Cherry (31 page)

(By the end of Meredith’s illustrious grad school career, Dan will be fully schizophrenic, and they’ll divorce. Twenty years after that in Boston, he’ll appear at your university office wearing a deerstalker hat and trying to convince you that everyone who sports a stocking cap is in the CIA conspiring to arrest him for drugs he bought back in 1970. A few years after this encounter, he’ll die of the AIDS virus that’ll plague other friends in this circle.)

Once Meredith’s deflowered (a private event), you set her guzzling Gallo wine stolen from your parents’ cupboard. Because you lack rolling papers, you wind up constructing a joint from a tampon wrapper, blowing smoke out the screen. You laugh yourself sick when she starts cussing, saying motherfucker and dickhead and shit-for-brains, because the words sound so foreign in her mouth.

Still the evening lacks the flavor of triumph you’d envisioned for Meredith’s initial debauchery. For years, you’d tried to lure her into the illicit, perhaps believing it would bond you two more deeply somehow. (Maybe there was some unconscious desire to shave a few IQ points off that raging intellect so you might better keep up.)

But once she passes out, her eyelids sealing her from you, a bleak loneliness settles, cold as a winding sheet. Though you’ve ingested enough pot and wine to set your brain waves sloping into sleep, you stay awake, for there’s some instinctual desire to guard her. The room revolves in such slow loops that her deep repose befuddles you, seems unnatural or wrong, like a sickness. Every now and then, she sighs like it’s her last breath. Anyway, this urge to go for help keeps running through you. You climb out of bed a few times to tap on your parents’
closed door but ultimately slide back under the covers, for what might you say is amiss? You’re the one who brought her here.

Decades later, you’ll know there was no cavalry to call, no ready salvation to offer. Meredith needed a kind of simple care that eluded you. That fact will leave this carved-out sense of having failed her. Not intentionally, but from being blind.

But no sooner does this rhetoric unhook you from blame than you remember the ragged-looking kid your son brought home about age eight. This kid also knew no better, but nonetheless drew for you on borrowed paper various cartoons as thank-yous for all the time spent at your house. One Christmas, you pulled from your icy mailbox his rendering of two Disney pals on red paper. It was folded four times and held the following note: God loves us because we loves you. Part of you knows that with sufficient heart, you might have marshaled some comfort for Meredith other than oblivion.

W
ITH THE AID OF HALLUCINOGENS
, you set off like some pilgrim whose head teems with marvels and vistas, baptismal rivers from which you plan to emerge purified. But what’s longed for usually bears no resemblance to what you find.

On Independence Day, you’re affably tripping your brains out at dawn in a public park when Clyde pulls up in a van painted red, white, and blue, with stars in a peace sign where the Volkswagen symbol should be. He’s twenty-one, and for your sixteenth birthday made you a fringed leather purse that you stupidly left at a Who concert. Leans out the window saying those dudes over there are from Colorado. Have this amazing dope.

You turn to see three shirtless, not unlovely boys you don’t know (a rarity) playing Frisbee. A yellow dog with a red bandanna around its neck flies vertically through the air to catch an orange disc in its jaws.

Clyde says, Gonna take them swimming down in Village Creek. (He gestures at various vans and vehicles.) Wanna come?

Clyde has owlish blue eyes and chews the end of a safety match; his
fluttering hair is long as yours. Your mild crush on him combines with the lure of strong dope, to get you off your skinny ass and into the van. (When you hear three years hence that he’s killed himself in a way and for a reason unknown, the shock of it will flare through you like lit solvent then evaporate, leaving only this day’s image of Clyde.)

In the phone call you make from the Fina station en route, your crotchety-sounding daddy just hears that you’re going swimming, which is truth enough though he may imagine you’re calling from the town pool two blocks away.

Thus a caravan of hippie vehicles winds into the bowels of east Texas, the piney woods. After a tooth-bumping ride down a rutted logging road cut by long-gone wagon wheels in red clay, you reach the sandy-bottomed creek from which you drew catfish with a cane pole your daddy baited for you. By then the psychedelic rush kicks in, and the day’s episodes start to run together as if rained on. Things happen to you, and you mostly meander inside yourself, detached.

The guys strip down for swimming right away while you sit on a warm red car hood too high to move. So many dicks dangling before you somehow look individually odd. Like space creatures. How long do you goggle at them, eyeballs popped out on hallucinated springs as you marvel at the diverse herd before you check yourself and retract your attention?

An older girl in an orange halter assembles sandwiches from an economy-size packet of bologna. You want her to verify that the boys’ organs dangle in lengths and girths corresponding in no way to the size of the bearer. But her granny glasses make you flash that she’s not really a hippie, only some prim goodwife imported from
The Scarlet Letter,
which you should be at home reading. Though this makes no sense whatsoever, you hold your tongue and busy yourself helping with the sandwiches, scribbling peace signs or stars on slabs of Wonder bread with yellow mustard till you suspect all the boys have submerged their accompanying dicks underwater. Only then do you look up, trying to maintain the blasé air of someone who sees flagrant-dicked boys all the damn time and cannot be ruffled by one boy’s high, muscled ass or by
another’s shiny auburn hair falling in a curtain across his broad shoulders.

When the goodwife hands you a sandwich, it seems a gargantuan Dagwood sandwich, two feet high, and it seems rude to say that ingesting stuff while tripping makes you half nuts, for who can figure how many chews to take and when to swallow? Plus you so vividly picture the musculature of your throat and the secreted digestive acids—the mechanics of eating gross you out. Because you so don’t wish to offend her pinch-mouthed self, the sandwich stays gripped in hand the whole morning till all the iceberg lettuce and meat and tomato wheels have flopped out to be set upon by ants.

Blank time gets spliced in. Next thing you know, one of the Colorado boys sits on the bank with his legs stretched out stiff before him like a doll. His feet are swollen up to twice their normal size as if snakebit, worse than the gout of an old lady in a nursing home forced into those tight, white socks. Everybody gathers around, addled over the bloated feet.

You say, They kinda look like a pair of potatoes. It’s a voice so rusty you wonder if you’ve spoken all morning. The guy cuts you this wounded look. To reassure, you say with the authority of the rabidly high that it’s probably just ant bites. But inside you recoil from the prospect of those bloated feet exploding. You even edge back a few paces as if to avoid any splatter, for you have imagined the blow-out—how his spirit will leak from ankle holes till he’s empty and flat as roadkill. It makes you want to make for the road and stick your thumb out or else to fall down giggling.

What ant bite does this? the guy says, voice higher with panic.

Clyde asks Cathy to look at it since her mom’s a nurse. But Cathy’s naked as a jaybird and, by being solo in this, seems aggressively, savagely naked. She has a great pelt of pubic thread and globular breasts perched high on what looks like a dwarf’s body. In fact, she seems so devolved and feral that Clyde’s speaking to her at all strikes you as perverse.

All she says is, You might oughta stop scratching at that. Looks
to be making it worse. You try not to gape at her talking, for words from the bandanna-wearing dog right then would seem no more strange.

Do you think I need to go to the hospital? the dude says, his voice in another register now, like a record played too fast. You nonchalantly wonder what evolutionary purpose this might serve—the voice rising with fear. Then suddenly, the grim prospect of the hospital rears up—the even now revolving glass door that would scoop you up and spit you out into the emergency room’s atmosphere of Lysol woven through with its single fiber of death.

You want to say, Exploding feet or no, buddy, kiss that hospital’s ass goodbye. To get this wagon train of sun-scorched freaks rolling toward western medicine would require something way more dire—car wreck, actual overdose with heart stoppage.

The swollen-foot dude says, I can’t lose my feet.

Another girl offers up, Why don’t you bury your feet in sand and see if the swelling goes down?

One of the Colorado dudes asks hopefully if that’s some Indian cure, the sand stuff, and somebody answers probably while the rest of you nod.

Any nod on serious hallucinogens can become sagelike, and suddenly the group resembles some Bedouin tribe weary with ancient desert wisdom looking down on the scorpion-stung interloper whose tongue is slowly swelling his throat shut.

To calm the nearly weeping boy, joints are rolled and guitars broken out. The guys take turns at Neil Young or Bob Dylan while you pretend to read—an impossible task as high as you are. The sentences warp and bow up on the page like so many worms. In truth the paperback is a shield against the unwanted advances of this one doglike Colorado guy. He keeps saying that you’re one foxy lady (a phrase which sends a sliding Hendrix
wha-wha
through your head).

Eventually, you fancy being privy to everyone’s thoughts. One voice at a time they wind through you until the rambling rush chatters up your mind entirely. So you set down your book, rise up, strip down, and wade into the warm river with as much offhanded aplomb as a
publicly naked person can muster. (As an adult on nude beaches in France, you’ll find disrobing before such a generalized audience impossible, and so will sit resolutely in your bikini as the naked sneer past. You’re not overly modest, but unless someone has a fairly vested interest in your particular nudity, you find no reason to sashay it around.)

The instant you dive under, the voices wash from your ears. You swim in a hard crawl upstream till your arms get rubbery and you’re forced to wade out wobbly kneed onto a sandbank in what your head announces is the Forest Primeval.

An internal flash of Adam and Eve in the garden makes you shy. Cover yourself, some internal voice commands. Though there’s no one around for miles, you roll in wet sand, caking whole handfuls on your breasts and pubis (as if any picnicking fisherman might be fooled you were clothed).

Thus clad, you lie on your back in sand baking for some unmeasured interval. It’s two minutes. It’s an hour. The acid is gobbling up the day. Then through the brush comes a rustle and plop in the water. You sit up to see an alligator tail, or the hallucination of one—junior size, maybe three feet in length—making its S-curve in the current. The sight starts your heart jackhammering against your rib cage. Your body reverberates with every pulse beat like a struck gong.

The poem you take up writing makes your predicament an apt allegory for the human condition. You write large, walking across the sand with a stick, half-believing this artifact will be fossilized then unearthed in some distant millennium by archeologists who, stunned by the lines’ grace, will derive some aborigine ritual.

But your final product has devolved into monkey language. Now you doubt the alligator was real. Meanwhile, the sun has started falling fast through pines, having burned itself into the murky red of the rubber ball you used to play jacks with.

You wade back in and swim downstream. After a few strokes, a fish leaping nearby shoots adrenaline through you again, so your arms whirl windmill-fashion, and your feet kick up a huge wake.

In an eyeblink, you’re back at the camp in cutoffs and T-shirt. The
river’s gone, and you’ve entered this heavy element. They’re loading vehicles around you.

You’re told but don’t quite believe that in your absence some redneck appeared on the far bank with a rod and reel. He hollered over to put some damn clothes on, his wife and kids were there. To which Clyde allegedly said back,
Take yours off,
then shook his dick at the guy, who said he was going to call the law. Once he disappeared, everybody but Cathy got dressed.

So the fiesta is ending, no jugglers or Mexican trumpets, and you’re crashing hard among strangers. The Colorado guys once so tanned and smartly traveled in your eyes have progressed into a fairly gnarly crew. The one who fancies you has taken from his mouth a plate holding four front teeth. You long to be home with the sand rinsed out of your crotch and wearing an eyelet lace nightgown while holding a cat on your lap.

Here’s when the cops show up.

Not just a pair of cops either, but legions of cops, a tide. A swarming army comes crashing toward your now simple and slow-moving tribe. (Think: Margaret Mead’s peace-loving tribe.) Through dense brush they come—announced by branches snapping under black shiny shoes. There are highway patrol wearing flat-brimmed hats à la Smokey the Bear. Cops from the nearby burg of Kountze have donned khaki and Stetsons. A few guys in pale blue shirts and dark pants wearing flashlights instead of guns may be rent-a-cops like you see hanging around the mall. They surge in a thunderous tide—hollering and waving arms—into your midst. All foliage is whapped back and shoved aside. Then they’re rousting companions into various get-arrested postures.

Your response to this is to stand stock still, a marble statue like in freeze tag. That’s what most everybody does. Only the swollen-foot boy tries hilariously to cram one elephantine foot into the tiny huarache that now seems woven for a Barbie. The supremely bare Cathy also scrambles, scuttling behind a car to wiggle into her gauzy Mexican dress, which—given that she’s soaking wet—you can see straight through
(including but not limited to every lock of her big black beaver). Clyde and a few other guys have listed backward, actually wading into the shallows. One guy says, I’m on probation.