Astonishingly, I wasn’t heard. I stood rock-still, enclosed by heat and bombarded by a series of Caution signs with missing and rearranged letters. It was as if a full-body dyslexia were trying to push me one way or the other, toward some hellish, irrevocable act. I stood very, very still, then heard Season’s voice for the first time. “It’s just the wind and the beads. Isn’t it pretty?”
The male lover answered, “It’s spooky.”
Season sighed. “It’s nature. Charlie says that after Helter Skelter, when the big corporations are all gone and the land reverts to the people, man-made things and nature will work together in perfect harmony. It’s in the Bible, and the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and Charlie and Dennis Wilson are doing an album about it.”
“You’ve got this Charlie dude on the brain.”
“He’s a wise man. He’s a shaman and a healer, and a metaphysician and a guitarist.”
The male lover snorted, and Season sang, “ ‘You say you want a revolution, we-el-el, you know, we all want to change the world.’ Charlie calls that the gospel according to Saint Paul and Saint John.”
“Ha! You want to hear the gospel according to Saint Me?”
“Well... okay, sure.”
“Then dig: good food, good dope, good vibes and good fuckin’, and if someone gets in your way, lock, load and fire between their eyes.”
“And death to the pigs.”
“Not my scene, my dad’s a cop. What’s Charlie say about instant replays?”
“What do you mean?”
“Come here, I’ll show you.”
Season giggled. I could feel the air heating up behind the bead curtain, and I got out of the womb before the warmth could claim me.
That night my dreams were a compendium.
I was armless and legless. A phantom named Charlie chased me, and I wanted to see why pretty young girls talked about him after they had made love with someone else, so I let myself be caught, screaming when I saw that Charlie’s face was a mirror that reflected not my face, but a collage of butchered sex organs. Walt Borchard taunted me for screaming, then shoved hundred-dollar bills in my mouth to shut me up. My mother grabbed at the money and tried to tourniquet her gashed arms with it; my father toasted a mushroom cloud rising over downtown L.A. Knowing that total silence would save me, I fastened brushed-steel clamps over my lips and turned a series of external gears that would keep my brain’s synapses from sparking. I started to feel impregnable, and tried to laugh. No sound came out, and a new array of mirror-faced enemies approached me, holding big metal keys that would unlock my voice, my brain, my memory.
I woke up at dawn, choking and gasping for breath. I had bitten through my pillow, and my mouth was filled with cotton and foam rubber. I spat it out and breathed deeply, then went into a coughing attack. I tried to bring my right arm over to wipe my eyes, but there was no feeling at all on the right side of my body.
I whimpered, “No, please,” then sent a “kick” signal to my right leg. It hit the floor, so I knew that part of me had not been amputated. Gritting my teeth, I signaled my arm: “Grab, tear, rip, gouge, live.” There was a stirring under the sheet, then my hand extricated itself from the wall by the bedstead. Blood and mortar covered my fingers, and I looked at the hole my nightmare had dug. The perfectly outlined apertures held my attention like cave hieroglyphics. I stared at them until feeling returned to my hand and I passed out from the pain.
I spent the day in a zombie state — sleeping, walking to the bathroom sink to soak my hand, returning to sleep. The ache in my fingers was dream proof that I existed as a functioning machine, and when I woke up to stay at dusk, I knew what I had to do. After removing the remaining plaster fragments from under my fingernails, I drove back to the womb to wait for the most perfect bodies it could give me.
Parked at the curb by the pink stucco building, I waited. At 7:00, Flower and Season left the apartment and hiked up to the Strip; at 8:19 Flower returned with a rodentlike hippie boy. The combination of the girl’s fatuousness and the rodent’s body flab spelled “no.” I continued my surveillance.
Flower and her weasel consort left at 10:03, parting company at the corner. Season and a rail-thin men of about thirty passed Flower on her trek back up to the Whiskey, exchanging words. Season was the one I wanted in my triumvirate, but her skinny partner looked mean-spirited and consumptive. Impatient, and itchy from the long transit of no brain-movies, I stayed put.
Shortly after midnight, Season and her lover exited the apartment and walked south, away from the Strip. I realized then that the girls probably synchronized their arrivals and departures, and laid odds that Flower would be returning within ten minutes. My hand ached, and I willed the throbs to a low ebb by concentrating on the question that had plagued my dreams: Who was “Charlie”?
True to form, Flower rounded the corner a few minutes later. A large man in army fatigues was with her, and he carried himself with an authority that was anti-hippie, anticounterculture, and purely masculine. Approaching the building, he took off his cap and smoothed his hair. It was a lustrous blond, and I knew he had to be Charlie.
Now my waiting was all shivers and tremors and tingles through the groin. Knowing Charlie would find a quick, violent coupling vulgar, I allowed for pre-sex mood-setting, then walked up to the door. With my heart thundering, I opened it and walked in.
The front room was pitch-dark, and I left the door ajar a few inches for light, then moved straight to the beaded curtain. I peered through, and candlelight framed him on top of her. I touched myself, but that part of me felt cold. My heart was going “ka-thud, ka-thud, ka-thud,” and I knew that soon the lovers would hear it. Touching myself again, I felt not coldness, but nothing. I whispered, “Charlie,” parted the curtains and walked to the bed. A breeze sent the light over entwined legs. I gasped and bent over and touched them.
“Oh God!”
“What the fu—”
I heard the words and moved backward; a light flashed on, and the legs I had been caressing kicked out at me. Then Charlie was pulling a sheet around himself, and all I could do was run.
I dived for the curtain, and a blow caught me in the back of the neck. Flower squealed, “Helter Skelter coming down!” and I fell to my knees. Then the front-room light went on, and a force around my neck uprooted me. I caught a topsy-turvy view of Tahiti and Japan via Pan American Airways, and billboards for the Jook Savages and Marmalade. I tried to run a defensive brain-movie, but my brains felt as though they were shooting out the top of my head. Charlie was screaming, “Fuck Fuck Fuck!”; then we were on the walkway outside, and people from the adjoining apartments were staring out their windows at me.
With my neck being twisted off its axis, I kicked sidelong at the gargoyles; glass flew into a succession of stunned faces. Screams and approaching sirens were ringing in any ears as Charlie dragged me downstairs, and the last thing I heard before blacking out was Flower singing an impromptu Beatles medley.
11
The caress cost me close to a year of my life.
I was arrested and charged with one count of Breaking and Entering, and the pick gouger in my pocket earned me a second charge of Possession of Burglar’s Tools. A voyeurism “beef” was pending, but my public defender told me that Uncle Walt Borchard talked the D.A. out of filing the charge — he did not want me to get a sex offender “jacket.” On attorney’s advice, I pleaded guilty at arraignment. My sentence: a year in the Los Angeles County Jail and three years formal probation. When the judge handed down the decree and asked me what I had to say for myself, I broke the pattern of silence/monosyllabic replies that I had maintained since the moment of my arrest. “I have nothing to say — yet,” I said.