UNLIVABLE WITH 

8

 

I don’t know how many times we came, but when the gray overcast dawn was coming through the only window, I reached for her again and she got up and put on her panties.

“It’s too much,” she said. “The acid. This little room. I think we should go outside somewhere. Get apart for a while.”

“You wanna walk in the park?” I asked as I stood up.

She bent to pick up her blouse and looked at me. I was gaping stupidly at her, erection undiminished. She stepped over, held my cock, and looked up into my eyes and said, “Put it away and get dressed.”

I shriveled. While dressing, I tried to figure out if I had done something wrong.

“I thought I’d go down to that little store on the corner and call a friend,” she said, angling arms through coat sleeves. “Remember, I told you about Tim? He has a car. I was going to ask him to take us for a ride in the country.”

I tested her mood by trying for what would now be a non-sexual hug, but she shrank and said, “I don’t want to touch.”

By the time Tim arrived the effect of the LSD had subsided to what would have been tranquil lucidity if I hadn’t been so troubled by the suspicion that Ruth’s change in mood was brought about by my having exposed some repulsive aspect of myself.

Tim left his wife for Ruth, who then left him for his friend Ben, who Ruth left to move in with me. Tim was a one-man cult centered on Ruth. He hadn’t told her yet, but he was in the middle of a novel about her, furiously written in longhand on binder paper. His attitude toward her was that of a dog with the leash in his mouth begging for a walk. I would learn later that he was capable of a junkie-like obsession for particular women.

I was dimly and patchily aware of all this when I met Tim. He had alert deep-set eyes and a handle-bar mustache framing an irritatingly constant smile. Because of the mustache and a gap in his front teeth, he resembled Teddy Roosevelt.

While I put on a coat and searched for keys, Tim studied me.

“How much is your rent here?” he asked.

“I pay fifteen for my room,” I answered.

“I’m looking for a room.”

“There’ll be one available for twenty five next week.”

Ruth got into the front seat of Tim’s clunky old ’53 Chevy and I surprised everybody by getting in the back. I felt cranky and annoyed by her distance though I felt the same need for solitude. She looked into the backseat at me and smiled with amusement.

The car was one of those Tim frequently bought for under fifty dollars and abandoned where it died. As it warmed up, I was certain that I could hear the tapping of each valve in the engine.

The streets had the festive air of a sunny Saturday, kids playing and fathers polishing cars. All the basketball courts in the Panhandle were full. By the time we reached the Golden Gate Bridge, Tim and Ruth were in the groove of an old rapport, discussing people I didn’t know. While the wind through the window laved my face, I became absorbed in the faces of the tourists on the bridge passing like fluttered cards. When we were passing above Sausalito, I stared down absently at its steep green slopes and the houses like box seats on the City. Meanwhile, I was analyzed scenes from last night, searching for what I did wrong.

In Mill Valley, we climbed serpentine roads that tunneled through redwood forest, and at one point, I thought I caught Tim gloating in the rearview mirror. Ruth and I hadn’t spoken once so far in the thirty minutes of the ride, and Tim was giddy with hope. He joined Ruth in a game of creating architectural cocktails: this house on that lot with those gables and that garden. Soon they were on a merry-go-round I couldn’t jump onto.

We parked beside a fern-strewn slope with a vista of the bay. After a while, Ruth exclaimed of whirring crickets, “Oh, listen to the animals!”

I snorted, contemptuous of her city-ignorance. I was abandoned now in the back seat, glancing at Ruth, hoping our eyes would meet. But her eyes seemed to touch on everything but mine. Then I realized with a jolt that she wasn’t pretending to ignore me. She had forgotten all about me!

“Look! There’re freaks in that car!” Ruth exclaimed later as we crossed over the bridge back into the City.

A carload of freaks passed in the same direction, honking and holding up two fingers. Tim and I had dark hair just to the top of the collar, not long by Haight-Ashbury standards, but long enough to be recognized as part of the uniform.

She and Tim returned the sign and the honk and laughed at the cutting-up in the car as it passed. I noted that this was the third or fourth time I had seen that two-fingered salute. The victory sign from World War II was becoming a hip hand-signal. Significant when the velocity of change was such that many fads lived only weeks.

At the booth, the toll taker said our toll had been paid by a car up ahead. The car with the freaks honked, rear window full of V signs, and then it disappeared into traffic.