I saw him standing by our stove, bent to the open door, moving his hooked hands in and out of the heat the way a man does when they're numbed so stone hard he's afraid to thaw them back to feeling. I left him alone. I peeled out of my overalls and boots and mixed Dobbs and me a drink. The guy never moved. When Betsy came downstairs she told me she had let him in because he was obviously about to freeze to death and didn't seem the slightest bit worried about the prospect.
"He says he's got something for you."
"I'll bet he does," I said and went over to talk to him. His hand was as hard as it looked, a calloused claw, beginning to turn red with the heat. In fact he was turning red all over, beginning to glow and grin.
He was about thirty-five or forty, like Bible Bill, with a lot of hard mileage in his eyes and scraggly hair on his face. But this hair was the color of berries on a holly bough, the eyes sharp and green as the leaves, merry. He said he was called – no lie! – John the Groupie, and that we had met once fifteen years ago at the Trips Festival, where I had given him something.
"I got good and turned on," he confided with a big limber-shouldered shrug, "and I guess I never been able to get turned off."
I asked him what in the dickens was he doing this far north at Christmastime with nothing on but ventilated sneaks and kneeless jeans and a Sunset Strip pink pearl-button shirt? He grinned and shrugged his carefree shrug again and told me he'd caught a ride with a hippie kid outta LA over the Grapevine, and the kid said he was headed all the way to Eugene, Oregon, so John the Groupie says, well, what the hell… never been to Oregon. Ain't that where Old Man Deboree hangs his hat? Maybe I'll go check him out. Met him once, you know, over a tab or two, ho ho.
"Besides," he added, trying to get that big red claw down a hip pocket, "I got something here I knew you'd want."
This made me back off two steps, I didn't care how carefree his shrug or merry his eye. If there was one thing I had learned in Egypt, it was Don't take nothing free, especially from ingratiating types who come on "My friend please be accept this wonderful geeft, my nation to yours, no charge" – pressing into your palm a ratty little scarab carved out of a goat pellet or something, a little hook by which the hustler can attach himself to you. And the less you want the goddamned thing he forces on you the more attached he becomes.
"I got right here," John the Groupie announced proudly, holding out a wad of white paper, "Chet Helms's phone number."
I told him I had no need for Chet Helms's phone number, that I had never needed Chet Helms's phone number, even during Chet Helms's San Fran Family Dog promoter days, hadn't even seen Chet Helms in ten years!
John stepped close, becoming intimate.
"But I mean this isn't Chet Helms's answering service, man," he made me to realize, delicately holding forth the little chit like it might have been a spindle of the purest Peruvian. "This is Chet Helms's home phone number."
"No," I said, holding both hands high and away from the offered morsel, which I wanted about as much as I wanted a goat turd or a hit off Bible Bill's bottle. "No."
John the Groupie shrugged and put it down on the coffee table.
"In case you get eyes for it later," he said.
"No." I picked it up and put it back in his hand and folded the freckled fingers over it. "No, no, no. And I'll tell you now what I have to offer: I'll give you something to eat and I'll let you sleep in my cabin, out of sight. Tomorrow I'll give you a coat and a hat and put you back on I-5, on the southbound side, with your thumb out." I fixed him with my sternest scowl. "My God, what a thing to do – just showing up at a man's place, no invitation, no sleeping bag, not even any damned socks. It's not courteous! I know it's inhospitable to turn a wayfarer out like this, but goddammit, it's discourteous to be tripping around unprepared this way."
He had to agree, smiling. "Like I said, I never been able to get turned off the trip. I guess I do get turned out a lot, though, ho ho hee."
"I don't want to hear about it," I kept on. "All I want you to know is I'm offering warmth and sustenance and a way back to Venice Beach if I don't have to listen to you run any numbers on me, savvy?"
He put the paper back in his pocket. "I savvy like a motherfucker, man. Just point me to this outasight abode."
Like I say – likable. Just your basic stringy, carrot-topped, still-down-and-it-still-looks-up-to-me acidhead flower child gone to seed. Probably no dope he hasn't tried and, what's more, none he wouldn't try again. Still grooving, still tripping, he didn't give a shit if he was barefoot in a blizzard. I left him rolled up in two cowhides, thumbing through the latest Wonder Warthog while the pine flame roared and rattled in the rusty little cabin woodstove like a caged Parsi firedemon.
When he wandered back up to the house it was dark. We had finished supper and were on the other side of the room watching Monday Night Football. I didn't turn but I could see Betsy in the mirror setting him a place. Quiston and Caleb had been duck hunting the day before, and we'd had two mallards and a widgeon for supper, stuffed with rice and filberts. A whole mallard and two half-eaten carcasses were left. John ate the mallard and picked all three carcasses so clean that red ants wouldn't have bothered over the leavings. Plus a whole loaf of bread, a pot of rice big enough for a family of Cambodian refugees, and most of a pound of butter. He ate slowly and with bemused determination, not like a glutton eats but like a coyote who never knows how long it might be before the next feast so he better get down all he can hold down. I kept my eyes on the game, not wanting to embarrass him by letting on I was watching.
It was the Dolphins against the Patriots, the fourth quarter. It was an important game to both teams, as they fought for a playoff berth, and a tense series of downs. Suddenly Howard Cosell interrupted his colorful commentary and said a funny thing, apropos of nothing discernible on the screen. He said, "Yet, however egregious a loss might seem to either side at this point in time, we must never lose sight of the fact… that this is only a football game." A very un-Howard-Cosell-like thing to say, I thought, and turned up the sound. After a few moments of silence Howard announced over the play-action fake unfolding on the field that John Lennon had been shot and killed outside his apartment in New York.
I turned to see if John the Groupie had heard the news. He had. He was twisted toward me in his seat, his mouth open, the last duck carcass stopped midway between tooth and table. We looked into each other's eyes across the room, and our roles fell away. No more the scowling landowner and the ingratiating tramp, simply old allies, united in sudden hurt by the news of a mutual hero's death.
We could have held each other and wept.
The weather broke that night. It rained awhile, then cleared. The sun sneaked through the overcast after breakfast, looking a little embarrassed for the short hours it had been getting away with during this solstice time. Betsy bundled John up and gave him a knit cap, and I drove him to the freeway. I let him off near the Creswell ramp. We shook hands and I wished him luck. He said not to worry, he'd get a ride easy. Today. I saw somebody stop for him before I had gotten back across the overpass. On the way home I heard a report on Switchboard, our local community-access program, that there was no need to call in to try to scam rides today, that everybody was picking everybody up, today.