When he looks up at the fog he’s still seeing stars.
How will he explain this to Sungaard?
He’s penniless again.
He staggers bent over to the van and climbs in.
35
Matt, Laurel, and Julie climb the canyon path from Dodge City toward Sycamore Flats on Sunday afternoon, where the Summer of Eternal Love is in full swing.
Matt has spent most of Thursday in bed, icing his aching gonads on the advice of Christian. Then Friday and Saturday traipsing the city with Laurel, knocking on what seemed like ten thousand doors. They learned not one thing about where Jasmine might be; got not a hint or sense of her. It felt more like she’d been beamed light years away, like in that stupid new TV show. Late last night, dropping Laurel off at home, Matt has grasped the terrible possibility that their mission will fail and he’ll never see his sister alive again. Maybe at all.
Today Julie wears another of her mother’s hand-sewn prairie dresses, this one a periwinkle blue, and her old lace-up granny boots with the low heels. Her hair is brushed into a mane of dark curls. Laurel has a tie-dye dress, huaraches, and a straw fedora for the sun.
Matt flops along in the black, slightly too-big Converse high-tops and his new-used shorts, and a very cool T-shirt with a faded Disraeli Gears album graphic front and back. His nuts still hurt from the Hessians, but the ice has helped.
Not only that, but this morning’s paper-route collection got him his twice-monthly twelve dollars and fifty cents, and four dollars in tips for good service! Food for days. And maybe a week or two of campground rent. No more financial worries for now.
He does feel gutless and guilty for coming to this BEL “experience” rather than pressing forward with his search for his sister. She’s a prisoner and he’s going to a party. He and Laurel still have hundreds of homes and apartments to deal with. Their search is going slower than he thought it would. He says as much to his mother.
She takes his hand as they walk. “I’m guilty too, Matt, but we can take this time for ourselves, and I’ll tell you why. This event is supposed to be a celebration of love. Let’s celebrate everyone we love, and keep them in our hearts, and prepare ourselves for the days to come. We’re going to find her. Someone will talk. Someone will see her. Something will fall into place. Who knows, we might even get a miracle.”
It might take a miracle, he thinks.
It’s hot and the traffic on Laguna Canyon Road is jammed to a stop, with hundreds of cars parked in both directions as far as Matt can see. He hears Tim Leary’s amplified voice, and the band tuning up, and the war protesters hollering Hell no! We won’t go! over and over as police and news helicopters hover and circle.
People stream like ants along the trails leading up to the meadow, lugging blankets and pup tents and folding chairs and coolers. Many of them have their hot-fuchsia-and-Day-Glo-green invitations out and ready.
Julie has hers in her hippie bag and Matt’s is folded up in his pocket. He doesn’t know what to expect of this “experience,” though Johnny Grail told him it would be mind-blowing.
Scampering up from behind them, a wild-eyed man with a Superman cape and a batch of invitations takes Matt’s arm and whispers into his ear. He says that the orange suns in the upper left corner of the invitations have actually been dipped in pure Orange Sunshine LSD by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and when Johnny Grail says “do it now,” everybody is supposed to tear off the corner and eat it.
“Really?” asks Julie. “How clever!”
“I can sell you three for ten dollars.”
“No thank you, I’ve got mine in the bag.”
“I just heard Dylan’s on his way.”
Superman races ahead. Matt sure hopes Superman is hallucinating because he, Matt, has delivered 250 of those invitations, making him guilty of felony drug distribution. Johnny wouldn’t pull that on him, would he?
Sitting in the Mystic Arts World office that morning, Johnny Grail told Matt that the Hessians were a new motorcycle club that had just started up in nearby Costa Mesa. Very violent, uncool people. Grail knew some of them from his Anaheim street-fighting days. From before he saw God on his first LSD experience and decided to found a church where worshippers could take acid and hear God speak personally to them, too.
The Hessians had been trying to buy large amounts of Orange Sunshine LSD from him for weeks and he had refused. He could barely get enough Orange Sunshine for his congregation, let alone to sell in quantity to a biker gang.
Johnny had then given Matt a sly wink and a gravelly cackle of laughter. But he had turned serious when confiding to Matt that someone had betrayed the BEL and Marlon Sungaard, and that this Judas would be discovered and punished severely. And no, Johnny had not left one dime at Main Beach for the fucking Hessians. The Brotherhood would have four sentries staying at Mystic Arts World after hours, every day from now on until the Hessians backed off. Johnny said most of the brothers had guns and knew how to use them.
At Sycamore Flats the trails converge under a big archway of scaffolding and four-by-fours. A fuchsia-and-Day-Glo-green plywood sign announces:
By its enormity and the way the psychedelic letters seem to move with a life of their own, Matt can tell that Christian painted it. He sees Christian pointing up at it with a little crowd around him, maybe explaining how he did it.
Cops and deputies and plenty of scruffy narcs are clustered at the entrance. Patrol cars and vans and of course Moby Cop. Matt sees Furlong and Brigit Darnell, both in plainclothes.
Chain-link screens and K-rail barricades have been set up to funnel the crowd into the meadow. There are dozens of trash cans under Christian’s sign.
Matt reads the notice as they approach the entrance:
Matt looks into one of the trash cans, sees the ounce-bags and half-pound bundles of weed, scores of tablets of Orange Sunshine, squares of blotter acid with the cartoon of Truckin’ Man printed on, foil-ball mysteries, red, yellow, blue, and two-toned pills, bottles of liquor and wine and beer, baggies of powdered and glistening black shit he can’t even guess the contents of. The trash can is three-quarters full and it’s only one of at least a dozen — maybe more. Around a freshly dug ditch short of the entrance, people are swilling alcohol, then pouring the remnants onto the ground rather than surrender it to the cops, and others toss pills and shake magic mushrooms and peyote buttons loose from baggies, while dogs lap up the concoction and the feral boys from Dodge City form drug-and-alcohol mudballs and throw them at each other.
“Twenty-five thousand idiot hippies here today, and you have to be one of them,” says Furlong, straddling the entrance.
Matt shrugs.
Julie rifles through her bag with an air of annoyance and drops two fat joints into a trash can.
“Is that all?” asks Furlong.
He’s got his aviator sunglasses on and he’s wearing jeans and a yellow Hawaiian shirt with hula dancers. Matt sees the sidearm bulge.
“Oh, hi Bill,” says Julie. “Groovy shirt.”
“What else is in the hippie bag?”
“Just water and my invite and some apples.”
She holds the bag open and Furlong looks in.
“What about you, Matt? Anything to declare?”