Are things going to get heavy and bad here too, he wondered, like they did at Jerry Fabin’s house during the last few weeks with him? It used to be mellow here, he thought, everybody kicking back and turning on, grooving to acid rock, especially the Stones. Donna sitting here in her leather jacket and boots, filling caps, Luckman rolling joints and telling about the seminar he planned to give at UCLA in dope-smoking and joint-rolling, and how someday he’d suddenly roll the perfect joint and it would be placed under glass and helium back at Constitution Hall, as part of American history with those other items of similar importance. When I look back, he thought, even to when Jim Barris and I were sitting at the Fiddler’s, the other day . . . it was better even then. Jenny began it, he thought; that’s what’s coming down here, that there which carried off Jerry. How can days and happenings and moments so good become so quickly ugly, and for no reason, for no real reason? Just–change. With nothing causing it.
“I’m splitting,” he said to Luckman and Arctor, who were watching him rev up.
“No, stay, hey, man,” Luckman said with a warm smile. “We need you. You’re a brother.”
“Naw, I’m cutting out.”
From the house Barris appeared cautiously. He carried a hammer. “It was a wrong number,” he shouted, advancing with great caution, halting and peering like a crab-thing in a drive-in movie.
“What’s the hammer for?” Luckman said.
Arctor said, “To fix the engine.”
“Thought I would bring it with me,” Barris explained as he returned gingerly to the Olds, “since I was indoors and noticed it.”
“The most dangerous kind of person,” Arctor said, “is one who is afraid of his own shadow.” That was the last Freck heard as he drove away; he pondered over what Arctor meant, if he meant him, Charles Freck. He felt shame. But shit, he thought, why stick around when it’s such a super bummer? Where’s the chicken in that? Don’t never participate in no bad scenes, he reminded himself; that was his motto in life. So he drove away now, without looking back. Let them snuff each other, he thought. Who needs them? But he felt bad, really bad, to leave them and to have witnessed the darkening change, and he wondered again why, and what it signified, but then it occurred to him that maybe things would go the other way again and get better, and that cheered him. In fact, it caused him to roll a short fantasy number in his head as he drove along avoiding invisible police cars:
THERE THEY ALL SAT AS BEFORE.
Even people who were either dead or burned out, like Jerry Fabin. They all sat here and there in a sort of clear white light, which wasn’t daylight but better light than that, a kind of sea which lay beneath them and above them as well.
Donna and a couple other chicks looked so foxy–they had on halters and hot pants, or tank tops with no bras. He could hear music although he could not quite distinguish what track it was from what LP. Maybe Hendrix! he thought. Yeah, an old Hendrix track, or now all at once it was J.J. All of them: Jim Croce, and J.J., but especially Hendrix. “Before I die,” Hendrix was murmuring, “let me live my life as I want to,” and then immediately the fantasy number blew up because he had forgotten both that Hendrix was dead and how Hendrix and also Joplin had died, not to mention Croce. Hendrix and J.J. OD’ing on smack, both of them, two neat cool fine people like that, two outrageous humans, and he remembered how he’d heard that Janis’s manager had only allowed her a couple hundred bucks now and then; she couldn’t have the rest, all that she earned, because of her junk habit. And then he heard in his head her song “All Is Loneliness,” and he began to cry. And in that condition drove on toward home.
In his living room, sitting with his friends and attempting to determine whether he needed a new carb, a rebuilt carb, on a modification carb-and-manifold, Robert Arctor sensed the silent constant scrutiny, the electronic presence, of the holoscanners. And felt good about it.
“You look mellow,” Luckman said. “Putting out a hundred bucks wouldn’t make me mellow.”
“I decided to cruise along the street until I come across an Olds like mine,” Arctor explained, “and then unbolt their carb and pay nothing. Like everyone else we know.”
“Especially Donna,” Barris said in agreement. “I wish she hadn’t been in here the other day while we were gone. Donna steals everything she can carry, and if she can’t carry it she phones up her rip-off gang buddies and they show up and carry it off for her.”
“I’ll tell you a stony I heard about Donna,” Luckman said. “One time, see, Donna put a quarter into one of those automatic stamp machines that operate off a coil of stamps, and the machine was dingey and just kept cranking out stamps. Finally she had a marketbasket full. It _still_ kept cranking them out. Ultimately she had like–she and her ripoff friends counted them–over eighteen thousand U.S. fifteen-cent stamps. Well, that was cool, except what was Donna Hawthorne going to do with them? She never wrote a letter in her life, except to her lawyer to sue some guy who burned her in a dope deal.”
“Donna does _that?_” Arctor said. “She has an attorney to use in a default on an illegal transaction? How can she do that?”
“She just probably says the dude owes her bread.”
“Imagine getting an angry pay-up-or-go-to-court letter from an attorney about a dope deal,” Arctor said, marveling at Donna, as he frequently did.
“Anyhow,” Luckman continued, “there she was with a marketbasket full of at least eighteen thousand U.S. fifteen-cent stamps, and what the hell to do with them? You can’t sell them back to the Post Office. Anyhow, when the P.O. came to service the machine they’d know it went dingey, and anyone who showed up at a window with all those fifteen-cent stamps, especially a coil of them–shit, they’d flash on it; in fact, they’d be waiting for Donna, right? So she thought about it–after of course she’d loaded the coil of stamps into her MG and drove off–and then she phoned up more of those rip-off freaks she works with and had them drive over with a jackhammer of some kind, water-cooled and water-silenced, a real kinky special one which, Christ, they ripped off, too, and they dug the stamp machine loose from the concrete in the middle of the night and carried it to her place in the back of a Ford Ranchero. Which they also probably ripped off. For the stamps.”
“You mean she sold the stamps?” Arctor said, marveling. “From a vending machine? One by one?”
“They remounted–this is what I heard, anyhow–they relocated the U.S. stamp machine at a busy intersection where a lot of people pass by, but back out of sight where no mail truck would spot it, and they put it back in operation.”
“They would have been wiser just to knock over the coin box,” Barris said.
“So they were selling stamps, then,” Luckman said, “for like a few weeks until the machine ran out, like it naturally had to eventually. And what the fuck next? I can imagine Donna’s brain working on that during those weeks, that peasant-thrift brain . . . her family is peasant stock from some European country. Anyhow, by the time it ran out of its coil, Donna had decided to convert it over to soft drinks, which are from the P.O.–they’re really guarded. And you go into the bucket forever for that.”
“Is this true?” Barris said.
“Is what true?” Luckman said.
Barris said, “That girl is disturbed. She should be forcibly committed. Do you realize that all our taxes were raised by her stealing those stamps?” He sounded angry again.
“Write the government and tell them,” Luckman said, his face cold with distaste for Barris. “Ask Donna for a stamp to mail it; she’ll sell you one.”
“At full price,” Barris said, equally mad.
The holos, Arctor thought, will have miles and miles of this on their expensive tapes. Not miles and miles of dead tape but miles and miles of tripped out tape.
It was not what went on while Robert Arctor sat before a holo-scanner that mattered so much, he considered; it was what took place–at least for him . . . for whom? . . . for Fred–while Bob Arctor was elsewhere or asleep and others were within scanning range. So I should split, he thought, as I planned it out, leaving these guys, and sending other people I know over here. I should make my house super-accessible from now on.
And then a dreadful, ugly thought rose inside him. Suppose when I play the tapes back I see Donna when she’s in here–opening a window with a spoon or knife blade–and slipping in and destroying my possessions and stealing. _Another_ Donna: the chick as she really is, or anyhow as she is when I can’t see her. The philosophical “when a tree falls in the forest” number. What is Donna like when no one is around to watch her?