‘I can understand how you enjoy it, hating Benjamin Franklin, but what about Eddie?’
‘I have the feeling it just gets the Low-Rider off. A little kink in the wiring. I mean, look how he dresses. And every time I mention being horny he gets nervous about Lucille. I know I can get a tad rambunctious, but hey, I ain’t gonna fuck no helicopter.’
Daniel said, ‘It felt like a ceremonial purification.’
‘Better safe than sorry,’ Mott replied. He stopped in his tracks, groaning ‘Did Benny Franklin say that?’
‘I think so,’ Daniel said gravely. He didn’t know, actually, but he’d never seen Mott look scared before.
Mott had the knife in his hand before Daniel saw him move. He tossed the knife up, caught it by the back of the blade, and extended it to Daniel, handle first. As Daniel took it, pearls of sunlight shattered on its edge.
Mott dropped to his knees in front of Daniel. ‘Cut out my tongue.’ Mott closed his eyes and stuck out his tongue. His abject vulnerability suddenly frightened Daniel. ‘Cud da fugger od!’ Mott demanded, sticking his tongue out farther.
Daniel realized then that Mott was as stoned as he was. He shifted logic. ‘You won’t ever be able to taste your chili again,’ he reminded him.
Mott opened one eye thoughtfully, then the other. ‘Couldn’t eat pussy either, could I? Kinda the clincher, huh?’ He got to his feet. ‘Well, even assholes like Ben Franklin get it right once in a while, I guess.’
Daniel handed the knife back to Mott.
‘You’re a clear thinker, Dan. I like that. We’ll make good pardners. I’ll keep you loaded, you keep me sane.’
They arrived back at the barn shortly after dark, taking a different route: cocaine, vodka, demerol, and, the last miles, a few Dexamyl spansules.
Daily life at the Rocking On was remarkably like that at the Four Deuces and the Wyatt Ranch, except the work involved the production and transfer of drugs. Mott assigned Daniel seven marijuana patches to plant and tend – each with thirty holes – and it took a long day’s ride to complete the circuit. Later he only had to check twice a week through the summer to make sure the drip-irrigation systems hadn’t clogged and the fences hadn’t been breached. Low-Riding Eddie usually delivered some illegal substance for sale once a week, and there were always general chores. Mott worked the same basic schedule, so he and Daniel seldom rode together except to meet Lucille. Mott claimed a seven-day work week on the grounds that drug use constituted research and testing, not recreation. After that first obliterating trip with Mott, Daniel kept his drug intake down. He declined so often that Mott finally told him, ‘Tell me when you want something,’ and quit offering.
The ranch house and numerous outbuildings occupied a thirty-acre alluvial plain above Dooley Creek. Many of the outbuildings had been built by Mott when he was taken by the notion that American carpentry as an art form had never gone through a period of surrealism. Mott had set out, with gargantuan energy, to rectify this. Daniel’s ‘cabin,’ for instance, looked like a head-on collision between a Maidu sweat lodge and a Swiss chalet, while the guest cottage might have been the bastard offspring of a Mongol yurt and a Texarkana motel. The only structures spared the influence of Mott’s surrealist period were the original ranch house and barn, and the forty-foot-square cinder-block bunker with a single iron door, which served as Aunt Charmaine’s laboratory.
Aunt Charmaine was a moderately tall woman in her early forties, thin, hazel-eyed. Daniel enjoyed just watching her move – each gesture was economical and precise, imbued with an elegant certainty. She wasn’t Mott’s aunt as he’d first assumed, nor anybody’s as near as he could tell. She was often absent from the ranch, sometimes for weeks at a stretch, but when she was there she spent most of her time in her lab. Daniel was curious what she did in there, but the extent of her explanation was that she was a research chemist. She gracefully deflected further questions until he understood her research was not a topic of discussion. She was friendly but distant. Daniel was fascinated by her, and not the least because Mott treated her with almost intimidated deference, actually calling her ‘ma’am.’
When Daniel questioned him, Mott said, ‘I don’t hardly know a thing about her, and she’s been here for three years. I don’t have a clue what she works on in that lab. I’ve never been invited inside, and you mighta noticed she don’t exactly jabber. Tell you the truth, that woman’s a little spooky. You get the sense she knows exactly what is going on and just what to do about it if anything needs doing. Like, one time we were having a little harvest party in the house and she came up to have a polite glass of wine before she trucked on back to the lab. When she was there, this big ol’ fly got in a jug of wine. People were all trying to figure how the fuck to get it out when Charmaine calmly gets a chopstick outa a drawer, pokes it down the bottle, and that wine-soaked fly hops right on the chopstick and she takes it outside where it buzzes away. People are going, you know, “Wow, that was slick,” and she sort of looked puzzled and said, “Nothing wants to die.” And I got this really weird feeling that the fly had told her what to do. It’s your call, Dan, but I know in my bones that if you got outa line with her, she’d line you right back up, and maybe line your ass right out, if you get my lean.’
Daniel still meditated morning and evening, but dropped the dream meditation because he thought it might be the cause of his continued dreamlessness. He hunted and fished, occasionally with Mott but usually alone. He read omnivorously, stocking up on library books on the monthly trip to town. Some evenings he smoked dope with Mott and listened to Mott’s plaster-cracking sound system, driven by banks of solar panels that would dwarf the average drive-in movie screen. Daniel learned to cook, out of necessity. He chopped wood. He went swimming. And when Mott wasn’t around, he snuck into the greenhouse and whispered endearments to the chiles.
The weekly descent of Mommy’s Commies added saturnalia to the routine. Mommy’s Commies was a commune of thirty-two young women and one old woman who lived on the Godfrey Ranch seventy miles east. The old woman was a Sorceress of the White Fury and the most brilliant teacher of its arts. When the women were at the ranch, Mommy, as she was called, expected them to pay undivided attention to the lessons at hand. When they were away she encouraged them to play, and especially to explore – with proper precaution – their particular sexual energies. Though not formally affiliated with AMO, Mommy’s Commies had helped distribute their contraband for fifteen years. Mommy felt a little danger and a chance to be bad were essential for fledgling sorceresses, and the money was good, too.
Eight women arrived every Thursday evening to make the pickup, and left the next morning to four different cities. Daniel never had a chance. Mott didn’t want one.
After Mott had greeted them, taking all eight in his arms at once and bellowing some endearment like, ‘If God didn’t want me to eat pussy, why’d he make it look like a taco?’ they gathered in what Mott referred to as the pleasure dome, the outside of which looked like a melting cube, for a brief business meeting and a long party. The inside of the dome featured padded walls, a thick carpet, Mott’s membrane-shredding sound system, and a bar that served Mott’s homemade whiskey and absinthe, and any drug you could name. Occasionally, the synergistic effects of multiple drug ingestion would cause what was then known in hip circles as a bummer and among young sorceresses as a learning experience. But despite the occasional psychic cave-in, the party mood usually prevailed.
After the ritual exchange of dope and money, the stash was divided into four, and then each woman cut a small portion for the party, most of which went to Mott as sort of a king’s tariff to protect their shares through the evening. Mott’s notion of a party was to take all available drugs and liquor, listen to some loud sounds, get naked, form a pile, and screw till you passed out. It never happened that way, but as the night burned on Mott usually convinced one or a few to repair to his place. Daniel, shyly, would ask one of those remaining if she would like to go to his cabin and talk awhile. After an hour of nervous chatter he would try to seduce her. His high success rate was more a tribute to their understanding than his style.