Текст книги "Palo Alto Stories"

Автор книги: James Franco

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 11 страниц)

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you’ll make an official apology to Miss Grossman, the woman you hit.”

“Yes, ma’am.” We got to leave and finally, on the drive home with my dad, those guys in my head shut up.

The next week I reported to my probation officer and set up a supervised apology with Sally Grossman. We met at the little place Sandwich Etc. in midtown, not far from where the accident had happened. Sally Grossman was fat, and she came with her fat friend, and there was a moderator there, Jake. He had combed white hair and a weak, kind face. We all had coffee and we sat around a small round table and looked at one another. I said I was really sorry. Sally Grossman looked like she liked that, but the fat friend looked angry.

Then Sally said, “Look, you have a problem. You’re an alcoholic.”

I nodded that, yes, I was.

“I can understand that,” she said. “I have a problem too, eating. In some ways your problem is easier to deal with. I have to deal with temptation at least three times a day. You know?”

I said that, yeah, I did. Then Jake said that he had a problem too, that he had dealt with a gambling addiction. And that was it. The fat friend didn’t say she had a problem. So we drank our coffee and Jake talked about the benefits of 12-step programs and I said that it sounded like a good idea and I would probably go soon. Then we were done and the next week I started my community service at the Children’s Library.

The two old ladies who ran the library were nice to me. An old one with short brown hair in a bob was the assistant librarian, and a reallyold one with short gray hair in a curly flattop was the main librarian. The brown-haired one was named Judy; she was dry-skinned and thin. The other one was dry too, Mags; she didn’t say much. They must have seen a little kid inside me, because they smiled at me like they smiled at all the kids who came in.

I walked to the library after school twice a week and on Saturdays. The old ladies would give me a cart of books to shelve. But after the first day, I just started reading all the picture books and didn’t do the work. When the library closed at six, my cart of books would still be full, but the old ladies never said anything about it.

“See you soon, Teddy,” they would say, and I’d tell them that they would. Sometimes when I was sitting on the floor reading, the old ladies would walk by the room. I know they saw me but they never mentioned it. There was a garden behind the library; they called it “The Secret Garden.” There were sycamore trees in two rows and wooden benches with rounded cement frames. Sometimes I sat out there to think. But I didn’t know what to think about.

I didn’t talk to Fred for two weeks. I was a little angry that he had predicted the accident, but more because he had gotten out of the car, and even more because I was embarrassed about everything. One day, he showed up at the library. I was on the floor reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar.He sat down next to me and I read out loud to him. At the end the caterpillar turned into a butterfly. After that Fred came all the time.

One day, I started reading him The Rainbow Goblinsby Ul de Rico. It was my favorite book when I was a kid. It’s about this group of goblins that are each painted a different color of the rainbow and they hunt rainbows because they live off the juice of the rainbows’ colors. The way they do it is they sneak up on the rainbows and they each lasso their designated color and then they drain the colors into their buckets and drink them. There are amazing pictures. Well, the goblins get sloppy and a field of flowers overhears their plans and then all the flowers of the valley conspire with the rainbow and the next day, when the goblins attack the rainbow, it disappears and the lassos spring back at the goblins and they’re trapped in them and then the flowers secrete weird colorful juices, tons of them, and drown the goblins. One thing that was always interesting to me as a kid was that the goblins didn’t wear underwear and when they drowned you could see the blue goblin’s butt.

While I was reading this to Fred, sometimes my gaze would catch a picture on the far wall. It was an image from In the Night Kitchen. Those three laughing bakers had such fat faces. Heavy-hanging cheeks and bulbous noses like genitals. I didn’t want to look, but the picture kept grabbing my eye. Fred lay there with his eyes closed and his mouth open. He was higher than I was.

At the end of the book the rainbow vows to never touch the earth again.

“That shit was stupid. That was your favorite book?”

“Yes.”

“Faggot,” said Fred. He didn’t open his eyes.

I looked up and saw those bakers again. They were cooking up the naked boy in a pie. I was happy there with Fred.

“Those fucking goblins were gay!” he said.

“Not so loud,” I told him.

Fred didn’t open his eyes. “They suckthe juice out of rainbows? Rainbows stand for faggots.”

“Shut up, Fred.”

“What? They’re gay! Rainbows are gay!” His eyes were a little open now.

“So?” I said.

“So, don’t get all worked up over it. It’s just a fact, you and the Rainbow Goblins are gay.”

“Shut the fuck up, Fred,” I said.

“What? They’re a bunch of dudes, and they all hang out all the time. That’s all they did,hang out together. All those dudes.”

“So?” I said.

“And they lived together in a cave.”

“So?”

“All in a cave! Gay! Dirtyand gay,” said Fred. As if he was the cleanest guy.

“Great fucking point, Fred. I mean, what children’s book character isn’tgay?”

Fred didn’t answer. Then he said, “A lot of them.”

“Cat in the Hat?” I said. “Gay. The Grinch? Gay. Hungry Caterpillar? He turns into a butterfly, gay!” Now Fred was thinking about it. I continued, “The Runaway Bunny, the bunny in Goodnight Moon,the Velveteen Rabbit, PeterRabbit, all gay. All rabbits are gay.”

“No.”

“They’re sensitive, but different, but also like boys, but then also not.”

He thought, and then said, “Yeah, I guess they are.”

“The little boy who flies around nakedin Night Kitchen,and Max from Where the Wild Things Are,gay!”

“Bullshit, Max isn’t gay.”

“Bull true, he dresses up in his little white wolf suit, so gay. And then he tells his mom to fuck off…”

“That’s not gay…”

“. . . and then he goes to an island and hangs around with a bunch of monsters who party with him all night, dancing and parading him around on their backs.”

“That’s so weird, but I think it’s kind of true,” said Fred.

“All little-kids’ stories have to be like that. They have to be all soft and gay, so that the moms are okay with it.”

Fred sat there, and then he said, “ Iwant a wolf suit.”

“Yeah, me too,” I said.

“I can’t think of anything sexier than a skintight, furry wolf suit,” said Fred. He was really laughing a lot, almost too loud. Those three bakers looked like they were laughing too.

That night I had a dream. There were rainbows everywhere and I was driving all over town in my dad’s busted car, wearing a white wolf suit. The car was making this horrible grinding sound with a whine underneath it. Whenever I hit another car, it just bounced off me and I would cackle.

Two days later, I went into the library to work. The place was empty as usual. I stopped at the front desk. Judy, the brown-haired one, was there.

“I really like it here,” I said.

“We like you,Teddy,” she said. “You’re always welcome here, even after everything is over.”

I said thank you and walked toward the back room. Down the hall, Mags, the gray-haired one, came out of the bathroom and slowly made her way toward me. When we passed, I smiled, and she smiled a wrinkled smile and said quietly, “Good boy, good boy.”

Fred didn’t come in. I rediscovered all the Bill Peet books. He usually wrote about animals and drew great pictures. I went through all of them. There was one about a hermit crab called Kermit the Hermit who hoarded all his stuff, and one about clumsy circus lions, and another about a little mountain goat with huge horns that he could ski on, and a peacock with a scary face patterned into his plume, and a pig with the map of the world on its side, and this clumsy beast that was part rhino, part giraffe, elephant, camel, zebra with reindeer horns called a Whingdingdilly. And there was this one about a dopey sea serpent named Cyrus that terrorized galleons. It was good to read those books again; all the feelings came back to me.

Once upon a time there was a giant sea serpent named Cyrus. Even though he was a horrible looking monster he wasn’t the least bit fierce. All he ever did was wander about in the sea with no idea of where he was going.

“I’m tired of wandering,” said Cyrus one day. “I wish there was something more exciting to do. . . .”

Part II

Wasting

Things got bad at the Children’s Library. I started taking the books home without checking them out and then not returning them. Sometimes Fred and I would get high and draw dicks and pussies on the animals in the books and then put them back on the shelves. One time I was in the Secret Garden and I tried to carve APRIL into the bench, but I didn’t finish because one of the librarians came out, so the carving just said APRI, but the R was a little unfinished and the I was really light.

Then one day after school, my mom told me my probation officer wanted me to call her. I called from the kitchen phone while my mom washed vegetables in the sink. As the phone rang I watched my mother with the vegetables and I realized what a small woman she was.

“Hi, Janice,” I said into the phone.

“Teddy, I’m gonna need you to come to my office on Tuesday after school.”

“That’s the day I go to the Children’s Library.”

“You’re not going there anymore and you know it.”

“What do you mean? I love that place,” I said, and my mother looked over.

“Well, you screwed it up,” she said. “I’ll see you at three twenty on Tuesday. Don’t be late, and you better not drivehere.”

My mother was holding half a green pepper. She looked so sad. The water ran in the sink.

On Tuesday, during first period auto class, Barry Chambers and Bill and I went out to the train tracks to try some of the weed that Barry had been growing in his backyard, on top of the shed. We walked down the tracks a little and stood near the Bat Cave. No Goth kids or anyone else was around. Barry had the stuff rolled in Saran Wrap. He unrolled it and there were two thick, glistening buds. Barry broke off enough for a bowl and filled his smooth porcelain rainbow pipe. The stuff was strong. When I coughed, Barry said, “See, I got the good shit.” Bill took some and he coughed too.

“How’d you grow that?” said Bill.

“I just ordered the seeds from Amsterdam and followed instructions,” Barry said. Barry was Mormon and cuddly like a sea lion and Bill was half Mexican and dumb.

After we smoked we sat on the rail of the tracks. The graffiti on the cement wall of the Bat Cave looked good. ORFN was up, and MSTK, and REVERS, written backward, and the best was LUST. With my eyes I kept tracing the way the letters flowed into each other. They were so well done I could taste them like chewy candy.

“What’s up with you and April?” I asked Barry.

“April is crazy, but we’re gonna fuck.”

Bill had been quiet the whole time, but he said, “Yeah, fuckthat shit.” I guess he meant April was the shit and Barry should fuck her. His eye whites were pink and the veins were apparent. He was yukking.

I stood up and went to the wall. I had a black Sharpie in my pocket and I wrote SHIT FUCK COCK SUCK DIE ASS NOTHINGNESS MEANINGLESS CRY. My writing went a little over LUST, but he was big and in red spray paint.

“What does all that mean?” said Barry.

“Nothing,” I said, but it was something. Barry let us use his Visine and then we went back and made it before the end of auto class. I banged on the side of an engine with a hammer and then I sat in a metal chair. In English, I looked at a book but the words didn’t separate; all the letters were ants marching into the crease.

After school, the weed was wearing off and I walked with Fred toward the court building where Janice had her office. It was near California Avenue, so we just walked down El Camino. Fred had been doing crazy things lately. Stupid things, like throwing rocks through house windows at night, and then running.

“Can you believe that Barry is gonna fuck April?” I said.

“No,” Fred said. Fred had never fucked, and I had only once. It was with Shauna. Everyone called her Dog Bite Shauna because a dog had bitten her and there were two horizontal scar lines on the left side of her face. We did it at a party, and when I was finally on top of her I closed my eyes because her face was so close. We kissed while we did it and I remember being surprised because I was holding her face and I couldn’t feel the scars, but when I opened my eyes they were there.

“ Barry?I mean why Barry?”

“I don’t know, cuz he’s a fucker,” said Fred. “And he’s nice.”

“But Barry? He’s, like, chubby and he’s Mormonand… I mean, I don’t think he’s ever fucked before. Why does she like him?” We thought while we walked.

“He plays drums,” said Fred.

“Whatever,” I said, and we walked in silence. On a public mailbox I drew a face with my Sharpie. It was a mournful face, and next to it I wrote,

FUCK INTO THIS

BORN INTO THIS

At California Avenue, Fred went into the café at the Printer’s Ink bookstore to get coffee and I walked on to the court building. It was three thirty already.

I went to the seventh floor and checked in and then waited in a wooden chair for Janice. I wasn’t high anymore but I was so tired I kept my backpack on when I sat. I was slumped to the side of the chair when she came out.

“Okay, Teddy.” I stood up. “Nice shirt,” she said. I had a red plaid shirt on and the pocket was ripped so it hung funny. She was fat, and wearing tan pants. When she turned, her ass was this huge ugly thing that was wide and flattened from sitting. In her office, I took my bag off and sat in the heavy wooden chair across the desk from her.

“So,” she said, and then was very still. Her face was like her ass, flat and wide. Her cheeks stuck out farther than her temples and they hung like the jowls of a Saint Bernard. Her skin was oily and olive-colored with splotches of red around her nose.

I didn’t say anything. The walls were beige and the ceiling had those white squares with little holes in them. It was the most boring place I had ever been. Finally she asked me if I was high and I said I wasn’t and she said she could test me if she wanted to and I told her that would be okay, but she didn’t say anything more about it. Then she said, “You drew a dick on the Runaway Bunny?”

“No, that was Fred,” I said.

She asked who Fred was but I didn’t answer. “Did you have friends visit you while you were doing community service at the Children’s Library?”

“No, no one came, it was me. I’m sorry I drew the dick on the Runaway Bunny, and the vagina on the mom bunny. It was really stupid, I’ll pay for the book.”

“Yes, you will, of course you will, but you’re not doing the rest of your hours there. The librarians don’t want you there anymore.”

“They like me.”

“No, they don’t. You’re lazy and you carved ‘ape’ into their bench outside.”

I started laughing. It seemed really funny at the time so I kept laughing. Maybe I was still high. “I didn’t write ‘ape,’ I wrote ‘apri.’”

“What the hell is ‘apri’?”

“Nothing, just some shit.”

“Well, you’re paying for that too,” Janice said. I said okay, and she asked what kind of asshole I was, defacing libraries. I said I didn’t know. Then she handed me a list of places where I could finish my community service hours. I had thirty-two hours left. I could work at Goodwill, I could clean up graffiti, I could work at Planned Parenthood.

“Goodwill sounds okay,” I said. She was looking at her own copy of the list.

“No, actually you don’t get to choose,” she said. “You’re working at Sycamore Towers.” Sycamore Towers was a nursing home. My great-grandfather had been there before he died at Stanford Hospital. I used to visit when I was about three and he’d always give me chalky candies. “Great-grandpa candies,” we called them. There is a photograph of him and me shaking hands in the doorway to his room: he is tall, in a gray suit, with white hair; and I’m in a diaper, standing on my toes to reach his hand.

I started working at Sycamore Towers. It had fourteen floors; I worked on the twelfth. There was a desk station for the orderlies in the center of the floor, and from there the four wings extended out in each direction, so the place was shaped like a crooked cross. Each wing held eleven rooms for the residents: five on one side of the hall and six on the other. Near the orderlies’ station there was a community room where the old people worked on crafts, and across the hall there was a TV room.

Most of the old people were in wheelchairs and they didn’t move much. They usually sat dispersed about the four halls doing nothing. There were also some that lay in bed all day and had bedpans. Except for the meals and craft time, the old people were left to themselves. Some watched TV in the TV room and a few read, but most stared at nothing.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I’d walk to the Towers after school. I’d get there around three thirty because it wasn’t very far, over near University Avenue. When I arrived at the Towers the old people would be having their craft time in the community room. I would sit with them and make sure they had their beads and crayons, and if anyone needed water I would get it. They would do crafts for an hour and then they were free until dinner at six. I would push them around in their chairs and clean up after them and get supplies from the storage room for the orderlies.

There was another kid working off community service hours; his name was Brian and he went to the other high school, Gunn. He was Asian, and had a tall head and a square haircut, so he looked like a number 2 pencil eraser. He was a smart kid but he had two hundred hours of community service because he made a bomb at school.

One afternoon when he and I were in the elevator bringing up packs of toilet paper from the basement, I asked him about the bomb.

“It wasn’t a bomb,” he said, like he had been waiting for me to ask. “It was supposed to be a joke. I mean, I’m good at chemistry and I knew what I was doing, I’ve done it a bunch of times before. It was supposed to be a smoke trick, that’s it. All this smoke was going to come out of the drinking fountain, and everyone would get scared, big deal. But the guy I did it with fucked up and put the pipe too far into the fountain, so there was no room for the smoke to get out and the whole thing exploded.”

“Oh fuck,” I said.

“It was bad. The cement went flying and there were flames and a bunch of backpacks got completely melted and a few kids got burned on their backs and heads. One girl had her hair burned off on one side.”

“That’s horrible,” I said.

“Yeah. What’s worse is I got expelled. And I was supposed to go to Duke next year, and they pulled my scholarship.”

For a smart guy Brian seemed dumb, the way his huge head bobbed around when he talked. Just before we got to our floor he asked me if I liked the old people.

“They’re okay,” I said. “They’re just like big children.”

“They fucking smell,” he said, and then the bell dinged and the doors opened and he walked out.

Crafts for the old people usually meant drawing with crayons, or stringing beads, or making cat’s eyes with yarn. At first I just sat and watched; their weak fingers had difficulty gripping things and some of their wet mouths hung open. On the third week I started drawing them. I had put in a lot of time in drawing classes, especially since the last arrest. In the evenings I didn’t work with the old people, I would go to life drawing and portraiture classes at the Palo Alto Art League. It was just this cool old building that was actually pretty close to the Towers. My teacher, Mr. Wilson, was this wily old guy with a beard like a wizard who wore all denim, every day.

I started bringing my sketchbook and sketching pencils. I usually just drew the old people’s faces. I would draw life in their eyes even though many of their lights had gone out. I would capture their decaying skin with as much realism as possible. Wrinkles within wrinkles, blotches, hair in wisps. And their necks like fowls’: bone protrusion, saggy-soft flesh, goiters. I drew all of the people on my floor many times. The orderlies didn’t care that I hardly helped because they were worse than I was. They were all young, and argued in Spanish and laughed around the orderly station; and the guy orderlies would tease the girl orderlies, and they all would flirt; but when they dealt with the old people they were mean and cold, as if all the old people were animals.

“Those are cool pictures,” Brian said. “They make me think of death.”

“I’m trying to draw them with some dignity. It doesn’t seem like anyone else cares,” I said.

“It’s hard, man. Who wants to care for someone who has lost his mind and motor skills and can’t take a shit without help? That’s why you have all these stupid assholes here, to wipe their asses for them.”

“But the orderlies don’t care about these people.”

“No shit, becausethey have to wipe their asses and change their bedpans and listen to their insanity everyday; we only have to be here twice a week. Imagine if you were here every day.”

“I hope I die before I ever come to a place like this,” I said. Brian said I probably would because I smoked cigarettes.

I drew one woman more than all the others. Her name was Tanya. I liked her because of her smile and her eyes. That was all, she wasn’t any smarter or more coherent than the rest of the old people. She just radiated kindness.

I’d draw her in all different ways. Her face with its cross crinkles, like bunched cloth around her eyes; her mouth: wrinkly soft from so much smiling. I’d draw her full-bodied; grinning in her wheelchair, sitting over the beads that she would thread and drop, which bounced, sharp-sounding, on the floor; or in the TV room, hunched in her sweater: birdlike, brittle, her chair angled slightly away from the television because she wasn’t really watching. And her smile always like a child’s.

One Thursday, during craft time, when they were all coloring with their crayons, I placed two of the drawings I had made of Tanya on the table in front of her. Tanya was working on a red house; the jagged red scribbles shot all over the page and into the blue mountain she had drawn in the background. When I put the pictures down she stopped with the crayon. The color was called “Watermelon.” She looked at my pictures. They were good; one was of her face and caught her warmth, the other was a picture of her in her chair, hunched and staring at nothing. She picked one up and then the other, and then she cooed.

“Ooooh, these are nice, very nice. I don’t play with games, but I like this so much. My daughter come, and she walk good.” Then Tanya put them down and was drawing again. I thought she had already forgotten about me, but as she was going over the jagged marks of the barn with Watermelon, she said, “I’m drawing a barn. The place I grew up in when I was a little girl. My daddy said, when peacetime come to the horses, then we all sleep. Sleep, sleep good, you think?” And then she stopped drawing and looked at me like she wanted an answer.

“Sure,” I said, “sure,” and she smiled and all the warmth I liked came into her face, and then she went back to drawing.

The next day was Friday. In auto class Barry said his parents were leaving for some Mormon thing and he was thinking about a get-together at his house that night, not a party but a group of people to celebrate the full harvest of his plant. I said I would think about it, but I knew it would be him and April all over each other.

After school I went to the Art League like I usually did on my days away from the Towers. I had a class from four to seven and another from seven to ten. It was me and a bunch of older people and one young Asian girl who was pretty good. There was one model per class. In the early class the model was a guy named Ogden who was about fifty-five; his body was muscular but his skin hung a little loose. The teacher, Mr. Wilson, walked around with his gray beard and bald head, and denim shirt tucked into his jeans. He would lean over and give suggestions to people.

I was drawing in a different way than I usually did. Usually I would try to be as exact as possible, like a Renaissance painter, but all that seemed like bullshit suddenly. The drawings of Tanya did something to me. I think I had really captured her, they were my best drawings, but it didn’t mean anything. Everything was changing, things felt different, but I wasn’t sure why. I was drawing Ogden in a much looser way than I usually did. Usually I would just do one drawing per pose, but I was doing five to ten and letting them drop on the floor. Mr. Wilson stood next to me and held his chin in his hand.

“Going fast. Really fast,” he said. I said I was and kept drawing.

“You know, Picasso drew fast,” he said. “He could draw a dove in sixteen seconds, and they’re great, right?”

“The doves? Yes.”

“But that sixteen seconds had six decadesof work behind it,” he said, then he dropped his hand from his chin and smiled through his beard. Most of the other students had heard him because he talked pretty loudly, and they all approved of his wise observation, grunting and saying, “Ahhh,” and “Oh, how true, how true it is.” Wilson went on: “Picasso started off painting in a classical style, but it was only after he had masteredthe mastersthat he broke tradition and became Picasso. He knew he had all the skill of Raphael at age sixteen, but that wasn’t enough. Technical skill is never enough. He needed to find his voice. We all have a voice or a style, but it takes practice, practice to find it. The technical stuff needs to become second nature.” Everyone agreed with this part too. Wilson said quietly to me, “You remind me of Sylvester Stallone.” I stopped drawing. Wilson went on: “I used to go to art classes with him. He was always trying to break away from classical form.”

One of the ladies spoke up. “Sylvester Stallone, the actor?”

“That’s right. He’s a huge art enthusiast and not a bad artist either.” Everyone was surprised and talked about it for a bit. Someone said that underneath all that muscle he was actually a really intelligent guy. “He did write Rocky,after all.”

During the Stallone discussion, Ogden held his pose. I tried not to listen and draw, but something had gone out of me. I picked up a few of the drawings that had dropped to the floor. They looked like a kid’s drawings, except they were of a naked man.

In the second class we had a woman, Beth. She was about forty and large: her breasts hung heavy and low so that the skin stretched thin at the top of them, and her belly had folds. She was great for drawing, but I wasn’t in the mood. Wilson had killed my motivation for the fast drawings, but I didn’t have the patience to do it the old meticulous way either. I wanted to leave but I didn’t know where I wanted to go. I just drew her belly and shaded it and went over it again and again until it wasn’t any good. I thought about bodies decaying and my own life shriveling.

Wilson was going on about his near-death experience again. He had had open-heart surgery six months before and almost died. He loved to talk about it, and the ladies and old guys loved to hear it.

“. . . It’s true. I don’t care how much attention we devote to the bodyin here, I knowthere is a spirit, I experiencedit. Whatever it is that makes me mehad lifted away from this earthbound state and I was on my way, I was on my way.” He was laughing at his own enthusiasm and some of the women were laughing too; a few had stopped drawing to listen. “Excuse me, Beth, for talking about the body so much while you’re posing for us, but I think we should all think about this whilewe draw the body. The body is the vehicle for the spirit.We can’t draw the spirit, we can only draw physical things, but throughthose physical things you might be able to intimate something of the spirit underneath. At least try,don’t just draw Beth, draw her soul. Because it’s there.I am telling you, when I was going toward that light, something said, ‘Cy, nope. Nope, nope, nope, you’re getting a first-class tickeroo back to earth, you better do good by it.’”

Usually I liked Wilson, but he seemed different now, like a clown. After class, I stuffed all my drawings into a trash can. Beth came out of the bathroom with clothes on and saw me trashing the drawings of her. She was wearing blue sweatpants and a black hooded sweatshirt like she was a regular person. She didn’t say anything.

Instead of going home, I started walking toward Barry’s house. I didn’t care if April was there, I was ready to get high and not think about anything. The night was cold and I hunched with my hands in my pockets and my sketchbook under my arm, and there was a low orange moon, almost full, and huge because it was so low. And I didn’t care.

I got to Barry’s a little after ten thirty; I walked through the ivy-lined pathway on the side of the house, and the heart-shaped leaves against my face were cold. At the back of the house the curtain was closed behind the sliding glass door that led to Barry’s room. I heard voices and I tapped lightly. Barry’s sea lion face appeared, scruffy and round. When he saw it was me he smiled and slid open the door.

“Welcome, motherfucker,” he said. It was warm and dark inside. He had his lights off and his blacklight on, so the Zeppelin poster and the Crumb KEEP ON TRUCKIN’… poster were glowing in bright greens and pinks. On the floor there were about eight people sitting in a circle.

“Teddy,” someone said, “siddown and get ready for the magic carpet ride.” I sat down and I saw that it was Bill. He put his arm around me for a second and squeezed my shoulder. He must have been excited because that was a lot of talking and touching for him. Fred was also there, and Ed, and Ivan, and Ute, and Jack Canter, and Tim Astor. No girls; no April. Barry continued packing his green three-foot bong.