The Children of Hamelin (34 page)

“Hey man, cut it out, you’re not the fuzz... what’re you doing this for? All I want is some acid, will you stop—”

“What if this call is being traced? What if there are narcs pounding their flat feet up your stairs at this very minute—”

The line went dead.

I hung up the phone and went back to my pacing in the living room thinking: that was a real dirty number to pull. Fuckin’ A it was! But how had that freak gotten my number? Now
there
was a stupid question! But no stupider than the answer, Robin giving my phone number to her speed-freak customers—

The phone range again. I had a premonition...

“Yeah?” I said belligerently into the receiver.

“Hi baby,” said a soft thin girl’s voice I didn’t recognize.

“Robin?” I said, not really believing it was her—unless this was some kind of stupid put-on.

The girl’s voice giggled. “No baby,” it said,
“you’re
Robin. I’m Suzy. I’m stoned, really, really stoned.... Hey, you’re
not
Robin, are you? I mean, I’m not
that
stoned, am I? You’re a
man...”

“That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me all day.”

“Hey, this
is
Robin’s number?”

“This is
my
number. What’s
your
number?”

“Oh WoW WoW WoW! Hey man, you
do
know Robin? I haven’t got a wrong number? You her old man?”

“You could say that.”

“Wow, you had me going there; I mean here I am stoned out of my beautiful little old mind and I thought I had a wrong number and you could be some kind of square freako and here I am rapping to you about how stoned I am... Well, look, Robin’s old man, I just dropped one of Robin’s caps about an hour ago and it’s groovy, groovy stuff, and there are four other people here who want to take my trip with me, so if Robin will get over to Ronnie Freed’s pad, we’d like to score another four caps....”

“I’m sorry, I don’t think Robin will be able to make it.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m an ax-murderer and I just chopped her up into a thousand pieces and flushed them down the toilet. Except for her left nipple, which I’ll mail to you if you’ll give me your address....”

“Aaaaah! Oh shit! Eeeee!”

Click.

I felt like an awful creep even as I put the phone back on the hook:
that
I shouldn’t have done. I wasn’t mad at poor Suzy, wasn’t her fault that Robin was giving out my number to every head in creation; I shouldn’t have done such an evil thing to her, say a thing like that to someone on
acid
for chrissakes!

But that goddamn Robin. Wasn’t enough she was dealing out of my pad, she had to turn me into a fucking answering-service! Getting me involved in a goddamn dealing scene! Was Jeff right? Or was she just too damned stupid to realize that it was uncool to get someone involved in a dealing scene without asking them? What the hell
was
inside her head, anyway?

I went back to my pacing, faster and faster and faster; burn the dope out of my system because I wanted to be stone-cold straight when she got back.
If
she got back. If I let her back.... Goddamn it, I had put all this shit behind me a thousand years ago with Anne... no one was going to put me on
that
bummer again.

No one!

“What the fuck’s the matter with you?” I shouted at Robin as she stood in the doorway.

She glanced nervously behind her into the hall. “Cool it, will you,” she said. “I’m sorry I took so long. I’ve been missing a lot of connections.”

I closed the door behind her and followed her into the living room. She sat down on the couch and began rolling a joint. I sat down beside her and knocked the paper out of her hand. Grains of pot went flying all over the table.

“Hey man,” she crooned, “what
is
bugging you?”

“What’s bugging me?
I got two calls while you were gone from some Duke and a chick named Suzy who said she was high on your acid. They both wanted to buy some more, that’s what’s bugging me!”

She looked at me as if I were crazy. “But that’s groovy,” she said. “I’ve still got twelve caps I couldn’t get rid of. I knew Duke wanted ten, but I couldn’t get a hold of him. How many did Suzy say she wanted?”

“What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“Hey... what
is
wrong, Tom?” she said softly, her eyes worried, genuine concern written all over her face. It made me feel like a monster of uptightness. I had to get hold of myself...

“You gave them my phone number, didn’t you?”

“Well, of course I did. Where else would they get it?”

“You don’t understand? You really don’t understand, do you?”

She took my hand, squeezed it gently, studied my face. “You’re not freaking out, are you?” she said. “It’s gonna be all right... take it—”

“I’m
not
freaking out. I’m not even stoned any more. Don’t you realize what you’ve done? You’ve involved me in your goddamn dealing, is what you’ve done. Giving my number to your customers as if I were your fucking answering-service.”

“Hey, what is this?” she said a shade belligerently. “All I did was let some people know where I was so they could get to me if they wanted to score. What’s all this paranoia?”

“It’s a dealing scene, dammit! You don’t just go and involve people in dealing scenes without bothering to ask them!”

“Oh Wow!” she snapped, her face getting hard. “Of all the square, shitty, uptight—” Then suddenly her face melted. “Oh wow...” she said again. But this time it had the tone of an apology. “I forgot. Man, I’m sorry, I really am, I forgot you were used to
junkie
dealing scenes. Yeah, that kind of shit can be a real bummer. Wow. I can see you’d be uptight if every junkie in the world knew your number and knew a chick was dealing out of your pad...”

“If you do understand, why did you go ahead and do it?”

“Because it’s not like that, Tom, really it isn’t. I don’t deal smack, these people aren’t
junkies.
You can trust them. Fred’s groovy; you liked
him,
didn’t you? And Jeff turned out to be someone you knew....”

“A
junkie
I knew!”

“And you were once a junkie
he
knew, dig?”

That brought me up short—because next thing I would’ve screamed at her might’ve been something like “once a junkie, always a junkie,” and where would that have left
me?

Robin put her hand on my knee. “Look,” she said. “I really dig you. When I’m here, I want to feel like you’re my old man. So giving people the phone number is the most natural thing in the world. I never dreamed it would put you uptight. Believe me?”

I was beginning to feel like a lower and lower form of animal life with every word she said. Goddamn, maybe I
was
acting like a paranoid ex-junkie. I dug Fred and Jeff; for all I knew, Duke and Suzy were okay too. They had trusted
me
up front, and I had come on like a king-sized shit...

“Yeah, I believe you,” I said. “But you’ve gotta understand—”

She squeezed my kneecap tenderly. “But I
do
understand,” she said. “You’re coming on as if I were getting you into a smack-dealing scene because that’s what you’re used to. But it’s just not like that....”

“Maybe it isn’t... I dunno, maybe it
is
just my paranoia, but I don’t know if I can hack it—”

She kissed my cheek lightly. “I really do understand your hangup,” she said. “But try to understand me. This is my scene; it’s where I’m at, and I’m not ashamed of it and I’m not going to play phony games with you or anyone else. We’ve gotta be honest with each other, we’ve gotta accept each other for what we are, or it’s just no good between us. Dig?”

“Dig. But I don’t know if—”

“I know, I know, I’m putting you on a trip back to a lot of old shit that hurt you once. I’m telling you my scene isn’t like that, but you’ve got to see I’m telling you the truth all by yourself. I dig you. I dig you enough to walk out the door with no regrets, if that’s what you want.”

“I don’t want to do that...”

“Then you’ll have to come to peace with who I really am, because I’m just not gonna live a game for you. If you want me around, you’ve gotta accept what I am. Otherwise, it’s been a gas....”

“I dunno....”

She smiled a warm human smile at me that melted my insides and made me hate my paranoia. She really wasn’t asking any more of me than I was of her. She was right. But... but...

“Oh course you don’t know,” she said. “I don’t expect you to know right now. Look, I’ve gotta deal the rest of the acid anyway, why don’t I split for a few days and let you think it through, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. I kissed her on the lips. “You’re one fucking good chick,” I told her. “Maybe too good for me, is all—”

She smiled, touched a finger to my nose. “You’re gonna be all right,” she said. “I can feel it.”

“You’re not just gonna split and never come back?”

She laughed. “Tell you what,” she said, “I’ll leave the rest of the pot here as hostage—you
know
I won’t leave
that.”
She began rolling a joint.

“Peace-pipe for the road?” she said.

I nodded. There was nothing wrong with her; I had to get my head straight, is all. Or maybe my head was
too
straight...?

“Peace, baby,” I said, lighting the joint for her.

I felt myself choking on the stale taste of Choice as I hunkered on the dusty floor of the Foundation living room between Arlene and Ted, as Harvey sat down on his folding chair, lit a cigarette, and wound up for the pitch. Not plain old choice, dig, but Choice—like: quit college, like: throw Anne out, like: cold turkey—kind of choice that leaves you with the feeling that you’re gonna go down one road and never know what’s at the end of the other, a whole string of potentialities about to be snuffed out of your world-line forever.

Yeah, you could taste it in the air, hear it in the silence of maybe forty people hunched forward on the floor waiting for the Word, even smell it in the insane odor of paranoid sweat that seemed to hang over the whole room. Which was probably why I was getting that scared, empty feeling in my gut—contact paranoia. I mean, after all, I wasn’t hung-up in a Big Choice scene. Sure, Harvey was obviously going to take another big step towards San Francisco tonight, but that wasn’t my problem, there was zero probability, no chance, forget it baby, that anything would even make me consider following the Man and his junkies into the sunset. Arlene? Not even Arlene would be worth getting sucked into a bummer like that, and besides she was so hung on New York... Yeah, sure, she had a heavy choice coming, and I must be picking up her vibes... or maybe my choice was just whether I’d make one more college try at breaking up Harvey’s game, whether I’d try to make Arlene’s choice for her... Shit, maybe I had just been smoking too much metaphysical dope lately....

Harvey blew out a cloud of ectoplasmic smoke. “Well this time we know what we’re here to talk about,” he said, “Whether or not the Foundation will move to San Francisco...”

An anxious stirring among the animals on the floor: Ted was hunkered on the balls of his feet, ready to pounce; next to him, Doris was deep inside her own head; beside me, Arlene chewed her lower lip, grim and uptight as if her life were on the line.

“I’ve been giving it a lot of thought,” Harvey said. “I’ve made the personal decision to go along with a move to San Francisco—but not with a simple majority vote. I think if we do move, we’ve got to do it as a community. And if we’re going to start thinking of ourselves as a community, we can’t let ourselves get trapped in a numbers game—”

Community... was that what was eating at me? Not the Foundation, but the Brotherhood of Dope. Wasn’t that what Robin was trying to get me to see—that as a member of the International Pot-Smoking Conspiracy, I couldn’t very well get self-righteous about dealing as long as I was buying? Could that be the Choice whose nasty vibes I was tasting—in or out of the dope scene, and Robin only a part of it, the chick that I would keep if I came back to the Tribe, or the chick I would lose forever if I closed that door behind me...?

“We’ve got to come to some kind of organic community decision,” Harvey was saying. “A vote, maybe several votes, should be part of it, but a mathematical majority would be meaningless. We’ve got to reach a community consensus, a group feeling... perhaps even a group consciousness—”

Robin had her community and she was willing to pay her dues to it. I had had a community—Junk—and baby, I had paid all the dues there I cared to. Question was, was she right, was the smack scene different than the general dope scene? Or were only the names changed to protect the innocent, whoever they were? Was it smack that made the smack-dealing scene and acid and grass that made the acid-and-grass-dealing scene—or was it Dealing itself that made any dealing scene a paranoiac’s orgy? I couldn’t see taking the blind chance that Robin’s dealing wasn’t just dirty old Dealing... Was I starting to get smart?

Or just getting old?

Brrr! Yeah, that was where the cold wind was blowing from: if I couldn’t accept Robin for what she was, what was I but a dirty old man trying to make it with a young chick, but too scared and old and wasted to do anything but fake it... not really making it... Shit!

“So what I’d like to try tonight,” Harvey said from about a thousand light-years away, “is several ways of coming to a group consensus. First, I’d like to see a show of hands of those who
really
want the Foundation to move to San Francisco. Not a vote on whether to go or not, just those who now feel
personally
committed to trying to get the Foundation to make the move.”

About a dozen hands went up: Charley Dees, Rich Rossi, Tod and Judy, Bill Nelson, Bonnie Elbert, a few others who were still faces without names to me, and of course Ted, whose right hand shot into the air like a spastic Nazi at a Nuremburg rally. Noticing that she wasn’t Sieg-heiling, Ted shot Doris a dirty look; Doris gave me a Gallic shrug and raised her hand too.

“Hmmm, a bit less than a third of the membership,” Harvey said. “Okay, now I want to see everyone who’s committed to staying in New York no matter what the Foundation does....”