“I’m clean.”
“Attaboy.” Furlong lifts his dark shades and gives Laurel an appraising look.
“And you, Miss Kalina?”
“No drugs, no drinks. Is Dylan really coming?”
“I wouldn’t bet on that. But I did hear that the Dead are on their way. If they live long enough to get here.”
Furlong lowers his glasses with a puzzling smile and they pass into the crowded meadow redolent with the smells of coastal sage and marijuana. Julie stops and takes her son by the hand, then Laurel’s too.
“I’d like to give you some good news, Matt. And you too, Laurel. My good news is no more dope. No more dragon balls, pills, nothing. I threw them all away. Everything but a little pot. I was having a problem will all that hard stuff, and now I’m better. I’m done. I’m clean.”
This is news to Matt, but is it true?
He and Laurel trade looks and Matt sees optimism and belief in her. He wishes he had Laurel’s sunny trust in people and belief that prayer works and things happen for a reason.
“Anyway, that’s my news.”
“It’s great, Mom.”
“And look at yourself,” his mother says. “Inches taller and pounds heavier than you were just minutes ago! You are growing up beautifully. I’ll remember this moment the rest of my life.”
Laurel squeezes his upper arm.
He does, in fact, feel much taller with Julie and Laurel by his side. Thinks: I’m pushing six feet.
With this alleged good news from his mother, Matt feels a noticeable lightening inside too, the lifting of a weight. Which makes him feel even taller. The weight also feels like it could drop back into him, fast. Can she really beat opium?
He puts an arm around her shoulder, and the other around Laurel’s, feels protective and proud to be here, towering over them.
Wishes in his unsettled heart that Jazz was here too.
Buddy Miles and his band are cranking a Hendrix song, and the sea of bodies sways. Beneath the sycamores that line the meadow’s edges, Matt sees half-hidden smokers, needle-shooters, snorters, fondlers and fornicators in sleeping bags and under blankets; and wandering naked people, dogs, small children, and Superman, still hawking his phony LSD invites. A naked woman canters on a white horse, followed by air-brushed nudists in rainbow colors. Matt isn’t sure he can trust his eyes but a writhing woman with a huge stomach seems to be giving birth while splayed out on a blue bath towel in the tan grass. Officer Brigit Darnell — in a yellow sundress, her hair freed from its restrictive braid into a single thick ponytail — kneels to help with the delivery. A biplane trails a banner for Rosemary’s Baby.
When the band takes a break, Matt hears the protesters outside starting up their chanting again.
Hell no! We Won’t go!
Make Love Not War!
Kill Hate Not Babies!
We Won’t Fight the Rich Man’s War!
Timothy Leary and Johnny Grail take the stage, leaning in close together and trading off amplified exhortations to the crowd.
“Feel God’s love!” Johnny screams out, spreading his arms, smiling and squinting up at the sun.
It looks to Matt that almost everyone in the crowd is waving an invite in the air, some of them waving handfuls of them. Fuchsia and green flash in the hot, hazy canyon air. If Superman is right, Matt thinks, this is going to be one giant hallucination about an hour from whenever Johnny Grail says to feel it now.
Which he now does, loudly through the mic.
“Feel it now! Feel it now! Breathe the breath of God!”
Matt watches in disbelieving dread as thousands of people eat the Orange Sunshine corner of their invites. All around him he hears the sound of paper being torn and sees hands going to mouths. A canyon full of chomping mandibles.
Julie swallows hers with a swig of water and a guilty grin.
Johnny Grail is leading mass chants now, which rise loud enough to overcome the protesters near the barricades.
Buddy Miles starts playing distorted Hendrix riffs quietly, while Leary plunks himself down center stage on a small Afghan rug and begins meditating.
Through the back-feeding mic, Grail tells a long, rambling story about the time he stole his first LSD at gunpoint because he’d heard it was such a great trip, and later that day when he’d dropped “maybe like ten doses, I saw God and my ego was demolished and I saw wonderful shapes and colors and later I saw that the secrets of the universe were totally attainable through LSD, and that I would found a church to prove it!”
Matt watches as his mother falls in with a group of hippies headed toward the stage. All tie-dye and hair, they dance as they travel. Julie is graceful, her black hair rippling in the sun, and Matt tries to believe that she’s going to be okay after all. The dancers head up the narrow trail toward a sandstone plateau called the Porch, a popular young persons’ place to watch the sunrise. Matt has been there himself, with Kyle and Jazz and friends from school. The last hundred feet are a steep climb, but once you get up there it’s a great view.
After about an hour of this, Matt senses that Superman wasn’t kidding about the Orange Sunshine on the invitations. The general level of revelry hasn’t just increased, it’s taken on a strange kind of urgency. Leary is gone and Grail’s story is finally over and a Black Panthers spokesman takes the stage and tries to get a Fuck Nixon! chant going, but Christian yanks the mic away from him and starts singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” in a good strong tenor, and the bands kicks in, and most of the crowd knows only some of the words by heart so the song dribbles into chaos after that.
Matt watches as three open-bed pickups wobble to a stop just inside the chain-link, loaded with bags of food and plastic half gallons of water.
When the crowd realizes what’s up, they charge the trucks, board them like pirates, and run off with whatever they can carry.
“I’ve had enough of this,” says Laurel, fanning herself with the fedora. “Getting weird.”
“I don’t want to leave Mom here. She ate that paper sun, whatever it was.”
“You don’t really believe it’s acid, do you?”
“Laurel, I believe it really could be.”
“She’s almost there.”
Julie is easy to follow in her periwinkle dress. She’s in about the middle of the group, arms out, dancing between the boulders as she climbs toward the Porch. Matt remembers the rattlesnakes sunning on the rocks in spring but today is too hot for them. Probably.
“We can wait for her,” says Laurel.
Another biplane cruises over the meadow, this one pulling a banner for Sea & Ski tanning lotion.
Matt sees a rush of bodies down near the entry barricades, like a mob surrounding a fight. But it’s not a fight at all, as two skinny, shirtless men emerge carrying a naked girl who is either unconscious or dead. One man has her under the arms, the other by her ankles. Out of Matt’s sight, behind the scaffolding, a siren shrieks alive.
“My God,” says Laurel.
“Probably overdosed,” says Matt, trying to see the girl’s face through her hair, and thinking of the seaweed in Bonnie Stratmeyer’s hair down at Thalia that morning.
By then Julie and her band of dancers are swirling on the Porch. There must be thirty of them, Matt thinks, remembering the deep-cut rain furrows in the sandstone and hoping his mother won’t turn an ankle.
The crowd swells. Most are on their feet, swaying in rhythm — or no rhythm at all — to the music. People are still pouring in past the drug-filled trash cans and the cops and the barricades, many of them heading straight for the crowded, trampled meadow dance floor. The band has segued into a dreamy jam that keeps changing melodies, then drifts away from any melody that Matt can follow, while the rhythm guys plunk away in a heavy groove.