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.
Grabowski wished the boy would turn the radio off, but he didn't like to push himself forward. He was tolerated-a solid worker, who could drink the strongest man on-site under the table of a Friday night. But he kept to himself.
As the girder came down and the crew swarmed up to fix it in place and the cold wind off the bay drilled through thin nylon and aging skin, he thought how strange it was to find himself here-him, the middle child of a prosperous Warsaw household, the small sickly one, the studious. He was going to be a doctor, a professor. His brother Kliment-half envied, wholly admired, big, bold, dashing, with a cavalryman's black mustache-was going into the Officers' Academy, was going to be a hero.
Then the Germans came. Kliment was shot in the back of the head by the Red Army in Katyn Wood. Sister Katja disappeared into the field-brothels of the Wehrmacht. Mother died in the last bombardment of Warsaw, while the Soviets squatted on the Vistula and let the Nazis do their dirty work for them. Father, a minor government functionary, outlived the war a few months before collecting his own bullet in the back of the neck, purged by the puppet Lublin regime.
Young Wojtek, dreams of university forever shattered, spent six and a half years as a partisan in the woods, ended them a fugitive, exiled to a foreign land with only a single hope to keep his blood beating.
"I want you." The repetition was beginning to grate on him. He'd grown up with Mozart and Mendelssohn. And the message… This was no love song, it was a lust song-an invitation to rut.
Love meant more to him-a moment of cool moisture, sluicing across his vision, wiped away by the wind's chill hand. He remembered marrying Anna, his partisan girl, in what the Stukas had left of a village church, and afterward the priest himself had hitched up his threadbare cassock and played Bach's Toccata and Fugue on the organ, miraculously intact, while a starveling girl crouched to work the bellows. Next day they'd lie in ambush for the fascists, but that night, that night…
Another girder rose. Anna had left before him, smuggled out by helpful British operatives in June of 1945, bound for America with their child in her womb. He fought as long as he could, then followed.
Now he dwelt in a land he loved almost as a lover. He had nothing else. In twenty-three years he had found no sign of the woman he loved and the child she must have borne. Though, sweet Mary, how he'd searched.
"I waaaaaant you."
He shut his eyes. If I must endure that banal lyric one more time. ".. to die with me."
The music diminuendoed in an eerie wail. For a moment he stood very still, as if the wind had turned the sweat to ice within his shirt. What had seemed a mere syrup confection was infinitely more-more evil. Here was a man, anointed spokesman of youth, for whom the blandishments ou love or even lust-were degraded into a totentanz, a ritual of death.