Impossible Vacation (33 page)

I was trying at last to get to the end of the book and see how it resolved itself. But all the time I was reading Norman O. Brown’s descriptions of polymorphous delight, I was watching what looked like the living example of it out of the corner of my eye. I kept watching this divine little blond six-year-old passing from table to table. When he got close to me I found that I was completely taken in by him—“mesmerized,” I think would be the word. It was as if he were a living example of all that Norman O. Brown was theorizing about. There he was, this expansive, irresistible little Dionysian boy moving between tables like the spirit of eternal delight. He sat right down beside me and as soon as he sat down, I asked what he wanted. He said, “Cherry phosphate,” just like that, all bright and decisive, and I thought I’d gone right back to the turn of the century. A cherry phosphate? What could that be? But I ordered it anyway and it came, cherry syrup in soda water, all stirred up into the most beautiful color. He put a straw in and went at it. He looked like a color drinking a color. He was barefoot and dressed in faded overalls and a yellow T-shirt. His face was a healthy pink framed by long blond hair. It was a wonderfully bright face which had a crazy devil-or-angel ambiguity combined with a great openness. It seemed he’d already seen a lot, but it had not harmed him or shut him down. He could not be an average six-year-old, I thought—and then again I wouldn’t have known what that was, an average six-year-old, had one sat down on my lap.

We talked a little about his life and how he wasn’t in school yet,
but soon would be, because he and his mom had only just arrived in town and hadn’t been able to work it out yet. When I asked him where he came from he told me that it was a real long, long way off, that he and his mom had hitchhiked for lots of days and nights to get there. As we were talking his mom came over and said, “Oh, I see you’ve met Shanti,” and I said, “Oh, Shanti?”

And she said, “No, Om Shanti. That’s my son, that’s Om Shanti Karma.” And she said it just like that, like it was one of the most common names in town. Perhaps it was.

“Come on, Shanti, we have to get going. Thank the nice man for the soda and let’s head out,” his mother said to him. Shanti jumped up without thanking me and ran to his mom and took her hand. She stood there, a woman about my age, with some premature graying hair like me. She just stood there, wearing her kung fu shoes and a full dark skirt and white blouse, and looked back at me. Her face was far from sweet or demure, like the other hippie mothers I’d seen there. Her face was very out of place there in that sunny outdoor coffee yard filled with clean and squeaky blondes with peach complexions, creatures you felt you could eat without washing or cooking, just eat them raw.

Shanti and his mother turned and started off, but Shanti stopped and looked back, melting me with one glance. Then he looked up at his mother and said, “Isn’t someone coming with us, Mom?”

His mom turned to me and said, “Shanti wants to know if you’re coming with us.”

At that moment I wanted to drive them wherever they wanted to go, just so I could see Shanti’s face when he saw that big, pink, foolish car. I said, “Do you need a ride anywhere?”

“Oh, that would be nice, wouldn’t it, Shanti?” his mother said.

Shanti’s face lit up just the way I hoped it would when he saw Big Pink sitting in among the generic Rabbits, hatchbacks, and fast-backs. We all piled into the front seat, Shanti between us, instantly and madly playing with the radio knobs as his mother asked me, pulling out her pack of Camel Regulars, if I minded if she smoked. That was another big surprise that made her, like me, not quite fit into the way things were in that town. She was the first person I’d seen smoke a cigarette since I arrived.

“Not at all,” I said. “Smoke away,” and smoke away she did, as I drove very slowly to the house they called home.

“By the way, my name is Mustang Sally,” she said, taking another deep drag of her Camel, exhaling the smoke and with a fine finger removing a piece of tobacco from her thin lower lip.

“What’s that?” I asked, and she said it again, “My name is Mustang Sally.”

“Oh yes, of course,” I replied. “But what should I call you?”

“Call me Mustang,” she replied, taking another drag and exhaling the smoke straight up into the air.

In that short, slow drive to their little tract house she told me a bit of how they had come to be there, and I just tried to listen without judgment.

“Shanti and I are just staying with friends now until we can find the right place to pitch our teepee. We want to pitch it up in the Santa Cruz hills. We haven’t found our spot yet, but it will come,” she said, giving me a knowing look. “It will come in time.”

Mustang Sally spoke with an educated East Coast accent, which I couldn’t place, but it was definitely familiar to my ear. She went on to tell me how she and Shanti had hitchhiked down from Washington State with their teepee. “You mean you hitchhiked with a teepee? How did you ever get it into the cars?”

“Oh, no problem,” Mustang said. “We got picked up by vans and trucks mostly, and with cars we just put it on the roof. People are still real open and nice, at least on Highway 1, and they even let us stay in their homes.”

The house they were staying in was on a little side road not far from the beach. It was cozied in among a lot of other bungalows without much character or distinction. I pulled Big Pink up in front of the house and stopped. “Do you want to come in and smoke a joint?” Mustang asked. Her words went through me like an arrow. I wanted to do it and yet was afraid. Smoke a joint in the middle of the day? I’d only done such a thing once before, on
The American Dream
, and that had been so confusing. It had made me so anxious. I had felt very much out of control; but then again, here I was in a small little town with a car and Wally’s safe haven waiting for me, so why not? I knew for the time there were no strings attached to me
except in my memory, which I’d been able pretty much to beat off for the day. So why not go in and try to relax? If anything went wrong I could always just walk out and drive to the beach or go see Wally at work in his photography store. I was free. No one had any power over me, except perhaps Shanti; and besides, I wondered what it would be like to be stoned with Shanti and Mustang. But most of all I was not ready to say goodbye to Om Shanti Karma. I had fallen in love at first sight.

I did not like the feel, or “vibe,” as they say, of that house. As soon as I got inside, it felt weird. It was dark and cluttered. The furniture was an odd collection of Ethan Allen, junk picked off the street or the dump, and a big Castro convertible couch. All the window shades were pulled down in the living room, and clothing was scattered everywhere. But the kitchen saved the day. The kitchen was big and bright and not too cluttered, although the dishes in the sink looked like they were beginning to grow a fine green moss.

Mustang put the kettle on for tea and got a plastic bag of marijuana out of the kitchen cupboard. Shanti sat at the kitchen table and beamed up at me like a bright shining light. He seemed to be the main source of light in that house, and I secretly hoped that he’d never burn out. He sat there playing with a pot holder and looking up at me with that outrageous and incredible trust, and he asked me where I came from. When I said, “New York City,” Mustang responded by saying, “You remember New York City, Shanti. It was the place with all the big buildings.”

“Oh, you’ve been there?” I asked, happy now that some shared history outside of Santa Cruz might be possible.

“Oh, yes,” Mustang said. “Shanti and I hitchhiked there to visit his sisters once.”

While Mustang was rolling our first joint, a tall, lanky, very tough-looking woman dressed in a dungaree outfit came into the kitchen and plopped down at the table between us. “Oh,” Mustang cried with bravado, “let me introduce Ankh.” Then Mustang struck a match and lit the joint. Holding her first toke deep in, she passed it to me and, after exhaling, said, “Ankh, this is … Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

“Oh, it’s Brewster … it’s Brewster North,” I said, almost
embarrassed by the sound of it, or by the way it came out of me, so sort of uptight and preppy.

I took the joint from Mustang and took a deep drag. It was smooth, sweet, and mild and didn’t make me cough. “Mmmm, good,” I said, holding the smoke deep in. “Nice.”

“Yeah, that’s local stuff. It came down from the hills just outside of town,” Mustang said, with a wry smile.

I passed the joint on to Ankh, who moved in slow motion to take it from my hand and then, lifting it to her lips, also took a very deep drag and, holding her breath, said, “What kind of name is Brewster?” The marijuana had already begun to confuse me, and I wasn’t at all sure what she meant by “what kind of name.” But I just played along and said, “Well, I guess it’s English. It’s really a family name,” I said.

“Oh, yeah, well, sure, but what does it mean?” Ankh asked, holding her breath to keep the marijuana smoke in her lungs, sounding like she was about to explode. “So what kind of name is it? What does it mean?” she said, now at last exploding all over the place and blowing marijuana smoke out over Shanti’s head while he looked up, glowing.

“Well, I’m not really sure,” I said. “But if you sort of break it down, I guess it’s obvious what with the word ‘brew’ in ‘Brewster,’ that it must have come down from a long line of English brewers or something like that. As for ‘North,’ I guess it just means the direction on the compass, so I guess quite simply ‘Brewster North’ means brewers from northern England—that’s the most I can make of it,” I said, now almost confusing myself.

This crazy, chatty explanation of my name made both Ankh and Mustang laugh in that kind of manic, inappropriate marijuana response, something that started in a laugh and then went into a raunchy cough and finished with a real long stretched out, “Oh, wowww, toooooo much! This guy is toooooo much!”

Shanti glowed right beside me, happy, perhaps at his mom’s acceptance of me, or maybe because he saw that I felt at ease enough in their presence not only to make them laugh, but allow them to laugh at me. It never occurred to me to ask what the name “Ankh” meant or “Mustang” or “Shanti” for that matter, although at the time I remember the names all struck me—or at least “Ankh” struck me—as something Turkish.

“Ankh used to be named Bernice, and then I renamed her,” Mustang said, to try to clear up my obvious confusion.

“Oh, really?” I said, more curious now. “What on earth for?” And both Mustang and Ankh let out with another one of those hacking bursts of laughter which was followed by another big “Oh wow, oh wow”; then they said, “Oh wow, he got it!”

“Yeah, right,” said Ankh. “He got it, he got the ‘what on earth’ exactly. You are a very tuned-in individual, Mr. Brew,” Ankh said with a great stoned grin.

“Ankh is the earth sign,” Mustang said. “Ankh is the ancient Egyptian symbol of life.”

“Earth sign?” I asked.

“Yeah, you know, the figure eight. Show it to him,” Mustang said, and Ankh reached down her black T-shirt and pulled out a silver-plated figure eight that was on a chain around her neck. “You see,” Mustang said, as she passed the joint to me again, “Ankh—” Then she broke off, stopped, and turned to Ankh and asked, “You don’t mind if I tell him, do you? You don’t mind if I tell him how you got your name?”

“No, no,” Ankh laughed, “tell away, tell him. I love to hear you tell it, babe.”

“Well, anyway,” Mustang went on, “it’s really not such a big story. You see, Ankh used to be Bernice, and she used to also hang out with a lot of Angels.”

“Angels?” I asked, somewhat stunned. And they both went into another round of long, hacking laughter, which was beginning to make me feel extremely lonely, or as innocent as Shanti, who still just sat there between us, not laughing, but radiating contentedness as he continued to watch, listen, and finger a ragged pot holder like it was his new security blanket.

“You know—‘Angels’ as in ‘Hell’s Angels,’ ” Mustang said, after she managed to stop laughing.

“Oh yeah, of course,” I said. “And then what? Did they give her the name?” This question of mine made them both start laughing again, and Ankh, who now seemed almost unable to breathe, said to Mustang, “Can you imagine Bobby Giraffe knowing what the Egyptian earth sign was?” and then they both laughed some more.

By this time I was beginning to feel a little uneasy, and I wanted to ask if I could excuse myself and take Shanti home with me, or just take him out to the backyard to play; but then Mustang, who was really quite observant, noticed my discomfort and went on with the story, which I thought was actually very short and could have been told without all this laughter.

“No, no,” she said, “it was just because of Bobby Giraffe that Ankh paced so much, and I couldn’t stand her pacing. She’d get nervous or pissed off at Bobby and would go into this frantic pacing back and forth, and I thought if I changed her name to Ankh, she might begin to move in a more graceful figure eight.” At the moment I thought of saying, “Why not change her name to V-8 Juice?” but I held my tongue. I thought only Shanti would have appreciated it. “Anyway,” Mustang said, “it worked.”

And now, without laughter, like a weird dancer, Ankh, who was once Bernice, got up and demonstrated her figure-eight movement right there in the kitchen, while Mustang applauded and Shanti glowed, tearing small pieces of the pot holder off in his hand.

Well, I liked the story, but I was still a little nervous and had a feeling that I would be more relaxed with Shanti if the two of us could be alone. I stood up and stretched and felt the marijuana rush throughout my whole body; and then, without saying a word, because I figured they’d understand this kind of behavior, I just walked right out to the living room, and Shanti followed, just as I hoped he would. Shanti followed me like he’d been waiting for this move all afternoon. As soon as we got in the living room, Shanti plunked himself right down on the Castro convertible couch. As soon as his bum hit the couch a big, fuzzy puff of dust came up around him, and filled the shafts of sunlight leaking through the Venetian blinds. He laughed for no reason at all, or because of the dust. I laughed at him sitting there in that yellow dust, on that big gold-speckled couch, looking up at me as if to ask, “Well, what’s next?”