Drop City Read online

  She did. Because he quoted it to her every time he felt horny. Whoever they were, the Keristanians or Keristanters or whatever they wanted to call themselves, they preached Free Love without prejudice—that is, making it with anybody who asked, no matter their race or creed or color or whether they were fat and old or retarded or smelled like the underside of somebody’s shoe. It was considered an act of hostility to say no to anybody who wanted to ball, whether you felt like it or not—it’s seven A.M. and you’re hungover and your hair looks like it’s been grafted to your head, and some guy wants to ball? You ball him. Either that, or you’re not into the scene because you’re infected with all your bourgeois hangups just like your fucked-up parents and the rest of the straight world. That was what the Keristan Society had to say, but what she was thinking, or beginning to think, in the most rudimentary way, was that Free Love was just an invention of some cat with pimples and terminally bad hair and maybe crossed eyes who couldn’t get laid any other way or under any other regime, and she wasn’t having it, not tonight, not with Ronnie and what’s her name.

  “No, Ronnie,” she said, lifting his arm off her shoulder and letting it drop like the deadweight it was, “n-o.” She was on her feet now, looking down at him, at the tiny dollop of his face and the girl staring up at her with her smile fading like a brown-out. “I don’t give a shit about the Keristan Society. I’m going to bed. And don’t call me that.”

  He was hurt, put-upon, devastated, clinging to the girl—Merry, that was her name, Merry—as if she were a crate on the high seas and his ship had just gone down. “Call you what?”

  Breasts flapping, the little penis swaying, people hammering tambourines against their palms and the smoke of grass and incense roiling up off the floor like fog. “Don’t call me Paulette,” she said, and then she was gone, bare feet picking their way through the sprawled hips and naked limbs of her brothers and her sisters.

  It was another morning. This one came in over the treetops with a glow that was purely natural because she hadn’t been high for three days now because Ronnie was busy with Merry and the big-tits woman, who was twenty-seven years old as it turned out and worked as a secretary for some shipping company. Her name was Lydia, and she’d found a welcoming mattress or two and decided to stay on and screw her job and the plastic world and her big straining flesh-cutting brassieres and the hair pins and makeup and all the rest. Star was indifferent. It wasn’t as if she was in love with Ronnie or anything, she told herself. It was just that he was from back home and they’d been together on the road all that time, through the big bread pan of Iowa, yellow Nebraska, New Mexico in its shield of crumbling brown, brickred Arizona, singing along to the Stones, “Under My Thumb,” “Goin’ Home,” home, home, home. That was something. Sure it was. But as she maneuvered the bucket in under the first of the goats, she realized she was feeling good, clean and pure and good, without hangups or hassles, for the first time in as long as she could remember.

  The moment was electric, and she could feel it through the soles of her bare feet, through her every pore: this was the life she’d envisioned when she left home, a life of peace and tranquillity, of love and meditation and faith in the ordinary, no pretense, no games, no plastic yearning after the almighty dollar. She’d got her first inkling of what it could be like back at home with Ronnie, with some people he knew who’d rented a collection of stone cottages in deep woods no more than a mile off the main highway. She and Ronnie would go there most nights, even nights when she had to get up and work in the morning, because she was living at her parents’ still and this was a place where you could kick out your legs, drop all pretense and just be yourself. People from the surrounding cottages would gather in the last one down the row—two sisters from Florida had the place, JoJo and Suzie—because it was the biggest and it had a stone fireplace Suzie’s boyfriend kept stoked all the time.

  JoJo was older, twenty-four or twenty-five, and she’d been part of a commune in Vermont for a while—a place called Further—and on the good nights, when everybody wasn’t so stoned they just sank wordlessly into the pillows on the floor and let the heartbeat of the stereo take over for them, JoJo used to reminisce about it. She’d gone there just after high school, alone, with six dollars in her pocket and a copy of The Dharma Bums under one arm, hooked up with a cat, and stayed three years. Her eyes would draw into themselves as she talked, and the ash on her cigarette would go white. She’d sit at the kitchen table and tell Star about the way it was when you could live with a group of people who just lit you up day and night, your real appointed mystical brothers and sisters, selected out of all the world just for you, and about the simple joys of baking bread or collecting eggs or boiling down the thin, faintly sweet sap of the sugar maples till you had a syrup that was liquid gold, like nothing anybody ever bought in a store.

  Ronnie would be out in the main room—he was into heroin then—nodding and scratching and talking in a graveyard voice about cars or stereos or bands, and JoJo would have a pot of something going on the stove just in case anybody got hungry, and they did, they would, practically every night. This wasn’t a commune—it wasn’t anything more than a bunch of young people, hip people, choosing to live next door to one another—but to Star it seemed absolute. You could show up there, in any one of those cottages, at any time of the day or night and there’d always be someone to talk to, share a new record with—or a poem or drugs or food. Star would settle into the old rug by the fireplace, shoulder-to-shoulder with Ronnie, and listen to music all night long while a pipe or a joint went round, and when she wanted to just gossip or show off a new pair of boots or jewelry, she had Suzie and JoJo and half a dozen other girls to relate to, and they were like sisters, like dormmates, only better.

  That was a taste, only a taste. Because before long the police zeroed in on the place and made it a real hassle even to drive down the dark overgrown street to get there, the flashing lights and out of the car and where are you going this time of night and don’t I know you? And it was too dependent on drugs, everybody zoned out after a while, and no real cooperation—they all still had their own jobs in the plastic world. Suzie got busted, and then her boyfriend, Mike, and the whole thing seemed to just fade away. But now Star was here, in California, the sunshine ladled over her shoulders and the goats bleating for her, really part of something for the first time, something important. And how about this? Until two weeks ago, she’d never even seen a goat—or if she had, it might have been at a petting zoo or pumpkin patch when she was ten and her jaws were clamped tight over her braces because she wouldn’t dare smile with all that ugly metal flashing like a lightbulb in her mouth—and here she was milking the two of them like an expert, like a milkmaid in a Thomas Hardy novel, Star of the D’Urbervilles, and the whole community dependent on her.

  All right. The yellow milk hissed into the bucket. But then the second goat—it was either Amanda or Dewlap, and she couldn’t tell them apart for all the squeezing and teat-pulling she’d done for how many mornings in a row now?—stepped in it, and the milk, which they were planning to use for yogurt, not to mention cornflakes and coffee, washed out into the dirt.

  “Wow,” said a voice behind her, “—an offering to the gods. I am impressed.”

  She was squatting in the shade of the oak tree they tethered the goats to overnight so as to prevent them from stripping every last green and burgeoning thing off the face of the earth, and she pulled up her smile and swung her head round. She was happy—exalted, ready to shout out and testify, spilled milk and all—because this was what she’d always wanted, living off the land with her brothers and sisters, and fuck Ronnie, really, just fuck him. Okay. Fine. But she was smiling at nothing: there was no one there.

  Was it that bad, then? Flashbacks were one thing, but aural hallucinations?

  “Up here,” the voice said, and she looked up into the broad gray avenues of the tree and saw the soles of a pair of dirt-blackened feet, feet like the inside of a tomb, and the n
aked white slash of a man’s thighs and hips and then his bare chest and his hair and his face. He was grinning down at her. Spraddling a branch as big around as the pipes that fed water to the kids-on-bicycles and mom-in-the-kitchen suburban development where she’d grown up amidst the roar of lawnmowers and the smoke of the cooking grills. Barbecue. Lilac bushes. K through 12.

  What could she say? She automatically raised the rigid plane of her hand to shield her eyes against the glare, but there was no glare, only the deep shadows of the tree and the soft glowing nimbus of the sun.

  Behind him—to his left and just above him, and how could she have failed to notice it?—was a treehouse, the very image of the one her father had built for her in the wild cherry tree in their backyard when she turned eight because that was what she’d wanted for her birthday and nothing else. His voice came floating down to her: “Goats being naughty or were you really trying to propitiate the gods?”

  Propitiate? Who was this guy?

  “I was going to make yogurt—for everybody—but Dewlap here, or maybe it’s Amanda—doesn’t seem to want to cooperate.”

  “You need a goat wrangler.”

  “Right. You wouldn’t be a goat wrangler, would you—by any chance, I mean?”

  He was a naked man sitting in a tree. He laughed. “You got me pegged. But really that’s only my avocation—my true vocation, what I was born here on this earth to do, is build treehouses. You like it, by the way?”

  His name was Marco, and Norm Sender, the guy—cat—who’d inherited these forty-seven sun-washed acres above the Russian River and founded Drop City two years ago, had picked him up hitchhiking on the road out of Bolinas. Marco had built the treehouse from scrap lumber in a single afternoon—yesterday afternoon, in fact, while she was taking a siesta, meditating, pulling weeds and scrubbing communal pots—and when he reached down a bare arm to her she took hold of his hand and he pulled her up onto the branch alongside him as if she weighed no more than the circumambient air. She was in his lap, practically in his lap, and he was naked, but not hard, because this wasn’t about that—this was about brother- and sisterhood, about being up in a tree at a certain hour of the morning and letting the world run itself without them. “This is Mount Olympus,” he said, “and we are the gods and givers of light, and can you see that stain in the dirt down there on the puny earth where the goat girl made sacrifice?”

  She could, and that was funny, the funniest thing in the world, goat’s milk spilled in the dirt and the unadorned tin pail on its side and the goats bleating and dropping their pellets and some early riser—it was Reba, blowsy, blown, ever-mothering Reba—coming out of the kitchen in the main house with a pan of dishwater to drip judiciously on the marguerites in the kitchen garden. She laughed till her chest hurt and the twin points of oxygen deprivation began to dig talons into the back of her head, and then he led her into the treehouse, six feet wide, eight long, with a carpet, a guitar, an unfurled sleeping bag and a roof of sweet-smelling cedar shake. And what was the first thing he did then? He rolled a joint, licked off the ends, and handed it to her.

  2

  The roadside was silken with ferns, wildflowers, slick wet grass that jutted up sharply to catch the belly of the fog, and he was standing there in his interrupted jeans with his thumb out. He was wearing a faded denim jacket, a T-shirt he hadn’t washed in a week and a pair of hand-tooled red-and-black cowboy boots he’d got in Mexicali for probably a fifth of what he’d have paid in San Francisco, but they weren’t holding up too well. The heels had worn unevenly for one thing, and to compound matters, the uppers had been wet through so many times the color was leached out of them. Up under his pant-legs, the boots were still new, but what you could see of them looked something like the rawhide twists they sold in a basket at the pet shop. His guitar was another story. It had never had a case, not that he could recall, anyway, so he’d wrapped it in a black plastic garbage bag for protection. Now, as he stood there, thumb extended, it was propped up against his leg like some lurid fungus that had sprung up out of the earth when nobody was looking.

  It wasn’t raining, not exactly, but the trees were catching the mist, and he’d tied his hair back with a red bandanna to keep the dripping ends of it out of his face. He had a knife in a six-inch sheath strapped to his belt, but it was for nonviolent purposes only, for stripping manzanita twigs of bark or gutting trout before wrapping them in tinfoil and roasting them over a bed of hot coals. There was water in his bota bag instead of wine (he’d learned that lesson the hard way, in the Sonoran Desert), and the Army surplus rucksack on his back contained a sleeping bag, a ground cloth, a few basic utensils and a damp copy of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Just that morning he’d reread the opening pages—George and Lennie sitting by a driftwood fire in a world that promised everything and gave up nothing—while he made coffee and heated up a can of stew over his own campfire, and the dawn came through the trees in a slow gray seep. Marco was thinking about that, about how Lennie kept up his refrain An’ live off the fatta the lan’ despite all the sad dead weight of the evidence to the contrary, as the first of a procession of cars materialized out of the fog and shushed on past him as if he didn’t exist.

  He didn’t mind. He was in no hurry. He wasn’t so much running as drifting, anonymous as the morning, and yes, he’d had trouble with the law on a count of misdemeanor possession, dropped out of college, quit his job and then quit another one and another after that, and yes, he’d received the cold hard incontrovertible black-and-white draft notice in the gray sheet-metal mailbox out front of his parents’ house in Connecticut, but that was two years ago now. In the interim—and here he thought of his favorite Steinbeck book of all, Tortilla Flat—he’d been trying to make things work on a different level, living simple, dropping down where the mood took him. Everybody talked about getting back to the earth, as if that were a virtue in itself. He knew what the earth was—he slept on it, hiked over its ridges and through the glare of the alkali flats, felt it like a monumental set of lungs breathing in and out when he woke beneath the trees in the still of the morning. That was something, and for now it was the best he could do. As for the cars: he hadn’t been able to connect the night before either, and he’d found this place—this loop of the road hemmed in by white-bark eucalyptus that smelled of damp and menthol and every living possibility—and he bedded down by a creek so he could waken to the sound of water instead of traffic.

  When the cars had passed it was preternaturally still, no sound but for birdcall and the whisper of the dripping trees. He waited a moment, listening for traffic, then slung the guitar over his shoulder and started walking up the road in the direction of Olema and Point Reyes. He got into the rhythm of his walking, feeling it in his calves and thighs like a kind of power, a man walking along the side of the road and he could walk forever, walk across the continent and back again and his face telling every passing car that he didn’t give a damn whether they stopped for him or not. Twenty-five or thirty vehicles must have passed by and the sun had climbed up out of the fields to burn off the fog by the time a VW van finally stopped for him. It was practically new, the van, white above, burnt orange below, but as Marco came hustling up the shoulder he saw the peace sign crudely slashed on the side panel in a smear of white paint and knew he was home.

  At the wheel was an older guy—thirties, maybe even late thirties—with an erratic beard that hung down over his coveralls and crawled up into his hair. He was wearing a pair of glasses in clunky black-plastic frames, and his smile had at least two gold teeth in it. “Hop in, brother,” he said. “Where you headed?”

  The slamming of the door, a rattling blast of the tinny engine, kamikaze insects and dust, the rucksack and guitar flung into the backseat like contraband, every ride a ritual, every ritual a ride. “North,” Marco said. “And I really appreciate this, man,” he said automatically, “this is great,” and then they were off, the radio buzzing to life with an electric assault of rock and roll.

 
The visible world flew by for a full sixty seconds before the man turned to him and shouted over the radio, “North? That’s a pretty general destination. What’d you have in mind—Sitka, maybe? Nome? How about Santa’s Workshop? Santa we can do.”

  Marco just grinned at him. “Actually, I was going up to Sonoma—the Drop City Ranch?”

  “Drop City? You mean that hippie place? Isn’t that where everybody’s nude and they just ball and do dope all day long? Is that what you’re into?” The man looked him full in the face, no expression, then turned back to the road.

  Marco considered. He could be anybody, this guy—he could be a narc or a fascist or a stockbroker or maybe even General Hershey himself. But the beard—the beard gave him away. “Yeah,” Marco said, “that’s exactly what I’m into.”

  It couldn’t have much been past noon when they rolled through the hinge-sprung cattle gates and lurched up the rutted dirt road to the main house. This was the ultimate ride, the ride that takes you right on up to the porch and in the front door, and Marco had sat there, alive to it all, while Norm Sender roared, “Good answer, brother,” and launched into a half-hour treatise on his favorite subject—his only subject—Drop City.

  He was stoned on something—speed, from the look and sound of him—but that didn’t factor into any of Marco’s equations, because everybody he’d encountered for the past two years had either been high or coming down from a high, and he’d been there himself more times than he’d want to admit. At first, when he was nineteen, twenty, it was a matter of bragging rights—Oh, yeah, so you did DMT and smoked paregoric at the concert? That’s cool, but I’m into scag, man, that’s all, I mean that’s it for me. And acid. Acid, of course. And not to expand my mind or any of that mystical horseshit—just to get rocked, man, you know?—but now it was just more of the same. How many of those conversations had he had? It felt like ten million, so much air in, so much out. Still, when Norm Sender lit up a roach and passed it to him, he took it and put it between his lips. That was what you did. That was the ritual.