jealous of the cop; I'd been jealous of the garbanzo bean guy who had to come over to 45th Avenue that night my car didn't start; I'd been jealous of the Hershey Bar guy in that tawdry hotel across from Gramercy Park; I'd been jealous of Jim Moss sticking his big black dick in her; I'd been jealous of Ron Goldstein and Bud and the guys she couldn't remember; I'd been jealous of Tom, I'd been jealous of Elliot—but acid intensified everything. I was more jealous than I had ever imagined I could be. I was going to die of jealousy. I was going to explode from jealousy. I followed Ginny into the shower. Drops of water on her skin sparkled like diamonds. I kissed her shoulder. She tasted like salt. I soaped up my hands and washed her breasts and washed her belly and slinked down onto my knees and washed between her legs and dropped the soap and rinsed her off with the sparkling streams of water streaming down her stomach. My taste buds turned what she usually tasted like and the residue from the little bar of motel soap into their constituent molecules and came up with exotic perfumes and tastes I'd never tasted before. I opened her pussy up with my fingers and licked her hard little clit. She tasted like vanilla—like lemon, and cinnamon, and lilacs, and apples—and there was still a hint of the juice from the dill pickle and the oranges, too. I stood up and turned her around and fucked her a little, like a dolphin, maybe, or a slippery little sea otter. When we got out of the shower, I carried her across the room and laid her down onto the bed and spread her legs apart and stuck my dick in her and fucked her on the bed, hard, like a whore, like a slut, like a two-bit bitch who'd fuck anyone anywhere. I fucked her like her boyfriend in high school. I fucked her like the cop. I fucked her like all the guys she had ever fucked had fucked her. Then I turned her over and fucked her some more. I fucked her like the guy she took acid with the first time fucked her, and kept on fucking her. We worked our way down onto the floor, and I fucked her like a dog, like a goat, like a lamb, like a squealing little pink pig. The hooked rug cut wrinkles into her pretty kneecaps. Later, lying on my back with the dead weight of Ginny's tough, succulent little body on top of me in the small soft springy bed again, after the aphrodisiac of my jealousy had worn off some, my imagination was finally able just to go wherever it wanted to go. Whether my eyes were open or shut didn't seem to matter. Byzantine frescoes were interrupted by glimpses of green grinning imps and toothpaste commercials flowing in and out of my racing consciousness. Some of the images were more elevated than others. There was a little Disney animation, some Tolkien and Dick and Jane and Tales from the Crypt and lots of Dr. Seuss stuff, but there were all kinds of humane, religious looking things, too—stuff that guys like Bosch and Brueghel might have painted. All in all, I was pretty pleased with the way my imagination handled itself. Mayan and Egyptian motifs crawled across the walls like our cozy little cabin was some kind of non-denominational Sistine Chapel. They went on and on, flowing through me, each more exquisite than the last. I really sort of had to go with the flow. I had no choice. The minute I tried to stop and appreciate one or another of these fleeting miracles for much longer than no time at all, they got all jumbled up in my brain—but there was a phrase that kept repeating itself, a mantra I kept hearing: "Leave them alone, And they will come home, Wagging their tails behind them." I had no idea what was going on with Ginny. Whatever it was, it wasn't something I wanted to try to talk about. By the time I would have asked a question, too many answers would have come and gone, all at once, doubting themselves at every turn, up and down a whole huge hall of mirrors in my mind. It was best not to ask. It was best not to try to talk. It was best not to try, period—to do nothing, to relax, to let go, to leave all the little factories I had going on inside me alone, just to let them do their own thing, to let them be, to stay out of their way. The next morning we went back out into the forest again. I couldn't for the life of me find that fern plant, or the anthill—and I didn't even try to find the pinecone or the huge, mean, menacing spider that had tried to eat my brain. There were a few flies flying around, but they weren't leaving any vapor trails. The tree stump, we found. We made a special point of finding it, but the tree stump was nothing but a big burnt-out old stump of a redwood tree. We looked inside and saw the cavern we'd been in, but there was no longer a storybook world of any sort going on down there. It was just dirty looking—and dark and damp and uninviting—certainly not the sort of place that could, by any stretch of the imagination, be mistaken for heaven on earth.

Chapter Twenty Shrader Street Acid changed everything—politics, relationships, fashion, religion, war, peace, freedom, diet, philosophy, soap operas, advertising, you name it. The normal things you used to just do from day to day—get up, brush your teeth, eat a bowl of Wheaties, go to work at some flunky job—all that changed once you dropped your first little orange speckled hit of LSD or ate your first sugar cube or drank your first Dixie Cup of Kool Aid. Your hair grew long. You couldn't look into a bowl of Wheaties without imagining where the wheat grew, who planted it, how it got cultivated and turned into flakes and put into orange boxes...and who cut the trees to make the boxes and who drove the trucks...and that was before you even got to the milk and the sugar and all the grass the cow must have eaten, not to mention what the heck exactly was it that went into the making of a champion? You wore necklaces and bright-colored clothes; the gray hooded sweatshirt you used to put on without thinking about it one way or another became an elfin cloak. One of the changes I noticed was that Ginny didn't seem to give a shit whether I wrote books or not anymore—so I didn't. That was a relief. I barely read books anymore. It was all I could do to look at the pictures on psychedelic posters or in Zap Comix. Reading was too linear. Words were too cumbersome. Even the individual letters out of which words were constructed just got way too squiggly and artificial looking to mean anything anymore. Nothing made the kind of sense it used to make. Ginny still read books. She read books all the time, meaty stuff and fluff—but she hadn't ever read books in a very linear way, anyway—she didn't do much of anything in a very linear way. Taking acid had nothing to do with it. When we got back from La Honda, Ginny and I rented a two-bedroom apartment—410 Shrader Street, Apartment 3. It was a few buildings up from Oak, a block and a half down from Haight Street, three blocks from Ashbury. When we went to see about the apartment, the guy who managed the building had a monkey on his shoulder. He was an old Russian, probably in his early seventies. He'd been a circus performer—a daring young man on a flying trapeze. His last name was Forkel. His first name was Vela, but I never thought of him as anyone but Mr. Forkel. He reminded me of Vladimir Nabokov—well, of pictures I'd seen on dust jackets. Nabokov had worked in a circus, too. He also lived up here in Ashland, Oregon for a while. In the fifties, I think. He used to catch butterflies in the woods at the end of the ally behind my mother's house after he'd fiddled with Lolita enough for one day. Mr. Forkel and his wife lived in the front apartment. It had bay windows looking out onto Shrader Street. After I rang the bell, the first thing Ginny and I saw was the monkey. He popped his head up under Mr. and Mrs. Forkel's white lace curtains and gave us a sour look. Ginny gave him a sour look back. He grimaced at her and scratched his head. She scratched her head and stuck out her tongue at him. That was when Mr. Forkel's wife pulled the curtains aside and saw us standing there. Pretty soon Mr. Forkel let us into the hallway—him and his monkey. The monkey crouched on Mr. Forkel's shoulder. Its fur had a greenish tinge. It scratched its tiny, dirty, human-looking fingernails through its owner's sparse gray hair like it was looking for ticks. The monkey offered Ginny a piece of lint with a mawkish grin, showing off the bright blue veins on the wet pink insides of its lips. She took the lint from the monkey's fingers. They frowned at each other. Mr. Forkel called the monkey Houdini. "Hang on a second," he said. "Let me get rid of Houdini, here." He had only a slight accent. He scooted the monkey into his and his wife's apartment, and we followed him down the long hallway to the rear apartment on the right-hand side. "You got the garden out back. It goes with this unit." Mr. Forkel opened one of the window shades. Dirty white curtains billowed out. The cross ventilation seemed okay. I liked the idea of having a garden. We could grow things, rhubarb, tomatoes, green beans, like my grandpa used to grow. The curtains, we could wash—we could spiff the place up in all kinds of other ways; paint the walls, maybe. "It's how much, again?" I asked. "Two twenty-seven fifty. Two bedrooms. Furnished. The owner didn't raise the rent after the last tenants moved out. They weren't here long." "Why the fifty cents?" I asked. "Owner's Chinese. It's a Hong Kong corporation." Mr. Forkel went back to his apartment. Ginny and I walked around awhile, into the kitchen, into the bathroom. We tried the faucets, flushed the toilet. We sat on the couch. The refrigerator clicked on. We heard a siren. A bus stopped. There was the sound of compressed air when the bus door opened and another hiss of compressed air when the bus door closed. The bus drove away. We heard the voice of a kid yelling. The refrigerator clicked off. We went into the back bedroom. Clotheslines on rusted pulleys were strung between the backs of buildings. Facing the street, the buildings were the ornate, multicolored Victorians San Francisco's famous for, but in back they were dull blocks of wooden planks, painted pastel blue or peach or yellow. Falling-down fences heaped with mounds of thriving ivy separated the yards between the buildings. Two of the yards had been cemented over. Weeds grew out of cracks in the cement. In one there was a yellow dog dish, another had a vegetable garden. Between the buildings, the golden spires of St. Ignatius Church glinted and clouded over, in and out of the sun and patches of fog. We took it. That was where we lived from May of 1965 to the spring of 1968—well, on and off; it's all kind of a jumble. That thing they used to say—"If you remember the sixties you weren't there?"—that's not exactly a meaningless cliché. I moved out now and then. I went up to Oregon, came back, got my own place for a while, moved in with Ginny again. We had other roommates sometimes. Brenda Creswell was one. All I remember about her was that she played the same Judy Collins record over and over on some cheap-ass record player that hadn't had a new needle since she'd moved to San Francisco from Nebraska. Mary Kramer was another roommate for six months or so. She was stable, down to earth—a nurse. The only unconventional thing about Mary was that she was Pigpen's girlfriend. They were a miracle of contrasts. I remember finding them at the kitchen table one morning. Mary had just finished a nutritious, well-balanced breakfast and was dressed for work in her prim white uniform. Pigpen was wearing his black leather hat that was coming apart at the seams. Purple carbuncles pocked his unshaven jowls and poked up around the edges of his scraggly mustache. His jacket was coming apart at the seams; he was sort of coming apart at the seams, in general. I think Mary might have been trying to reform him, to clean him up, to nurture him, to give him some stability, to keep him from drinking himself to death. It wasn't working. As soon as she left, Pigpen poured whiskey from a silver flask into a cup of black coffee. All kinds of people used to hang out at our apartment on Shrader Street. We got our acid from Superspade. He got it from Owsley. It was to the apartment on Shrader Street that Hank Harrison brought little Courtney over for us to baby-sit—that day we took acid and her little towhead two-year-old glow lit up the place. Steve Gaskin used to drop by now and then. He was trying to get Ginny and Brenda to start up a commune with him out in the sticks somewhere. Ginny went into the U. C. Hospital psycho ward during most of the Christmas difficulties of 1965—from November until the end of February. When it turned spring things quieted down, as they always did in the spring. During the summer of 1966, we mellowed out, lived our lives. I worked at little jobs. Ginny continued taking classes at San Francisco State, although going nuts around Christmas kept getting in the way of accumulating enough credits to graduate. New hippies showed up in Haight-Ashbury every day. They just appeared—like crocuses. One day a guy would be a straight-laced claims adjuster, taking the bus down to Montgomery Street every morning, and the next day he'd be all decked out in hippie threads, leaning against the front of the Psychedelic Shop, asking for spare change. They danced around like dervishes, smiling the smiles they'd seen other hippies smiling, wearing clothes they'd seen other hippies wearing, smoking joints they'd been given instead of spare change. Most of them didn't have places to stay, but they found places to stay. They were kids. People took them in like strays. Ginny and I were getting old and wise and weary. By the fall of 1966, our apartment on Shrader Street had become a crash pad for all the people we knew who didn't live in Haight-Ashbury—Thulin practically lived there, that fucker. He and Wanda got married there. Holy smokes, was that ever a surprise. Well, he and Wanda got married in Golden Gate Park, actually, but we all came back to Shrader Street when the wedding was over. I've mentioned Thulin, right? One-Eyed Jon? The guy who gave Ralph Wood his first marijuana that time in the elevator of the Navarre Guest House? He had just the one eye, see. That was why we called him One-Eyed Jon. He ended up on the cover of Rolling Stone as one of the acid cowboys of Taos, New Mexico, but back then Thulin's main claim to fame was chicks. He fucked more chicks than you could shake a stick at. I think it had something to do with his eye. When I first met him over at Ralph Wood's place by the railroad tracks in San Mateo, his eye had been what we talked about. "What's wrong with your eye?" I nodded toward it. "This?" He reached up, plucked out his left eye, held it between his thumb and forefinger and looked at it with his other eye. Then he flipped the eye over in his hand, got his thumb behind it and acted like he was going to shoot it at me like a marble. "Nothing, man." He smiled. "It's glass. It's a glass eye." My own left eye squinted sympathetically as Thulin popped the eye back into its socket, and I felt a wave of empathy toward him. He pulled the same stunt on chicks. It worked like a charm. He'd meet a new chick, take out his eye and pretend to shoot it at her like a marble—always with the same goat-like grin and with his face glowing with simple-minded mischief and irresistible charm—and she'd melt. It must have aroused them in some visceral way, reaching down into some forgotten sexual, psychological mechanism left over from when men gave women the choicest tidbits of freshly killed animals as tokens of affection and desire. Whatever it was, Thulin fucked more chicks than anyone I ever knew. That was what the whole Haight Street thing was all about to him. That was what it was all about to lots of people, including, no doubt, all the chicks who were getting themselves fucked fourteen times a minute. I remember Thulin trying to explain the whole hippie thing to Mr. and Mrs. Forkel. Ha! If he could explain it to them, he could explain it to anyone. He couldn't, of course, but that didn't keep him from trying. There was a tarnished silver samovar and a tray of tall glasses on an end table in Mr. and Mrs. Forkel's apartment, along with pictures in silver frames, pictures of circuses and pictures of old people, their parents probably, daguerreotypes maybe, and pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Forkel when they were around our age. Young. In one of the pictures, Mr. Forkel was on a platform high up inside a circus tent. He was wearing a white body suit. His wife was beside him, wearing a tutu and sitting on the bar of a trapeze. She was smiling. He was stern and athletic looking. Thulin and I sat down in brocade-upholstered chairs across from them. Mr. and Mrs. Forkel were sitting with their hands folded in their laps on their brocade-upholstered couch. After it had brewed long enough, Mrs. Forkel got up and poured us a glass of tea. "A glass tea," she called it. Her accent was thicker than her husband's. She sat back down on the couch and folded her hands in her lap again. Mr. Forkel wanted to know if we could tell them what was happening in the neighborhood. He said this exact sentence, I swear, word for word: "Something's happening here but we don't know what it is." "You sound pretty hip already," Thulin said. "That's eet," Mrs. Forkel said. "Heep! I hear thees word many times." "It's from jazz," I said. "Hep cats. Le Jazz hot," Mr. Forkel said. "Yeah, well some beatniks turned it into the word 'hip' and pretty soon the newspapers were calling people 'hippies.'" "It is going like this everywhere on? And why so long the hair? The beads around the neck of the boys? The asking of spare change? Who has so much spare change? I'm telling you the truth, just going to the Cala, we see...such things...in the parking lot, on sidewalk, everywhere. Do we, Vela?" "We see a lot of things." He agreed. "It's kind of like a revolution," I told them. "We have seen a revolution," Mr. Forkel said. "We have lived through a revolution. This is not a revolution." He waved the gnarled fingers of his right hand. "Yeah, it must look a little strange, I admit. It's not very political. It's more, like, personal, individual. It probably started with a kid named Bob Dylan." "Who this boy is? What his mother is thinking?" "Dylan, my ass." Thulin frowned. "It started with Woody Guthrie, man. No, Kerouac. Or Henry Miller. Gandhi? Jesus, maybe—peace and love, turn your other cheek and all that. Yeah, yeah, it started with Jesus and them, that's what I think. Then Kesey came up from Stanford, and him and Cassady went around passing out free acid and got Timothy Leary to drop out of Harvard, along with what's-his-name, that Herb Alpert guy." "What is it, then?" Mr. Forkel asked. "This 'acid' that they give away?" "LSD, man! Lysergic acid di-thalidomide." "I don't think it's thalidomide, Jon." "And this is why the children grow too long their hair?" "Plus there's the whole war thing," Thulin said, holding his forearms out in front of him. "Nobody cares about the war," I said. "What do you mean, man? Like who?" "Like anyone with any brains, that's who." "So, what's all these demonstrations about?" "Politics. Anyone who joins anything's an idiot—that's all you need to know. You want to change the world? Be good. Don't fight. Eat your vegetables." "Thank you Krishnamurti," Thulin said. "Where'd you hear about Krishnamurti?" I frowned. "Ah, some chick, man. I don't know." He waved. "It goes more on, then? To when?" Mrs. Forkel asked. "I don't know. There are all kinds of other people coming out here all the time." "More chicks," Thulin said. "All that's really going on is chicks, more new chicks every day." "I think they have too life good. No pay the rent. Free food for eat. Free clothes to wearing. Free to sleep places..." "Free love." Thulin's good eye got extra wide. Mrs. Forkel removed her hands momentarily from her lap and held them to the sides of her face. "It's a phase," I said. "It'll go away." "I don't know." Mr. Forkel shook his head sadly. "Will it ever be Russia again? No. Never." "But that was a real revolution." I said. "I hope you know," Mrs. Forkel said.

Chapter Twenty-One Foghorn Fish-and-Chips Wait. Wasn't I talking about Thulin getting married? I was. Okay, so, not long after Thulin explained everything there was to know about current events in the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco to Mr. and Mrs. Forkel—which must have been somewhere around October of 1966—he got married. Ha! That was a surprise. He wasn't exactly the marrying kind. Thulin still lived at Ralph's place in San Mateo, but he'd been coming to the Haight pretty regularly for the last six months or so to pick up chicks. Ginny and I had an extra bedroom we let him use. We had a weird affection for Thulin. He'd get us dope, amuse us with his eye and totally crack us up when he got carried away with starry-eyed lust for some new chick or other. Usually it never lasted longer than a day, often no longer than an hour or so, but Wanda was different. Ginny and I were with him up on Haight Street the day he found her. We got to see the whole romance from beginning to end. Wanda was fresh up from San Carlos High School and didn't have a nickel to her name. Thulin spotted her on the sidewalk in front of Foghorn Fish-and-Chips and stopped, dead in his tracks. "Oh, my God." Ginny rolled her eyes. "You are such a rake, such a roué, such a snake—when are you ever going to leave these little girls alone?" "Tomorrow," Thulin said, staring straight at Wanda. She wasn't in line, but was lurking off to one side, looking longingly at the twin vats of boiling oil, salivating at the smell of deep fried fish and batter and malt vinegar and thick-cut, brown-skinned, French fried Russet potatoes still bubbling around the edges. Thulin kept his eye on her as she watched the English guy take a new batch of fries from the boiling fat. He gave them a few shakes in their wire basket, tossed them across the stainless steel counter and sprinkled them with salt from a giant aluminum saltshaker. Wanda licked her lips. Thulin walked up to her as if in a daze and said, "Hey." They talked for a while. Thulin showed her his eye. He popped it out and pretended to shoot it like a marble at her chest. Then he grinned his goat-like grin and popped the eye back into its empty socket again. "Cute," Wanda said. Her hair was long and thick and black and lustrous. She had it tied into a ponytail with a red elastic band. Thulin brought her over. "Me and Wanda here's gonna get us a couple orders of fish-and-chips, then maybe head on back over to your place." He grinned his goat-like grin and casually groomed his wispy goatee. Wanda smiled a shy, polite, half-smile and glanced at us, then looked down at her black Converse sneakers sticking out from under a pair of bell-bottom jeans. She had a pink plastic wallet in her right hand. The wallet was held together by the same red elastic bands she used to tie back her black hair. We talked. Wanda was in the tenth grade at San Carlos High School. She'd come up on the Greyhound. Her parents didn't know it yet, but she wasn't planning on going back. "I might need me a key," Thulin said. "Did Jon tell you his poem, yet?" Ginny asked Wanda. "No. He just showed me his eye." She brushed aside a strand of hair that had come loose from the elastic. "So, what'd you think?" I asked her. "I thought it was...um...unusual," she said. "How does his poem go?" "There'll be plenty of time for all that later." Thulin's forehead got all contorted like he was trying to give Ginny and me a secret signal to shut the fuck up. "Come on. It's the best poem ever. I want to hear it," Ginny said. "I'm gonna break...the chains of conformity...into a million...shitty...pieces." "Yeah? And?" Wanda asked. She was still waiting to hear the rest of the poem. Ginny and I knew he was through. "That's it," Thulin said. "That's my poem." "It doesn't rhyme," Wanda said. Ginny handed him her keys. They were still at it when Ginny and I got back to the apartment. He and Wanda were louder than any of the other chicks had ever been. We could hear them from the hallway. I worried for a minute that they might be breaking things. When he finally brought Wanda into the living room, Thulin had the biggest shit-eating grin I'd ever seen. He had his arm around her shoulders. I'd never seen him with his arm around one of his chicks before. She was gorgeous. They were all pretty cute, but Wanda was hauntingly beautiful. Her hair was blacker than black. It glistened all purple and green, like a starling's wing in the sun, and her skin was creamy and flawless. Her lips were full and soft but always on the verge of a slight sneer. She had extra white, even teeth when she smiled, but she didn't smile much. She was serious. What was also extraordinary about Wanda was that she only fucked Thulin just that one time. He couldn't figure it out. Days went by. She wouldn't go away. Thulin didn't know what to do. He kept kicking her out. She kept not going anywhere. That was fine with Ginny and me. They were cute together. She wouldn't fuck him and she wouldn't go away. Thulin didn't get it; it was beyond the realm of his experience. "So." Thulin raised an eyebrow. "When do you think you might be heading on back to San Carlos, little girl?" He called them all "little girl." "I can't go back there." Wanda laughed. "Are you crazy?" "So, what are you planning on doing, then?" "I'm not planning on doing anything, Jon." She blinked her eyes slowly and moved her lower lip. Her mouth was relaxed and slightly bored. "Yeah, well, if you're going to be here, we're going to be here, like, together, you know?" He nodded in the general direction of the extra bedroom and smiled the goat-like smile that had always done the trick with every other chick. "I don't think so," Wanda said. "What do you mean, you don't think so? Who the fuck do you think you are? The fucking Queen of fucking Sheba?" "Yes," said Wanda. "I am the fucking Queen of fucking Sheba." She made right angles of her arms and looked like a picture of a Pharaoh's wife on a pyramid. "Hey, listen, man," Thulin said. "You're cute and all that, but you're gonna have to split. Period. I'm not dicking around." He waved his thumb toward the door. Wanda shrugged her shoulders and stared at him. "Fuck it, then. I'll leave." Thulin opened the door. "Could you bring us back something to eat?" Wanda asked. When he came back with Chinese food and Wanda's usual can of Dad's Old Fashioned Root Beer, Thulin tried to get her to fuck him again. She wouldn't. He couldn't believe it. He kicked her out in as many ways as he knew how. Wanda examined the ends of her hair. She wanted them to get an apartment of their own. Thulin found a place around the corner on Page Street. He and Wanda moved into it together, but she still wouldn't fuck him. She wanted them to get married. He kicked her out of their new apartment again and again. She never left. During the wedding ceremony, Thulin kept shaking his head and rolling his eye and muttering obscenities into his wispy beard. He flipped the ring like a coin and kept trying to get the makeshift preacher to call it in the air. The makeshift preacher had some ocular trouble of his own. Gold wire glasses magnified his right eye. It seemed to float aimlessly over toward his hatchet nose like a dark, bloated tropical fish trapped in a tide pool. Thulin and Wanda had met the preacher in Golden Gate Park. His name was Kirk. He looked like a picture of the Prophet Ezekiel in one of those ornate Victorian Bibles. They took him home with them, and while he was cooking his brown rice and broccoli, Kirk agreed, under the auspices of the powers conferred upon him by some guru in Nepal, to marry them, for better or for worse. Wanda had the exact place she wanted to get married already picked out—up past the horseshoe pits, across from the fuchsia gardens, among ferns so gigantic they looked like palm trees buried up to their necks in black soil. Thulin didn't give a shit about any of that. He just wanted to get it the hell over with. During the ceremony, Kirk chanted some sort of chant he'd learned over in Tibet. Everyone knew what he was saying whether anyone could understand any of the words or not—well, everyone but Thulin. He'd gotten kind of monomaniacal. He didn't know anything but that he wanted to fuck Wanda. Then Thulin grabbed the ring out of the air for the last time and handed it over. Kirk looked through the circle formed by the ring and into the cloudless sky. Then he looked at Thulin through the ring. Thulin flipped him off. Then Kirk looked at Wanda through the ring. She smiled. There were tears in her eyes. Kirk's wandering eye settled on each of them. He put the ring onto Wanda's ring finger. It fit. That seemed significant. Kirk closed his eyes and bowed his head. Birds stopped twittering in the bushes. Then he opened his eyes and asked Wanda if she would take Jon to be her husband, to have and to hold. Wanda said, "Yes." Thulin got a big shit-eating grin on his face. Then Kirk asked Jon the same question. "Motherfucking, Jesus H. motherfucking fuck," Thulin answered. Wanda bashed the bridal bouquet across his chest. "Okay, okay, yeah," Thulin said. Kirk dutifully repeated the question, like he'd be breaking his vows to the guru in Nepal if he didn't conduct the ceremony correctly. "Yes. Yes. Yes. For cocksucking Christ's sake, what the fuck more do you want me to say? I do. I do. Jesus fucking fuck." Kirk deemed that to be sufficient. The ceremony was over. We all went back to Shrader Street—well, except for Wanda and Thulin—and when they finally showed up, he had another big shit-eating grin on his face, the biggest yet, the biggest ever. A couple of months later, Wanda was pregnant. Thulin couldn't believe it. He couldn't fucking believe it. He wanted to know if I could fucking believe it. We were having coffee in the donut shop on the corner of Haight and Shrader. "What am I gonna do with a kid?" he asked. "Kids are cool," I told him. "Yeah? What kind of a place is this to have a kid in?" "The same kind of place it's always been, Jon." "Yeah? With this fucking war and shit going on? I don't know, man. And what about other chicks? What am I supposed to do about that? Be a fucking monk?" Then he got pensive for a minute and started speaking more softly. "We've been talking about naming him Jon. Except if it's a chick. Then I don't know what we'd do. Any name we pick, I fucked some chick with the same name. That's gonna piss her off, you know? We talk about all kinds of stuff, her and me. I really totally love the fucking piss out of her, but—fuck it. I can't deal with this shit." "Wouldn't it be like starting all over...having a clean slate?" "What are you talking about, man? You offed you and Ginny's kid, didn't you? So, what's this clean slate horseshit? I've been trying to get Wanda to off the fucker. She won't do it. She's like all Catholic and shit. How'd you get Ginny to—have an abortion?" He must have seen that I wasn't amused. "I didn't. It was her idea—her and her father's lawyer. They talked it over. It wasn't practical, she wasn't in any condition, and it was true, she wasn't, but..." "You wanted a kid?" "Yeah. I like kids." "Hey, man, I groove with kids, too. But he'd also be, like, around all the fucking time, you know? Like fucking forever. Like fucking always. Pooping in his pants and shit—or her pants. Motherfuck. What would I do with a chick for a kid?" "Like it," I said. "Love it. Take care of it. Feed it. Clothe it. Educate it. Take it places. Grow it up." "Yeah, well, I don't know, man. We'll see." Not long after our conversation at the donut shop, four or five months before the baby was born, Thulin dumped Wanda and moved back to San Mateo. That was the last I ever saw of him. The next thing I heard was that he went to New Mexico and got his picture on the cover of Rolling Stone, and later I heard from Dick Joseph that he was killed in a drug deal that didn't work out. Wanda was pissed that Thulin dumped her. She didn't try to get him back, no—that wouldn't have been her style. She took it out on him by naming his kid "Popeye." She'd been going to name him Jon but decided at the last second to name him Popeye, instead. Dick Joseph kept track of her, too. He kept track of everyone. According to him, Wanda got on welfare, went back to school and ended up working as a dental hygienist in a small, rural community just outside Tallahassee, Florida—the sort of place a kid named Popeye would fit right in.

Chapter Twenty-Two Haight Street Wanda and Thulin getting married and having a baby, just like that, easy as pie, got me to thinking that that was what I wanted to do, that was what I wanted Ginny and me to do. I wanted us just to get married and live happily ever after. How hard could it be? If Thulin and Wanda could do it, why couldn't we? I wanted a kid. I wanted a house. I wanted a family, like my mother and father had a family. Ginny didn't want to do that. She wanted to be a muse. I went up to Oregon. She sent me this letter: "I am longing for unrest. My long subjugated, patronized, condescended-to, sneered-at romanticism is now crying, 'Let me live!' It's also sneering back at me for cowardice, jeering at me for finding mundanity, peaceful acceptance as the cure for internal turmoil. I want to be dishonest! I want to be deceived...skillfully. I want you to become romantic and write books and love and hate passionately. Let's fall in love and eat fire and have martinis out for dinner. Enough of all this realism and psychological health—I call for the demonic elements—tragedy, yearning, unrest, ecstasies, suffering. Wisdom's a bore, contentment a drag. Boy, I'm glad God stays so neat all the time—and doesn't ever get boring. He's so exciting, and it's safe to love Him too! I'm so glad you're gone. I can be so much closer to you. You can't armor me off. OH GOSH—I just REALIZED SOMETHING. YOW! About you! About me! (I don't want to talk about it now.) I know what. We can have a week for passion, yearning, romance, ect.—and one for serenity, calm acceptance and wisdom. They've just got to co-exist some way—and be pure too!!" I went back down to San Francisco in time for the Christmas of 1966—and we made it through another season of drunk, schizo insanity. She didn't get locked up in a psycho ward, but she got locked up in plenty of other places. A bartender wouldn't let her out of a bar on Haight Street after it closed. She called me. I went down there. They were listening to Chubby Checker on the jukebox. She was doing The Twist. I banged on the door. Cops came. The bartender let her out. We went home. The same sort of thing happened at the Straight Theater, not long after it opened again. This time it was some rock group. I got a whispery phone call. They had her trapped. They wouldn't let her go. I got up and got dressed and walked down there in the drizzly fog and wind and made a fuss. Some of the guys in another band found her, and Ginny and I went home. Guys were always kidnapping her when she was drunk. They wanted to keep her for themselves, I guess. The same thing happened at an art gallery, at a gas station on Van Ness and at the Seven-Eleven in Noe Valley. She wasn't just crying wolf, no; she got herself into scrapes, no doubt about it, big scrapes and little scrapes alike. Some of them I managed to get her out of; some of them I didn't manage to get her out of. Her Christmas troubles took their toll. I had been being torn up over the years into little pieces like Osiris and was being fed to the fishes in the Nile—she was eating my flesh like communion wafers; she was drinking my blood. After the worst of it was over, I went up to Oregon to recuperate again. When I went back down to San Francisco, she had messed with a bunch of guys while I'd been gone. I was getting used to it but it wasn't exactly the sort of thing you want to get used to. Toward the end of March of 1967, I rented a room in a huge hippie crash pad in the Lower Haight, on the northwest corner of Haight and Pierce, and messed with a fair number of chicks myself. It was sort of slick being a hippie for a while. There must have been fifty or sixty people coming in and out on any given day. I don't think anyone besides me was paying any rent and I wasn't paying much. Morning Dew and Little Schoolgirl played nonstop on about five different record players night and day—and chicks...whoa...I felt like Thulin. There were big, young, blustery blondes up from Santa Barbara with sand in their underpants from sleeping on beaches and frail, fawnlike, doe-eyed chicks out from Boston and droll chicks from Mississippi with lilts in their voices and twangy chicks from Missouri—every kind of chick you can think of—Saskatchewan, you name it. That was where I was living when I took a bus down to meet my mother at the airport. She had a layover in San Francisco on her way back from visiting my grandmother, who was dying on and off, back in Michigan. The Grateful Dead were at one of the gates. I introduced them. My mother nodded her head and smiled her motherly smile and asked, "How many of you boys are there in your band?" Jerry Garcia spread his hand open, the hand with only three fingers, and said, "Five, five, an even five." "Your mothers must be proud of you," my mother said. On the bus back up to the city, I sat next to a girl who was running away from home. She said she had just turned sixteen, but that might have been a lie. We spent a couple of days together in my room at the hippie crash pad. She was Italian. We came up with a whole new identity for her in case her parents had the cops looking for her. The name we settled on was Zita Silvano and we made it up that she had come out here from Bradford, Pennsylvania. She might have kept the name, for all I know. When her kids open up bank accounts they may use Silvano as their mother's maiden name. I wasn't cut out to be the kind of hippie that was showing up in the Haight by then. It was fun to fuck a bunch of different chicks, sure, but the whole hippie thing was over by 1966. A few minds got blown on acid. That was it. The culture was ripe. It had nothing to do with the war or civil rights or free speech. All that riding around in flower-power VW busses was the commercialization of the experience. The music, long hair, beads, dope, bare feet, brown rice, free love, Mr. Natural, psychedelic art, Timothy Leary turning and tuning and dropping, Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid hogwash, Cassady tooling Kesey's Merry Pranksters around in their funky bus—all that was nothing but advertising by people who'd already taken acid to get other people to take acid, and by then the advertising was getting mistaken for the only thing that really went on. A few minds got blown on acid. That was it. After a few weeks in the Lower Haight, I moved back into the apartment on Shrader Street and Ginny and I lived happily ever after again for another summer. Elliot came back into the picture sometime in May of 1967. He'd recovered from most of the short-term effects of his father having blown his head half-off. He was going to school at the Art Institute and teaching a class in airbrush technique. He had a girlfriend, too—a cute little Korean chick with nice tits, extra slanty eyes, one of those Asian overbites and vestiges of some difficulty with the English language. Ginny and I ran into them on Haight Street a couple of times—the first time we were in the middle of the block, between Ashbury and Clayton. Ginny and Elliot were sheepish with each other. I kind of liked the cute little Korean chick myself. She was noticeably not wearing a bra and didn't seem to mind me looking down the front of her loose fitting paisley shirt. She seemed to sort of like it, in fact. The cute little Korean chick kept trying to squeeze Elliot's Zippo out from the tight pocket of his jeans. He kept moving away, like he was embarrassed by her familiarity and obvious affection. That was all that happened. We went our separate ways. The next time we ran into them at the Drogstore Café. When I first came up to the house on Clayton Street to rescue Ginny from Jim Moss, there was a drug store on the corner of Haight and Masonic. By the spring of 1967 it had become a restaurant, which for some arcane legal reason, could not be called the Drugstore Café, so the owners named it the Drogstore Café. Ginny and I were sitting on a couple stools by one of the big picture windows, eating big dripping hamburgers and hot skinny French fries out of yellow plastic baskets—with squirts of ketchup from a red plastic container on the side. Well, my ketchup was on the side. I always squirted a mound of ketchup onto the side and dipped my French fries into it. Ginny squirted her ketchup like so many marks of Zorro all over her French fries. I put extra salt and pepper on mine. She didn't. She liked onions on her hamburgers. I didn't. We had separate likes and dislikes. We went around and around. I don't know how we lasted as long as we did. Elliot and the cute little Korean chick shuffled up behind us. What the hell was her name? Kim? Chee? Ting? Tang? Bing? Bang? I can't remember. She was sure cute, though—ripped up Levi's, a boy's white button-down dress shirt tied into a knot above her tiny waist, flat brown skinny stomach and a little slit of a belly button I wanted to lean over and stick my tongue into—and she still wasn't wearing a bra. This time there were big gaps between the buttons of her shirt. She had on a man's tie sort of half-tied and half-untied. It might have been one of the Roos-Atkins ties from Elliot's closet. She said she was a performance artist—like Yoko, she said. The only concession Elliot had made to the fashion trends of the times was that he had a small jade rooster on a leather thong around his neck. Other than that he might have been shuffling down a hallway at Hillsdale High in his maroon and black striped shirt and dusty Wellington Boots. Ginny and the Korean chick cocked their heads, squinted their eyes at each other, and said, "Hi." She and Elliot pulled up a couple of stools and sat between us, looking out the window. Nobody said anything for a while. Elliot took a couple of my fries. The Korean chick eyed Ginny's fries but didn't try to take any. Ginny and Elliot never quite looked at each other. They almost did, several times, but kept turning away. Finally, Ginny hit Elliot on the knee with her tiny fist and said, "Gosh. It's been aaages!" Elliot was always so sheepish around her, so shy. He twitched his lips into and out of a bunch of little half smiles, looked down and said, "Not that long." The Korean chick frowned. "So what about all this hippie horseshit?" I asked. "It's a groove, man. I dig it," the Korean chick said. "I think it's not going to last more than another couple months," Elliot said. "I think people are going to put a stop to it. I think there are going to be troop transport trucks in the streets, firing tear gas canisters into crowds of so-called hippies. Walter Cronkite will give it ten minutes on the news." "Who's it hurting?" the Korean chick asked. "Our brave young soldiers, fighting in Vietnam." He narrowed his eyes. "Our way of life, the Constitution of the United States, the fabric of society." "Do you really think that?" Ginny asked. "Not particularly, no, but people don't pay much attention to what I think." "I do." Ginny looked right into his eyes. "I think you probably know way more about it than any of us." She laughed then, and said, "Oh, dear," and covered her mouth with a handful of her hair. "I think everything's going to just keep changing and changing and changing, despite what anyone thinks," I said. "Like how?" the Korean chick asked. "Like who the fuck knows, you know?" I shrugged. "Okay," Ginny said. "Let's each say what we would see if we looked out this exact same window in, oh, I don't know, let's say thirty years from now." "You'd see the same things you're seeing today," Elliot said quickly, like he'd already been wondering the same thing. "I think there won't be a street corner in thirty years," the Korean chick said in stupid-sounding earnestness. "I think there will be a war. I don't know who between, but it's going to be the last war. Humanity will be obliterated." "I think the exact opposite," I said—possibly to give us something to talk about if the Korean chick and I ever ran into each other alone on the street. "I think people will be flying around in little one man helicopters—like the Jetsons. I think there will be plenty of everything for everyone—no police, racism or war. I think it'll be like looking out at the cover of a Watchtower Magazine. Lions will be lying down with lambs, swords will have been beaten into plowshares." "I think Elliot's more realistic," Ginny said. "Than me? Are you nuts?" I said. "Yes," she said. Everyone laughed. That was it. Elliot and the little Korean chick had somewhere to go. They went.