The Armageddon Rag

  “Thanks, but no,” Sandy said. “I have to get to a phone. I guess I’ll be leaving.”

  “I’ll walk you to your car,” Bambi said. She took his hand. They went back outside to Daydream. Ray was still there, sitting in the Jeep with his hands behind his head, looking up at the stars. He looked immensely contented. After years on the run, thought Sandy, it must be nice.

  Bambi must have noticed the look on his face. “Ray was a tortured, hunted man when he came to us for shelter,” she said quietly. “We taught him a better way. He found peace here. You could do the same, Sandy. You don’t need toys like this car. Just love.”

  Sandy sighed. “No,” he said, sadly. “I can’t. I won’t deny that you’ve got something good here. For you. For Ray, maybe. But not for me. You’ve built yourself a pretty little shelter, but you’ve written off the world.”

  “This is the world,” Bambi said. “The real world. We have food and drink and each other, the mountains and stars, clean air, peace. This is sanity.”

  “Maybe. But not reality. The mountains and the stars are fine. But out there is a world of pollution and murder and loud noise and neon lights and automobiles. And it’s just as real as your world. More so. There are only eight of you, and there are millions of them. You’re in the eye of the hurricane here, trying to pretend the storm doesn’t exist, but it’s out there all the same, howling.” He pointed down the mountain road. “The interstate runs less than thirty miles away. It’s full of semis right now. Full of oil trucks and carbon monoxide. Right by the entrance is a Chevron station and a diner that sells the greasiest cheeseburgers the world has ever known. And it’s real, Bambi. It’s real.”

  She lifted her head. “Not to us,” she said. “If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear, is there a sound?” Her hands rested on the bulge of her stomach. Draped in starlight, she looked austere, dignified, and infinitely serious. Sandy smiled at her and turned away, toward Daydream. He opened the door and got in and turned on the ignition before rolling down the window.

  “You dream the right dreams, Bambi,” he said to her, “and you’re tougher than I ever would have guessed. But my money’s on the world. It’s too big for you.”

  “Nothing is too big for the human spirit,” Bambi said. “It was good to see you, Sandy. Take my love with you, and go safely in light and joy.”

  “I’ll try,” Sandy said. “And you do me a favor, OK?”

  “What?” she said, looking at him gravely.

  Sandy pointed a finger at her and grinned. “Don’t name the kid Thumper.”

  For a moment Bambi stared at him in horror. Then her lips curled up in a smile. And began to tremble. And her eyes sparkled. She tried to hold it in, fought, lost, and surrendered in a guffaw of sudden laughter. Then she took one step closer and made a fist. “Sandy Blair!” she said, giggling. “You are absolutely horrible. You’re impossible! You’re tacky!”

  “I’ve never claimed otherwise,” Sandy said. He waved goodbye and slipped Daydream into gear, flicking on the headlamps as he began to move. They popped up and speared out into the darkness, and Sandy started to wind his way down the mountain road carefully, a broad smile on his face.

  Just around the first bend in the road, he heard the voices of the children and slowed to let them pass. Two of them went by and waved, and then, several steps behind, two more. The second pair did not wave. They were busy playing. As Sandy swung Daydream around a curve, they were outlined in the glare of the headlights clearly for an instant, and their voices floated through the open window. Bambi’s son Jason had a stick in his hand. He was pointing it at the ten-year-old, Free, and shouting, “Bang, bang!” But Free kept lumbering on, arms held out in front of him. “You’re shot!” Jason whined. “Bullets can’t hurt the Hulk!” Free shot back, as he grabbed the younger boy.

  Sandy looked back over his shoulder quickly as he passed and laughed out loud. But the laughter died in his throat, and all of a sudden he felt very sad and tired. He was going to take no pleasure in winning his bet with Bambi. The world was going to crush them.

  He fumbled around and found a cassette and slid it into the tape deck, and then rushed on through the night, toward a telephone and Davie Parker, while Bob Dylan told him that the times they were a-changin’. And the terrible thing about it was, Dylan was right.

  ELEVEN

  One generation got old, one generation got soul/

  This generation got no destination to hold

  And?” Froggy asked when Sandy had finished. “What did Deputy Parker say?”

  “He said he’d been waiting to hear from me. He’d gotten in touch with the FBI. They have a file on Morse a foot thick, confirming most of what my source told me. Oh, they don’t have any proof, of course, or Morse would have been behind bars a long time ago. But they have a mess of suspicions. About the fire that made him sole heir to his family fortune. About the Alfies. About Sylvester. But never anything they could take to court, and since Morse and the Alfies have been quiet for a long, long time, the feds just let it slide.”

  “And now?” Froggy asked. They were sitting in a sushi bar in Santa Monica, perched on high stools, washing down octopus and raw fish with copious amounts of green tea.

  “Parker is real excited. He’s trying to get the sheriff to reopen the case. So far, he’s not having a lot of luck. Meanwhile, he has warned me to stay out of it, now that things might get serious. In particular, he said I should stay away from Edan Morse.”

  “Will you?”

  Sandy swallowed some octopus and smiled. “Hell, no. Morse has a beach house in Malibu now. Unlisted number. Took me three days to track him down, but yesterday I tried to pay him a visit. A woman answered the door and told me he wasn’t home. I left my card and the number of my hotel. I can wait. I’ve driven too goddamn many miles to pack my bags and go home now. I want to know how this fits together.”

  Froggy grinned. He had a broad, flat face and fat cheeks, but when he grinned, the ends of his mouth seemed almost to touch his earlobes, and everything under his nose turned to teeth. Yellow teeth at that. “Sounds like a good story,” he said. “Jared’ll shit his pants when it runs somewhere else.”

  “That thought had occurred to me,” Sandy said. He was in a good mood, for a change. His talk with Ray had been the breakthrough he needed; now he was certain that he was on to something. Besides, he felt good seeing Froggy again.

  Harold “Froggy” Cohen had been Sandy’s roommate for two years at Northwestern, and his friend for years after that. They’d taken to each other almost from the start. Froggy had been a short, ungainly kid, thick around the middle, with Coke-bottle glasses and dandruff in his scruffy brown hair and the thickest eyebrows Sandy had ever seen. But they’d had a pile of stuff in common. Harold Cohen came from the Bronx and Sandy from New Jersey, so they were both Eastern exiles at college. They shared a taste for New York–style pizza and Schaefer beer. They both loathed the Yankees, an attitude that Froggy admitted had gotten him beaten up more than once in his Bronx childhood. They liked most of the same music, read most of the same books, got radicalized at much the same speed, and stopped at more or less the same place. But the real bond was Andy’s Gang, a television show both of them had watched religiously as kids.

  Hosted by Andy Devine and sponsored by Buster Brown Shoes, the show had featured the adventures of Ghanga the Elephant Boy, and weekly concerts by Midnight the Cat and Squeaky the Mouse. Midnight sawed on the violin while Squeaky did tricks; it had taken Sandy a long time to twig to the fact that they weren’t real live animals. But that was just the supporting cast. The real star of the show was Froggy the Gremlin.

  Every week Andy Devine would say, “Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy,” and there’d be this puff of smoke, and in the middle of it would appear this egregious-looking rubber frog puppet, wearing a dinner jacket, a striped vest, and a bow tie. “Hiya kids, hiya, hiya, hiya,” he would croak in the deepest, evilest, froggiest voice you’d ever want to
hear, while rocking from side to side and grinning like the devil. And Andy would tell Froggy about this week’s guest, be it Jim Nasium demonstrating exercises, Chef Pasta Fazool with a cooking lesson, or whoever, and he’d ask Froggy to promise to be good, and Froggy would make the promise solemnly while the kids chortled. And then Pasta Fazool would come out and start to show the kids how to make spaghetti. Behind him, Froggy would croak, “And then you put it in your hair, you do, you do,” in that low evil voice, and sure enough the chef would do just that. All the guests were similarly suggestible, or else it was gremlin magic. All the guests were also the same actor, but as a kid Sandy didn’t realize that, either. Every week would end in disaster, and Andy Devine would come rushing back out to do in Froggy, but the culprit would always vanish in a puff of smoke, to the delight of the kids. And the week following he’d return once more, promising to be good.

  Froggy the Gremlin was Harold Cohen’s hero. “My role model,” Froggy Cohen would say after the phrase role model had become fashionable, “the original anarchist.” The very first issue of the ratty-looking, lurid, but excitingly alive Hedgehog had featured a wickedly nasty fantasy by Cohen that explained the Vietnam War succinctly; Froggy the Gremlin had been visiting Nixon in the White House. “And then you drop napalm on their babies, you will, you will,” Froggy would chortle, and Nixon would do just that. Nixon and Jim Nasium had much in common, Cohen pointed out.

  After that smash debut, Cohen had gone on to write a column for them, called Amerikan History. The stories that Old Mrs. Wackerfuss didn’t tell you in third grade.

  But the highlight of his career had been the time when he’d challenged a Dow Chemical recruiter to a public debate. Froggy had been president of the campus SDS that year. The poor guy had accepted, and was seated at one end of a long table in his gray suit, white shirt, and blue tie when a smoke bomb went off at the other end, and Harold Cohen emerged in a tuxedo and bow tie, his face painted green. “Hiya kids, hiya, hiya, hiya,” he had croaked evilly, and the audience had roared back, “Hiya, Froggy!” in unison. The Dow man was finally driven from the stage in ridicule. It had been an inspired bit of guerilla theater.

  Froggy had also been the horniest human being Sandy had ever known. Despite his dandruff, his paunch, and his yellow teeth, he had been amazingly successful at it, too. Sandy, Lark, and Slum had all been in awe of him; Froggy had gotten laid more during freshman year than the three of them combined in the entire four years of college. Froggy’s secret was an absolute lack of shame. He would sidle right up to a girl he’d just met, grin his ear-to-ear grin, and say, “Hey, wanna fuck?” Sandy had once accused Froggy of going radical only because women in the Movement tended to be more available. Froggy had grinned at him and said, “Hell, Sandy, someone’s got to plunk my magic twanger!”

  Sandy had stayed in touch with Froggy for a long time after they had gone their separate ways, Sandy to write and edit the Hog in New York and Froggy to teach in California. Long after Sandy had lost track of Bambi and Lark, he and Froggy had still been writing, phoning, and even visiting each other, but it had finally ended with Froggy’s second marriage (he’d had a disastrous two-month marriage during his junior year in college, to a high-school senior he’d met at a rally and still described as having “the face of an angel, the patience of a saint, the world’s greatest tits, and the brain of Squeaky the Mouse”), to a harridan who hated all of his old friends.

  Fortunately, that was all past. The first thing Froggy had said when Sandy phoned was, “Hey, don’t worry about Liz. She’s long gone from my doorway, though not entirely from my paycheck.”

  “So you’re a single man again,” Sandy had said.

  “Nope. Married.”

  “Uh-oh,” Sandy said. “Number three?”

  “Number four,” Froggy said. “Number three and I had a great thing going for two years, until she ran off with her karate instructor. But number four is terrific. Wait’ll you meet her. She looks just like Andy Devine. It was love at first sight.”

  Sandy laughed. “Right,” he said. “You want to get together for lunch?” And that was how they came to their rendezvous at the sushi bar. Froggy hadn’t changed much. His cheeks seemed a little wider than before, his belly a little more pronounced, his hair a little thinner. But his teeth were just as yellow and his grin was just as broad, and it wasn’t long before Sandy found himself pouring out the whole story of his cross-country odyssey.

  After they finished eating, Froggy suggested a walk. “It’s only a few blocks to the beach,” he said. “I don’t have any classes today. I teach Monday-Wednesday-Friday, and have office hours on Tuesday, but no one ever comes to my office, so I won’t be missed.” Sandy agreed readily, and a few minutes later they found themselves strolling along the oceanside park and descending the cliffside stairs to the beach. There was a brisk wind and an early November chill in the air, although it was still warm by New York standards. The beach was deserted. They walked along the edge of the water leisurely, talking and playing chicken with the incoming waves, headed toward the amusement pier.

  Sandy found himself doing most of the talking, to appease Froggy’s endless curiosity. He began by talking about Maggie and Lark and Bambi, and eventually wound up talking about himself, his own life, his books, his house, his dreams, his failures. Froggy began by making cracks but soon grew serious. They finally seated themselves a few feet from the water, Sandy sifting cold dry handfuls of sand through his fingers as he spoke, Froggy with his arms wrapped around his knees, staring through those thick Coke-bottle lenses. “For a group who spent years living in each other’s hip pockets, we’ve drifted pretty far apart,” Sandy said, “but I’m not sure any of us have found a real answer. Me included.”

  Froggy blew through his lips and made a rude noise. “Hey, don’t go thinking we’re unique, Sandy. We’re just part of a so-cee-oh-logical phenomenon. This is Professor Doctor Harold M. Cohen talking to you now, so listen up. You and me and Lark and Bambi and all may be fucking up good, but we’re making history as we do it, Sander m’boy. Once we’re all safely dead, we’ll be a great generation to study. Take notes, and I’ll pitch wisdom atcha.” He cleared his throat. “Speaking historically, I see four major causes at work here. Number one, look at the period we grew up in. Postwar America, late Forties and early Fifties. A boom time, Sandy, one of the biggest and juiciest in American history. Peace and posterity, rampant progress all around, everything getting bigger and better every day. For us, the sky was the limit. We were the generation that wanted everything, that expected everything. The greediest kids in history, you could say. But also the most idealistic.

  “Number two, we were the first generation suckled on the tube. We grew up with Father Knows Best and dancing cigarettes and newscasts and, God help us all”—he rolled his eyes—“Froggy the Gremlin. From cradle on, we were immersed in a flood of information, exposed to everything under the sun. Well, the more information you get, the more contradictions you see, right? Even in the Ol’ South, massa knew book-learnin’ was no good for dem darkies, and he was right. The world we saw in the tube didn’t always square with what our mommies and daddies and teachers had told us, and Vietnam brought that home with force. Crossbreed that little dictum with our idealism, our high expectations, and what is so very quaintly referred to as The Turmoil of the Sixties becomes inevitable.

  “Third, maybe most important, was the size of our generation. We wanted to change the world because of one and two, and the old folks smiled and shook their heads and said every generation felt the same, that we’d grow out of it like they had. And we laughed. And raged. And knew better. We were going to be different, we insisted. This time it was really going to happen. But the irony is, we were right—we were different from all those generations that had gone before, because there were so fucking many of us. We’re the baby boomers, the biggest hairiest crowd that’s ever been invited to crash the party of life. All our lives American society has been busily remaking itself in o
ur image. The suburbs were built to house us. Toys and diapers and baby-food had their heyday when we were using ’em. The media have licked our rosy-sweet tushes every step of the way. When we were young, young was chic. When we got into fucking, all of a sudden you could say fuck in books and show tits in movies. Wait’ll we get old and gray, you’ll see so many senior citizen sitcoms on the tube you’ll get liver spots on your eyes just watching. No wonder we thought we had the power. We’d been changing the world all along.

  “Of course, our numbers have also made things harder for us. See all the young execs competing for the same promotions. Behold the vast sea of aspiring young writers and artists and filmmakers, the ravening hordes of playwrights, the teeming mass of young politicians yearning to give speeches! No one wants to sweep the floors or clean the toilet bowls or take dictation; we’ve all been educated to know better, but there are so many of us that most get trapped in places we don’t like. Hence Maggie, feeling wasted and useless and old, ruing the day she dropped out and turned on. Lark desperately playing a money game he can’t really believe in. Bambi redefining the rules so she can come out a winner. And Sandy, fretting his humble place in world lit’rature.”

  Froggy was enjoying himself; he worked up more and more steam with every word, and when he was finished he hopped to his feet and gave a small but flamboyant bow. Then he paused to brush sand from the seat of his baggy brown cords. “Write that in your story,” he said.

  “You said there were four causes,” Sandy objected. “You only gave three.”

  “I lied,” said Froggy. “It was a trick to see if you were paying attention. Hey, I do it to the kids all the time.”

  Sandy smiled and climbed up from the sand. “They must love you,” he said. “And hate you.”

  “It runs about fifty-fifty,” Froggy said, “but the trend is agin’ me, Sander m’boy.”