Summer of Love, a Time Travel Read online

  “That’s why I want to be cremated.” Just the facts, ma’am. “Fire is purifying.”

  “But I’m afraid. It’s so awful!”

  “Oh, it’s not so awful. Think of it this way, Starbright. We live on the Earth, and we kill things. You eat a cow or a carrot, it’s all the same. Everything is alive. So when you die, you give your body back to God. You give a little of what you took. I think that’s fair, don’t you?”

  She thought about that and, after a while, the pain in her heart eased. “Yeah.” She dried her tears on her sleeve. They smiled at each other. Maybe Professor Zoom was a wise man. Sometimes. “I think that’s fair, too.”

  *

  Rodge the Dodg, Paul, and Mickey huddle in the back of the van. They’ve long since finished the joints. Now they’re working on some splash. Up to the last minute, they’re also working on three new songs they intend to play, but haven’t practiced yet. Stevie snores, passed out. He rarely gets up before two in the afternoon, so maybe he’s just tired, Susan hopes, and not stoned out of his mind.

  The energy at the house has been strange, which hasn’t helped the band’s career. Sarah split, after knickknacking some expensive things. Mickey got wasted, then brought home someone new the next day. She wears a glittery pink boa clipped in her hair, a leather vest over nothing but her olive skin, and jeans slung low. Her stringy biceps are tattooed with a lightning bolt. Lady May, she calls herself, which the guys get mileage out of. “Lady May I?” they say in wheedling voices. Stella and Fawn, the other caterpillar-eyed girls, are freaked.

  Now Stan takes over the driver’s seat, ignoring everyone. He especially ignores Susan, which fills her with sadness and a deep, nameless fear. He’s working, she reminds herself, doling out ten thousand caps of LSD into single-serving baggies. He’s decided to call this batch dragon’s blood after—he tells her—an herb in some witch shop. The caps are bright red. Dragon’s blood. It fits.

  Suddenly things are happening. Everyone is jumping, piling out of the van.

  “Starbright, carry the mikes and tambourines,” Mickey says.

  She hops out, too. She is forever carrying the mikes and tambourines, or fetching a wine bottle or a hash pipe, or passing out postcards of album covers. She’s forever clapping her hands and cheering, admiring the men up on the stage. She’s grateful for such a groovy place to stay, of course. They feed her and don’t change her rent, but they do exact a price. She keeps thinking of Sarah’s bloodshot eyes beneath her false eyelashes.

  Susan understands Sarah. She wants to do her thing, too. Her mother says her drawings are not proportional, but Professor Zoom and Stan and everyone says her drawings are far out. She went to Mendel’s Art and Stationery Supplies—a store on Haight Street a lot like Mr. G’s but bigger and better—and bought a box of pastel chalks. She drew two posters for the Double Barrel Boogie Band, which Stan took to a graphics guy who knew how to print them up.

  Do her thing. She’s discovering it’s tricky doing her thing. While Stan the Man labors over the calculating machine—a big metal monster that goes ka-chunka, ka-chunka-chunka-chunka when he hits the Equals button—she works out the numbers in her head. She says, “Um, Stan, at seventy cents profit per hit, you’ll make seven hundred dollars per thousand. Um, that’s seven thousand dollars per ten thousand. That’s a lot of bread, huh?”

  And he gave her a look. What you’d call a dirty look.

  Susan has seen that look before. Bernie MacKenna or Allen Weisberg stand at the blackboard, working out equations or diagramming sentences and clowning around, and they are popular, the cool kids at school. But when Susan works out an equation or reads her poems—she doesn’t dare clown around—the girls whisper behind their hands and the boys snicker or stare coldly. Even the teachers give her that look.

  She feels like a freak. Like something is wrong with her. Her school counselor told her she is in the ninety-eighth percentile. What does that mean? What good does that do her? The girls, the boys, the teachers, they give her that look. So she stops speaking up, stops challenging the discussion. It’s confusing.

  Now she wonders if the spooky girl with her face has something to do with it. The encounter on Twin Peaks haunts her. Was the girl an awful omen? A prophecy she will have to face herself one day and see some terrible truth? She shivers at the memory and glances over her shoulder. Does she see black sparks?

  And there it is again: another Summer of Love change. What made her feel like a freak in Shaker Heights gives her credence in the Haight-Ashbury. Credence with none other than Professor Zoom, the resident shaman of the Double Barrel house. When he wants to discuss his quest for the Final Expression, he seeks out Susan. When he wants to discuss whether the U.S. Congress should ban consumer credit cards, he seeks out Susan.

  One day last week Professor Zoom found a Sacramento TV station rerunning “This Side of Paradise.” Susan had talked a lot about this Star Trek episode. The Enterprise touches down on Omicron Ceti III and discovers that the colonists are really groovy. Mr. Spock reunites with Leila, a woman who once loved him. Leila turns Mr. Spock on to spores that pop out of pretty pink flowers and smack people in the face. Mr. Spock gets smacked in the face by spores and becomes really groovy, too.

  Professor Zoom was impressed. Psychedelic secrets on national TV?

  But upon watching again, Susan was horrified. The spores turn the colonists into silly, passive know-nothings who must be rehabilitated to a useful life under the stern guidance of the Federation.

  Professor Zoom didn’t buy her interpretation. “Wake up, Starbright. The spores set Mr. Spock free. The spores forced him to give up his intellectual games. I mean, there he is, this uptight, supercilious robot—”

  “Mr. Spock is not a robot,” Susan said. “He’s half Vulcan.”

  “This uptight half-Vulcan schmuck—”

  They went at it like that until people started pouring in, looking for a party. Are the pretty pink flowers opium poppies? Do the spores enlighten the colonists or oppress them? In the climax, Captain Kirk insults Mr. Spock and goads him into a fistfight. The fight releases Mr. Spock from the spell of the spores. Violence restores him to his intellectual uptight self.

  “That’s a lousy statement about society and human nature,” Professor Zoom pointed out.

  “It’s confusing,” Susan admitted.

  “Forget it, Starbright. I really dug the beginning. The spores healed wounds and bestowed physical perfection. Maybe LSD will cure cancer.”

  Susan doubts that and, after watching the episode again, she’s sure she’s not mistaken. Star Trek says the love spores from the pretty pink flowers are bad.

  *

  Tam Theater looks like an ancient Greek amphitheater: stone seats slope up from a center stage, everything surrounded by the scenic mountainside and old-growth trees.

  Professor Zoom, disinterred from the driver’s seat, takes out his corncob pipe. “Got some Gold,” he calls to the tribe.

  This rousts stragglers out of the van. Stella and Fawn crowd around for a toke. Lady May struts up and pushes them aside. Susan says she’s got a sore throat and she’ll pass.

  Professor Zoom insists on giving her the first hit. He crooks his arm around her neck, thrusts the pipe in her lips. “Hold the smoke in your lungs as long as you can, Starbright,” he coaches irritably.

  Lady May is next, inhaling deeply. “I am so wasted!” she gleefully proclaims. A nipple slips out of her leather vest.

  “The ego must die,” Professor Zoom whispers, eying Lady May.

  Susan slips away, looking for Stan the Man.

  She’s fourteen. She doesn’t want to die.

  Changes upon changes upon changes. Her awkward fourteen-year-old body has changed overnight into a woman’s body. In the space of ten days, she’s become a sexual being. Her mother’s constant criticisms—you’re too fat, your hair’s too long, you’re not wearing that!—fade away before Stan the Man’s lustful gaze. They’ve had sex every day—sometimes twice
or three times—since the Celebration of the Summer Solstice.

  He jumps down from the driver’s seat, lithe as a panther.

  “Hi,” she says and lifts her face for his kiss.

  He seizes her, wrapping her in his hug, his hands roving over her body, squeezing her breast. He kisses her forehead, nuzzles her ear. He moves to her lips and the motion of his tongue in her mouth suggests what he does between her legs.

  “Say hey, Starbright.” He slips a package the size of a suitcase beneath her arm. “I want you to do something for me.”

  “What?” She’s still dizzy from his kiss, but an ominous feeling chokes her throat.

  Other than the sex, it’s not like things are all that great between her and Stan. She woke one morning to find him rooting around in her overnight bag. He found the hundred-dollar bill from Mr. G. When she asked what he was doing, he demanded to keep the money. Just a loan, he told her. Front money for his new deal. He’d pay her back after the deal went down. When she said no, he got all weird. He said she’d be sleeping in the street if it weren’t for him. She got frightened and silent. Then he came over to the mattress and climbed on top of her.

  Afterward, she let him keep the bill. When he was gone, she stuffed the rest of her cash and her library card in the hidey-hole in her purse where the lining was torn. Now she keeps the purse with her always. She even sleeps with it tucked beneath her pillow.

  “I want you to deliver the dragon’s blood to my connection.” Stan’s eyes are cold.

  “What connection?”

  “They’ll be looking for you. Hand it over, that’s all you have to do. You can do that, can’t you, Starbright?”

  Yes, she can. She’s struck with guilt, giving him a hard time over the hundred-dollar bill. She’s glad he doesn’t ask her to take money from the connection. If a narc spots her, she’ll be in big trouble. Apparently Stan’s got the money thing covered some other way. Cool.

  Sizzling with his kiss and her paranoia, Susan strides over to the face-painting tent like he tells her to and waits. She watches and listens for anyone looking for dragon’s blood. An electric guitar wails over the amps. That’s Rodg the Dodg. The band is starting their set, and she can’t be there!

  Half an hour crawls by. Children and their mothers come and go from the face-painting tent. No one pays her any mind. The Double Barrel finishes their first set. One of the songs they were rehearsing in the back of the van turns out better than she feared. She hops from foot to foot, trying to keep warm, furious with Stan. She’s only getting her hundred dollars back, whereas he will clear a year’s worth income, tax-free. Maybe she should get a piece of that. She wonders if she’s got the nerve to ask.

  She’s about to call it quits when two men wander by.

  A child with a painted clown face bursts into tears, holding up her packet of crushed green bean seeds.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” the child’s mother scolds. “Not everyone with long hair is cool.”

  Susan looks to see who crushed the child’s seeds. A man brushes past her. That must be him, a guy in a stovepipe hat that says “L-O-V-E” on the crown jammed over straggly black hair. Steely black eyes peer out from an unsmiling Buddha face with a drooping mustache. His partner is a wiry little guy with nut-brown skin etched by hard times and harder living. A yellow Happy Face button is pinned to the lapel of his Hawaiian shirt. His psychedelic getup can’t conceal his reptilian air. She can practically see a lizard’s tongue flick out and snag a fly.

  Even on Haight Street, Susan has never encountered men like these. They operate on some level of existence she knows nothing about. Violent and dangerous and mean. They drift into the face-painting tent.

  She wants to turn and flee, but then she hears them murmuring, “Dragon’s blood. Got dragon’s blood?”

  “Here,” she whispers. “I’ve g-got dragon’s blood.”

  Stovepipe is in her face in two seconds. “Got dragon’s blood?”

  “Y-yeah.” His eyes are so cold!

  “Where’s the dude?”

  “Around, I g-guess.”

  “Who is he?” the Lizard demands. “What’s his name?”

  “Just a guy,” she says, confused. They don’t know who Stan the Man is?

  “Give it here,” Stovepipe says.

  Susan does. Her hands are trembling.

  Stovepipe and the Lizard stalk out of the tent into a grove of trees at the edge of the campgrounds. She sighs with relief, but in a moment they’re back. Stovepipe hands her a smaller package. Then they disappear as quickly as they came.

  The package could be filled with newspaper for all she knows. It’s not her fault! Why did Stan make her do this?

  She runs back to the Double Barrel stage. The band is well into their second set. It’s the usual circus: fans dancing, bobbing their heads. Beautiful girls posing in exotic costumes. Stan lounges at the edge of the crowd, pointing at something onstage. A white-blond girl, bone-thin in expensive jeans, stands beside him, laughing.

  Susan taps his shoulder and hands him Stovepipe’s package.

  “Groovy, Starbright,” he says. His eyes are painfully bloodshot. He’s had more than a few hits of Professor Zoom’s Gold. He cups a smoking roach beneath the palm of his hand. “Everything was cool?”

  “Sure.” Her pitch for a share of the profits vanishes in thin air.

  The girl turns to glance at her. She’s got a long bony face and limbs like twigs. She must be eighteen, the ideal of beauty everyone adores.

  “Starbright, this is Marylou,” Stan says. “Her daddy owns half of Mill Valley.”

  “I’m Marilyn.” The girl laughs and punches his shoulder. “Isn’t he a pig, Starbright?” Her eyes assess Susan and dismiss her. The difference in their ages isn’t four years, it’s more like four centuries. “Give me some,” she says and pries the roach from his fingers.

  “I’ll give you some,” Stan growls in her ear.

  Susan wonders if she can stop the trembling of her lip.

  *

  Give me some. Back at the Double Barrel house, this is Marilyn’s big line. She says it over and over. She provokes the guys into screaming laughter. Give me some. Marilyn is so enticing, she even upstages Lady May, who pouts and frets.

  Susan huddles on the swaybacked sofa. She’s so sick to her stomach, she’s afraid she’s going to puke all over the floor. Has she got a fever? The neverending party swirls all around her. People pour in the door, laughing, toking, swigging pints of Wild Turkey.

  Give me some.

  Stella leaps onto the coffee table and begins to dance. She stretches out her arms in a beckoning gesture.

  Susan recognizes that gesture. Stella reminds her of Juno, the Transparent Woman.

  *

  Only girls and their mothers were allowed in the auditorium at the Cleveland Health Education Museum. Juno, the Transparent Woman, stood eight feet tall on her dais, her clear plastic arms beckoning. The auditorium dimmed and a don’t-be-afraid voice spoke on the PA system. The Transparent Woman lit up her internal organs. Her heart beat bright purple. Her arteries pulsed neon-red blood, while her veins pulsed cool blue. Her yellow lungs billowed, inhaling and exhaling. Her green stomach showed where food went, her pink bowls showed how waste products came out.

  Then the Transparent Woman lit up her reproductive organs. The girls stared in silence as their mothers coughed discreetly. Juno’s ovaries sent tiny turquoise eggs down her graceful fallopian tubes to the uterus, which glowed redder and redder. Red light flowed through the cervix and down the vagina. The voice said the vagina was the birth canal. Like the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal? The birth canal was where the baby came out.

  But how did the baby get in? The Transparent Woman turned dark. The man, said the voice, planted his sperm—like seeds—in the woman. The Transparent Woman lit up again. Here is where the man planted his seeds, the voice said. In the birth canal. Juno stood stiffly on her dais, smiling her transparent smile, giving no hint of the task at h
and.

  “Well, that’s that,” said Susan’s mother as they drove home through the dark. She never spoke about the Transparent Woman again.

  Susan’s first period came soon after Juno lit up her reproductive organs. She likes to imagine her uterus glowing redder and redder until red light flows out of her birth canal. For the past year, the red light has flowed as regular as clockwork. Every twenty-two days, exactly, between noon and one o’clock, the red light traces its path.

  Well. Susan sure knows how the seeds get planted now. Losing her virginity and sleeping with Stan every night has been as powerful a revelation as her trip. Sex is a lot like tripping. There are people who know and people who don’t.

  Sex is also a lot like a drug. In her eighth-grade science class, the teacher told them a story about how goslings raised with a bowling ball became imprinted on it and followed it everywhere as if it were a mother goose. Stan is her sexual bowling ball.

  Now she swallows hot tears. Her throat is killing her. Her nipples tingle, she can barely keep food down, and she’s got to pee every half hour. The Transparent Woman, a.k.a. Stella, dances on the coffee table.

  Her period is three days late.

  *

  Fawn leaps up on the coffee table and dances with Stella. They proceed to kick everything off, the grease-lipped beer mugs, rotten apple cores, the can of half-eaten SpaghettiOs, their clothes. People drift in and out of the living room, sit on the floor in circles, pass joints around, dance by themselves, roam off to raid the kitchen, or wander away through the halls.

  Stan the Man has disappeared.

  Susan is feverish, burning up. She’s so exhausted, her bones feel like a Gumby Doll’s. She just wants to sleep despite the fact it’s only late afternoon. Peace and quiet, that’s what she desperately needs. She climbs up the three stairways to her room.

  Only it’s not her room. It’s Stan’s room.

  The door is closed. Susan hears voices, not just his. Laughter, the chuckle of seduction. She pushes the door, and it swings open. He’s too wasted to have locked it.