She looked at him with half a frown and half a smile. "I still don't get it."
"I'm doing fieldwork to establish a context for my research. On the drug culture-the, uh, the counterculture. Trying to get an angle on how hallucinogen use affects people's outlook. "
He moistened his lips. "It's really exciting. There's a whole world I never knew existed-here." A nervous tic encompassed the Onion's smoky confines. "But somehow I can't really, well, make contact. I've bought all the Grateful Dead records, but I still feel like an outsider. I-I almost feel I'd like to be part of this whole hippie thing."
"Hippie?" she said with a patrician snort. "Mark, where've you been? It's 1969. The hippie movement's been dead for two years." She shook her head. "Have you actually done any of these drugs you're trying to study?"
He flushed. "No…. uh-I'm not ready to get to that stage. "
"Poor Mark. You're so uptight. Looks as if I'm going to have my work cut out for me, trying to show you what it is that's happening, Mr. Jones."
The reference skimmed his flattop, but suddenly his face brightened and his nose and cheekbones and whatnot went in happy directions, and he showed his horsy teeth. "You mean you'll help me?" He grabbed her hand, snatched his fingers away as if afraid they'd leave marks. "You'll show me around?" She nodded.
"Great!" He picked up the teacup, clinked it against an upper tooth, realized it was empty and clacked it down again. "I've been wondering why-that is, I-well, you've never, ah, talked to me like this before."
She took one of his hands in both of hers and he thought his heart would stop. "Oh, Mark," she said, tenderly, even. "Always the analytical one. It's just that since my eyes have been opened, I've realized that everyone's beautiful in his own way, except the pigs who oppress the people. And I see youstill straight. But you haven't sold out, man. I can tell; I can read it in your aura. You're still the same old Mark."
His head whirled like a carousel out of control. Cynical, his left brain tossed up the hypothesis that she was homesick, that he was part of a childhood and past she had cut herself off from, perhaps, too completely. He brushed it aside. She was Kimberly Ann, invulnerable, unapproachable. Any minute now she'd recognize him for the impostor he was.
She didn't. They talked on into the night-or rather, she talked and he listened, wanting to believe but still unable to. When the band took a long-overdue break, somebody cued up side one of Destiny's new album on the sound system. The gestalt burned itself irrevocably in: darkness and colored lights playing in the hair and face of the most beautiful woman in his world, and behind it the husky baritone of Tom Marion Douglas singing of love and death and dislocation, of elder gods and destinies best not hinted at. It changed him, that night. But he didn't know yet.
He was almost too surfeited with wonder to be elated or even surprised when, halfway through the band's exiguous second set, Kimberly stood up suddenly, clutching his hand.
"This is getting to be a drag. These guys don't know where it's at. Why don't you come over to my pad, drink a little wine, get a little high?" Her eyes challenged, and there was a bit of that old haughtiness, the old ice, as she pulled on waffle-stomper boots with red laces. "Or are you too straight for that?"
He felt as if he had a cotton ball sitting in the middle of his tongue. "Ah, I-no. I'd be more than happy to."
"Far out. There's hope for you yet."
In a daze Mark followed her out of the club, to a liquor store with a massive sliding San Quentin grating over the windows, where a balding pasty-faced proprietor sold them a bottle of Ripple under a gaze of fish-eyed distaste. Mark was a virgin. He had his fantasies, the Playboy magazines with their pages stuck together stacked among the scientific papers under the tumbledown bed in his apartment on the fringes of Chinatown. But not even in fantasy did he ever dare to imagine himself coupled with the resplendent Kimberly Ann. And now-he drifted the streets as if weightless, barely noticing the freaks and street people who exchanged greetings with Sunflower as they passed.
And he barely noticed on the rickety backstairs when Sunflower said, "… eet my old man. You'll love him; he's a really heavy dude."
Then the words crunched into his brain like a lead mallet. He stumbled. Kimberly caught him by the arm, laughing. "Poor Mark. Always so uptight. Come on, we're almost there."
So he wound up in this little one-lung apartment with a hot plate and a leaky faucet in the bathroom. By one wall a salvaged mattress with a madras-print coverlet rested on a door propped on cinder blocks. Crosslegged on the spread beneath a giant poster of the beatified Che sat Philip, Sunflower's Old Man. He was dark-eyed and intense, a black tee shirt stretched over his brawny chest with a blood-red fist and the word Huelga lettered under it. He was watching clips of a demonstration on a little rumpsprung portable TV with a coat-hanger aerial.
"Right on," he was saying as they came in. "The Lizard King has his head together. These clean-for-Gene work-withinthe-system aces like Turtle don't know what it's all about: confrontation with fascist Amerika. Who the fuck are you?" After Sunflower took him off to one corner and explained to him in a fierce whisper that Mark was not a police spy but an old, old friend, and don't embarrass me, asshole, he consented to shake Mark's hand. Mark craned past him at the TV; the bearded face of the man now being interviewed looked familiar somehow.
"Who's that?" he asked.
Philip lifted a lip corner. "Tom Douglas, of course. Lead singer for Destiny. The Lizard King." He scanned Mark from flattop to penny loafers. "Or maybe you've never heard of him."
Mark blinked, said nothing. He knew of Destiny and Douglas-as research he'd just bought their new album, Black Sunday, plain maroon cover dominated by a huge black sun. He was too embarrassed to say so.
Sunflower's eyes went faraway. "You should have seen him today at the demonstration. Facing down the pigs as the Lizard King. Truly far out."
Amenities out of the way, the two of them broke out a contrivance of glass and rubber tubing, tamped its bowl full of dope, and lit up. Had Sunflower by herself offered Mark the grass, he would have accepted. But now he was feeling strange and alien again, as if his skin didn't fit him right, and he refused. He slouched in the corner next to a pile of Daily Workers while his host and hostess sat on the bed and smoked dope and stocky intense Philip lectured him about the Necessity for Armed Struggle until he thought his head was going to fall off, and he drank the whole bottle of sickly sweet wine by himself-he didn't drink, either-and finally Kimberly began to snuggle up close to her Old Man and fondle him in a way that made Mark distinctly uneasy, and he mumbled excuses and stumbled out and somehow found his way home. As the first light of dawn drooled in the windows of his own dingy flat, he regurgitated the contents of the Ripple bottle into his cracked porcelain toilet, and it took him fifteen flushes to get it clear again.
So began Mark's courtship of Sunflower, nee Kimberly Ann Cordayne.
"I want you…" The words spilled across the wind, insolent, suggestive, the voice like molten amber with a whiskey edge for all the New Year's-noisemaker quality of the little Jap transistor. Wojtek Grabowski pulled his windbreaker tighter over his wide chest and tried not to hear.
The crane reared back like a zombie dinosaur, swayed a girder toward him. He gestured to the operator with exaggerated underwater moves. "I want you.." the voice insisted. He felt a flash of irritation. "A blast from the past-1966, and Destiny's first hit song," the announcer had warbled in his professional-adolescent voice. These Americans, Wojtek thought, they think 1966 is ancient history.
"Turn off that boogie-woogie shit," somebody growled. "Fuck you," the radio's owner said. He was twenty years old, two meters tall, and six months out of 'Nam. Marine. Khe Sanh. The argument ended.