The Children of Hamelin (7 page)

Robin seemed to snap back from somewhere far away; her glassy, dreamy eyes were suddenly rodent-bright, turned on me like a camera zoomed in to close focus. “Hey man,” she said earnestly, “what’s bugging you?”

“I got one of those free roadmaps you promised me. I don’t like the way the land lies.”

“Old tracks,” she said. “Don’t let it freak you.”

But it hurt; it hurt because she seemed to have seen all the way inside me and put my inner being down with two short words. And she was wrong, she had to be wrong! I had to make her understand to stop the hurting; if I couldn’t make her understand, then may be she was right and I was old, old, old.

“Look at this place,” I said. “It’s the Sargasso Sea. Everything that’s floating loose drifts down here and rots in the seaweed.”

“It’s the world, baby,” she said with a softness older than anything inside me.

“What’s the world, this freakshow?”

“No man, it’s the world,” she insisted.

“I don’t understand....”

“It’s the world. Dig—I’ll show you. Just keep walking and don’t look back till I tell you.”

We reached the northeast corner of the Park (don’t look back), crossed the street, continued east, and suddenly reality became cool and dark and echoing as we crossed the frontier into a new country: a deep canyon of huge empty gray buildings, the gray silent monoliths of some moldering necropolis, the flesh-dwarfing Stalinist architecture of a black and white film of East Berlin and up the ghostly street, the only three people in sight, two blocks further east, seemed like primitive savages scuttling at the feet of the giant enigmatic tombstones of the Pharaohs. Canyons measureless to man. Endless acres of dead city, stone upon gray stone—was this the New York of “nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there,” was this what the tourists saw, was the uptight cliche of New York of dead gray concrete canyons and frantic scuttling gray people the real thing after all? Was this concrete deathscape a map of our inner territory?

The drag of Robin’s hand brought me to a slow stop like the chain of a sea-anchor. “Turn around and dig it now,” she said.

I turned and stared down a long gray corridor of lifeless stone and my viewpoint seemed to flash down the cold canyon of buildings like a camera zoom-shot on Washington Square Park shimmering like an oasis beyond a desert of frozen gray sand. I was staring at a vision of the Village, an impressionist painting, all feeling and no detail, from the bottom of some horrible stone-walled pit, and now the Village-image shone like the dream of youth’s awakening and I knew that no one ran away
to
the Village, you ran away
from
the gray void at the bottom of the city’s pit, towards that shimmering vision of the Promised Land at the other end of the tunnel. Clawed your way up the rock walls, inch by inch if you had to, crawled along the desert sands towards the oasis....

“It’s the world,” Robin said.

“Yes....”

She knew, somehow, on some gut-level, she had known all along that the real choice wasn’t between good and evil but between two different styles of reality and neither was Shangri-La. But down here, at the bottom of New York’s Stalinist-gray bummer, I could see, could accept the fact, that the break from
this
to the Village had been a move towards freedom, a tropism towards light, a flight from a reality of walls to a place of the possible, where evil was ranker and good was more luxuriant, where “humanity festers rich as rotting fruit,” life, is all.

I didn’t like the game, but those were the cards, and it had been the only game in town. I had nothing to regret.

“Time for another magic carpet ride,” Robin said.

We got out of the cab at Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue: the cabbie had been giving us the “dirty hippie treatment” all the way, so I handed him a single and two quarters for the $1.50 meter, paused just long enough to let him wind up for a curse, then handed him another single and said: “And that for you, my good man.”

Walking up Fifth Avenue from the gaping cabbie, Robin said: “Why did you do that? That cat was bumming us all the way.”

“Precisely,” I said. Jesus, it had been the obvious move, hadn’t it? “Huh?”

“I did it to teach the bounder a lesson,” I explained patiently. “Man,” she said respectfully but obviously uncomprehendingly,
“are you stoned!”

Ah, the poor child, I thought with a sudden surge of well-being.

No sense of savoir-faire, no appreciation of true class, no instinct for the Grand Gesture. Jeez, it felt good to be walking up Fifth Avenue, posh gleaming banks, opulent shops, wide sidewalks, muted underplayed storefronts, great office buildings where the wheels of the world hummed, little touches of pure idiot elegance like the gilded lamp-posts and trash-baskets, all bathed in the Technicolor glow of a golden sunset.

“Dig it, dig it, dig it...” Robin mumbled.

“I dig, I dig,” I assured her. This was the real New York where, as Dickie Lee says, the Big Game is played. Here the huge buildings weren’t dead useless stone but great buzzing beehives, busy, busy, busy, fortunes won and lost, paper empires rising and falling, yeah, this is where the action is. That son of a bitch Dirk had pegged it right; he knew his own turf, had to give him that.

“Man, just so big, so big...” Robin said.

“Oh yeah, big all right!” Fifth Avenue on a sunset Saturday was empty but not deserted, expensive chicks in expensive shops, mysterious cats bustling around on mysterious day-off missions, tourists gawking; but still not the weekday mob jamming the sidewalks, moving at double-time. No, now Fifth Avenue was like some smoothly-oiled racing-engine taking it easy, idling, not much really happening, but man, dig the power in that lazy throb!

“Oh shit... wow...”

We were on the corner of Fifth and Forty-Fourth now; two blocks north was the second-string office building that housed the Dirk Robinson Literary Agency. A weird feeling, walking around outside the old boiler factory on a Saturday, with the building closed, stoned on acid! Wouldn’t it blow old Dirk’s mind to see me? Or would it? It wasn’t blowing
my
mind; it was unblowing it. Fifth Avenue had a real reality, a sense of contact with the Great World Out There. Even my shitty job, stupid maybe, corrupt maybe, in that office on this street, put me in some kind of contact with the pathetic dreams of the losers and the Big Game of the winners; it was possible to sit behind my typewriter and sniff the goings-on in both realities of the office, to glide back and forth between the Big Game and the compost-heap of broken dreams....

“Shit... shit... oh Christ...”

Hey, Robin was babbling! Her free hand was balled into a fist, her hand in mine digging into my flesh like a claw. I put my free hand on her shoulder, spun her around to face me. Her eyes were wild, unfocused; her mouth was trembling. She was off somewhere and it obviously wasn’t somewhere good.

“Hey, what’s the matter? Take it easy—”

She seemed to come back from wherever she had been, but there was an awful look in her eyes, look of someone who has looked somewhere they shouldn’t and now they know it.

“Dig it man,” she said, “we’re like ants. Dirty little ants crawling around their pantry. Nobody. Nothing. Dirty little ants. Oooh, shit!”

“Hey, take it easy, baby. Groove on the street. Dig it. Look at the golden garbage cans; isn’t that a gas?
Golden garbage cans!”

“Fucking gold garbage cans!” she shouted—and heads turned to sneer at the freaking hippie. I stroked her shoulder in a cool-it gesture. Softer, she hissed bitterly: “Yeah, those filthy cocksuckers with their gold garbage cans! What do they care? What do they know?”

Oh Christ, I thought, she’s on some kind of paranoid trip!

“They just sit there in their office buildings ruling the world and all we are to them is dirty little ants in their cookie jars…”

Oh wow, a hippie Proletariat workers of the world unite bummer!

“It’s not like that,” I said. “You’ve got to understand—it’s the Big Game, is all.”

“Game?”

“Yeah, it’s all a big groovy game. It’s their trip. They groove behind it, see?”

“We’re only pawns in their game...”

“Oh shit! You’re getting paranoid. Nobody’s out to get us.” Why couldn’t she understand?

“They’re monsters! Playing games with our lives!”

Jesus, where did she pick up all this pseudo-Marxist shit? The Wolves of Wall Street, the Fagins of Fifth Avenue!

“Oh man, you don’t understand, they control us all with wires in our heads and all they have to do is press a button and we jump and twitch and squirm—”

Goddamn, there was no way to talk her out of it! She was freaking out and I had to
do
something, had to put her head in another place... yeah...
Yeah!

I pulled her to the curb, waved my hand for a minute or so, finally got a cab (no real sweat on Fifth Avenue!), said “Magic carpet time, baby,” and stuffed her into the back seat ahead of me.

The cab ride downtown started bringing me down like a slow dissolve. The more Robin gibbered about Them and how They controlled the world and how we were Dirty Little Ants, the more aware I became of the fact that she was having an acid bummer, which reminded me of the fact that she was on acid which reminded me that I was on acid which reminded me that the big light show that was going on outside the cab was an acid distortion which kind of put me in the position of still being high but now seeing myself as high and so I could see myself beginning to slowly and majestically sink back into the sea of reality. Whatever that was.

By the time the cab had dropped us off on Avenue D, outside the housing project near where the trip had started, Robin was quieting down, and I felt that I was half in one reality and half in another, and not quite knowing which one was really real, or even if there was such a thing as real.

“Hey man, where are we going?” Robin said in a pathetic scared little voice as I started to lead her through the admittedly-ominous giant red-brick buildings of the darkening, glowering project towards the pedestrian bridge over the East River Drive that led to the strip of park along the river. “Those big buildings with metal spiders in them... we’re like ants... dirty little ants...”

Some esthetic, some strange sense of symmetry, had given me the idea of taking her back to the same place we had gone up in. It had been peaceful and groovy there, and it seemed like the logical antidote to her bummer.

“Somewhere groovy,” I told her as we puffed up the metal stairs of the pedestrian bridge. As we reached the arching span of the bridge over the snarling traffic of the East River Drive, I glanced down, winced as I imagined what it would do to her head now to see the cars shooting below us like crazed metal monsters.

“Dig,” I told her, “close your eyes and hold tight to my hand, and when I tell you to open your eyes again, I promise everything will be groovy.”

She looked at me with sick puppy-dog eyes, squeezed my hand, said: “I’m afraid... afraid of the dark inside my head...”

I put my arm around her waist, kissed her softly on the cheek. “Trust me,” I said.

She nodded, screwed up her face, closed her eyes, and I led her across the bridge, haltingly down the stairs on the other side, through the width of the narrow empty park, and sat her down on a bench facing the river.

I tried to see the view through her eyes: the lights of Brooklyn sparkling smokily in the dusk across the black sheen of water, the sky deepening to navy; the red-and-green jewels of an airplane’s running lights moving across the as-yet-starless sky.

I sat down beside her, put my arm around her shoulders, cradled her against me, said, “Open your eyes.”

Her body shuddered once against me; she opened her eyes. Sighed. Didn’t move for at least a minute that seemed to hang frozen in the air that was getting cold and dank.

Then she turned to me. She was smiling; her eyes were big and soft and calm. She kissed me gently on the mouth with soft-but-closed lips, held it for a long moment, then pulled away and lay her head on my shoulder, her cheek cool against mine.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Full circle, baby. It was a beautiful place to go up in, so I figured....”

“You’re just a beautiful, groovy cat,” she said. “I mean knowing how to bring me out of a bummer like that and you on your first acid trip... wow...”

“You’re okay now?”

“Oh sure man,” she said casually. “It was just a bad flash. It happens every once in a while. You get used to it.”

A long moment of silence during which I wondered if a freakout like that was something I’d ever want to be able to get used to. Quite suddenly, I realized that I hadn’t felt very high for... how long?

“I think we’re coming down,” I said.

“Yeah, it’ll taper off for a few more hours maybe, but I don’t feel very high anymore either. Not exactly the strongest acid I’ve ever had.” She paused. “Ah... you don’t know what time it is, do you?”

“Maybe five or six, I guess—”

“Uh... look, would it uptight you if I split now?” she said. “I mean, I’ll stay if you want, but I’ve got this thing I gotta do.”

“How about if I came along?” I said, not really meaning it.

“Might bummer you.”

Somehow, I didn’t mind. It seemed fitting. I felt tired as hell, and maybe I had a thing to do too: collect the fragments of the trip and try to paste them in the scrapbook of memory.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “I could do with some aloneness now, I think.”

She smiled, kissed me gently, go up. “You’re a groovy cat,” she said. “No goodbyes, okay? Just... later.”

“When will I see you again?”

She laughed. “When you most want to and least expect to,” she said. She started walking down the path, paused, blew me a kiss, and then was off like a wraith into the falling night.

I sat on the bench for a few minutes just staring into the water and thinking no-thoughts. My next real thought was that I was starting to get really cold and I was exhausted and thoroughly spaced-out.

So I got up and started walking home, looking forward to sleeping for about a thousand years, digesting the day’s enormities like a torpid python ruminating on his weekly meal.