Chapter Twenty-Three Golden Gate Park Then it was the summer of 1967, "The Summer of Love." Scott McKenzie sang his dork song about how everybody ought to go to San Francisco and wear some fucking flowers in their hair. It was far out. It was groovy. It was over. Then it was early October, the Fall of Love. All the hippies gave Haight Street a funeral and Ginny got her ass thrown in jail. The guards squirted mace in her face. The skin peeled away from around her eyes. She looked like a raccoon. It all started out innocently enough. The three of us—Kirk, the preacher from Thulin's wedding, Ginny and I—were on our way home after a rock concert at Speedway Meadows. Ginny and Kirk were drinking champagne. It was on the verge of the Christmas craziness again. I was a little fed up. Officer Garrens was the cop who arrested her. He was a notorious asshole—The Oracle and The Berkeley Barb wrote articles about what a notorious asshole Officer Garrens was. I'm getting ahead of myself again, however—as is my wont. I'll start from the beginning. It was early October, a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon. San Francisco's like that. The weather's crappy all summer, but it gets nice again in the fall. Ginny and I had gone our separate ways that morning. We frequently went our separate ways by then. Our promiscuity had taken its toll. It had always been okay for her to fuck other people. There were always mitigating circumstances—she was drunk, she was blacked out, she didn't know what she was doing—but it wasn't okay for me. It hurt her feelings. Things got sticky. We broke bonds we hadn't broken before. I was out wandering among the waifs fresh in from Kansas City and Des Moines. They were mostly making their way in the general direction of a free rock concert in Golden Gate Park. The Grateful Dead were going to be there, along with Quicksilver Messenger Service—the Quick and the Dead. It was going to be far out. It was going to be groovy. Big Brother and The Airplane were going to be there—that meant Janis Joplin; that meant Grace Slick. I went past the little knoll we used to call Hippie Hill. Black guys in sunglasses smoked Kools. They beat conga drums with cigarettes sticking to their lips. A Golden Retriever had on a red bandanna. A little hippie chick in granny glasses threw a stick for the Golden Retriever to chase through the purple haze of dope and patchouli oil that was rising up like the Jimi Hendrix song playing on the little hippie chick's little hippie radio. In the flat meadow in front of the knoll, college kids in Bermuda shorts threw Frisbees with one hand and drank beer with the other. A German Shepard leaped at a bright disk whistling above him. Neighborhood mothers sat on benches in front of the adobe rest rooms and talked and smoked and knitted long, colorful afghans, always with one eye on the children—boys and girls in clean shirts and tiny dresses wandering in the sandy dirt next to the merry-go-round or playing on the playground. A little girl in red pigtails was backed up against the steel steps of the big slide by a frisky black Cocker Spaniel who was trying to lick her Mary Jane's. His ears dragged in the dirt. She reached toward him, cautiously, courageously, almost touching his wet nose. The dog let out a couple of elongated yips and tore off sideways, low to the ground. The little girl was disappointed...and triumphant, too. Nobody saw—well, except for me. I saw. I wanted a kid, a little girl of my own. I wanted to hang out with her, to keep an eye on her, to see the things she saw. Beyond the park, streaks of bright-colored cars flashed through the thick branches of cedar trees and scraggly pines bordering Lincoln Way. I followed the blacktop path around Hippie Hill and over toward the tennis courts. My running shoes were yellow and black, the color of bumblebees. I walked along the path without making a sound. Next to the clubhouse, one of the tennis players was tying his shoe against the slats of a green bench. A chain link fence kept the dogs out and the tennis balls in. I stayed on the path over another hill or two, toward the conservatory, until I came to a little lake in the middle of nowhere. The lake had palm trees and huge ferns and rhododendron bushes crowded around it. The water was so thick with algae it looked like you could walk on it. There were orange clay cliffs around the lake. The cliffs were held together by the root systems of trees. I wanted to see what the lake would look like from the rim of the canyon and made my way up a narrow path, pulling myself along by grabbing onto saplings and exposed roots until I got to a ledge formed by the base of one of the eucalyptus trees—and just sat there. The lake was so chock-full of green algae it looked solid, like a giant lily pad. It looked like I could jump off the cliff and land harmlessly on the surface of the lake like it was a big green trampoline. I'd bounce up and fall onto it again and again, and the lily pad would keep me dry and suspended above the surface of the warm water while the waves I had made rocked me gently, like I was in a cradle. There wasn't a breath of air. It felt good not to have taken any drugs. I hadn't even smoked a joint with Dick Joseph when he'd come over that morning. I wanted to have a clear head; I had some serious thinking to do. I was trying to figure out a way to get rid of Ginny. I wanted to dump her. I wanted her to dump me. I was tired. Fed up. She was too much trouble. Too much? I didn't know. How much was too much? She was a lot of trouble, yeah, but was she more trouble than she was worth? That was the question. That's always the question. She was worth a lot. She needed me. I found her when she was lost. I rescued her. I rubbed her back and told her everything was going to be all right. If I dumped her, she'd kill herself. I didn't know what to do. She would die without me. I would die without her. But I was tired. Worn out. Fed up. We weren't going anywhere. We were dicking around. She was too much trouble. I wanted to jump off the cliff and land harmlessly on the lily pad lake. I wanted it to rock me to sleep like I was a baby in a cradle. But I also knew that it really wasn't a lily pad. It was a lake—a cold, wet, stagnant pond, crawling with thick algae and slick, rotted palm fronds and dead rhododendron blossoms...and frogs and snakes and bugs—and if I did jump off the cliff I'd end up stuck in muck up to my neck and covered with slithering slime until someone came along and pulled me out, which might not be for a long, long time. Nothing stirred. The soles of my shoes had made waffle shapes in the fine orange dust leading to the base of the tree I was sitting on. A fly landed in the treacherous hair of my arm. It crawled and hopped and finally made a harrowing escape over onto the knee of the Levi's I was wearing. I wore the same frayed Levi's almost every day. They were faded. They looked like the sky. I had on one of the old tie-dye T-shirts I used to wear most days, too—the one that looked like a faded sunset. More insects began to appear. They came from nowhere and everywhere—spiders and mosquitoes and bees and ants and green dragonflies, glinting in the sun. The longer I sat there, the better I blended with the tree, the more things got back to normal. I saw a gopher. It wrinkled its nose. Squirrels ratcheted at each other in the underbrush. Songbirds sang, oblivious now of the commotion I'd caused. They flitted from branch to branch, squabbling among themselves. It was like I wasn't there. It reminded me of what Elliot had been talking about in the living room on California Street—what the world would be like without him in it. The same as it would be without me in it, I imagined. He'd been in Vietnam. I was in San Francisco. The sky was blue. The grass was green. Everything's the same everywhere. How can you remember not being somewhere? Down at the other end of the lake, I noticed a guy in a shelter made out of tree branches. It was so well camouflaged that I hadn't seen it at first. He had a beard and long, graying hair tied back out of his sunburned face by a chamois headband. He was smoking a joint by himself in the sun. He didn't seem to have seen me—or he didn't give a shit if he had. I liked that. The guy had found himself a place to live, a home to call his own. He was having himself a calm, warm, peaceful Sunday afternoon. Then there was the sound of disembodied voices coming from the direction I'd come from. The voices kept getting louder. The canyon amplified sound. The voices were jarring. Birds stopped singing. "It was your fucking idea," one of the voices said. "I didn't want to buy the bitch no god damn shoes." "You got the son of a bitches, I didn't. Since when do you do what I say? It was worth it, though. Just for the look on her face. That was almost as good as the look on your face." The other voice burst into disturbing, unnatural, laughter. "Oh, yeah, it's fucking funny all right. We got us a god damn pair of girl's shoes and no pussy. That's fucking funny all right." The bodies of the voices came over the crest of the hill leading down toward the lake. They were two guys around nineteen or so, both in white T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up and both with new crew cuts, the kind they might recently have gotten in the army. The one who didn't think it was funny was tall and skinny and had a fresh tattoo on the side of one of his biceps. A jagged scar was visible under the close-cropped black hair on his scalp. His companion was skinny, too, but shorter and blond, with a bright ring of acne around the back of his neck and pimples pinpointing his face. The tall one tossed the shoebox at him. "Here, you keep the fuckers," he said. "You weren't gonna get no pussy, no matter what you bought the bitch." "My ass," said the tall one. "Not her ass, though, that's for sure. No way, Jose—here, I don't want these fuckers." The short one threw the shoebox back at the tall one. The two guys had walked to the far side of the lake by then. They came unexpectedly to where the hippie was sitting under the branches of his shelter. The three of them froze momentarily. "Hey, Moses, how'ya doin'," the tall kid said, at last, rocking back on the heels of his shiny black army boots. The hippie didn't respond. "Moses in the bulrushes," the blond kid said. "I said, how'ya doin', man," the tall one said. The hippie looked up at them. His legs were folded under his torso, and his hands were in his lap, fingers joined together. "I'm doing fine, thanks," he said. "Well, that's good. That's good. That's good to hear," said the tall guy, clasping his own hands. "Say, listen, partner. We're kind of new here and was wondering if you might know where we could get us some pussy? Some cute little hippie chick, flower child who might want to fuck herself a couple United States Marines?" "No, man, I don't know." "We got these shoes she might like." The short guy laughed. "Sorry." "Sorry don't cut it, Jasper." "Look. You boys really ought to just toddle on off about your business." The old hippie shooed them away like there was a swarm of benign gnats in his face. "You look, asshole. We asked you a civil god damn question. Maybe you got yourself a little hippie chick stashed in them bulrushes. How about you trot her ass out here and we fuck her for you, one at a time. How would that be?" "Yeah, one at a time, that'd be nice," said the short Marine. The hippie stood up. He was muscular, sturdy, relaxed. "Okay, let's do this thing," he said. "You both gonna jump me like chicken fuckers?" "Hey, hold up a minute, man." The tall Marine held up his hands. "What's this we heard about how all you long hair hippie pricks is such big peace lovers? You want to fight us now, is that it? Well, shit." He glanced at his partner, feigning disappointment. "We come out here wanting to do like they say on the radio, you know? Make love, not war. Fuck us a flower child for free, and look what we get—some asshole looking for a fight. Is that what you want, dipshit?" "Tell you what, Baldy." The hippie reached into the grass and weeds by his feet and picked up a small machete. "How about you make love with this? How would that be?" He pointed the machete lazily at the tall Marine's chest, like he was maybe drawing his attention to an algebraic equation on a blackboard. "Hey, man, there's no need..." the tall one said. The Marines backed up and turned around, tripping over their own feet and each other's feet, just as the hippie let out a yell like an Indian coming down the side of a hill on a pony. He swooshed the machete over his head and lunged toward the Marines. They ran. As they were running, the tall Marine tossed the shoebox over his shoulder. It caught the hippie square in the chest. The box came apart. The shoes went in different directions and the tissue paper they'd been wrapped in floated gently onto a small flowering bush. The shoebox slowed the hippie down for a second, but he kept after them until the whole pageant vanished over the ridge and out of sight. I heard their army boots for a while, clodhopping against the asphalt, getting further and further away, heard the diminishing war whoops of the old hippie still chasing them. I was hoping they might come back, so I could give them a round of applause. I had it all pictured, like a curtain call. The Marines would roll down the sleeves of their T-shirts. The tall one would wipe the grease paint tattoo off his bicep, and the short one would remove the rouge that had made the acne look so realistic, and the hippie would bend so low to take a bow that his long gray wig would fall off, and he'd catch it in mid air and laugh, as though that too were part of the act. I would have given them a standing ovation; I would have whistled and stomped my feet in the dirt. But they didn't come back. I got up from where I'd been sitting, went over to the other side of the lake and looked inside the hippie's house. There were a couple of cans of Sterno and an aluminum frying pan on the floor. I picked up the shoes. They were more along the line of bedroom slippers, actually. They had low heels and were covered with brocade cloth, which was covered with hundreds of tiny, different colored beads, mostly white and pink, but a few were amber, and three or four were purple, like amethysts. I looked inside. They were a Size 5 ½ B. They were too big for Ginny, but I picked them up anyway. I got the tissue paper out of the flowering bush and put it into the box and put the slippers on top of it and covered them with the folded tissue paper like I used to do when I sold shoes. I was a born shoe salesman. I could do it again. I could get a job down at Macy's or Magnin's. It hadn't been bad. Chicks came in. I sat on my comfortable stool and helped them into new shoes with a silver shoehorn and told them they looked gorgeous. What had been wrong with that? I'd been good at it. I'd made decent money. I could do it again. I could get a place to live—maybe back down around San Mateo. I could look up Bonnie. She was cute—she looked like Brigitte Bardot, for God's sake—and she'd been in love with me. Why I had ever gone out on a date with Virginia Good, I did not know. That had been what fucked things up with Bonnie, right there. That first date with Ginny. Motherfuck. What more could I have asked for? Sure, Bonnie was stupid. Sure, she didn't know what I was talking about half the time, but so what? She wasn't a raving lunatic drunk. She didn't get her ass kidnapped nine times a day. She didn't go on bus trips with Kesey and Cassady and who knows who all any time you had your back turned for more than five seconds. Tortured young Assistant Psychology Professors weren't forever knock, knock, knocking on her cute little door down in Fritz Perls's hot tubs at Esalen. She didn't hang out with rock-and-roll assholes. She didn't smash typewriters and break windows and gouge slices of skin out of my god damn back. She wouldn't have wanted to fuck my best friend. She didn't spend Christmases in insane asylums. She wouldn't have killed our kid. Bonnie would have loved our kid; she would have cuddled and cradled and nurtured our kid—him or her, both of them, a boy and a girl, all our kids. She would have cooked and cleaned and made the bed and changed diapers. She would have gone to the grocery store with our kids strapped in the basket of the shopping cart—and she would have fucked my brains out at the drop of a hat, both because she loved to fuck and because she wanted to make more kids. And it wasn't too late! Bonnie wore a size 5 ½ B! I remembered that. I could have taken that beat-up old shoebox down to San Mateo and could have gone up to wherever Bonnie may have been living by then, and simply have said, "Hi." She would have dropped everything she was doing, no matter what it was, and we would have lived happily ever after, Bonnie and me and our nine happy kids and their ninety-nine happy kids. But I didn't.

Chapter Twenty-Four Speedway Meadows Back in the main part of the park, crowds of people were still heading toward the ocean, toward the muffled sound of music coming from the bands. When I got to a conspicuous place along the path, I put the shoebox down where someone would be sure to find it. Another path converged into the one I'd been on, and all of a sudden there was a cute little black chick in a pair of red cutoffs walking ahead of me. Her hair was dyed amber-blond and cut in a short Afro. The cutoffs were as skimpy as they could be and still have had a crotch. There were calluses on the backs of her heels. Her calves glistened in the sun clear up to where her ass disappeared under the frayed cutoffs. If I dumped Ginny, there were plenty of other chicks around. There were plenty of other guys, too. We wouldn't die without each other. None of them was her, however; none of them was me. The only way you ever know what's going to happen if you do something or don't do something is to do it or don't do it and see what happens and what doesn't happen. I turned into a trail that led through the bushes. The black chick kept heading toward the ocean. I walked and walked. The trail came out by the buffalo paddock. Except for one of the calves, the buffalo were far away, under their trees, munching on a broken bale of hay in the dirt around their shelter. The calf was scratching itself against the rough bark of a scrub oak by the fence. Its coat was half growing in for the winter and still half falling out from the summer. It looked hot and itchy and miserable and prickly. As if to emphasize these conditions, the poor thing stuck out its tongue and moaned. Its tongue was thick and purple and cracked—the way Ginny's got when she drank too much red wine. Maybe I'd see her through one more Christmas. Who else could? Nobody. Fuck. The music kept getting louder—guitars, feedback, amplifiers. A woman was singing. It sounded like Janis Joplin. Through the foliage I could see thousands of people fanned out in front of the makeshift bandstand. I cut through some bushes and ended up behind the stage. It was Janis Joplin. Guys from other rock groups were lying in the grass, waiting, resting, talking to women, picking at the strings of guitars that weren't plugged in. There was a tangle of cable and wires that hooked the sound equipment together under the stage. It all looked like a giant mess to me, everything hanging in great loops and knots under the planks of the platform. I had no idea how people ever got it put together in a way that made sense, and I especially didn't see how they ever got it taken apart again—but they did, they must have, there was always another concert again the next weekend. I felt lighter, freer, relieved, encouraged. Things would figure themselves out. Speakers throbbed. My eardrums throbbed along with them like we were all plugged into the same sound system through which Janis was wailing out another little piece of her heart. The music shook into me from the ground up and made my dick tingle like my legs were a big tuning fork. I knew some of the musicians from Thulin or Ginny or Brenda. I didn't hang out with them—mainly because I didn't much care for the scruffy motherfuckers—but some of them had been over at the apartment on Shrader Street to buy drugs or to sell drugs or just to get loaded. They nodded at me and nodded among themselves and sometimes just nodded. Nobody knew anybody's name. A couple hundred yards out beyond the platform, Speedway Meadows was wall-to-wall people moving like a big, colorful, symbiotic extension of the band, like a time-lapse garden of wildflowers opening up in the morning sun. Farther out, the crowd thinned into smaller groups sitting on blankets. I started making my way back home. I still had some thinking to do. I picked my way through the crowd, touching people inadvertently. People smiled at me. They danced around me, breathed on me. I was jostled, toasted with wine, stepped on, ignored, excused, forgiven. The people in the crowd were from all over the place—some kid's Madras shirt with the sleeves torn off had come from the J. C. Penney's in Yankton, North Dakota; the chick with horn-rimmed glasses and thick braids got her tire-tread Mexican sandals from a street vendor in Brooklyn. I came to an area where the crowd had formed a circle around a woman who was dancing obliviously, all by herself. She was wearing a thin, faded, blue and white pioneer dress. I could see her breasts through the loose armholes. Her hair was long and straight and streaked lighter and darker shades of blond. The sun on her throat made her look vulnerable. Sweat glistened on her forehead. Blades of grass poked up between her long, narrow toes. She didn't shave her legs. Janis Joplin stopped singing. Silent, twangy reverberations from the sound system hung in the air for about a tenth of a second, then people screamed and yelled and clapped their hands, and the dancing chick fell into a heap of arms and legs and blond hair and faded blue fabric on the bright green grass. Way at the back of the crowd, Ginny was sitting on a blanket with Kirk. They were drinking wine and talking about Nepal. He and Ginny had the hots for each other but hadn't done anything about it yet—usually she got drunk first. I sat on the edge of their blanket. The concert was over. People were dispersing. Fog was coming in from off the ocean. The wind had begun to blow. Leaves were falling. "Let's get a bottle of champagne," Ginny said, like it was an unusually brilliant idea—a new idea, something she'd never thought of before. "Sounds cool," Kirk said. So we did that. Ginny and Kirk and I cut over to a liquor store behind Kezar Stadium and got a bottle of champagne and a couple of plastic champagne glasses. Ginny and Kirk were yucking it up, charming the pants off each other. I'd seen it too many times, but it was all so new to Kirk. He was enthralled. He'd forgotten everything he ever learned over in Tibet and Nepal and India, and all he wanted out of life from then on was to fuck Ginny. I'd seen that too many times, too. By the time we got to Stanyan Street, the champagne bottle was empty. We turned the corner onto Haight and were just about to the bowling alley. Ginny still had a little champagne left in her glass. It was dark by then. Fog diffused the light coming from street lamps. Two cops were walking toward us. One of them was swinging a nightstick. They were smiling, chatting, talking cop talk. Ginny laughed. "What's funny?" one of the cops asked. "Oh, I don't know. Just cops, I guess." Ginny shrugged and got that impish, Pied Piper of Cops look in her eye. "Yeah?" the cop swinging the stick said. "We were just thinking the same thing about you long hair hippie freaks." "How fortuitous that we're able to entertain one another," Ginny said. "Ain't it though? You got some ID?" "What for?" "Just show me some ID." "How's this?" Ginny gently flipped him off. "That's not good enough. Diver's license, please." "I don't have a driver's license. I'm not driving." "How'd you like me to run you down to the station?" "How'd you like my father's lawyer to sue your ass for harassment?" It was an offhand remark. She sidestepped the cop standing directly in front of her and kept walking. Kirk and I walked around the other cop. When the three of us were safely past the cops, Ginny turned around and tossed the last few drops of champagne toward them. None of it actually got on either of them, but that was that, she had assaulted a police officer. She was under arrest. Kirk ducked into the bowling alley. I reasoned with the cops. I told them she didn't mean anything, that she had a thing about cops. She was working on it. She was seeing a psychiatrist. "She's legally nuts," I told them. "I don't think there is such a thing," said the cop with the nightstick. "Hey, if you don't believe me, call her shrink," I said. The cops looked at each other. Then, to my astonishment, they agreed to talk to her psychiatrist, like "legally nuts" might have been something they'd vaguely heard about in cop school. Ginny and I got into the back of the police car. Officer Garrens was sitting in the passenger seat. He stretched his arm across the back of the front seat, turned sideways, readjusted his girth, looking straight at Ginny, and asked her in a calm, informative, lighthearted, jovial tone of voice, "You know what happens to little hippie chicks when they go to jail, don't you?" "They get raped by fat ugly fucks like you?" "Hey, you're quite the little spitfire, aren't you?" "Suck my dick," Ginny said. "First you get strip-searched. That means we take off your clothes and check your orifices for contraband. Then we have to hose you down to get rid of the lice and the bed bugs, and you get put into a holding tank with junkies and drunk street whores puking their guts out. There are snakes on the floor, bugs, cockroaches big as my thumb. All kinds of pesky little critters creep and crawl and slither around on the naked, shivering bodies of smart-mouth hippie chicks who get their butts tossed in the can." To give him the benefit of the doubt, Officer Garrens may just have been trying to steer Ginny away from a life of crime, but I doubt it. The cop who was driving stopped in front of our apartment building and left the red and blue lights spinning silently on the police cruiser while the four of us went inside. I dialed Dr. Crockett's number and got the answering service. I knew I'd get the service, but they'd track him down. "I have to go potty," Ginny said. "Hold it," Officer Garrens said. Ginny crinkled up her nose and frowned and said, "You big meanie." She was a little unsteady on her feet. Then she said, in a more forceful tone, "I'm going to go potty now," and took a couple steps down the hall. Officer Garrens grabbed her arm. "Hang on there, missy." "Don't touch me." Ginny pulled her arm away. Dr. Crockett came on the line. "Okay, I've got her shrink on the phone." I covered the mouthpiece. "He wants to talk to whoever's in charge." "Tell this jerk cop to get his hands off me," Ginny called across the room. "Nobody's got their hands anywhere," the other cop said and took the phone. "Tell him I'm going to the bathroom," Ginny said and turned on her heel and started to march in a huffy sort of way down the hallway again. Officer Garrens grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked her back. "Ow," Ginny said. Then she wheeled around and slugged Officer Garrens square in the jaw and brought her knee up into his crotch, and when he bent over from the pain, Ginny butted her forehead into the bridge of his nose. He made a sound like a moose and started sinking toward the floor. I heard gurgling somewhere deep in Officer Garrens's throat. Ginny kicked him in the leg, just below the knee. Then she tried to kick him in the neck and in the head and to kick his red, huffing and puffing face, but the other cop was pulling her away by then. The three of them ended up in an awkward looking pile of arms and legs and bodies on the floor. The other cop managed to get his handcuffs clicked around Ginny's wrists, but her feet were still free. She kicked without aiming. She kicked and screamed while they were dragging her out the door of the apartment, and she kicked and screamed all the way through the long hallway, and she kicked and screamed as she was being yanked through the front door. Out on the stoop, she caught her foot between the iron bars of one of the railings and lost a shoe when the cop twisted her leg loose. Officer Garrens had a towel over his nose by then and wasn't helping much. I saw Ginny's head bash against the doorframe of the police car when the cop finally managed to get her pushed through the door, but she didn't seem to take much notice. She kicked at the screen between her and the front seat. Every time she kicked the screen with the foot with the missing shoe, Ginny let out a yell. It hurt. You could tell. But that didn't stop her from kicking the screen again and again. The next day I met Ginny's father's lawyer by the elevator at the Hall of Justice. He was a businesslike Boalt Hall kind of guy, fifty-five or so, getting ready to retire. When we got off the elevator at the jail, he went to the counter and filled out paperwork and after awhile, Ginny came out. Blood had soaked through gauze taped over her upper left arm. Her hair was matted. Her face was splotchy under the fluorescent lights. She had an Ace Bandage around her right ankle. She couldn't see very well. The skin had peeled away from around her eyes. She looked like a raccoon. "You look like a raccoon," I said. "Thank you, dahling," she said in that brave, shaky, embarrassed, ironic tone of voice she used when she was getting out of one of the scrapes she'd gotten herself into. "I feel like Oedipus." "You don't look like Oedipus," I said and smiled. "I thought I was blind. I was blind! Then I could see—amazing." "What happened?" "I'd like to hear that myself," the lawyer said. "We might have a problem. The cop you kicked is in the hospital." "I kicked a cop? Good," Ginny said. "His nose is broken. There may be other serious injuries." Then the lawyer looked at her carefully for the first time and said, "My God, Ginny. What happened to your face?" "The guards at the jail did it. They kept calling me over to the bars, then kept squirting mace in my face, right into my eyes. 'Come here, little girl, we've got something nice for you.' Squirt, squirt. They thought it was hilarious." "How long did they do that?" the lawyer asked. "For aaages and aaages." Ginny's eyes grew wider and wider. "We need to get you to a doctor," the lawyer said. Her father's lawyer got Ginny off on the assault charge. Then he sued the City and County of San Francisco for police brutality—or rather, to be precisely accurate, he counter-sued the City's suit against her for kicking the cop. The lawsuit went on for years. I had to have my deposition taken. The main thing the City Attorney wanted to know was how many times I had taken LSD. I couldn't give him an exact figure. Then he asked me what color my jacket was. I told him it was green. He said it looked more like brown to him. I looked down at one of the sleeves of my jacket and could distinguish fibers of both brown and green, along with some orange fibers and black fibers and even a few red fibers. I told him that maybe he ought to take a sample of the fabric and send it to the FBI to see if they could tell him what the hell color it was. It looked green to me. Eventually, the city settled the lawsuit. They didn't like their chances with a jury. Officer Garrens was a big son of a bitch. Ginny was barely five feet tall and had never weighed more than a hundred and four pounds in her life. The settlement money didn't quite cover attorney fees.

Chapter Twenty-Five Kentfield Ginny's run-in with the cops and the ongoing lawsuit took some of the steam out of the Christmas stuff of 1967. By her standards, it wasn't all that bad, just a scrape or two, a single abduction by a young black cab driver and a lame suicide attempt inspired by a Maxfield Parrish painting and a sudden feeling of kinship with Ophelia—she waded out into the little duck pond across from the Portals of the Past in Golden Gate Park, covered herself up with handfuls of vegetation and lay down onto her back in the shallow water, but didn't manage to drown. She got a degree in psychology from San Francisco State in the spring. She was still short a few credits, but her father's lawyer got the school to give her the thing anyway. Her father sent her a note saying that he was proud of her. Toward the end of the summer of 1968, we gave up the apartment on Shrader Street. Tom Piper was working as an engineer and had moved up to Marin County. Haight Street had turned into nothing but junkies and speed freaks. Everyone was moving up to Marin County by then. Tom got a house near a little creek in San Anselmo. Ginny had always wanted to live in a place near a river. Tom was glad to have her. Their relationship was still platonic. He thought this was his big chance. I stayed at Elliot's apartment in the city for a while, then Elliot and I rented a house together in Marin County ourselves, just the two of us. The house was in Kentfield. The backyard went clear up to the top of Mt. Tamalpias. There was a cement fishpond in the front yard. The only reason Elliot and I could afford to live there was that the house was a wreck. The Independent Journal advertised it as a "Handyman Special." It needed things like a new foundation, rewiring and the plumbing replaced, but the first thing Elliot and I fixed-up was the fishpond. It was full of dirt. It hadn't been used in twenty years. Ginny found the fishpond. We didn't know it was even a fishpond. We thought it was dirt. Once Elliot and I moved to Marin, Ginny spent most of her time over at our house. Poor Tom Piper, he was pissed. After Ginny found the fishpond, the three of us went to work. We dug the dirt out of it and patched the cracks in the cement and painted it blue and filled it with water and put in a bunch of goldfish—brown goldfish, orange goldfish, black goldfish, Creamsicle goldfish, spotted goldfish, you name it. Elliot got some old rusted, wrought-iron chairs from his mother. We cleaned them and sanded them, and Elliot got a long extension cord for his compressor and airbrushed them a pretty shade of grayish-white, and the three of us settled back in our wrought iron chairs around our freshly refurbished fishpond. We may not have had any wiring or sewer pipes, and some of the faucets might have dripped a little, but we sure had a hell of a place to sit around and wonder how we were going to get wiring and faucets that didn't drip. It was quiet out there. We didn't talk much. There wasn't a lot to say. Elliot was still in love with Virginia. She still knew it. We all still knew it. We all still pretended not to notice. Robins hopped around under the bushes. A Monarch butterfly fluttered from one rotting calla lily to another. One of the fish was biting at the top of the water. They were just ordinary goldfish. One of them died now and then. The rest of them ate it. We found stringy orange carcasses lapping up against the powder blue shore. The fish biting the air was one of those bulbous, raisin-colored things with flowing, useless fins. The surface of the water reflected branches of the huge pine tree in the front yard. There were puffy clouds crawling across the sky. Ginny tossed a stone at the fish biting the surface of the water. The pond rippled. The clouds got jumbled up. The branches of the pine tree shimmered like a mirage. The goldfish all dove to the bottom of the pond, stabilizing themselves with their tails, taking lazy gulps of water. "Why'd you do that?" Elliot asked. "I hate that bug-eyed fucker. He keeps chasing Ondine." "Who's Ondine?" "The pretty orange and white one." She pointed. She'd named them all. Genghis Kahn. Ondine. Willow. Heloise. Abelard. Sri Ramakrishna. Semolina Pilchard. Mowgli. Raskolnikov. I forget the rest. There were about fourteen all together. Some were friends. Others were bitter enemies. A few didn't take sides. Elliot and I got to be buddies again. He tried to teach me how to paint. I was hopeless. He tried to show me how to use an airbrush. I was more hopeless. He tried to get me to dance like a flamenco dancer while he played his guitar. I laughed. Ginny danced like a flamenco dancer for him. He tried to teach me all kinds of things. I was as much a novice as he was a genius at everything he tried to teach me. We had long philosophical conversations. He was still a pacifist. He asked me once if I had any idea how many living things nobody could even see—dust mites in the carpet, frail, sharp-nosed creatures clinging to grains of pollen the relative size of hot air balloons, infinitesimal little rhinoceros-looking things that spent their lives carting flakes of dead skin off the sheets at night. According to Elliot, it was impossible to calculate the number of sentient organisms that got sucked into oblivion every time some insensitive brute took it upon himself to breathe. "Half of all life on Earth is invisible," Elliot said. "You're full of shit," I told him. "Why?" "Why you're full of shit? I have no idea." "In what way, then, am I full of shit?" "You want examples? Okay. In the first place, if you take it to its logical conclusion, everything is invisible. I mean, all anything's made out of is cells and molecules and atoms and electrons and stuff nobody can see, right? So that blows your whole theory right there. How can half of anything be invisible if everything is? And what makes you think anything's even alive to begin with? You think you're alive? Or me? You think I'm alive? Or some dust mite? How can that be? Because you think we are? If everything's nothing but inanimate atoms, what makes life? Tell me that. Do you know? No. Are atoms alive? Name me one atom that's even partly alive. Nickel? Cadmium? Boron? That's what makes life such a big fucking mystery—nobody can figure it out—and anyone who thinks he can is full of shit. That's the definition. Thinking you know anything means you're full of shit." "Yeah?" "Yeah." "And where, exactly, did you learn all this?" "From taking acid." Elliot hadn't ever taken LSD. I had. Ha! Ginny thrived over at our house. She was in her element: Perpetual Adoration. Elliot doted on her. She dug it. Elliot sprayed urethane foam all over the walls and the ceiling of one of the upstairs bedrooms for her. It was "Ginny's Room." She kept her latest shrine there. He airbrushed the foam to make the room look like she was in a tree. She said she felt like a bird when she walked in the door, like she could fly if she wanted to. It didn't last, but the three of us liked being there together. I was working at a job as a vault teller on Montgomery Street, at the main branch of the Bank of America. By the beginning of fall, Ginny and Elliot were alone with each other all day. I didn't get home until way after dark. She lounged around half naked and told him nonsense stories while he painted pictures of her. One thing didn't lead to another. The pictures weren't representational. The last thing they looked like was Ginny, but they made you feel how he felt about her. Why they never just fucked and got it the hell over with, I have no idea—out of consideration for me, I suppose, but that just made it worse. It was achingly romantic. He was Lancelot; she was Guinevere. When I got off work, the bus let me out by the Seven-Eleven on Sir Francis Drake. After you got past the smell of exhaust and the blink of neon from the highway, the street sloped down into what used to be a narrow, grassy meadow, back before civilization took over. Sometimes at night it seemed to get that way again. I imagined what it must have been like to be one of the coastal Indians who used to live there, taking refuge from the cold in the hollow of a dead redwood, peering up at the same incomprehensible shawl of stars. There was a street light every so often now, sure, and the road was paved and there was that stop sign at Madrone, but if you really put your mind to it you could still feel how it might have been to have been an Indian living in our little valley before civilization took over. I remember walking home one night. It must have been November. I could see my breath. It was getting close to Christmas again. I wasn't thinking about being an Indian. I was watching my feet step on shadows of themselves. When I got directly under each of the streetlights, my shadow would disappear and a new shadow would grow out in front of me again. I heard a faint scream—probably from some TV. Then I heard a pretty good-sized pane of glass break and heard another scream, a louder scream. It sounded like Ginny. It was. Fuck. I ran the rest of the way down to the house, crashed through the side door, ran up the back stairs, through the kitchen and into the living room. Elliot was sitting on top of her. He had her arms pinned to the floor with his knees and was trying to cover her mouth. His hand was bloody from where she'd bitten him. He looked up at me. He was scared. He wasn't acting. His cheek twitched. His mouth trembled. There were tears in his eyes. I didn't laugh. The living room window was shattered. "Could you do this?" Elliot asked. "Sure." We traded places. I sat on Ginny while he tended to his hand. I didn't ask what had happened. It didn't matter. She was drunk. I was used to it. Elliot wasn't. That was the one thing I was always better at than him—taking care of Ginny when she went nuts. I was a genius at taking care of Ginny when she went nuts. Elliot and I had to move. It was the beginning of my fifth and final Christmas with Virginia Good. We all went our separate ways. Ginny stayed at Tom's place in San Anselmo. Elliot went to his mother's new house. I moved back to San Francisco, into a studio apartment on Central, across the Panhandle from where my newly married sister, Nicki, and her husband, Murph, were living on Fell Street. Murph had settled down some since he used to hang out with Thulin and Ralph Wood. He'd become a family man. Ginny still came over to my apartment a lot. It was well into December. It was probably my fault. I should have known better. We went over to Nicki and Murph's one night. They had their Christmas tree up. There were lights everywhere and presents under the tree and Christmas cards on the mantle. Bing Crosby was singing sappy Christmas songs. Their newborn baby boy, Myles Cadet Murphy, was asleep in his bassinet in their bedroom. Ginny got drunk and tried to fuck Murph on the living room floor in front of my sister and me. I shouldn't have taken her over there. I knew how she got. Of course it was my fault. What the hell was I thinking? Nicki was sitting on the couch with a glass of wine in her hand, watching very closely as Ginny climbed into her husband's lap. Nicki never liked Ginny much to begin with. Most women didn't. I don't know why not. Some women liked her—Brenda and Mary had—but most women didn't. Guys sure did. Maybe that was it. Murph was cute about it. He frowned and shook his head and screwed up the corner of his mouth and raised his eyebrows and laughed uncomfortably while she put her arms around his neck and squirmed in his lap. Nicki looked at me. I was sitting across the room in an armchair. She looked back down at Ginny and her husband on the floor between us and looked at me again. I shrugged. She shrugged. Nicki and I both felt sorry for Murph. He didn't know what to do. I got up, took Ginny by the arm, pulled her off Murph's lap and said, "Come on, we're going." "No. I need to know what he wants," Ginny said. "He needs to know." "I don't need to know shit," Murph said. "I know everything I want to know." "No. You don't. You need to know what you want." "And you know what that is?" Nicki asked. Then she laughed. Then she frowned. Then she screwed up the side of her mouth and shook her head. "I do. He knows, too. Murph knows. Don't you, Murph? Don't you?" "Ginny. Shut the fuck up," I said. I was pissed. Finally pissed. Permanently pissed. Fed up. Tired. Bored. I can't explain it. I'm not even going to try. It wasn't emotional in the least. It was factual. Enough was enough. Watching Ginny and Murph was the last straw. She was nothing but a drunk. You see drunks on the street. They come up to you in bars. They're boring. They're stupid. Nothing they do or say has any meaning. It doesn't matter whether they live or die—and suddenly somehow, that was it. I don't know what else she said. I don't know what else I said. Ginny eventually took off with a couple of Mexican garbage men at around five in the morning. The last I saw of her, she was on the running board of a Sunset Scavenger Service truck. I didn't care. I didn't want anything to do with any of it anymore, and went up to my parents' house in Oregon again. Tom Piper got to handle the rest of Christmas that year. He thought he was up to it. He wasn't. Here's the second to last letter I still have. It doesn't have a date, but this one had to have been from sometime around Christmas of 1968: "Gerry: I am in a hospital—and have been for three days. But not me—a ream of identities all using THIS body. I have some kind of brain damage. The experiences have been HUGE—from deepest despair to laughter—never really happy though. I'm too sick. I must see you. And Elliot. You both I saw during 'various' stages of minds and you are both quite different than ordinary humans. I am being fed through the arm by a bottle and through the fanny with something they put in. "Before I had my last 2 pills I was a MESS MESS MESS and wanted to die. The pain was unendurable in my head and tum. I couldn't move and gagged which broke my head apart. OH I must tell you how it happened. Tom did it. He hit me perfectly and I fell and broke something in my spine. I stayed home and was strange but quiet...no drinking...so drinking doesn't have anything to do with this one—finally I just fell in a swoon and went potty all over myself. "He took me to Kaiser emergency where the doctors found blood in my spinal column and put me in ambulances for the city where I am now. They will do an EEG when I am well enough. (Damn—that's when they stick millions of pins in your skull and make you sit there forever.) Are you surprised at all this? I have no idea when I'll be plopped into a bramble of pain and other worlds again. "Last night they had to make me naked and put ICE towels all over me to bring the fever down. It was AWFUL. ICKY. Now I feel OK except for a headache which is continual but less. There IS something physically wrong in my head. I am SO weird from one minute to the next. WHERE ARE YOU? COME! I seriously may really KILL myself. That's all. Tom will mail this...bye...it's late." Along with the letter, Tom Piper enclosed this note: "She's in the Kaiser Hospital on Geary Street. I didn't hit her. I threw her away from me. The doctor found blood in her spinal fluid from a probable burst blood vessel around the brain. They are keeping her in the hospital because the tests that they would have to make in order to know exactly what is wrong are quite painful and they can achieve the same result by merely keeping her under close observation. She has a temperature of 102. They are doing things to lower it. She has had a powerful headache continually since the fall. She is mentally confused frequently. The doctor said tonight that they would probably do another spinal tap Friday to see if she needs to remain in the hospital until sometime next week."

Chapter Twenty-Six Cole Street By the spring of 1969, I had recuperated up in Oregon long enough to have another go at San Francisco. I got a job at the phone company on New Montgomery Street. That was where I met Melanie. She'd had a kid when she was fifteen, a daughter, Wendy. Wendy had just turned four. Melanie and Wendy were living out in the Mission with a redheaded bricklayer named Dick. Wendy's real father was long gone. So were all sorts of other guys by then. Melanie and I were alone in one of the elevators a week or so after I had started working there. I'd noticed her before. She was cute...and shy. She kept to herself, didn't seem to have any friends. In the elevator that day, she had on a shiny green blouse, a short red skirt and a pair of red and green earrings. "You look like a Christmas present," I said. She glanced up briefly, looked into my eyes, and looked down at the floor again, all so quickly I wasn't sure I'd really seen her smile, but I had. I can still see it anytime I want—her slow, smoldery smile, her big shy eyes. The next day we walked up to Chinatown together. She had on a gray cotton dress. Some old Chinese guys were playing checkers under a cement pavilion in Portsmouth Square. Some other old Chinese guys were doing Tai Chi on the lawn. Kids jumped on and off the merry-go-round. We got a couple of hot dogs and found ourselves a cement bench. Melanie treated everything she touched as though it got its feelings hurt as easily as she did. She let the hot dog bun sort of melt in her mouth awhile before she nudged her teeth through it and bit into its tender, fragile skin. Then she chewed slowly, moving the bite of hot dog and bun gently up and down inside the warm pink walls of her pretty chipmunk cheeks. I was wearing a pair of thin cotton khaki slacks, without any underwear. My dick stirred. She might have noticed. Nothing ever got very verbal with Melanie. Why talk about things you could just do? Ginny, on the other hand, holy shit, she thought there was no point doing stuff you could just talk about. They were as different from one another as two people get. Ginny was hard. Melanie was soft. Ginny had a tiny mouth; Melanie's mouth was wide and slow and luscious. She wore thick, creamy, red lipstick. Ginny thought makeup was silly and stupid and bourgeois. Her eyes were small and piercing and luminous and blue. Melanie's eyes were huge and warm and green...and gray and swallowed you up in comfort and generosity and hospitality. She thought one thing at a time and got nervous when she had to talk, and when she did talk, Melanie got straight to the point. Ginny always double-edge sworded everything; for every good there was a bad—she never just flat-out, unequivocally did or said or even thought the tiniest little two-bit thing. Melanie was immediate, direct, forthcoming, uncomplicated. "Is that a birthmark?" I brushed a small discoloration on the inside of Melanie's thigh. She was wearing sheer white tights. Her dress had a prim, white lace collar. She looked right into my eyes. Her innocence scared me. Then she reached over and deliberately folded her fingers gently over my not quite yet completely throbbing dick. On our way back to work, I put my arm around her shoulders. She reached back, slipped her hand across the back of her neck, lifted her hair out from under my arm and let it rest more comfortably over my arm—and wow was her hair ever pretty, glinting all red and gold and chestnut in the sun. Melanie and I met up at a Laundromat out in the Mission after work the next night. It was Friday. Dick the bricklayer was away for an obligatory weekend in the Army Reserves. I gave Wendy sticks of Juicy-Fruit gum and lit books of matches for her to blow out while her mother took the clothes out of the dryer. We went upstairs. Melanie folded laundry. Wendy spit in my face. Her spit tasted like Juicy-Fruit gum. "Ooo, that feels good," I said. Wendy spit in my face again. She wasn't being playful. She was spitting in my face because she didn't want me there. I didn't blame her. I shouldn't have been there. Here they were, this nice little family, a mommy and a daddy and a little girl. What was I doing there? I wanted to fuck Melanie, yeah, but that was about it. And what, for that matter, did Melanie have me over there for? She wanted to fuck me, too, I presumed, but there had to be more to it than that. She probably wanted me to fall utterly in love with her. I didn't want to do that. I was still in love with Ginny, for one thing. Yeah, I was fed up with her. She was a drunk. She was nuts, she drove me nuts—but that didn't diminish the fact that I was in love with her. What's being fed up with someone ever had to do with being in love? Wendy spit in my face again, and suddenly all the second thoughts I was having vanished. Hey, spit in my face all you want, kid—I'm going to stay here and fuck your mother whether anyone likes it or not. Ha! Eventually, Wendy got tired of spitting at me—or maybe she just ran out of spit—and fell asleep on the bed. Melanie scooped her up and laid her down onto a little mattress in the walk-in closet and covered her with blankets. Melanie and I touched each other's faces. I put my hand under her pretty hair, and rubbed the back of her neck, and she put her arms around me and we kissed each other and held each other and took off our clothes and made love with each other for a long time next to piles of folded laundry still slightly warm from the dryer. In the early, early morning, crouched next to a window across the room, Melanie was looking out at the orange sun coming up over the rooftops. She was smoking a cigarette. She smoked lots of cigarettes. True cigarettes. True Blues. She smoked cigarettes and chewed the skin around her fingernails and rested her chin on her knees and wound her hair around one of her fingers, looking for split ends. Wendy was sound asleep. She was snoring. Her tangled blond hair covered her pillow. Her left arm was cuddled around an inflatable Easter bunny with buckteeth, a big smile and a wink in one of his bright blue eyes. There were empty gum wrappers everywhere. I was picking up one of the gum wrappers when Dick came home. He just walked right in the front door like he lived there. His weekend in the Army Reserves had ended early. I didn't say anything to him. He didn't say anything to me. He knew it wasn't my fault that I was there. I put my clothes on and left. I didn't find out until later what happened after I was gone. First he threw some of Melanie's clothes out the window. Then he slapped her. Then he pulled her hair and slapped her again. Then he closed the door to the walk-in closet where Wendy was sleeping and fucked Melanie on the floor until her knees bled and turned her over and fucked her until she had rug burns on her shoulder blades. Jealousy's an aphrodisiac. Melanie didn't resist. She didn't say a word. She let him fuck her until her knees bled and let him turn her over and fuck her until she had rug burns on her shoulder blades, and when he was through they knew it was over, and he was sad, and she wasn't, and that was that. The next day Melanie called me from a pay phone and I picked her and Wendy up in a rented car. They were standing in front of the Shell station on the corner of 20th and Valencia. Wendy was dragging her inflatable Easter Bunny by one of its inflatable ears. Melanie had a suitcase and a black eye and a pretty good-sized gash on the side of her lower lip. I was living in a house with a bunch of other people over by Eighth Avenue and Clement. Melanie and Wendy stayed there with me for a few days, then the three of us got an apartment on Cole Street, not far from Ginny's old place on Clayton. It had been five years—almost exactly to the day—since I put one of my mother's fancy teacups into a bag, took a bus up to Haight-Ashbury and rescued Ginny Good from Jim Moss. After a while I was in love with Melanie—not utterly, but I definitely liked her a lot. She was an oasis. A sanitarium. Somewhere I could go to keep getting over Ginny. I had to get over Ginny. It was all very logical. She was nuts. She was a drunk. So what if I was in love with her, I had to get over being in love with her. Melanie would come in handy. She could absorb me, distract me, love me, like me, fuck me, laugh at my jokes. That was what I had in mind. What Melanie had in mind was a lot more clear-cut. Things were either yes or no with her, on or off, true or not true. She was either in love or she wasn't. There were no two ways about it. And she was in love with me. Suddenly. Just like that. Boom. She couldn't help herself. It just happened. Nobody analyzed it. I had a job. I was good with the kid. It was obvious I liked her. I listened to her. I talked to her. I was interested in how she got to be who she was and loved that she was in love with me. That was the only thing that ever mattered to Melanie. Being in love—what it felt like, how it made her feel. All she wanted was to show me how much in love with me she was; all she wanted was to fuck and fuck and fuck. She was good, too—really good. She'd had years of unabashed practice, years of experimentation with different guys with different ideas about what it took to be a good fuck, and Melanie had picked up something from each of them—wow, was she ever a good fuck. Melanie had just turned fourteen when she used to wait outside the W. T. Grant Store in Citrus Heights for Wendy's father to come along on his motorcycle and take her to the fields by the river to fuck. She fucked him among the thistles and the whirring of flying grasshoppers while they listened to the rippling of the river. There were other men after Wendy's father—short-term guys, long-term guys, smart guys, dumb guys, nice guys, assholes, jerks, shy guys, you name it—anyone who really wanted her could have her. Melanie wasn't like a four year-old kid. She didn't need anybody to be the Daddy. She didn't need to be drunk. She was a pretty little nineteen-year-old with big, serious eyes who, if she knew anything, sure knew how to fuck—and she was in love with me! And on top of all that she loved to take acid. There was nothing in the world Melanie liked better than to take LSD and fuck. That was all we did. You want to go to the movies? No, let's take acid and fuck. She didn't even say it. She didn't have to say it. LSD was an aphrodisiac. Love was an aphrodisiac. We wore ourselves out. And it was working. I was getting over Ginny. Sure, I missed her. I missed how we used to be together. How she used to hide. How I used to find her. How I knew what to do when she went crazy, how she needed me, how she taught me everything I knew, everything I know, how fun we were with each other, how funny. But I also had Wendy, and Wendy wasn't like a four year-old kid, she was a four year-old kid. Ha! We dug each other, Wendy and me. We galloped down the sides of sand dunes like horses and found sea shells on the beach and watched the sun set and watched the sky turn all purple and pink from one side of the horizon to the other. Wendy would point up at the sky and say, "Ooo, pretty." Then she'd point down at a piece of polished glass shimmering in the sunset and say, "Ooo, pretty." Then she'd pick up a small rotting octopus and say, "Ooo, pretty." There was almost nothing Wendy didn't think was worth mentioning. She made up for all the talking Melanie didn't do. Wendy jabbered all the time. Sometimes she fell asleep in the middle of a sentence and finished the same sentence the first thing the next morning. I had all kinds of things going for me. The memory of Ginny was fading fast. Wendy and her mother had no idea I was just using them. Wendy thought I was her dad. Melanie thought I was her boyfriend, her husband, the love of her life. She thought we were together. We were. I was. But, still. I was older than her. I was twenty-seven by then; Ginny was twenty-eight; Elliot was twenty-six. We knew more than Melanie did. We'd been through more. Melanie was a kid. She'd had a tough life, sure, but she couldn't begin to understand the things that had been going on with Ginny and me for the last five years. Around the middle of June, I heard from Elliot again. He called me one night. He and Ginny were living together in L.A. I'd known by then that they were living together, but I'd been immersed in Melanie and hadn't paid it much mind. Elliot's phone call made the fact that they were actually living with each other more concrete—sleeping in the same bed, doing the things people do. He fucked her. She fucked him. Shit. They had two turtles. The turtles had names. They were happy. His voice sounded apologetic—not guilty, exactly, he knew I was living with Melanie by then, too—but he sounded apologetic nonetheless. I was jealous. Fuck. I was utterly in love with Ginny all over again. I didn't mention the details of Elliot's phone call to Melanie. She knew that Ginny and I had lived together on and off for years and that Elliot and I had been friends since high school. She thought it was perfectly natural that the two of them had gotten together after Ginny and I split up. I was scared to tell her anything different. She was fragile. She wanted me to be as much in love with her as she was with me. Was that so much to ask? She wanted to believe that, like her, I only had room in my heart to be in love with one person at a time. But that wasn't true. I had more room in my heart than that. Melanie wouldn't have understood. She was like one of those little African antelopes that, when it catches the scent of a lion, leaps straight up and starts running before its feet even hit the ground. That I was still in love with Ginny would have been more than the scent of a lion; it would have been like a lion roaring in Melanie's face. So I told her that Elliot called. I told her that he and Ginny were living together in L.A. That was it. That was all I told her.

Chapter Twenty-Seven Sutro Heights Then one day everything fell apart forever. Wendy was staying with her grandmother in Sacramento. Melanie and I had each other all to ourselves. We hopped on two or three busses and ended up way out at the end of Geary Street. There's a park out there—Sutro Heights Park. Two cement lions crouched on squat cement pillars with a daunting, heavy black freshly-painted chain strung between them at the entrance to the park. The chain normally wouldn't have been that big a deal, but Melanie and I were so stoned on acid it took us forever to climb over it. Once we finally got past the chain and the lions, we pulled each other by turns up the stony path until we came to the crest of a hill and stumbled into the remnants of concrete gun emplacements left over from World War II. They were covered over with ice plant and lichens. The heavy artillery that had been housed in the bunkers had been aimed out at Japanese war ships that might have come steaming toward the Golden Gate. It was going to blow them to smithereens. I knew my history. I didn't try to explain any of it to Melanie. She had an innate aversion to facts of any kind. It was misty but unusually warm that day. The ocean was gray. Seabirds cried to each other. I saw the whole bloody conflagration as it might have taken place—Japanese destroyers knifing toward the city, big guns blazing through slits in the concrete, shells landing like geysers, ships exploding, Jap sailors crying like seabirds. Melanie was busying herself with the building of waterfalls. She pushed tiny drops of water, like mercury from a broken thermometer, into a larger drop of water at the center of a fleshy lichen. Then she swept that drop of water along with one of her bitten-off fingernails into a bigger drop of water until it grew too massive to remain contained by its inherent surface tension and flooded over the walls of the lichen like a waterfall. The cascading water sent a shock of surprise through her. She was more sensitive than a spider web. The least little whisper of air sent electrical currents of surprise and delight through her, from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. She started making a big drop of water out of little drops of water on the glistening surface of a fern frond. Melanie liked the feelings of things, the way they tasted and smelled and how they made her feel. She touched the fern the way she would have wanted to be touched if she were a fern. She touched the fern as though she were touching herself. It was sexual. The fern was getting aroused. So was I. Everything she did was sexual, sensual; it gave her pleasure to give pleasure. The park had a gazebo. We went into the gazebo and sat down. Its rafters had been painted over and over with thick white paint. Drizzle clung like jewels to the strands of a spider web in one of the corners. The surfaces of the benches crawled with the graffiti of generations. I climbed up and hung upside-down by my knees from one of the rafters. I could feel the blood bulging the veins in my forehead, throbbing through my temples. Melanie had just put on fresh lipstick. Her girlishness took my breath away. I went boneless as an octopus with my hair and my head and my neck and my arms dangling down, and closed my eyes. Melanie put one of my fingers into her mouth. I felt the nipple of one of her breasts move under her silky shirt and touched it with the tip of my tongue. "God, I love you," I heard her say. I opened my eyes and slipped two of my fingers through a space between the buttons of her lilac blouse. Where my mouth had been there was a wet spot, like a purple heart. "I think," I said. "My head. Is. Going. To. Explode." Melanie didn't say anything. I climbed down and sat next to her and tried to talk again. "Acid," I began. And stopped. And started again. "This." I stopped. "This is a stupid drug to try to talk about...or on...or in...or under. Hey, did you know. That. When I was in the seventh grade. I memorized. The only thing I ever memorized?" Melanie didn't answer, but I assumed she wanted to know what it was. "It was a list of prepositions," I said. "They were in a thick, flimsy, red paperback book. I still know them. Wanna hear?" She still didn't answer, but I knew she would want to know, so I told her. "In, on, into, over, under, to, at, by, for, from, of, off..." "Huh?" Melanie said. "Never mind." I laughed. Then Melanie stretched out on the wide bench and laid her head in my lap. The ends of her hair brushed the floor. She closed her eyes. Nerves made a muscle twitch lazily in one of her cheeks. Her mouth was open. Her tongue rested comfortably against the backs of her bottom teeth. I smoothed out one of her eyebrows and rubbed the muscles where her jaws joined, right where the muscles of my jaw ached. That was when Melanie asked the fateful question. She was just trying to make conversation, I guess, but it was the fateful question, nonetheless. "Are you jealous of them? Ginny and Elliot?" I didn't answer right away. That was it, right there. That was all she needed to hear. My heart broke. I felt my heart break in my chest. I got tears in my eyes. Waves of sadness and regret washed over me. Yeah, I was jealous, sure, but the thing that really got me crying, the second wave of sadness that welled up was that in that tiny fraction of a second I wasn't in love with Ginny or Melanie or anyone. I wasn't in love, period—love, schmove, stick it up your ass. What the fuck does it mean, anyway? Love. What does that mean, Ginny had asked when we were on the floor of her apartment on 45th Avenue. I didn't know. I don't know. I've never known. I'll never know. You can't trust the stuff is all I know. It comes and goes. It wasn't something I could explain to Melanie at the moment, so I just didn't answer and started to cry instead. I tried to stop crying, but that just made it worse. The drug no doubt affected the way Melanie saw it, too. She never forgot it, that brief hesitation, the momentary pause, then all that crying and trying not to cry. She saw things simply, directly. She saw things for what they were, and what she saw was that I wasn't in love with her, that I'd never been in love with her, that nobody had ever been in love with her and that nobody would ever be in love with her no matter what she did. That broke my heart even more. I wanted to tell her that wasn't it. But I couldn't. She wouldn't have believed me. She wouldn't have heard. She wouldn't have listened. She saw what she saw. She'd seen what she'd seen. You had to go all the way back to before Melanie was born to know how really mean and cruel and unfair it was for her to have seen that I wasn't in love with her. You had to know that Melanie's mother was already pregnant with her when she met the guy who eventually married her. Nobody bothered to tell Melanie that. The guy who married her mother treated Melanie like shit because she wasn't his kid. She thought she was his kid. That was the cruel part. He slapped her and pulled her hair and beat her with a stick until she cried. She didn't cry easily, either. She was brave. She was stoical. She had too much pride to cry. But once he started swatting his stick across Melanie's bare legs, he didn't stop until she cried—and what it felt like to her was loathing, hatred, unadulterated dislike. She didn't know what she'd done to deserve to be beaten with a stick. The only thing she could figure out was that she had just been born bad, like no matter how hard she tried to be good she could never be anything but bad—and she tried to be good all the time. Everything she did was good. She washed the dishes until they sparkled and shined the faucet handles and cleaned the toilet bowl and got A's in school and didn't talk back and kept her room spotless—but no matter what she did or didn't do, the guy who married her mother shook her and slapped her and pulled her hair and beat her bare legs with a stick because she wasn't his kid. Melanie's mother didn't interfere. She felt sort of guilty that her husband had to feed, clothe, educate and generally put up with some other guy's child, but she didn't feel all that great about her daughter being beaten with a stick, either. She's the one I blame as much as anyone—well, next to me, I guess. I blame myself for everything. At least there came a time when Melanie found out that the sadistic prick really wasn't her father and she could make some kind of belated sense out of it, but with me it was like I was mean and cruel and unfair on purpose. "Yeah, I guess," I said, when I was finally able to answer the question she had asked what seemed like a hundred years ago. "Sometimes." "Oh," she said. That was all she said. But her eyes went out of focus and she looked like she'd been hit on the top of her head with a ball peen hammer. I wasn't in love with her. I never had been. Nobody ever had been. Nobody ever would be. That was the only truth she knew. It hurt. I tried to fix it. I tried to tell her about love, about what I had meant, but that just fucked things up even worse again. "Elliot," I said. "Elliot used to quote The Bible all the time. There was a thing from the Song of Songs he used to say." Then I stopped and got fucking tears in my eyes again, another fucking lump in my throat, another fucking ache in my heart. "'Stay me with flagons,' he used to say." A picture came into my mind—Ginny drunk, her otherworldly blue eyes blacked out, pulling at the ends of her hair, shuddering, shivering, shaking her head, trying to be sane, trying to see things as they really were, laughing, saying, "Oh, dear," Elliot and me trying to comfort her. "'Stay me with flagons; comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love,' that's all I'm trying to say," I said. Melanie had no idea how to respond to that. It didn't seem to make any sense to her. It didn't make any sense to me by then, either. We somehow made our way back home again, but that was the day everything fell apart forever all the same. Well, that was the beginning, anyway. If it had just been that, that I hadn't been utterly in love with Melanie for a minute or two, on acid, in a gazebo in Sutro Heights Park sometime in the summer of 1969, things might have figured themselves differently. But it wasn't just that. A few weeks later, rather than simply avoiding the subject of Ginny and Elliot altogether like anybody with any brains would have done, I exacerbated the Bejesus out of it by coming up with the brilliant idea that the four us ought to all just live together. Ha! How fucking stupid of an idea was that? I know exactly how it happened, when and how and maybe even why. I was in the shower, watching the water stream down my body, down my stomach and down my legs and off the ends of my feet and down the drain—like my life, I remember thinking. That was when I had the clearest picture I've ever had of anything, a picture of Ginny and Elliot and me and Melanie all living in a big house together. It was a fantasy, sure, but I didn't see anything wrong with it. I didn't see why we couldn't just do it. I thought we could all just fuck each other and cook and clean and have each other's babies and things. I told Melanie about it when I got out of the shower. All she had to do was say no. But she didn't say no. She didn't say anything.

Chapter Twenty-Eight The Garden of Eden Okay, this part gets a little tricky. Toward the end of 1969, Melanie and Wendy and I moved to Sacramento for a year or so, and the idea of us all living together got put on the back burner, but when we moved back to the Bay Area again at the beginning of 1971, I still didn't see anything wrong with it. I thought, at the very least, that it wouldn't do any harm to just maybe try it sometime and let the chips fall where they may. Man, was I ever wrong about that. After we came back from Sacramento, we lived in an apartment by the San Mateo Municipal Golf Course. I sort of eased Melanie another step in the general direction of her and me and Ginny and Elliot all living together by encouraging her to fuck other people. I wanted her to get over the idea of being jealous—to see that she could be with other people without it diminishing the affection we had for one another. I wanted her to find out for herself that I would be even more in love with her than ever. So she started fucking other people. I'm pretty sure that what Melanie had in mind was that once she actually went out and fucked some guy, I really wouldn't like it and we could forget about the whole absurd notion of us all living together. It was the early seventies. These were all such early seventies things to do—getting a bunch of people to all live together like Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. We may even have had a Lava Lamp there for a while. I remember this one guy in particular. He was a bartender at the Off Broadway. I never met him. I just remember him. Melanie was a dancer by then. She had started working at topless bars in Sacramento, and when we moved back to the Bay Area, she worked at one or another of the clubs on Broadway. She was the headliner in a love act at The Garden of Eden. There were pictures of her in Playboy. Melanie and the bartender at the Off Broadway had the hots for each other the minute she started working there. "It's just...really...physical," she said. "Hey, so fuck him and get it over with." "When?" "Whenever you want." "Tonight?" "Okay." "He'll bring me home, then. Don't wait up." I did wait up, however. I waited up all night. I waited up until around five the next morning. I can still hear her footsteps on the sidewalk. The sun was about to come up. Birds were singing so excruciatingly loudly I didn't see how they could keep from tearing their poor little pink gullets out. I expected the sidewalk to be strewn with dried-up sparrows' throats. I expected them to crackle under my shoes the next time I went outside. The front door opened. I could barely hear it because of the birds. Our bedroom door opened. The birds stopped singing. "So?" "I thought you'd be asleep." "I'm not." "What do you want to know?" "Did you fuck him?" "Yes." "What's up and down your arms?" "Hickies." "From him?" "No. I did it to myself." "While he was fucking you?" "Yes." "Did you suck his dick?" "Yes." "Did he eat your pussy?" "Yes." "Did you come?" "No." "Why not?" "I just didn't. Do you want me to take a shower?" "No." "I probably should." "No. You shouldn't. Really. Just come here." Jealousy may have been an aphrodisiac, but it was also kind of a bitch. I didn't want Melanie fucking everybody in town. Well, I did and I didn't. It was all part of the preparations that needed to be in place. The next guy, she fucked five days a week. That was her job. She got weekends off. I forget his name. He lived in Foster City and owned a couple of the clubs on Broadway. He paid Melanie to clean his house and fuck him. Some days she didn't bother cleaning his house. After awhile I didn't see how she could possibly have any reservations about at least trying the idea of us all living together. In the meantime, Ginny and Elliot had moved up from L.A. and were living in a Taoist commune in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The commune was run by some old Chinese guy by the name of Gia-Fu Feng, who, along with his young Caucasian girlfriend, had written a book about the teachings of Lao-Tzu. The people in the commune ran around naked all day. They greeted the sun in the morning, said good-bye to the sun at night and ate organic vegetables and lentils and brown rice. Melanie and Wendy and I went down there one weekend. Wendy dug it, but it wasn't Melanie's cup of tea. She liked wearing clothes, for one thing. Clothes were pretty. She liked how they felt. She liked how they made her feel. No one wore any make up, either. She felt out of place. If that was what I had in mind about us all living together, I could forget about it. That wasn't what I had in mind, I told her. What I had in mind was that you pick the people you want to live with and you live with them—like a family. I got a job running the registration desk and taking care of periodicals at the San Mateo Public Library. We moved to a nice house on a quiet street in Burlingame. I had money coming in. Melanie quit working and stayed home with Wendy. I had my mind set on us all living together more than ever. I had done enough. She'd fucked plenty of other people and, to my way of thinking, the time had come to just try it and see. Elliot stayed with us for a couple weeks during the Christmas of 1971. Ginny had wrecked the dining room at the commune. They'd had to leave. She was in a private mental hospital in Santa Cruz. Melanie and Elliot got to know each other on their own terms. They didn't do anything untoward—nobody was trying to push anything on anyone—they just got to know each other. They liked each other. They talked. They were shy with one another. He drew pictures of her and told her she reminded him of Cordelia—she was Cordelia, actually. If you really want to know what Melanie was like, go read King Lear. Elliot and Wendy finger-painted in front of the fireplace. Nobody watched TV. See. It was like a family, like I knew it would be. Melanie admitted it hadn't been bad, but she was still glad Elliot left when he did. Six months later Ginny and Elliot showed up together; arm in arm, hand in hand. That was when the shit hit the fan. Melanie and Wendy and I were living in our cozy little house. We had a fig tree in the back yard. I was working at the library. I wore suits and ties and belonged to the employee credit union. Melanie and I were more in love than ever. Some weekends we still took acid and lounged around out in the hammock in the backyard and watched hummingbirds and bumblebees leave jewel-encrusted vapor trails among the fig leaves and thought we were Adam and Eve. She was happy. I was happy. Wendy was happy. Susie was happy. Susie was a shiny black squirmy little part Labrador Retriever and part Dachshund who had followed Wendy home from school one day and kept getting knocked-up by the next door neighbors' Kerry Blue Terrier. The neighbors complained that Susie enticed him over there because of his champion blood lines, although why Susie would have done that we had no idea, since all she ever got out of it was a minimum of seven of the ugliest yapping little blue-skinned puppies you ever saw. Wendy used to have to spend two or three days over in front of Safeway getting rid of the little bastards out of a cardboard box marked "FREE PUPPIES." But the next door neighbors swore it was a conspiracy to contaminate the racial purity of the Kerry Blue Terrier breed. Their dog wouldn't have anything to do with the champion bitches they tried breeding him with. His heart belonged to Susie. The next door neighbors also had a bomb shelter and thought World War II had been lost—which may have accounted for some of their views on racial purity. In the summer of 1972, Susie had just had her latest batch of ugly puppies. There were nine of them this time. Every morning, bright and early, Melanie waded out into this huge warm whimpering pile of black and blue flesh, carrying a speckled roasting pan full of hot Puppy Chow, and Susie's puppies went berserk. They engulfed her ankles and licked her feet and bit at her toes and looked up at her in utter adoration with their newly-opened eyes—while Susie sat on her blanket like it was a throne, squirming and wagging her entire body with such pride and gratitude and dismay that Melanie had to make a conscientious effort to keep from laughing out loud for fear Susie might get her feelings hurt. Melanie and Susie were the two happiest creatures in all creation. Melanie was almost complacent. That was the way she wanted to live—knee-deep in newborn puppies, trying not to laugh out loud. All she wanted was to shine the faucet handles, clean the toilet bowl, bake enchiladas and have me love her forever. And we were doing that. There wasn't anything wrong with it. I was happy. Wendy was happy. Susie was happy. Her nine ugly puppies were happy. Everyone was happy. There wasn't anything wrong with anything. We had the next door neighbors to gossip about and the people at work to gossip about and movies to go to and the Sunday paper to read and a brand new Safeway less than a block away. But, despite the fig leaves and the hummingbirds and the bumblebees and Susie's puppies and the rest of all that other unbridled bliss, I still had it in mind that you only live once and that there are things in life you have to try if you get the chance—if for no other reason than just to know for sure that they really won't work—and Ginny and Elliot and Melanie and me all living together like one big happy family was still one of those things.