Summer of Love, a Time Travel Page 6

  Leo Gorgon was invited to sit on the council. Gorgon had journeyed from New York City to San Francisco in the winter of ’66 for the New Year’s Eve Bash and has done his Digger thing in town ever since.

  But here’s the trouble: Ruby was not invited to sit on the Council for a Summer of Love, even though she’s lived in the San Francisco Bay Area her whole life and owned a hip business in the Haight-Ashbury since 1962.

  Why not?

  Dig It:

  The Council for a Summer of Love invited only men. Like Leo Gorgon, they are all tall, good-looking, and white. They like to party. They’ve been partying with each other since forever. Well, six months feels like forever when you’re wasted from morn till eve.

  The boys are pleased with themselves. They publish proclamations. They hold press conferences, which get televised and covered by the papers. They’ve declared that two hundred thousand flower children are about to descend on the Haight-Ashbury.

  At first, Ruby was stung by the council’s failure to invite her, which she had trouble understanding till she got it: she’s an uppity bitch. Wait, wait. She’s an uppity colored bitch. Two-hundred-thousand flower children are about to descend on her neighborhood? Far out. She wants five dollars from each and every one of them.

  No wonder a Digger like Leo Gorgon is sniffing around her skirts. Who believes his shuck that money is dead?

  *

  Ruby climbs the stairs to her apartment. Two stories of Victorian manse, all for her. Pa would have been so proud to see her success as a grown woman. Ma would have been proud, too, knowing how her hard work at Marinship during the war and the settlement money after her shameful death had provided for her daughter.

  She heads for her kitchen, retrieves that fine bottle of Chablis, takes glass and bottle to the living room, and lights a log in the fireplace.

  She settles on her comfy couch, and her cats rouse themselves from all over the apartment to join her. There slinks Sita, a tiny seal point queen, and Luna, a blue point princess. Rama, a regal seal point king, perches on the arm of the couch next to Ara, a flame point prince, all amber and ivory. Now Alana, the Angora, bounds onto her lap, a lithe little beauty with golden eyes, silky white fur, and a plumy tail. The cats crowd around, nuzzling her fingers, trilling and purring.

  “My babies,” Ruby croons.

  The comforts of home tug at Ruby’s heart more powerfully these days than adventures out there, in the world. But, sweet Isis, in the old days, she had herself a time.

  North Beach in the late fifties: the Beats ranted and raved, they were a crazy cabal, but they inflicted their neuroses mostly on each other and they read books. They took pride in the intellect, schooled or self-taught. They actually read and wrote poetry. Words, jazz, and ideas turned them on. Oh, the Beats smoked grass and drank peyote-button tea. In her twenties, Ruby tried just about everything there was to try in those days. She regretted nothing. It was part of the exotic philosophies, otherworldly cultures, and experiments on life’s odyssey.

  Beat for Ruby meant the quest for freedom.

  The junk scene happened then, too, as Ruby well knew. Junk had blown through the underground a long, long time. A few got into it; a few lost their way to it. But the hip in late fifties California generally disdained habits. Habits hung up your freedom. A square gig on Monkey Street or a spike in your valley both boiled down to the same thing: trips that stole your mind and your time and eventually your soul.

  By 1962, North Beach was getting too wild and too mean. It got so you couldn’t stage a decent Blabbermouth Night without some drunk taking a swing at a Poet and bringing down the house.

  So Ruby and a lot of folks split to the Haight-Ashbury, where the rents were ridiculously low, the air fresh and chilly, the park gorgeous. The neighborhood was strictly lowbrow, on the wide, full lip of the Fillmore, a scary black ghetto. She and her friends set up shops, studios, cafes. They smoked some more grass and drank a whole lot more Papa Cribari Red, in spite of the hangover.

  The colony was cool in ’62, private and civilized. No one chased after the media. No one wanted to be pigeonholed, let alone holed up in a prison cell at the Big Q. The colony got behind poetry and art and novels, philosophy and jazz and folk music. People formed makeshift families of all kinds behind closed doors; they cherished their privacy. The scene was really rather Zen.

  Ruby called it the personal revolution.

  And dope was not some monstrous, all-consuming demonic force. A cultural demigod. A cruel, obsessive commerce. A standard by which folks associated or did not associate with each other.

  Ruby, sipping her wine, cuddling her cats around her, wonders: When did it change?

  Grandmother Says: Meng (Youthful Folly)

  The Image: A spring wells at the foot of the mountain.

  The spring escapes stagnation by filling the hollow places in its path.

  The Oracle: Youthful folly may succeed, provided truth is sought.

  In the time of youth, folly may not be an evil. This is the initial stage of all things. But one must seek experienced teachers and maintain property attitudes. Such attitudes include modesty, receptivity, and perseverance.

  Hexagram 4, The I Ching or Book of Changes

  Ruby remembers the next new group infiltrating the scene, hot and restless at twenty years old. Junior hipsters, the Beats mocked them. Hippies. They were a new breed of drifter, kids on the road. Teens who shot junk, did time in juvie, ran with biker gangs in New York City, New Orleans, Los Angeles. They slid in and out of the nuthouse. A whole underclass who aspired to much and received little in chicken-in-every-pot America. But these kids were discovering that drifting could be all right. A groove, in fact. Hell, this is America. Rebels built the place.

  Hip to the dope underground, riding the bicoastal circuit, cooler than cool, these young hoodies had an entrepreneurial streak that had eluded the Beats. They didn’t just deal to survive, they dealt to thrive. They had ambition. They knew how to hustle. If you did it with wit and style, hustling could be fun and exciting, not to mention lucrative. A beautiful market was opening up. A ripe market, bigger than big. The college scene, the youth scene, the swinging scene.

  That’s when it changed, Ruby decides and sips her chablis.

  Everyone began to talk about dope. Write about it, joke about it, sing songs about it, recommend it, revel in it, glorify it, find salvation in it. She counted a dozen drug jokes in A Hard Day’s Night. No, not the Beatles, packaged up squeaky-clean for the teenyboppers? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

  Turn on, tune in, drop out. Leary is lecturing about it, Kesey is partying on it, everyone who is anyone is turning on. They say lawyers and doctors and politicians will be turning on one day. Imagine! And all the laws of the land and scary propaganda films couldn’t put that shattered value system together again.

  But dope was never the New Explanation. Not to Ruby.

  *

  A breeze kicks up from the ocean. The wind chimes on the deck off her kitchen clang. Ruby sets down her glass, unlocks the kitchen door, and steps outside. The willow and the lemon tree toss about, casting restless shadows across the backyard. She breathes the damp night air, catches sprinkles of rain in the palm of her hand.

  The wind chimes are way too loud; she’ll never get to sleep tonight. She reaches for the redwood bench, drags it over to the deck’s edge. She steps up and reaches for the chimes. The breeze kicks up again, and suddenly she’s dizzy. The long day, a sip of wine, the lateness of the hour all conspire to steal her balance. She wavers, unsteady on her feet.

  She starts to fall!

  She seizes the chimes, which are strung on tiger-tail fishing line. Her foot slips off the bench, scraping her ankle. Jammed together, the chimes make an awful clamor. She dangles from the tiger-tail, testing claims that the line can support up to two hundred pounds. Not that she weighs quite that much, but dripping wet she’s got some heft to her. She catches herself on the railing, swings back. She loses her grip, falls down on the
bench. “Damn!” she mutters. Her heart is pounding like a jackhammer. She wipes sweat from her upper lip.

  As she sprawls, breathing heavily, she hears a low hiss, and her eye catches on something. A tall, dark figure stands in the backyard just inside the wood-slat fence, arms raised, hands extended, fingers spread. Eerie black sparks flicker around the fingertips.

  A burglar, a dealer, a drifter, a narc, a cop, the FBI, the CIA, a murderer? Leo Gorgon? The red-haired dude?

  How many people does she have to be afraid of?

  What is it?

  The wind moans, and shadows swirl like living things. Where eyes ought to be in the figure’s face burn two black holes. She can just make out a snarl of a mouth.

  A deep, awful cold rushes up from the yard.

  Crazy thoughts tumble through her mind. Has she fallen off the deck, after all, broken her neck, and died, and she doesn’t know it yet? Has her double come to take her soul away?

  The figure takes a step toward her.

  No! She hasn’t fallen! She’s not dead! She runs inside, bangs the door shut, locks it tight. She slaps the kitchen light off, grabs the phone.

  And call who? Cops who want to bust her?

  She turns and sees a face—sweet Isis, it’s her face—smashed against the glass of the door. Lips writhe off shattered teeth. An eye drips down a cheek.

  She screams.

  The face disappears.

  *

  Ruby peers through the front-door peephole of the Mystic Eye. The red-haired dude is still sitting on her stoop, his back propped against the wall, his long legs stretched out before him. Arms folded over his chest, he nods gently, eyes closed, chin drooping in the collar of his jacket.

  She cracks open the door with the chain lock still locked.

  “Hey, you,” she whispers. “Wake up. Can you hear me, huh?”

  He yawns, blinks. His eyes flutter open, shiny from the street lights. Human eyes, not black holes.

  “You tell me why you stayed and watched Leo Gorgon and you tell me right now. What do you know about him?”

  “I told you,” he says, sitting up and stretching. “I calculated the probabilities. I… .” Big yawn, another stretch. “I calculated.”

  “Calculate your ass over here.” She slaps the door in frustration. “And don’t give me that probabilities shuck. No one outside of the Haight-Ashbury knows about Leo Gorgon. I’ve never seen you before, sonny. So tell me something good. Convince me.”

  He stands, loosening his legs. “Convince you of what?”

  “That you’re not the Man, setting me up for a bust ‘cause you don’t like my face.” She grinds her teeth. “Damn it, sonny, I need somebody. To help me now.”

  He comes over at once and huddles by the door. “I’m not a narc, I swear. Your sign”—he points up at her blue neon Eye of Horus, which she leaves on all night for good luck—“is a sign.”

  “My sign is a sign. I’m glad we cleared that up.”

  “Yes! If my calculation is correct, you’re another point of reference. I searched my Archives after you kicked me out. I’ve got a record of a woman, probably a shop owner. A quadroon, dark curly hair, light skin.”

  “There’s a record?” Ruby’s adrenaline shoots through the ceiling. “Of me?”

  He presses his thumb to his lip. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Sonny, I’m not worrying. I’m panicking.”

  “Forget I said it. Believe me, you’re not in any trouble. Please tell me how I can help you. Is something wrong?”

  A record of you, a record of you keeps echoing in her ear. Damn if she knows why, but she decides to trust him. His vibe is still all right.

  “Someone’s messing around in my backyard. There’s something weird about it. I don’t want to call the cops.”

  He bends and deftly picks up a large square of something that looks like plastic sandwich wrap lying on the stoop. He’s been sleeping on sandwich wrap? He shakes it like a stage magician and the plastic wrap vanishes in his hand.

  “I’ll go look.”

  “Don’t get your head blown off, you hear?”

  “How do I get back there?”

  “There’s an alley right there, next to the building. The garage is out back. The yard is next to it, but it’s all fenced in and the gate is locked.”

  “I’ll manage.”

  He strides down the alley before she can tell him to stop. She slams the door shut, hits the deadbolts home, races upstairs to the kitchen, and steps out on the deck.

  She watches him down below, pushing the gate open. Beautiful. He picked the lock. She’s not sure which makes her happier: that he’s a narc or a lockpick. He takes something from his jacket pocket and proceeds to creep along her fence, north to south, and back again.

  Nothing. The intruder is gone.

  “You see anything?” he calls up to her.

  “No. He—she—it; it’s gone.”

  He stands at the foot of the stairway leading up from the yard to the deck. If she’d fallen, she could have broken her neck. He gazes up at her, his face as pale as a peeled potato.

  “Lock the gate,” she says, “and come on up.”

  She steps inside and sits warily at her kitchen table.

  In a moment, he clatters up the stairs, steps inside, and shuts and locks the door behind him. Polite. A respectful young man, how often do you see that these days? He takes out an astringent-smelling tissue and swabs his fingers, his palms, his knuckles, between and around his fingers, underneath his fingernails, digging at the quick.

  “You jimmied the lock.”

  “No, no, it was open.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He shrugs. “My name is Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco and I need a place to stay.”

  Ruby sniffs. Isopropyl alcohol. Is he a needle freak? But folks like that are notoriously nonchalant about personal cleanliness. “I can’t help you with that, sonny. Like I told you, I live alone.”

  “But you shelter people. Runaways, and people.”

  “No, you’re mistaken. I don’t. I never have. Oh, maybe a friend now and then. Or a lover. But I don’t rent rooms. This isn’t a crash pad. And I don’t take in runaways. Or people.”

  “But you will.”

  “No, I never will. I’m not into communes. I like my privacy. I need my privacy. I’ve worked long and hard to get a place of my own. So you best be on your way.”

  “I won’t disturb you.”

  “You got that right, you won’t disturb me. Try the Print Mint. People crash on the floor there. Or Trip Without a Ticket on Cole Street, that’s a Digger pad.” Ruby thinks again. “Try Huckleberry House or Glide Church or All Saints. Or just walk down the street. There’s always a party. Someone will take you in. But you can’t stay here.”

  “I’ll pay you rent. I’ll sleep on the floor. I’m used to sleeping on floors.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I hate sleeping on floors.” He pulls a wad of new-looking dollars from his jacket pocket and clumsily hands them to her.

  “What are these, marked bills?”

  “Straight from the Treasury.” He chuckles. “I’ll work for you. You need someone to watch the shop for knickknackers while you’re busy selling. Isn’t that true?”

  Only too true. Knickknackers account for a couple hundred a month flying out the door. But what would he take? She studies him. “Why? Why here? Why me?”

  He smiles, and it’s a lovely smile. A Rich Kid smile with perfect, sparkling white teeth. He shrugs. “Let’s just say I like your sign. I like your shop and I like you. You’re different.”

  “Uh-huh.” But different is good in Ruby’s world. Different is what she’s set out to achieve. “My pa was half Cherokee and half Irish, and my ma was Haitian black with a splash of Southern cream. I am Ruby A. Maverick, and you may call me Ruby.”

  “You’re beautiful, Ruby. And you are going to let me stay.”

  “Uh-huh.” She li
kes flattery as much as anyone, but he’s much too young for her. She’s old enough to be his mother, she thinks for the hundredth time. Oh hell, she’s old enough to be everybody’s mother. Well, not quite. But what will people say on the street?

  What will people say. The thought of gossip makes her smile. Let them flap their jaws.

  “I must be crazy.”

  “You won’t regret it.”

  “We shall see.” She shakes her finger at him. “Listen up, Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco. No dope and no funny stuff in my house or you’re out on your ass. You rip me off, I’ll get you busted, I swear.”

  “No dope and no funny stuff and I won’t rip you off.”

  “We shall see.” If only she could believe him.

  *

  Ruby takes Chi into her living room with its hardwood floors and Persian and Navajo rugs. She shows off her herb and cactus planters, her teak and rosewood furniture. Her stereo record player and reel-to-reel tape deck are connected to speakers on both private floors. On the white stucco walls she’s mixed Op Art and Mondrian prints with framed psychedelic posters from the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom.

  “Oh, I know they’re just posters,” she says. “But one day they’ll disappear.”

  Chi stares with that odd sense of wonder. “Yes, they will. They’ll disappear and people will only guess what the real thing once looked like.”

  Cool. He appreciates art. That’s a good sign. She finds her glass of wine, offers him some. He declines, also a good sign. Some young dudes can’t handle the booze.

  He gingerly sits on the couch, and her cats swarm curiously all around him, sniffing, trilling, rubbing against him the way cats do. A very, very good sign, that her little psychic barometers take so readily to him.

  “It’s sad, you know?” she says, settling herself in her rocking chair. “It’s all just a hustle these days. There’s no quest for freedom anymore. Today was the Solstice, the first day of summer. A very high holy day to the ancients. The longest day of the year. And you know what, Chi? I say it’s all a shuck. The Haight-Ashbury has up and died. The love is gone.”