Drop City (22 page)

The whole room watched as Norm led Premstar to the table, where he pulled out a chair for her with the kind of exaggerated gallantry that announced to everybody they'd been balling ten minutes ago, handed her the joint and leapt up onto the worn oak planks. “People,” he shouted, “brothers and sisters, this is my rap and I'm like more than grievously sorry to have to lay it on you tonight of all nights and even before we light the bonfire and dance, and I mean we
are
going to shake it out, believe me, we are going to
dance
like nobody has ever danced, I mean we are going to
reinvent
the whole trip of dancing for now and forever, but this has been coming down a long time now and there's no denying it, no postponing it anymore, and I've just
got
to get it out, so bear with me . . .” He stopped right there, and nobody said a word, nobody so much as breathed.

Star found Marco's arm and pulled it up over her shoulder like a cloak. Her heart was pounding now too, along with her head, a little hammer there striking over and over like in the TV commercials—she wasn't going back to Peterskill no matter what happened, not if Drop City closed down tonight. She was going to stay here, right here, and she didn't care what Norm said or how bad it was.

Norm bent low to light the joint for Premstar, and Premstar took a hit and Norm watched in a proprietary way as she passed it on to Reba before he straightened up again and looked out over the room. “I'm telling you the bad news first, but remember what the
I Ching
says—‘Perseverance Furthers'—and you are all, every one of you brothers and sisters, going to
know
that the good vibes outweigh the bad and that we
will
persevere in our mission and our philosophy and all the love and truth and the beautiful vibes of Drop City and everything we've accomplished here in spite of the fascists beating at the door.” Another pause. His voice dropped. “Only we won't be here. Not on this property.”

If there was any air left in the room, it was gone now, sucked right out the window. Not here? What was he talking about?

“The fuck we won't!” Jiminy jumped up out of his chair, his hair
windmilling round his shoulders. His fist was balled, and he brought it down on the table at Norm's feet, and then rocked back into himself, trembling all over. The day hadn't been kind to him either, Star could see that.

“It's over, people,” Norm sighed, and he never even glanced at Jiminy, just let his gaze seek out each face in the crowd, one after another, like beads on a string. “The bureaucrats've won the war. The pencil-pushers, the accountants, the
man.
We're history here, and you better get used to it, because the straight world is moving in.”

Everybody was aroused now. Or no: they were incensed. “Bullshit!” a voice shouted from the far side of the room. “We won't let them!” “No!” Maya joined in, nothing to her voice but textured air, her glasses flashing in the glare of the overhead lights like a shield, and what was with the lights, Star was wondering, why feed PG&E? Was Norm staging this? Was that it?

And then a voice she recognized, knew so intimately it was as if she were speaking herself: “Come on, Norm, come on, man, don't let us down.” It was Ronnie, across the room, his face pinched and his eyes swollen in his head. He looked terrible. Looked as if he'd been buried a week and dug up again. But that voice, that tone—there was something raw and desperate in it, a quaver she recognized from all those late-night disquisitions on God, the futility of life and how impossible it was to find a good FM station in the flatlands, and she understood in that moment how much all this meant to him. Ronnie. Pan. He needed Drop City as much as she did. “Come on, Norm,” he nagged. “Come
on.
”

Norm bowed his head a minute, as if all the fuss were too much for him. He dug at his beard, pushed the hat brim up off his brow so that the bandage flared out like an accusation. “The bulldozers'll be here inside of a week. And that's whether the pigs come back and lock me up or not, because let me give it to you straight, people—by order of the
judge,
and you can look it up, Judge Vincent T. Everard, the Right and Honorable, they're going to take down every
substandard dwelling on the place, and that's their words, not mine, because I say
substandard,
my ass.”

“Right on!” Mendocino Bill shouted, and then they were all shouting, a dizzy reeling tightly wound gabble of voices—no, they wouldn't budge, they'd fight, they'd chain themselves to the gates—but all Star could think of was the naked hills and the rubble of the yurts and huts and plastic sheeting all rolled up like a frayed blanket, and would they spare the treehouse? Would they see it, even?

She drifted in and out of it then, because that was when the joint worked its way to her and she touched her lips to it and tasted her brothers' and sisters' communion in the wetness of it and filled her lungs with the dense sweet smoke that was going to knock her headache down and out for the count and fill her every cell and fiber with bliss, the bliss she needed and deserved and wanted because that was what this life was all about, wasn't it? Norm went on and on, ranting about the county, about Mr. Jones and the plastic society that spawned him, about conformity and hate and love and the
I Ching.
He must have talked nonstop for half an hour, his voice dipping and raging and looping back on itself until it was a kind of white noise and the words couldn't touch her—she'd had enough bad vibes and negativity for one day. Enough. Enough, already. And she was about to get to her feet and say just that—
Enough, and let's sleep on it and see what the morning brings
—when the room fell silent.

She looked round her, and it was as if she'd just awakened.

Norm was still up there on the table, the artificial light bleeding from his face. He'd just delivered the good news, the promise that was going to redeem them all and resurrect Drop City, and it came in three interconnected syllables that didn't sound like a promise at all—it was more like a joke, or maybe a dream. She couldn't even be sure she'd heard him right, and before she knew what she was doing, she was raising her hand, raising her hand and flapping it at the end of her wrist as if she were wedged behind a tiny shellacked desk back in elementary school. “Norm, Norm!” she cried amidst a tumult of
voices, everybody talking at once, everybody shouting, but she was on her feet now and he was looking right at her through the clear hard lenses of his taped-up glasses as if she were the only one in the room. “Norm, did you say
Alaska?
”

Yes. That was what he'd said: Alaska. He repeated it for her, the whole long strung-together Normed-out sentence that ended with the noun that hit her like a body blow, the name of that alien, icebound afterthought of a place that had no deeper association for anyone in the room than
Sergeant Preston of the Yukon,
and the Yukon wasn't even in Alaska, was it? No matter. Norm had the stage, Norm was their leader and guru and though he'd never led them before, he was leading them now, his feet dancing and his arms beating time to the silken swoosh of the suede fringe, and he was selling Alaska as if he owned it. “No rules,” he shouted, “no zoning laws, no taxes, no county dicks and ordinances. You want to build, you build. You want to take down some trees and put up a cabin by the most righteous far-out turned-on little lake in the world, you go right ahead and do it and you don't have to go groveling for anybody's permission because there's no-fucking-body there—do you hear me, people? Nobody. You can live like Daniel Boone, live like the original hippies, like our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers—off the land, man, doing your own thing, no apologies. Do you dig what I'm telling you?”

Silence, stunned silence. Everybody was seeing sled dogs and tracts of rippled snow. They were seeing—what?—king crab, bears, Eskimos, Mount McKinley rising up out of a wall calendar like a white planet tearing loose from its moorings. He was joking. He had to be.

“Are you fucking crazy?” Star turned her head and Mendocino Bill was right there beside her, tottering on his swollen white feet, his beard draining the color from his face. “Are you out of your fucking mind? Alaska? It's like sixty below up there. What are we going to do, make igloos like Nanook? Eat snow and icicles and what, seal blubber?”

“Longest day, man,” Norm said. “The sun won't set up there tonight. I've seen it. For three years I saw it. And you know what that means? That means strawberries the size of apples, that means tomatoes like watermelons and zucchini you could hollow out and
live
in. And this”—he reached into his jacket pocket and produced another communal joint, gaudily rolled in red-white-and-blue-striped papers—“this shit grows like giant redwoods up there, like sequoias, I mean, get me to the
lumber
mill, man.

“My uncle Roy—and I don't know how many of you know this, I mean, you do, Alfredo, and probably you, Verbie—he's got a place up there, just outside of Boynton, on the Yukon River, farthest place you can drive to in the continental U.S., the last place, I'm telling you, the last frontier, and what's the whole town built out of? Logs. You know what I'm saying?
Logs!
I lived there three years after I dropped out of high school in my junior year because I couldn't take the plastic bourgeois capitalist fucking bullshit
brainwashing
anymore, and I know what I'm talking about.” He flipped off his glasses, wiped them on his sleeve and clapped them back on again, and then he was shaking out a folded piece of lined yellow paper and holding it up to the light.

“You see this, people? See it? This is a letter from my uncle. From Uncle Roy himself, dated two months ago, and I've been carrying it around ever since. You know what it says?” He paused to look out over the room. “It says he's in Seattle, living with my other uncle, Uncle Norm—my namesake—because he's seventy-two fucking years old and he's got arthritis so bad he can hardly wrap his fingers around the pen. He's not going back, not ever, and you know what that means? That means the cabin is ours, people, fully stocked and ready to go, traps, guns, snowshoes, six cords of wood stacked up outside the door, pots and pans and homemade furniture and all the rest, and it's going to be an adventure, it is. We're going to take down some
trees,
because that's the way you do it—lumber is free up there, can you dig that,
free
—and we're going to build four more cabins and a meeting house and we're going to build right on down to the river
because the salmon are running up that river even as we speak and they're running in the
millions.
You dig smoked salmon? Anybody here dig smoked salmon? And the blueberries. The cranberries. You never saw anything like it. You want to know what we're going to eat? We're going to
eat the land
because it's one big smorgasbord. And there's nobody—I mean
nobody
—to stop us.”

Everyone in the room was on their feet now, and it was like a rally, like a concert, and Star was thinking about the time she'd seen the Velvet Underground live in a downtown loft that was wall-to-wall people—there was that kind of excitement, that kind of energy. A current was burning through the room, and it was burning through her too, and never mind the headache, never mind the bulldozers, this was something new, outrageous, beyond anybody's capacity to imagine or envision, and when Norm scrambled down from the table they buried him in an avalanche of hands and shoulders and hair, and the questions never stopped. When? Where? How? That was what they wanted to know, and so many people were talking at once they might as well have been speaking different languages entirely. Verbie was right there at his shoulder, and Jiminy wedged in beside her, his eyes shining. Even Reba looked upbeat.

“Details!” Norm cried over the tumult. “Petty details, people.” He was already in motion, dismissing every rational fear and practical concern with a casual swipe of his hand. He had Premstar by the arm and he was leading her through the crush and into the kitchen, and through the kitchen and out into the darkened yard, shouting over his shoulder like an agitator leaving the arena: “The bonfire! On to the bonfire!”

“Man, has he lost it or what?” somebody said, and Star felt herself jostled from behind. “I mean, do you believe this shit?”

She looked to Marco, only to him, and he was watching her out of hooded eyes as they moved toward the door and the scent of the damp night air. He met her gaze and then he grinned and shrugged his shoulders. “You know,” he said, and he put his arm round her
shoulders and locked his hip to hers, “I've always wanted to see the northern lights.”