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“I paint some too,” Dream Dog said when I stopped to exam-ine the signature. “Animals mostly. Dogs and cats and ducks. I told Axel that he could have some of my drawings when he got tired’a this stuff.”
It was a large bedroom. The oversized bed seemed like a raft on a wide river of blue carpet. The sheets and covers were a jaundiced yellow and the windows looked out under a broad redwood that dominated the backyard.
A newspaper, the Chronicle, was folded at the foot of the bed.
The date was March 29.
There were whiskey glasses at the side of the unmade bed.
They also had the sheen of dried liquor. The pillows smelled sweetly, of a powerful perfume. I had the feeling that vigorous sex had transpired there before the end, but that might have been some leftover feeling I had about Maya Adamant.
The room was so large that it had its own dressing nook. I thought that this was a very feminine touch for a man, but then maybe the previous owners had been a couple and this was the woman’s corner.
There was an empty briefcase next to the cushioned brown hassock that sat there between three mirrors. Next to the handle was a shiny brass nameplate that had the initials ANB stamped on it.
There was a bottle of cologne on the little dressing table; it smelled nothing like those pillows.
“Axel entertain a lot?” I asked my hippie guide.
“Oh man,” Dream Dog said. “I seen three, four women in here at the same time. Axel gets down. And he shares the wealth too. Sometimes he calls me in and we all get so high that nobody knows who’s doin’ what to who — if you know what I mean.”
I did not really know and felt no need for clarification.
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The dressing table had three drawers. One contained two plastic bags of dried leaves, marijuana by the smell of them. Another drawer held condoms and various lubricants. The bottom drawer held a typed letter, with an official heading, from a man named Haffernon. There was also a handwritten envelope with Axel’s name scrawled on it. There was no stamp or address or postmark on that letter.
“I’m going to take these letters,” I said to my escort. “Maybe I can get to Axel or Cinnamon through somebody here.”
“But you’re gonna leave the dope?” Dream Dog sounded almost disappointed.
“I’m not a thief, brother.”
The little white man smiled and I realized that his attitude toward me was different from that of most whites. He was protect-ing his friend from invasion, but this had nothing to do with my being black. That was a rare experience for me at that time.
There was an empty teacup on the dressing table too. It was also dried up. From the smell I knew that it had been a very strong brew.
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When we were back out on the sidewalk I felt as if a weight had been taken off of me. Something about the house, how it seemed as if it were frozen into a snapshot, made me feel that something sudden and violent had occurred.
“You spend a lot of time with Bowers?” I asked the hippie.
“He gives these big old dinners and your cousin’s always there with some other straights from over in Frisco. Axel buys real good wine in big bottles and has Hannah’s Kitchen make a vegetarian feast.”
Dream Dog was around thirty, but he looked older because of the facial hair and skin weathered by many days and nights outside.
I was smoking Parliaments at that time. I offered him one and he took it. I lit us both up and we stood there on Derby surrounded by all kinds of hippies and music and multicolored cars.
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“We trip a lot,” Dream Dog said.
“What’s that?”
“Drop acid.”
“What kind of acid?” I asked.
“LSD. Where you from? We drop acid. We trip.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see. You do drugs together.”
“Not drugs, man,” Dream Dog said with disdain. “Acid. Drugs close down your mind. They put you to sleep. Acid opens your crown chakra. It lets God leak in — or the devil.”
I didn’t know very much about psychedelics back then. I’d heard about the “acid test” that they gave at certain clubs up on Sunset Strip but that wasn’t my hangout. I knew my share of heroin addicts, glue sniffers, and potheads. But this sounded like something else.
“What happens when you drop?” I asked.
“Trip,” he said, correcting my usage.
“Okay. What happens?”
“This one time it was really weird. He played an album by Yusef Lateef. Rite of Spring but in a jazz mode. And there was this chick there named Polly or Molly . . . somethin’ like that.
And we all made love and ate some brownies that she was sellin’
door-to-door. I remember this one moment when me and Axel were each suckin’ on a nipple and I felt like I was a baby and she was as big as the moon. I started laughin’ and I wanted to go off in the corner but I had to crawl because I was a baby and I didn’t know how to walk yet.”
Dream Dog was back in the hallucination. His snaggletoothed grin was beatific.
“What did Axel do?” I asked.
“That’s when his bad trip started,” Dream Dog said. His smile faded. “He remembered something about his dad and that made 7 0
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him mad. It was his dad and two of his dad’s friends. He called them vulture-men feeding off of carrion. He ran around the ashram swinging this stick. He knocked out this tooth’a mines right here.” Dream Dog flipped up his lip and pointed at the gap.
“Why was he so mad?” I asked.
“It’s always somethin’ inside’a you,” the hippie explained. “I mean it’s always there but you never look at it, or maybe on the trip you see what you always knew in a new way.
“After he knocked me down Polly put her arms around him and kissed his head. She kept tellin’ him that things were gonna be fine, that he could chase the vultures away and bury the dead . . .”
“And he calmed down?”
“He went into a birth trip, man. All the way back to the fetus in the womb. He went through the whole trip just like as if he was being born again. He came out and started cryin’ and me and Polly held him. But then she an’ me were holdin’ each other and before you know it we’re makin’ love again. But by then Axel was sitting up and smiling. He told us that he had been given a plan.”
“What plan?”
“He didn’t say,” Dream Dog said, shaking his head and smiling. “But he was happy and we all went to sleep. We slept for twenty-four hours and when we woke up Axel was all calm and sure. That was when he started doin’ all’a that travelin’ and stuff.”
“How long ago was that?” I asked.
“A year maybe. A little more.”
“Around the time his father died?” I asked.
“Now that you say it . . . yeah. His father died two weeks before — that’s why we did acid.”
“And where is this Polly or Molly?”
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“Her? I dunno, man. She was goin’ from door to door sellin’
brownies. Axel an’ me were ready to trip and we asked her if she wanted to join in. Axel told her that if she did he’d buy all’a her brownies.”
“But I thought you said that you were at this other place.
Asham?”
“Ashram,” Dream Dog said. “That’s the prayer temple that Axel built out behind the trees in his backyard. That’s his holy place.”
“Where do you live?” I asked Dream Dog.
“On this block mainly.”