Amateur Insanity

“The End of the Dance”

 

The next day Tim’s father flew up from L.A. where he and Tim’s mother lived in retirement. This was Tim’s father’s second trip north for a breakdown and this time he wanted to take Tim back to Southern California. At first, Tim didn’t want to go.

“C’mere,” he said to me and went down the hall into the kitchen, leaving his father in his dark suit in the middle of the livingroom.

Embarrassed for Tim, I said to his father, “I’ll be right back.”

His father was stocky and severe with wire-rimmed glasses, an old liberal-activist, protestant minister, a friend of Upton Sinclair.  I wanted to establish myself as an ally but instead caught a glint of outrage and accusation.Tim was standing in the center of the kitchen, staring at air with those enormous pupils, not only forgetting what he wanted to say but where he was. So I spoke first.

“Tim, you’ve gotta go with him man.”

He awoke and said with confused desperation, “No, no. . . I don’t want to. . I . . . No . . . Do you think I should?” His skeptical, plaintive eyes searched mine.

“Yeah, you’ve got to go. Suppose the police come?  If you go home with your dad there’ll be no way to find you.  Nobody around here will tell them where you live. They know you had nothing to do with. . . what happened to Shob. And I won’t be here.” 

He was surprised. 

“I’ve gotta leave too,” I continued. “I’m gonna get a draft notice any day. I realize what’s going on. I might be paranoid but . . . you know where I grew up, everybody knows everybody, and I think they’ve been waiting for a chance to get me ever since my first weekend home from college with long hair. So I’ve gotta split man. I can’t stay here and take care of ya.  And if you leave, that’s the best way to avoid any problems with the police.”  

While he considered this, I started toward the doorway.   

“Besides,” I added, “it may not be that bad. You can hangout at Venice Beach. That place is groovy.  I’ll visit ya as soon as I can.” He stared at me a moment.  “C’mon,” I said and started down the hall to the living room where I could see his father, stiff as rigor mortis, on the couch.
Tim eventually followed me. After we agreed on how to dispose of the apartment and its contents, Tim and his father left, each with a cardboard box full of indispensable books and records and clothes.

The next day, Monday, Shob’s death made it into the media. He was murdered on the previous Thursday, the day after he talked with Tim and I, but his body wasn’t discovered for a couple days. Stabbed twelve times, once through the heart, he was dead the whole time Tim asked around for him. The murderer, a biker friend of Shob’s, on acid at the time, was caught in Shob’s car, with thousands of Shob’s dollars (probably intended for our grass deal), his pistol, and his left arm cut off at the elbow, which, in a silly, early street-rumor, the murderer was caught gnawing.

Then, a couple days later, the body of another major dealer, Super Spade, also an acquaintance of Tim’s and mine, was found in a sleeping bag hanging down a cliff near picturesque Point Reyes Lighthouse. At first there was speculation that the same guy murdered both, and then the newspapers swallowed an old street rumor about the Mafia taking over the Haight drug business. 
In all, the conservative Examiner squeezed four days of headlines out of the Haight’s first big murders. Shob got his picture in Time Magazine, described as an “unemployed flutist,” in a story titled, “End of the Dance.”  Though it was only the first week of August, for Tim and I and for the media, the Summer of Love was over.

But I lingered on, in part because I wasn’t sure where else to go. No place in Nazi-Occupied-Territory anyway. And just as threatening to me was the speed overdose after-effect. The pad now was full of soothing quiet and solitude and I didn’t answer the door or go through it for a couple days. I thought I knew what to expect but the flashbacks were more intense than after the first one. The fear now was that I would be stuck in that day, somehow couldn’t come down.

I’d found a volcano of self-hate and murder. But this second speed crash showed me that, to my shock, on some level, in some way, I believed the red necks’ unremitting message that something was subtly, fundamentally, and unmistakably wrong with me. Could I be a mutation locked out of the unconscious wavebands of human love?