“It gets better.”
As we passed them, she showed me the lounges for the performers. They looked like airport lounges or something, sort of plush but impersonal. Very soundproofed. I suddenly began to notice how everything off the corridors was soundproofed.
Then we came into another room, marked STUDIO A. Shock: it was like a heavy living room. Persian carpets on the floor, hangings on the walls, colors and textures. “Like a very nice cathouse,” I said.
“Close,” she said. And out came another joint. She lit up as I wandered around the room. There were microphones everywhere, and a stand for guitars, and a piano in the corner. I sat down at the piano.
“Do you play?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“You play anything?”
I shook my head, and plunked out “Chopsticks.” She laughed, and then said, “Stay there,” and left the room. I walked around, breathing in the luxury, and then began to drift into the sense of working with my group, the cigarettes and the quiet talk and everybody getting together, getting their heads and fingers loosened…
“Hello,” she said. Her voice was funny. I turned around and saw the drapes pulling back to reveal a glass wall, and her behind the glass, staring in at me. The lights in the other room were overhead, harsh and funny. I could see the room was filled with recording equipment, decks and spools and dials and consoles; she was wearing earphones. A flash on the mechanical sense: there was money in all this, and manufactured products, industry just like everywhere else. The flash faded. She made a gesture for me to go toward the microphone.
I tapped it. “Is this thing working?” I heard my own voice, from speakers mounted somewhere in the room. It was working.
“We, uh, just want to play a few numbers that we know well, because we’ve never played together before.”
She knew where that line came from, and she smiled. I began to get into it.
“My name is, uh, Lucifer Harkness…”
Something happened. The voice was warbling as it came back to me. She was flicking buttons. I laughed. “What’re you doing to me?”
Now it was echoing, Doing to me, to me, to me, me.
“Yeah, well, actually…”
This time it was thin, high, squeaky, if your memory served you well. It startled me. “This is getting to be a drag,” I said. I wanted to play something, now was the perfect time to be able to do it, but I didn’t know how. It was finally hitting home, the foolishness of it, that I couldn’t even do simple chords on a guitar, I couldn’t do anything. Hopeless. I began to get depressed, and she must have sensed it, because she suddenly came around, opening the studio door, and led me out of there.
“It’s because the place is deserted,” she said. “Empty buildings are always depressing.” She smiled and squeezed my hand.
23
SHE CAME TO THE HEARING with me. I had a clean shirt and tie and I stood up straight for the judge. She sat in the back of the hearing room; I glanced back once to look at her.
The judge asked me if my legal rights had been properly attended to, since I didn’t have a public defendant by my side. I didn’t mention to the judge that I’d been through that whole riff before and it was a drag, because the P.D. doesn’t give a screw about what happens to you, he just wants to look good in front of the judge. So I told the judge that everything had been taken care of, but that in this instance I preferred to defend myself. The judge looked a little amused and a little pleased at that, and told me to proceed.
My defense was pretty weak, but logical. It included such helpful hints as the fact that I was scheduled to leave California the next day, providing I didn’t get hung up in jail and cost the good taxpayers additional expense. I also said that I had no relationship with the primary defendant in the case, i.e., the lid of dope, and that I considered it a freak accident that did not merit my bearing the weight of its consequences any more than I already had.
The judge replied that I had a sharp, clever, and discerning mind, but that I obviously knew nothing about the law. Which, he added, meant nothing, since all charges had been dropped by the D.A.’s office, and if I would speak to the clerk before leaving the courtroom, I was free to go.
I was pleasantly dazed. I thanked the judge, who told me not to thank him, and I left.
Sukie laughed as we walked out the door.
24
THE NEXT DAY WE WENT up to Tilden, very early, to watch the sun come up over the Bay. It was cold and dark when we arrived, and we huddled under a blanket drinking Red Mountain and feeling the dry warmth spread outwards. From the top of the ridge you could see everything, Oakland and Berkeley below, and Richmond and Mt. Tamalpais in the distance.
Around six-thirty some freaks showed up and did a dance to greet the morning, while the mists slowly disappeared below and the sun spilled across the Bay. And then suddenly it was time to leave, to return to the world of cars and sewage systems and plane schedules and Burger Kings. We went directly to her room and got in bed, blowing dope and drawing each moment out, as if we could forestall evening.
Late in the afternoon I went downstairs to find Musty, who was in the kitchen, where I’d first seen him. He was drinking jasmine tea, smoking a butt, and selling a couple of bricks to a fantastic-looking thirty-five-year-old chick. The chick split when I showed, taking the bricks with her in an alligator handbag.
“You see?” Musty said, as she left. “All types.” Then he grinned. “Look at the ass on her. Beautiful.” He sighed, got up, and brought out my ten bricks. “Listen man,” he said, “I’m sorry about Lou. He’s a little speedy, you know. Bad scene. Does up three bags a day.”
“What the hell,” I said, feeling magnanimous. “Past tense.”
Musty glanced at me as he set the scales on two pounds even and weighed the bricks, one by one. “You’re a good head, Harkness,” he said. “I can dig why Sukie balls you.” I didn’t really feel like talking about that. “Got a knife?” he said.
I gave him my Swiss Army job and he sliced the bricks open. They cut clean through, no rocks, no clay, practically no sticks. They were righteous keys, all right. “Dig the way the blade goes through?” he said. I nodded.
I’d already tasted the dope, so there was nothing left to do but soak the bricks in Coca-Cola for a minute, so they wouldn’t smell too bad, and wrap them up. Then into my aluminum-lined suitcase and do up both sets of locks. The ten bricks fit very nicely without shaking or banging when I picked up the suitcase.
Musty held out a hand. “Be cool,” he said, “and say hello to John for me.”
I went back down the hall, heading for the staircase to say goodbye to Sukie. I dreaded going up those stairs and then down again, but I found her standing in front of the door, raincoat over her shoulder.
“I’ve got to drop the car at the airport,” I said.
She nodded.
“How’re you going to—”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said.
I already had my ticket, so when we got to the airport we just stood around and made each other uncomfortable until they announced boarding for my flight. I kissed her quickly. We were standing underneath a billboard that said GET AWAY FROM IT ALL. I considered taking a later flight and calling John to say I’d gotten stuck in traffic, but the truth was that the East was seeping back into my brain again, the East and Boston and wet roads and hour exams. I knew I had to go.
She kissed me again. “Will I see you…” She stopped.
“Sure,” I said, squeezing her. “Sure, of course you will.” I was definitely getting back into my Eastern frame of mind, I realized, complete with an enormous paranoia about departure scenes and weeping chicks.