Drop City

  From the main house, the sounds of laughter, conversation, music, all blended in a murmur that was like some sort of undercurrent, as if that was where the real life was, the only life, and this out here, this nature and this crepitating dark, was for losers—losers and snakes. Lydia was in there, and Merry, Verbie and the rest of them. Maybe he’d get up and go inside, just for the human warmth and companionship, because that’s what Drop City was all about, companionship, a game of cards maybe, or Monopoly—but then the image of Alfredo clawed its way into the forefront of his brain, and he thought maybe he wouldn’t.

  Alfredo was one of the founding members of the commune, one of Norm Sender’s inner circle, one of those sour-faced ascetic types, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, Reba’s old man. He was always going on about natural childbirth and how Reba had cooked up the afterbirth and everybody shared a piece of it and how Che and Sunshine had been born outside under the moon and the stars, but he was an uptight, tight-assed jerk nonetheless, and two days ago Ronnie had gotten into it with him over some very pointed criticism about volunteering to do wash-up or haul trash or dig a new septic field because all these people were clogging up the commune’s only two working toilets until they were rivers of shit, and he wouldn’t mind, would he? Hell, yeah. He minded. He didn’t come all the way out here to California to dig sewers. Jesus Fucking Christ.

  That was what he was thinking, sitting there on the warm snake-loving pavement with the night festering around him, just a little shaky, but pissed off too, royally pissed off, when Lester and one of the other spade cats—Franklin, his name was Franklin—appeared out of nowhere with a jug of wine. “Hey, brother,” Lester breathed, easing himself down beside him, “—what you doing out here, swimming?”

  “I don’t know. Yeah. I guess. I was swimming before—earlier, you know?” The words seemed to be stuck in his mouth, like the crust at the bottom of a pan. “Kind of cold now, I guess. But what’s happening with you?”

  Franklin was just standing there, the jug of wine—Cribari red—dangling from his fingertips like a big glass bomb. Lester grinned. “Same old shit,” he said. “We’re having a party in the back house, brother, and you’re welcome to join us—we’d be real pleased about that, in fact; I would, at least—how about you, Franklin?”

  Franklin said he’d be pleased too.

  “By the way,” Lester said, and they were already gathering themselves up, “you wouldn’t happen to have a couple of hits of that mescaline I heard you got left, would you?”

  Well, he did. And two minutes later he was in the back house and there were six or seven cats sitting around listening to Marvin Gaye out of a battery-powered portable stereo with a blown bass, thump, thump, blat, thump, thump, blat. Sky Dog was there, cradling his guitar, somebody had lit a couple of scented candles because there was no electricity in the back house, and there was a new girl there—a chick—and she couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen. A runaway. What was her name? Sally. Where was she from? Santa Clara. And what was her father like? He was a son of a bitch. They probably got twenty a week just like her, and none of them stayed more than a night or two, as if this whole thing—Norm Sender, Alfredo, Reba, Drop City itself—was no more than a kind of extended slumber party.

  Ronnie introduced himself as Pan, gave her a little brotherly and sisterly squeeze, and then settled in on the floor against the back wall and took it upon himself to make sure the jug kept circulating. All was peace. Silken voices murmuring, Marvin Gaye, Sly and the Family Stone, Hendrix, thump, thump, blat, and Pan was in the middle of an elaborate story about a free concert in Central Park and the good and bad drugs he’d done that night and how somebody had vomited all over the windshield of his mother’s car, which he’d borrowed with every warning and proscription attached, when Sally, the skinny-legged fourteen-year-old runaway in the patched jeans and stretch top, cried out. Or she screamed, actually. “Get off me, you freak!” she let out in a piping wild adolescent vibrato that shot up the scale like feedback, and Ronnie glanced away from his story to see Lester simultaneously pinning her down and going at her breasts with both hands and the pink slab of his tongue, and Sky Dog—Sky Dog, Mr. Mellow Peace-and-Love himself—stripped to his tanned buttocks and working hard to peel her jeans down the flailing sticks of her legs.

  Ronnie was right in the middle of a story, his voice droning on through the standard interludes and rich with the twenty nasal catchphrases of the day, and he was so mellowed out he could barely keep his head up off the floor, but this—this scream, this scene going down in the corner—sent a shock wave through him. “Get off, get off!” the girl kept screaming, and now her legs were bare and Sky Dog’s buttocks were clenching and thrusting in a way that hurt to watch, a way that was wrong, dead wrong, and Ronnie tried to get up off the floor, tried to say, Hey, man, what do you think you’re doing, because this wasn’t right, it wasn’t—but by the time he got to his feet he realized everyone in the room was looking at him with eyes that had no brotherly or even human spark in them.

  In the morning, which came hurtling out of the sky like a Russian missile aimed straight at his brain, Pan opened his eyes on the stiff tall grass and the golden seedheads drooping over him as if he were already dead and decomposed. He seemed to be lying supine in the weeds beyond the back house, and this was a nasty little surprise, speaking of snakes, rattle or otherwise. His hair was stiff with dirt and bits of twig and chaff, and when he rubbed the back of his skull he felt an unevenness there, as if some essential fluid—blood, that is—had leaked out of him and coagulated in a bristling lump. He felt bad. Bad in every way. But most of all, he felt thirsty, and he saw himself rising up out of the sun-blasted weeds and staggering first to the hose on the back lawn and then to the pool, where the dried blood—and there seemed to be a rough granulated gash over his cheekbone too—would dissolve and boil up around him in a dull brown cloud of cellular material gone to waste.

  It must have been noon or maybe even later, because people were gathered round the lawn and the pool coping with metal plates of lunchtime mush in their hands, eyes shining, hair flowing, all the colors of their sarongs and T-shirts and burnished flesh aglow as if everybody was a lightbulb and they just kept shining and shining. A couple of people made comments—“Rough night, huh?”—and laughed and joshed him in a brotherly and sisterly way when he bent to the hose and let the silver liquid flow in and out of his mouth in a long glowing arc. He couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him, or what was most wrong—hangover, drug depletion or blood loss, and had he been in a fight, was that it? He tried to focus, tried to bring up the image of that girl on the floor in the back house, but the only thing that came into his mind was a phrase he’d used a thousand times, two truncated monosyllabic words that did nobody or no thing justice at all: Free Love.

  Reba’s kids were there, nice day, lunch outside, not enough seats in the meeting room–dining hall anyway, and they were chasing each other around the pool as if they’d never stopped, their cheeks distended with corn mush and cauliflower, their bodies naked and brown and stippled with cuts, contusions, poison oak, dirt. He dropped the hose and moved toward the water like a zombie. Then he was in, the green envelope, the cessation of sound, his limbs moving under command of the autonomous system, pump and release, pump and release, till he cracked his head on the far side of the pool and heaved himself streaming from the water.

  Somebody else was in now, cannonballing and shouting, the two yellow dogs barking at their heels, Lydia—was that Lydia?—and the greenish water lapped at his knees and he was feeling he ought to shake the water out of his hair and get himself a plate of mush just for the ballast, when he locked eyes with Alfredo across the lawn. Alfredo gave him a look, niggardly little eyes, his mouth like a wad of gum stuck up under a desk at school, and Ronnie gave him a look back. He wasn’t going to take any shit. He had as much right as anybody to be here—LATWIDNO, right?—and he wasn’t about to apologize to Alfredo or Norm Sender or anybody el
se. Then he felt a hand on his knee and it was Lydia, her breasts bobbing, the hair pressed flat to her head. “Where you been?” she said. “We looked all over for you last night.” The water lapped, dragonflies hovered. And then: “Did you hear what happened?”

  No, he hadn’t heard.

  She blinked the water out of her eyes, snaked a hand up his leg, and he felt himself go hard against the rough wet folds of his cutoffs. “A girl got raped.”

  “Raped? What do you mean raped?”

  “I mean she was some runaway—fourteen, she was only fourteen—and Norm’s freaked about the whole thing, running around the kitchen jabbering about the man—the man’s coming, the man’s coming—and hide the dope and all, and clean this shit up, and do this and do that, and Alfredo’s right there with him. They want Lester out. And Sky Dog and the rest of them.”

  Ronnie considered this, the water lapping at his legs, Lydia’s breasts bobbing at his ankles, her hand crawling up his thigh. His normal response would have been something like “Bummer” or “Heavy,” but the moment was huge and hovering and his head wasn’t clear yet, not even close, so he just stared down at the white ghosts of her legs kicking rhythmically beneath the surface.

  “What I hear is they got her stoned, and then they pinned her down, and it wasn’t just Lester and Sky Dog either. It was all of them.” She paused, kicking, kicking, the slow fluid rhythm of her legs. Che threw something—a scarred Frisbee—at his sister and she let out a shriek, and then the dogs started barking and Reba, at the far end of the pool, went off on a laughing jag, ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha. Lydia’s hand was cold. She clutched him tighter. “Somebody said you were there,” she breathed, and then trailed off.

  He was there. Sure he was. And he’d gotten into it with a couple of them too, hadn’t he? Sure, sure. He must have. Because he didn’t care how stoned he was or how voluntarily primitive it got, he wasn’t about to stand by and watch something like that . . . And the thought of it, the thought of that cheap little acidic moment in the back house with all those null and void faces and the thump, thump, blat of the stereo and the girl with her stick legs flailing just made him feel so black inside he wished he’d never left home himself. What could he say? How could he explain it?

  “Yeah,” he said, “yeah. I was there.”

  Lydia seemed to consider this a moment, her eyes glittering like planets in the uncharted universe of her face. She was a big girl, big in the shoulders and the hips, big all over, black hair, everted lips, flecks of eye shadow caught in her lashes like drift washed up on a beach. Her legs kicked beneath the surface. Her hand tightened on his thigh. She blinked the water out of her eyes and gave him half a smile. “You want to rape me too?” she said.

  4

  Alfredo was the one who called the meeting, eight P.M., the supper dishes mostly washed, or soaking anyway, and everybody feeling lazy and contented, six pans of brownies cooling on the kitchen table and the promise of a movie afterward (Charlie Chaplin, one Star hadn’t seen—something about Alaska, was that possible?). A few people had dressed for the occasion, Verbie in particular, because a meeting was really the template for a party, everybody already collected from their huts and yurts and the back bedrooms and all those acres of strung-out woods, and why not, Star was thinking, why not? Party on. If you thought about it, even peeling potatoes for the veggie stew or hacking the weeds out of the garden was a kind of party. It certainly wasn’t work, not in any conventional sense, not when you were surrounded by your brothers and sisters and nobody was standing over you with a time clock.

  By half past seven, Verbie was parading around in a lime green cape over a pink ruffled blouse, her face painted the color of the cracked saltillo tiles Norm had inexplicably dumped on the west side of the house one morning before anybody was awake. Jiminy was right there with her, wearing a high hat and tails with nothing underneath but a pair of Donald Duck briefs, some new guy was playing bongos, rat-a-tat-tat, the dogs and even the goats were in a high state of alert, and Maya swept in the door in a Goodwill wedding gown that looked as if the moths weren’t done with it yet. And Ronnie? Ronnie was Ronnie, keep it simple. Star settled for a little face paint—a peace sign on each cheek and a third eye, replete with false lashes, centered in the middle of her forehead.

  It must have been eight-thirty or so by the time Reba came in and lit some candles and set two pots of chamomile tea and a tray of thick ceramic mugs on the big table at the front of the room. That was the signal, or so Star thought, and she settled in on the floor beside Marco, Ronnie, Merry and Lydia, but it was another half hour before Norm Sender showed up and Alfredo lifted an old circus-prop megaphone to his lips and began saying, “All right, people, all right—can I have your attention up here for just a minute, and we’re going to make this as painless as possible, I promise you—”

  Star was feeling good, very good—blissful, even—as she sank into the pillows and Marco put his arm around her and one of the yellow dogs threaded its way across the room to settle at her side and prop a big yellow head on her knee. Everything seemed to converge in that moment, all the filaments of her life, the tugging from one pole to another, Ronnie, Marco, the teepee cat, her parents and the job and the car and the room she’d left behind, because this was her family now, this was where she belonged. She stretched her legs, gazed up at the drift of cobwebs stretched out across the ceiling like miniature cloudbanks and the craneflies straining against them. Until Drop City, she’d never belonged anywhere.

  Who had she been in high school? Little Miss Nobody. She could have embroidered it on her sweaters, tattooed it across her forehead. And in smaller letters: I AM SHIT, I AM ANONYMOUS, STEP ON ME. PLEASE. She wasn’t voted Most Humorous in her high school yearbook or Best Dancer or Most Likely to Succeed, and she wasn’t in the band or the Spanish Club and when her ten-year reunion rolled around nobody would recognize her or have a single memory to share. The guys noticed her, though. In college they did, anyway. They noticed her big time, noticed her in the hallway and the cafeteria and downtown in the claustrophobic aisles of the record store, their eyes glazed with lust and a kind of animal ferocity they weren’t even aware of. She dated a few of them, but she’d never had a serious boyfriend, and though she was pretty—she knew she was pretty—she couldn’t figure out why that was, except that something was out of sync, as if she’d been born in the wrong era and the wrong place, especially the wrong place, where nothing ever happened and nobody ever got anywhere. That’s what it was, she decided, that had to be it, and the notion comforted her through all her disappointments and the cardboard array of days and months and years, each as stiff and unyielding as the one that preceded it. She sat through the banal Education classes, Psych 101, faced down the six primary causes of World War I, algorithms and the internal anatomy of the earthworm, thinking there had to be something more.

  She graduated, put on a face and started teaching third grade in the very elementary school she’d attended ten years earlier, living in her girlhood room in her parents’ house like a case of arrested development, and she was just like her mother everybody said, because her mother taught kindergarten and wore cute petite-size pantsuits and mauve blouses with Peter Pan collars and so did she. But she didn’t want to be just like her mother. When she got home at night she balled up her pantyhose in her own petite-size pantsuits, flung them on the floor in her room and lay stretched out on the floor with a speaker pressed to each ear, staring at the flecks and whorls of the thrice-painted ceiling while Janis Joplin flapped and soared over the thunderous changes of “Ball and Chain.” Her mother chattered through dinner, the lace curtains from Connemara hung rigid at the windows, her father guarded his plate as if someone were about to take it from him. She could barely lift the fork to her lips, peas, meat loaf, cod in cream sauce, Brussels sprouts. And what about Tommy Nardone, is he behaving in class, because I had his brother Randy, and believe you me, her mother would say, and she’d nod and agree and go back up to her room and study the
sneers of the Rolling Stones on the jacket of the Out of Our Heads LP. And then she went to buy makeup at Caldor one rinsed-out dead bleak soul-destroying October afternoon and ran into Ronnie in the record section—Oh, yeah, he’d dropped out, all right, and he was hustling records just until he could save the bread to get out to California, because that’s where it was happening, there and no place else. Oh, yeah. Miniskirt. Head shop. The Haight. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

  “There’s been some problems,” Alfredo was saying, “and I’m sure everybody’s hip to them, but we all—I mean, me, Norm, Reba and like everybody that was working the communal garden this morning?—we all felt things had come to a head . . .”

  “Which head?” Ronnie said, propping himself up on his elbows. “I think there’s more than one here, man.”

  “Uneasy lies the head—” Merry chimed in.

  Ronnie swung round, playing to the crowd: “Heads of the world, unite!”

  There was some foot-stomping, a spatter of applause and a whinny or two of laughter that might have had a bit too much fuel behind it. Alfredo merely sat there, slumped over the table, his eyes burning into every face in the room. When the noise died down, he continued: “Yes, but you all know that two toilets are inadequate for a commune this size, not to mention the fact that we’re swamped with visitors every weekend, and with summer coming on it’s just going to get worse—”