I stopped at a Bob’s Big Boy on Ventura Boulevard. There was an attractive couple in a booth near the door, and I took a counter seat that gave me visual access to both of them. I was in the conscious process of turning them blond when they got up and walked over to the cashier. A pair of burly young men in denims took their place, the taller of the two pocketing the tip. As his hand scooped the coins, I turned it into a reptile’s claw; soon both youths were fixed in my mind as buffoonish lizards. Then their loud voices made me stop brain-gaming and listen:
“... yeah, for-real hippie hookers. I’m talking chicks who love their work, who groove on ballin’ more than money. Cheap, too. The one chick, Season, hit me up for a ten-spot in the morning; the other, Flower — can you dig it? — goes for even less. You gotta listen to their rap about this guru guy they groove on, but who cares?”
“And you’re tell in’ me they hang out at the Whiskey every night? That they’ve got a pad off the Strip, and they spread all night for a tensky?”
“I don’t blame you for not thinkin’ it’s for real, but listen: they got an altered motive, or whatever you call it — they’re recruiters for this guru guy Charlie, and they tell you the fuck bread is for ‘The Family,’ and you should come out to this ranch where they live. It’s a hype, but who cares?”
“And these chicks are boss foxes?”
“Primo.”
“And all I gotta do is hit the Whiskey and ask around for them?”
“No, just go there and look cool, and they’ll find you.” “Then why the fuck am I sittin’ here lookin’ at your ugly face?”
Not knowing I had just crossed paths with history, I left a dollar on the counter and drove to the Strip and the Whiskey Au Go Go. A neon sign announced “The Battle of the Bands” — “Marmalade” vs “Electric Rabbit”; “Perko-Dan & his Magik Band” vs “The Loveseekers.” Parking spaces were scarce, but I found a spot in a gas-station lot across the street. Knowing this was a criminal mission — not an exercise in mental surgery — I walked over to the door, paid my cover charge and entered into a dark cavern of high-decibel noise.
The amplified electrical twanging was hideous, and had nothing to do with music; the darkness that enveloped everything but the stage was soothing and an unwitting ally — I could not see the people who were jammed together at matchbook-size tables; there would be no fetching bodies to distract me from my mission. The six gyrators who banged guitars in the glow of strobe lights would force me to search for “Flower” and “Season” — their “stage presence” was a frenzy of long matted hair, Day-Glo “threads” and sprayed body fluids.
Turning away from them, I found an empty table and sat down. A waitress materialized, placed a napkin in front of me and said, “Three-drink minimum, three-fifty a drink. If you want liquor, I have to see some ID. If you want to leave and come back, I’ll have to stamp your hand.”
I said, “ginger ale,” handed her a five-dollar bill and squinted into the darkness. After a few seconds, the shapes of sitting people came into view. I decided to keep my eyes fixed on a midpoint among the rear tables, hoping to catch Season and Flower moving between them in their “recruiting” efforts. I was moving into my own world of pure concentration when I felt a hand on my arm and heard a breathy female voice. I was caught off guard, and my knees jerked up and hit the table, knocking it over. The girl who had spoken to me scuttled out of the way, and I saw that she was lovely, with waist-length black hair. Smiling, I willed an aura of psychic invisibility and spoke in a tone of pure nonchalance, pure savoir faire. “I just got back from the Continent, and the cafe accommodations there are more accommodating. Won’t you sit down and join me for a drink?”
Her mouth dropped, and her loveliness turned fatuous. “What? You mean you’re clumsy?”
“Just captivated,” I said. “Won’t you sit down?”
The girl said, “Captivated?” and gave me a look that was half-contempt, half-befuddlement. An errant strobe flash magnified her mouth; she was both slack-jawed and sneering. The sneer crept over me, and I mentally hacked off her limbs and tossed them in the direction of “Electric Rabbit” and their off-key wailing. The girl muttered “Weirdo” under her breath, then waved to someone in back of me and called, “Season! Wait!”
My targets.
The girl threaded her way toward an Exit sign by the back tables. I hesitated, then followed. When she got to the door she huddled with two others; from ten yards away I saw that both of them were long-haired and wearing buckskin pants and vests. I was not close enough to determine their genders, and I had to keep my brain scalpel from hacking through their britches so I could tell. Suddenly what the two had between their legs was the most important thing in the world. I was moving to the door when the black-haired girl skipped back into the nightclub melee, and the buckskin pair pushed through the door to the street.
I followed.
The two crossed Sunset in an androgynous swirl, fixed by a steel tracking device that kept me oblivious to everything else around me. Dimly, I realized that I was jaywalking straight through a stream of traffic, and that horns were honking and tires squealing. Still I pursued; still I kept my tunnel vision activated. When the street was behind me, with residential darkness looming ahead, a turning car illuminated my prey. I saw that they were male and female, both slightly built, a mustache on the young man the only distinguishing feature. My tracking device snapped off, a “caution” switch snapping on in its place.
I held back and took deep breaths; the buckskin pair rounded the corner and walked up the side stairs of a pink stucco apartment building with exposed doorways. “Season” opened the third door from the end and flicked on an inside light, then pointed the young man in. When she closed the door behind them, the light went off immediately. She had not used a key to enter; the door was most likely unlocked.
I waited for twenty excruciatingly long minutes, then walked over and up to the door. “Caution” burned behind my eyes in red neon, and I put my ear against the plywood surface and listened. Hearing nothing but the crackle of electricity coursing through my body, I entered.
The apartment was completely dark, and the spongy carpeting seemed to seduce me into it, slowly. The walls felt like an embrace; the stale air was warm. When my eyes were able to pick out details, the cheap wrought-iron and Formica fixtures did not register as sterile — they came alive as objects belonging to people I wanted to know. The heat of the four-walled vacuum settled near my physical center, smothering the Caution sign. I saw a short hallway and a doorway strung with beads immediately in front of me. Darkness reposed behind it, but I knew that would not stop me from seeing. I tiptoed to the last barrier separating me from the lovers.
Grunts, giggles and squeals of pleasure sounded behind it. Parting the beads and squinting until my eyes ached allowed me to see shadow-light on ankles locked together; breathing in gave me the taste of marijuana. The love noises grew more intense, and the words I was able to discern — “yeah,” “give it,” and “come” — issued from vulgar voices. It rattled me, and cold air started to seep into my sensual womb. To staunch the freeze, I turned myself dumb and stared through the beads until I saw two women writhing, friction producing sparks where their nipples rubbed together; two men joined groin to groin, their straining limbs keeping the juncture point hidden. Then all four became one, and I got lost trying to see who was where. I came then, my hands tightly grasping the beads.