"Fuck it," Larry opined once again. He looked terrible - a pale, frail phantom stumbling up a New England highway. "Gimme the sixties."
Sure, the sixties, those were the days. Mid-sixties, late sixties. Flower Power. Getting clean for Gene. Andy Warhol with his pink-rimmed glasses and his f**king Brillo boxes. Velvet Underground. The Return of the Creature from Yorba Linda. Norman Spinrad, Norman Mailer, Norman Thomas, Norman Rockwell, and good old Norman Bates of the Bates Motel, heh-heh-heh. Dylan broke his neck. Barry McGuire croaked "The Eve of Destruction." Diana Ross raised the consciousness of every white kid in America. All those wonderful groups, Larry thought dazedly, give me the sixties and cram the eighties up your ass. When it came to rock and roll, the sixties had been the Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde. Cream. Rascals. Spoonful. Airplane with Grace Slick on vocals, Norman Mailer on lead guitar, and good old Norman Bates on drums. Beatles. Who. Dead -
He fell over and hit his head.
The world swam away blackly and then came back in bright fragments. He wiped his hand across his temple and it came away with a thin foam of blood on it. Didn't even matter. Whafuck, as they used to say back in the bright and glorious mid-sixties. What was falling down and hitting your head when he had spent the last week unable to sleep without waking up from nightmares, and the good nights were the nights when the scream got no farther than the middle of his throat? If you screamed out loud and woke up to that, you scared yourself even worse.
Dreams of being back in the Lincoln Tunnel. There was somebody behind him, only in the dreams it wasn't Rita. It was the devil, and he was stalking Larry with a lightless grin frozen on his face. The black man wasn't the walking dead; he was worse than the walking dead. Larry ran with the slow sludgy panic of bad dreams, tripping over unseen corpses, knowing they were staring at him with the glassy eyes of stuffed trophies from the crypts of their cars, which had stalled inside the frozen traffic even though they had some other place to be, he ran, but what good was running when the black devil man, the black magic man, could see in the dark with eyes like snooperscopes? And after a while the dark man would begin to croon to him: Come on, Laarry, come on, we'll get it togeeeether Laaarry -
He would feel the black man's breath on his very shoulder and that was when he would struggle up from sleep, escaping sleep, and the scream would be stuck in his throat like a hot bone or actually escaping his lips, loud enough to wake the dead.
Daytimes, the vision of the dark man would recede. The dark man strictly worked the night shift. Daytimes, it was the Big Alone that went to work on him, gnawing its way into his brain with the sharp teeth of some tireless rodent - a rat, or a weasel, maybe. During the days, his thoughts would dwell on Rita. Lovely Rita, meter-maid. Over and over in his mind he would turn her over and over, seeing those slitted eyes, like the eyes of an animal which has died in surprise and pain, that mouth he had kissed now filled with stale green puke. She had died so easy, in the night, in the same f**king sleeping bag, and now he was...
Well, cracking up. That was it, wasn't it? That was what was happening to him. He was cracking up.
"Cracking," he moaned. "Oh Jeez, I'm going out of my mind."