“Really? And how was that?”
“Utterly fucking cool.”
“No problem with like grease and germs and all that?”
“The ants would be at it next day, the birds and the flies and whatnot. The sun. Rain.”
“Let nature take care of it, right?”
“Yeah, that's right: let nature take care of it.”
Most of the brothers and sisters had already eaten-dinner was at six-but they lined up nonetheless, all except for Merry and Alfredo and a couple of the hard-core vegetarians like Verbie. (That hurt him-_Merry__-but she was adamant, every creature is sacred, wouldn't slap a malarial mosquito if it was perched on her wrist, and did he know about the Jains in India who went around with gauze over their faces so they wouldn't inadvertently inhale so much as a gnat?) Norm was there, though, glad-handing and effusing, ripped on something and shouting “Loaves and fishes! It's a miracle!” every two minutes. Somebody dragged the big speakers out onto the back porch and dropped the needle on _Electric Ladyland,__ and pretty soon people were dancing out across the lawn in a kind of meat frenzy, and by the time it was over the steaks were gone, and a good time had by all.
At one point, stretched out on the grass with his plate, a transient joint and the dregs of a jug of wine he kept swishing round the bottom of his fruit jar in the hope a little _circulation__ would make it taste less like recycled lamp oil, Ronnie found himself hemmed in by the professor and his old lady, the one who'd let out that stone-cold shriek when he'd come staggering out of the woods with the deer wrapped round his shoulders, and if anybody thought _that__ was fun they were out of their minds. Star was there too, and Marco, Lydia, Jiminy, a whole little circle of people off the main circle, and they'd been discussing weighty matters like is Hendrix an alien and how many heads fit on the pin of an angel. And suddenly here was this _professor__ sitting right there at his elbow with a plate full of gnawed gristle, and the professor was saying things like “So, when did you drop out?”
Ronnie wanted to tell him to fuck off and go back to Berkeley with the rest of the tourists-_Can't you see we're having a party here, man?__-but there was something about the guy-the gray in his beard, the fruity rich mellow tenor that brought back all those somnolent afternoons in English class-that just made him duck his head and mumble “A year and a half.” And it wasn't just that he was mumbling, he was exaggerating too-six months was nearer the truth. But the professor didn't want any six-month hippies, he wanted the genuine down-in-the-trenches peripatetic lifetime dirtbags he could awe and thrill the _reading public__ with. He had a notepad. He had a-no, yes-tape recorder.
“You mind if I tape this?” the professor was asking.
Hendrix rode the night, supreme, astral, totally mind-blowing, and Ronnie mumbled _Sure__ and the professor's old lady moved in, thick legs in a long skirt and the joint pinched in her fingers like a deadly writhing South American bushmaster with its fangs drawn. Did she take a hit? Yes. And then she passed it on.
“You're how old? Here, talk into this.”
“Into this?”
“That's right, yeah.”
“I'm twenty-two.”
“Family problems?”
“No more than usual.”
“Ever run away from home?”
“Not that I can remember. Or maybe once. Or twice.”
“You were how old then?”
“I don't know-nine. I went to the bowling alley and hid behind the pinball machine.”
“Both parents alive?”
His parents were alive, all right, but so was Lon Chaney Jr. in _The Mummy's Ghost.__ They were just like that, staggering from one foot to the other and grunting out hostile messages to the world and the trashed wind-sucking son they saw only at dinner because he needed that dinner to stay alive. Might as well wrap them up in mummy's bandages too, because they were both walking disasters, his father's nose like a skinned animal pinned to his face with the shiny metallic tackheads of his eyes, his mother a shapeless sack of organs with a howling withered skull stuck atop it. Come to think of it, she could have starred in _Screaming Skull__ herself. And they nagged. Nagged and grunted. Pan looked into the professor's eyes and then away again. “Yeah,” was all he said.
“Any abuse? You use marijuana? Hard drugs? Booze? What about Free Love? Any social diseases? You vote in the last election?”
Pan fell into it. He warmed, grew effusive. He told the professor about scoring dope on South Street and cooking it up in whatever semi-clean receptacle that happened to be handy and wouldn't catch on fire, a spoon usually or one of those little cups they poach eggs in, an example of which he'd had and prized for about a week until it got lost, and he laid out both his arms like exhibits at the morgue to show the professor his tracks that were six months gone because the truth of the matter was heroin scared the shit out of him and he was never going to do anything other than maybe snort it ever again. Drew was dead. And Dead Mike, he was dead too. “But Free Love-oh, man, don't get me started. That's what this is all about-the _chicks,__ you know what I mean?” That was when he realized Star was watching him, her knees pulled up to her chin and locked tight in the clasp of her arms, the firelight like hot grease on her face and that smirk she had, that smirk that was more of a put-down than anything she could ever say.
“What about VD?” the professor was saying, leaning in close with the microphone, his face hanging there at the end of his veiny blistered old man's throat like a piñata, the gift-shop peace medallion dangling like a rip cord below that and his eyes like two wriggling leg-kicking toads, and Pan-Ronnie-felt so _embarrassed,__ so fucking mortified and put-upon, he actually jerked the microphone out of the professor's hand and then, not knowing what to do with it, flung it into the fire in one smooth uncontested motion.
“What the hell you think you're doing?” the professor wanted to know, and his old lady-the poet-said, “American Primitive,” and laughed a long-gone laugh.
Ronnie was on his feet now, not much kicking power in a pair of huaraches, but enough to send the rest of the apparatus-the big silver-and-gray box with the knobs and dials and slow-turning _spools__-into the fire too, and the professor shouting and grabbing for the machine amidst the coals and the black and quiescent remains of the deer.
“You crazy son of a bitch!” That was what the professor said, but it was nothing to Ronnie, he wasn't even listening. He heard Star laugh though, a hard harsh dart of a laugh that stuck right in him as he went off into the night, looking for something else altogether.
Later, much later, after sitting around a campfire with some people he didn't recognize-or maybe he did recognize them-he thought about going up to the back house and seeing what Sky Dog and the spades were up to, but then he thought he wouldn't. Better not press his luck. There were people who wanted him gone-and here Alfredo's face loomed up out of a shallow grave in the back corner of his mind, followed in quick succession by Reba's and Verbie's-and what happened the other night had split the place down the middle. Lester and Sky Dog and the rest had been voted out, and that meant they didn't show for meals and kept strictly to themselves, running the Lincoln down to the store for wine, cigarettes and processed cheese sandwiches every couple hours, but they might as well have been in another county for all they had to do with Drop City. They'd smelled the meat-Ronnie had seen them out on the porch of the back house as the light faded, and he almost wished they would have come down and joined the party so he could show them what he'd done with a.30–06 rifle and two shining copper-jacketed bullets, but they weren't interested, because it was war now, and you had to choose sides. And that was no contest as far as Pan was concerned. He was for the side in control, the side that had all the chicks and the food and the big house with the KLH speakers and all of those five hundred or eight hundred or however many records that were lined up on the shellacked pine bookcases in random order and was there a radio station in the _country__ with a better collection?