TRANSFIGURATIONS
by Victor Milan
November night wind whipped his trousers, stinging skinny legs like triffid tendrils as he shoehorned himself into a small club not far from campus. The murk throbbed like a wound, pulsing red and blue and noise. He stopped, hovering there in the door with the lumpy orange-and-green plaid coat in which his mother had packed him off to MIT three years before hanging on his narrow shoulders like a dead dwarf. Don’t be such a coward, Mark, he told himself. This is for science.
The band lunged at “Crown of Creation” and wrestled it to the floor as he instinctively sought the darkest corner, teacup in hand-he’d learned how unhip it was to order Coke or coffee, at least.
Other than that he’d learned none of the moves in weeks of research. The way he was dressed, in his high-water pants and pastel polyester shirt of the sort that always pouched out at the sides like a sail in the wind, he might’ve been in danger of being taken for a narc—this was the fall that followed Woodstock, the year Gordon Liddy invented the DEA to give Nixon an issue to distract attention from the war-but Berkeley and San Francisco were hip towns, university towns; they knew a science student when they saw one.
The Glass Onion had no dance floor as such; bodies swayed in crepuscular crimson and indigo glow between tables or crowded into a clear space before the tiny stage, with a whisper of beads and buckskin fringe and the occasional dull glint of Indian jewelry. He kept as far from the action’s center as he could, but being Mark he inevitably bumped into everyone he passed, leaving a wake of glares and thin embarrassed “excuse me’s” behind him. His prominent ears burning, he had almost reached his goal, the little rickety table made out of a Ma Bell cable spool with a single dented green auditorium chair beside it and an unlit candle in an empty peanut butter jar plunked down on it, when he ran smack into somebody.
The first thing that happened was that his massive hornrim glasses slid down the ramp of his nose and disappeared in the dark. Next he grabbed the person he’d bumped with both hands as his balance went. The teacup hit the floor with a crash and a clatter. “Oh, dear, oh, please excuse me, I’m sorry…” tumbled from his mouth like gumballs from a broken machine.
He realized there was a certain softness of the person his skinny hands were clinging to so fervently, and a smell of musk and patchouli detached itself from the general miasma and drilled its way right up into his sensorium. He cursed himself: You had to go and run over a beautiful woman. At least she smelled beautiful.
Then she was patting him on the arm, murmuring that she was sorry, and they both bent down to the floor together in search of teacup and glasses while the bodies went round and round around them, and they bumped heads and recoiled amid apologies, and Mark’s fevered fingers found his glasses, miraculously intact, and fit them back in front of his eyes, and he blinked and found himself staring from a distance of five inches into the face of Kimberly Ann Cordayne.
Kimberly Ann Cordayne: the girl, yes, of his dreams. Childhood sweetheart, unrequited, from the moment he’d first beheld her, pinafored and five, riding her trike down the modest suburban SoCal street where they both lived. He’d been so entranced by her Hallmark Card perfection that the raspberry scoop fell off his ice cream cone to hot doom on the sidewalk and he never noticed. She pedaled over his bare toes and cruised on with her pert nose in the air, never acknowledging his existence. From that day his heart had been lost.
Hope and despair surged up like surf within him. He straightened, his tongue too tied to produce words. And she yelled, “Mark! Mark Meadows! Fuck, but it’s good to see you.” And hugged him.
He stood there blinking like an idiot. No female who wasn’t a relative had ever hugged him before. He swallowed spastically. What if I get an erection? Belatedly, he made feeble patting gestures at the small of her back.
She pushed away, held him at arm’s length. “Let me look at you, brother. Why, you haven’t changed a bit.”
He winced. The taunting would begin now, for his skinniness, his clumsiness, his crew cut, the pimples still sprinkled across scrawny, allegedly postadolescent features and his most recent, most aggravating deficit, his utter and complete inability to be anywhere near With It. In high school, Kimberly Ann had evolved from indifference into his foremost tormentor-or, rather, a succession of jocks on whose overelaborated biceps she hung, cooing encouragements, had assumed the role.
But here she was tugging him toward that corner table. “Come on, man. Let’s talk about the bad old days.”
It was an opportunity for which he’d hopelessly hoped three quarters of his life. Face-to-face with his paragon of love and beauty while the band on stage assaulted the Beatles’
“Blackbird”-and he couldn’t think of one damned thing to say. But Kimberly Ann was more than happy to do the talking. About the changes she’d been through since good old Rexford Tugwell High. About the far-out people she’d met at Whittier College, how they turned her on and opened her eyes. How she’d dropped out midway through her senior year and come here, the Bay Area, the bright mecca of Movement. How she’d been finding herself ever since.
Perhaps he hadn’t changed, but she most definitely had. Gone was the straight black ponytail, pleated skirts, pastel lipstick and nail polish, the prim stewardess perfection of an up-and-coming Bank of America executive’s one daughter. Kimberly’s hair had grown long, hanging down well past her shoulders in a great kinky cloudy Yoko Ono mane. She wore a frilly peasant blouse embroidered with mushrooms and planets, a voluminous skirt tie-dyed into what reminded Mark of nothing so much as fireworks displays in Disneyland. He knew her feet were bare, from having stepped on one. She looked more beautiful than he ever could have imagined.
And those pale eyes, winter-sky eyes, that had so often frozen him in the past, were glowing at him with such warmth he could barely stand to look at them. It was heaven, but somehow he couldn’t buy it. Being Mark, he had to question. “Kimberly-” he began.
She held up two fingers. “Hold it right there, dude. I left that name behind me with my bourgeois ways. I’m Sunflower now.”
He bobbed his head and his Adam’s apple. “OkaySunflower.”
“So what brings you here, man?”
“It’s an experiment.”
She eyed him across the rim of her jelly jar wineglass, suddenly wary.
“I just finished my undergrad work at MIT,” he explained in a rush. “Now I’m here to get my doctorate in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley.”
“So what’s that got to do with this scene?”
“Well, what I’ve been working on is figuring out just how DNA encodes genetic information. I published some papers, stuff like that.” At MIT they’d compared him to Einstein, as a matter of fact, but you’d never catch him saying that. “But this summer I found something that interests me a lot more. The chemistry of mind.”
Blue blankness, her eyes.
“Psychedelics. Psychoactive drugs. I read all the material-Leary, Alpert, the Solomon collection. It really-what’s the expression? Really turned me on.” He leaned forward, fingers plucking unconsciously at the felt-tip pens nestled in their plastic protector in his breast pocket. In his excitement he sprinkled the spool tabletop with unconscious spittle. “It’s a really vital area of research. I think it might lead to answering the really important questions-who we are, and how, and why.”
She looked at him with half a frown and half a smile. “I still don’t get it.”
“I’m doing fieldwork to establish a context for my research. On the drug culture-the, uh, the counterculture. Trying to get an angle on how hallucinogen use affects people’s outlook. “
He moistened his lips. “It’s really exciting. There’s a whole world I never knew existed-here.” A nervous tic encompassed the Onion’s smoky confines. “But somehow I can’t really, well, make contact. I’ve bought all the Grateful Dead records, but I still feel like an outsider. I-I almost feel I’d like to be part of this whole hippie thing.”
“Hippie?” she said with a patrician snort. “Mark, where’ve you been? It’s 1969. The hippie movement’s been dead for two years.” She shook her head. “Have you actually done any of these drugs you’re trying to study?”
He flushed. “No…. . uh-I’m not ready to get to that stage. “
“Poor Mark. You’re so uptight. Looks as if I’m going to have my work cut out for me, trying to show you what it is that’s happening, Mr. Jones.”
The reference skimmed his flattop, but suddenly his face brightened and his nose and cheekbones and whatnot went in happy directions, and he showed his horsy teeth. “You mean you’ll help me?” He grabbed her hand, snatched his fingers away as if afraid they’d leave marks. “You’ll show me around?” She nodded.
“Great!” He picked up the teacup, clinked it against an upper tooth, realized it was empty and clacked it down again. “I’ve been wondering why-that is, I-well, you’ve never, ah, talked to me like this before.”
She took one of his hands in both of hers and he thought his heart would stop. “Oh, Mark,” she said, tenderly, even. “Always the analytical one. It’s just that since my eyes have been opened, I’ve realized that everyone’s beautiful in his own way, except the pigs who oppress the people. And I see youstill straight. But you haven’t sold out, man. I can tell; I can read it in your aura. You’re still the same old Mark.”
His head whirled like a carousel out of control. Cynical, his left brain tossed up the hypothesis that she was homesick, that he was part of a childhood and past she had cut herself off from, perhaps, too completely. He brushed it aside. She was Kimberly Ann, invulnerable, unapproachable. Any minute now she’d recognize him for the impostor he was.
She didn’t. They talked on into the night—or rather, she talked and he listened, wanting to believe but still unable to. When the band took a long-overdue break, somebody cued up side one of Destiny’s new album on the sound system. The gestalt burned itself irrevocably in: darkness and colored lights playing in the hair and face of the most beautiful woman in his world, and behind it the husky baritone of Tom Marion Douglas singing of love and death and dislocation, of elder gods and destinies best not hinted at. It changed him, that night. But he didn’t know yet.
He was almost too surfeited with wonder to be elated or even surprised when, halfway through the band’s exiguous second set, Kimberly stood up suddenly, clutching his hand.
“This is getting to be a drag. These guys don’t know where it’s at. Why don’t you come over to my pad, drink a little wine, get a little high?” Her eyes challenged, and there was a bit of that old haughtiness, the old ice, as she pulled on waffle-stomper boots with red laces. “Or are you too straight for that?”
He felt as if he had a cotton ball sitting in the middle of his tongue. “Ah, I—no. I’d be more than happy to.”
“Far out. There’s hope for you yet.”
In a daze Mark followed her out of the club, to a liquor store with a massive sliding San Quentin grating over the windows, where a balding pasty-faced proprietor sold them a bottle of Ripple under a gaze of fish-eyed distaste. Mark was a virgin. He had his fantasies, the Playboy magazines with their pages stuck together stacked among the scientific papers under the tumbledown bed in his apartment on the fringes of Chinatown. But not even in fantasy did he ever dare to imagine himself coupled with the resplendent Kimberly Ann. And now-he drifted the streets as if weightless, barely noticing the freaks and street people who exchanged greetings with Sunflower as they passed.
And he barely noticed on the rickety backstairs when Sunflower said, “….eet my old man. You’ll love him; he’s a really heavy dude.”
Then the words crunched into his brain like a lead mallet. He stumbled. Kimberly caught him by the arm, laughing. “Poor Mark. Always so uptight. Come on, we’re almost there.”
So he wound up in this little one-lung apartment with a hot plate and a leaky faucet in the bathroom. By one wall a salvaged mattress with a madras-print coverlet rested on a door propped on cinder blocks. Crosslegged on the spread beneath a giant poster of the beatified Che sat Philip, Sunflower’s Old Man. He was dark-eyed and intense, a black tee shirt stretched over his brawny chest with a blood-red fist and the word Huelga lettered under it. He was watching clips of a demonstration on a little rumpsprung portable TV with a coat-hanger aerial.
“Right on,” he was saying as they came in. “The Lizard King has his head together. These clean-for-Gene work-withinthe-system aces like Turtle don’t know what it’s all about: confrontation with fascist Amerika. Who the fuck are you?” After Sunflower took him off to one corner and explained to him in a fierce whisper that Mark was not a police spy but an old, old friend, and don’t embarrass me, asshole, he consented to shake Mark’s hand. Mark craned past him at the TV; the bearded face of the man now being interviewed looked familiar somehow.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
Philip lifted a lip corner. “Tom Douglas, of course. Lead singer for Destiny. The Lizard King.” He scanned Mark from flattop to penny loafers. “Or maybe you’ve never heard of him.”
Mark blinked, said nothing. He knew of Destiny and Douglas-as research he’d just bought their new album, Black Sunday, plain maroon cover dominated by a huge black sun. He was too embarrassed to say so.
Sunflower’s eyes went faraway. “You should have seen him today at the demonstration. Facing down the pigs as the Lizard King. Truly far out.”
Amenities out of the way, the two of them broke out a contrivance of glass and rubber tubing, tamped its bowl full of dope, and lit up. Had Sunflower by herself offered Mark the grass, he would have accepted. But now he was feeling strange and alien again, as if his skin didn’t fit him right, and he refused. He slouched in the corner next to a pile of Daily Workers while his host and hostess sat on the bed and smoked dope and stocky intense Philip lectured him about the Necessity for Armed Struggle until he thought his head was going to fall off, and he drank the whole bottle of sickly sweet wine by himself-he didn’t drink, either-and finally Kimberly began to snuggle up close to her Old Man and fondle him in a way that made Mark distinctly uneasy, and he mumbled excuses and stumbled out and somehow found his way home. As the first light of dawn drooled in the windows of his own dingy flat, he regurgitated the contents of the Ripple bottle into his cracked porcelain toilet, and it took him fifteen flushes to get it clear again.
So began Mark’s courtship of Sunflower, nee Kimberly Ann Cordayne.
“I want you…” The words spilled across the wind, insolent, suggestive, the voice like molten amber with a whiskey edge for all the New Year’s-noisemaker quality of the little Jap transistor. Wojtek Grabowski pulled his windbreaker tighter over his wide chest and tried not to hear.
The crane reared back like a zombie dinosaur, swayed a girder toward him. He gestured to the operator with exaggerated underwater moves. “I want you . .” the voice insisted. He felt a flash of irritation. “A blast from the past—1966, and Destiny’s first hit song,” the announcer had warbled in his professional-adolescent voice. These Americans, Wojtek thought, they think 1966 is ancient history.
“Turn off that boogie-woogie shit,” somebody growled. “Fuck you,” the radio’s owner said. He was twenty years old, two meters tall, and six months out of ‘Nam. Marine. Khe Sanh. The argument ended.
Grabowski wished the boy would turn the radio off, but he didn’t like to push himself forward. He was tolerated-a solid worker, who could drink the strongest man on-site under the table of a Friday night. But he kept to himself.
As the girder came down and the crew swarmed up to fix it in place and the cold wind off the bay drilled through thin nylon and aging skin, he thought how strange it was to find himself here-him, the middle child of a prosperous Warsaw household, the small sickly one, the studious. He was going to be a doctor, a professor. His brother Kliment-half envied, wholly admired, big, bold, dashing, with a cavalryman’s black mustache-was going into the Officers’ Academy, was going to be a hero.
Then the Germans came. Kliment was shot in the back of the head by the Red Army in Katyn Wood. Sister Katja disappeared into the field-brothels of the Wehrmacht. Mother died in the last bombardment of Warsaw, while the Soviets squatted on the Vistula and let the Nazis do their dirty work for them. Father, a minor government functionary, outlived the war a few months before collecting his own bullet in the back of the neck, purged by the puppet Lublin regime.
Young Wojtek, dreams of university forever shattered, spent six and a half years as a partisan in the woods, ended them a fugitive, exiled to a foreign land with only a single hope to keep his blood beating.
“I want you.” The repetition was beginning to grate on him. He’d grown up with Mozart and Mendelssohn. And the message… This was no love song, it was a lust song-an invitation to rut.
Love meant more to him-a moment of cool moisture, sluicing across his vision, wiped away by the wind’s chill hand. He remembered marrying Anna, his partisan girl, in what the Stukas had left of a village church, and afterward the priest himself had hitched up his threadbare cassock and played Bach’s Toccata and Fugue on the organ, miraculously intact, while a starveling girl crouched to work the bellows. Next day they’d lie in ambush for the fascists, but that night, that night…
Another girder rose. Anna had left before him, smuggled out by helpful British operatives in June of 1945, bound for America with their child in her womb. He fought as long as he could, then followed.
Now he dwelt in a land he loved almost as a lover. He had nothing else. In twenty-three years he had found no sign of the woman he loved and the child she must have borne. Though, sweet Mary, how he’d searched.
“I waaaaaant you .”
He shut his eyes. If I must endure that banal lyric one more time. “..to die with me.”
The music diminuendoed in an eerie wail. For a moment he stood very still, as if the wind had turned the sweat to ice within his shirt. What had seemed a mere syrup confection was infinitely more-more evil. Here was a man, anointed spokesman of youth, for whom the blandishments ou love or even lust-were degraded into a totentanz, a ritual of death.
The girder clipped an upright and rang like a cracked bell. Grabowski shook himself, gestured the crane man to stop. At the same time, he strained, heard the announcer say the name Tom Douglas.
It was a name he would remember.
Mark hoped it was a courtship. Two days later Sunflower caught him coming out of a meeting with his sponsor and took him for a walk in the park. She let him tag along to the night spots and late-night rap sessions, to protest rallies in People’s Park, to concerts. Always as her friend, her protege, the childhood friend she had made it her personal crusade to redeem from straightness. But not, unfortunately, in the exalted role of her Old Man.
He found reason to hope, however. He never saw the studly Philip again. In fact, he never saw one of Sunflower’s boyfriends more than once. They were all intense, passionate, brilliant (and at pains to tell you so). Committed. And muscular; that much of Kimberly’s taste hadn’t changed. That gave Mark many choice moments of despair, but deep inside his skinny bosom he nursed the notion that someday she would feel the need of a rock of stability, and would come to him as a seabird to land.
But still, he never, never made it across the gap that yawned between him and the world he yearned for-the world Sunflower inhabited and personified.
He survived that winter on hope and the chocolate-chip-oatmeal cookies his mother sent.
And music. He came from a household where they sang along with Mitch, and Lawrence Welk occupied the same pinnacle as J. F K. Rock ‘n’ roll was never permitted to sully the air of his parents’ house. He himself had been as oblivious to it as to everything outside of his lab and his private fantasies. He hadn’t been aware of the Beatles’ invasion, Mick Jagger’s arrest for lycanthropy at the Isle of Wight concert, of the Summer of Love and the acid-rock explosion.
Now it all came rushing in on him. The Stones. The Beatles. The Airplane. The Grateful Dead. Spirit and Cream and the Animals, and the Holy Trinity: Janis, Jimi, and Thomas Marion Douglas.
Tom Douglas most of all. His music brooded like an ancient ruin, dark, foreboding, hooded. Though his real affinity was to the gentler Mamas & Papas sound of an era already history, Mark was drawn to the Douglas touch-dark humor, darker twists-even as the Nietzschean fury implicit in the music repelled him. Perhaps it was that Douglas was everything Mark Meadows wasn’t. Famous and vibrant and courageous and With It and irresistible to women. And an ace.
Aces and the Movement: in many ways they blasted into the mainstream of public consciousness flying formation like the heavy-metal warbirds Mark’s father had led into battle over North Vietnam. There were more rock ‘n’ roll aces than among any other segment of the population. Their powers tended not to be subtle. Some had the ability to project dazzling displays of lights, others made extravagant music without the need of instruments. Most, though, played mind games with the audience by means of illusion or straight emotional manipulation. Tom Douglas-the Lizard King-was the head-trip master of them all.
Spring arrived. Mark’s faculty adviser pressured him for results. Mark began to despair, hating himself for his lack of resolution, or whatever defect of manhood kept him from precipitating himself into the drug scene, unable to continue his research until he did. He felt like the fly preserved in a Lucite ice cube his parents had inexplicably possessed when he was a child.
April saw him withdraw from the world into microcosm, to the paper reality inside his peeling walls. He had all Destinys records, but he couldn’t play them now, or the Dead, or the Stones, or martyred Jimi. They were a taunt, a challenge he could not meet.
He ate his chocolate cookies and drank his soda pop and emerged from his room only to indulge a nostalgic childhood vice: love of comic books. Not only the old classics, fables of Superman and Batman from the days of innocence before humanity drew the wild card, but also their modern successors, which featured the fictionalized exploits of real aces, like the penny dreadfuls of the Old West. He devoured them with addict’s fervor. They fulfilled by proxy the longing that had begun to eat him up from inside.
Not for metahuman powers; nothing so exotic. Not his craving for acceptance into the mysterious world of Counterculture, nor the desire for the lithe braless body of the former Kimberly Ann Cordayne that kept him awake night after sweaty night. What Mark Meadows desired more than anything in the world was effective personality. The ability to do, to achieve, to make a mark; good or bad, it scarcely mattered.
An evening toward April’s end, Mark’s retreat was shattered by a knock on his apartment door. He just lay there on his thin mattress on sheets unchanged in living memory, burying his long nose farther in the pages of Cosh Comics’ Turtle number 92. His first reaction was fear, then anger at the intrusion. The world, he’d decided, was too much for him; he’d resolved to let it alone. Why couldn’t it do as much for him?
Again the knock, imperative, threatening the thin veneer of wood over emptiness. He sighed.
“What do you want?” He edged the words with a whine. “Are you going to let me in, or am I going to have to smash through this papier-mache thing your pig landlord calls a door?”
For a moment Mark just lay there. Then he laid the comic on the mottled hardwood floor by the bed, and in his dingy tired socks padded to the door.
She stood there with hands on hi s. She had on another Fourth of July skirt and a faded pink louse, and against the spring Bay chill she’d pulled on a Levi’s denim jacket with a black United Farm Workers eagle stenciled on the back and a peace symbol sewn on the left breast. She pushed into the room and slammed the door behind her.
“Look at this shit,” she said with a gesture that bisected the walls at breastbone level. “How can a human being live like this? Living on processed sugar”-a nod at a plate of half devoured cookies and a glass of brown soda that had been flat last week-“and wadding your mind with that pig-authoritarian bullshit”—another knife-edge gesture toward Turtle, lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. She shook her head. “You’re eating yourself alive, Mark. You’ve cut yourself off from your friends, the people who love you. This has got to stop.”
Mark just stood there. He’d never seen her look so beautiful, though she was berating him, talking like his mother-or more correctly, his father. And then his skinny body began to vibrate like a tuning fork, because it struck him that she had said she loved him. It wasn’t the sort of love he’d yearned and burned for from her. But emotionally he couldn’t be a chooser.
“It’s time you came out of your shell, Mark. Out of this womb-room of yours. Before you turn into something from Night of the Living Dead.”
“I’ve got work to do. “
She cocked an eyebrow and nudged Turtle 92 with a booted toe.
“You’re coming with us.”
“Where?” He blinked. “Who?”
“Haven’t you heard?” A shake of the head. “Of course not. You’ve been locked here in your room like some kind of monk. Destiny’s back in town. They’re playing a concert at the Fillmore tonight. My dad sent money. I have tickets for usyou, me, and Peter. So get your clothes on; we’ve got to leave now so we don’t have to stand in line forever. And for god’s sake try not to dress like such a straight.”
Peter looked like a surfer and thought he was Karl Marx. His looks reminded Mark uncomfortably of an earlier boyfriend of Kimberly Ann’s, the football team captain who’d busted his nose in high school for staring at her too avidly. Standing outside in a threadbare tweed jacket and his one pair of jeans, breathing humid air and used smoke, he listened while Peter delivered the same lecture on the Historical Process all Sunflower’s boyfriends gave him. When Mark didn’t agree avidly enough-he could never make enough sense out of all these manifestos to form much of an opinion-Peter fixed him with an ice-blue Nordic glare and growled, “I will destroy you.”
Later Mark found the line was a direct steal from the old man with the beard himself. Right now it made him want to melt through the tired pavement outside the auditorium. It didn’t help that Sunflower was standing there beaming at the two of them as if they’d just won her a prize.
Fortunately Peter got into a screaming argument with the cops who frisked them for booze at the door, diverting his wrath from Mark. Guiltily, Mark hoped the cops would slam Peter over his blond head with a nightstick and haul him off to the slammer.
But Destiny was concluding its most tumultuous tour ever. Tom Douglas, whose consumption of booze and mindaltering chemicals was as legendary as his ace powers, had been getting mean drunk before every show. The Lizard King was on a rampage; last week’s New Haven concert had culminated in a riot that trashed Yale’s Old Campus and half the town. In their own clumsy way the cops were trying to avoid confrontation tonight. Frisking wasn’t the shrewdest way to go about it, but the cops-and the Fillmore managementweren’t eager to have the kids getting any wilder than Tom Douglas was going to make them anyway. So the audience got shaken down as they came in, but gingerly. Peter and his golden head went unbusted.
Mark’s first Destiny concert was everything he might have imagined, raised to the tenth power. Douglas, characteristically, was two hours late onstage—equally characteristically, so fucked up he could barely stay standing, much less keep from pitching off into the mob of adoring fans. But the three musicians who made up the rest of Destiny were among the tightest performers in rock. Their expertise covered a multitude of sins. And gradually, around the solid skeleton of their playing, Douglas’s ramblings and inchoate gestures resolved into something magical. The music was a blast of acid, dissolving Mark’s lucite prison around him, until it reached his skin, and stung.
At the end of the set the lights went out like the shutting of a great door. Somewhere a drum began a slow, thick beating. From darkness broke a tormented guitar wail. A single blue spot spiked down to illuminate Douglas, alone with the mike in the center of the stage, his leather pants glittering like snakeskin. He began to sing, a soft low moan, increasing in urgency and volume, the intro to his masterpiece, “Serpent Time.” His voice soared in a sudden shriek, and the lights and the band boomed suddenly about him like storm surf breaking against rocks, and they were launched on an odyssey to the furthest reaches of the night.
At last he took upon him the aspect of the Lizard King. A black aura beat from him like furnace heat and washed across the audience. Its effect was elusive, illusive, like some strange new drug: some onlookers it lifted to pinnacles of ecstasy, others it crammed down deep into hard-packed despair; some saw what they most desired, others stared straight down the gullet of Hell.
And in the center of that midnight radiance Tom Douglas seemed to grow larger than life, and now and again there flickered in place of his broad half-handsome features the head and flaring hood of a giant king cobra, black and menacing, darting left and right as he sang.
As the song climaxed in a howl of voice and organ and guitar, Mark found himself standing with tears streaming unabashed down his thin cheeks, one hand holding Sunflower’s, the other a stranger’s, and Peter sitting glumly on the floor with his face in his hands, mumbling about decadence.
The next day was the last of April. Nixon invaded Cambodia. Reaction rolled across the nation’s campuses like napalm.
Mark found Sunflower across the Bay, listening to speeches in the midst of an angry crowd in Golden Gate Park. “I can’t do it,” he shouted over the oratory din. “I can’t cross over—can’t get outside myself.”
“Oh, Mark!” Sunflower exclaimed with an angry, tearful shake of her head. “You’re so selfish. So-so bourgeois.” She whirled away and lost herself in the forest of chanting bodies. That was the last he saw of her for three days.
He searched for her, wandering the angry crowds, the thickets of placards denouncing Nixon and the war, through marijuana smoke that hung like scent around a honeysuckle hedge. His superstraight attire drew hostile looks; he shied away from a dozen potentially ugly encounters that first day alone, despairing ever more of his inability to become one with the pulsating mass of humanity around him.
The air was charged with revolution. He could feel it building like a static charge, could almost smell the ozone. He wasn’t the only one.
He found her at an all-night vigil a few minutes before midnight of May third. She was crosslegged on a small patch of etiolated grass that had survived the onslaught of thousands of protesting feet, idly strumming a guitar as she listened to speeches shouted through a bullhorn. “Where have you been?” Mark asked, sinking to the ankles in mud left by a passing shower.
She just looked at him and shook her head. Frantic, he plopped himself down beside her with a small squelching splash. “Sunflower, where have you been? I’ve been looking all over for you.”
She looked at him at last, shook her head sadly. “I’ve been with the people, Mark,” she said. “Where I belong.” Suddenly she leaned forward, caught him by the forearm with surprising strength. “It’s where you belong too, Mark. It’s just that you’re so-so selfish. It’s as if you’re armored in it. And you have so much to offer-now, when we need all the help we can get, to fight the oppressors before it’s too late. Break out, Mark. Free yourself.”
Surprised, he saw a tear glimmering off in one corner of her eye. “I’ve been trying to,” he said honestly. “I… I just can’t seem to do it.”
A breeze was blowing in off the sea, cool and slightly sticky, occasionally shouldering aside the words garbling out of the megaphone. Mark shivered. “Poor Mark. You’re so uptight. Your parents, the schools, they’ve locked you into a straitjacket. You’ve got to break out.” She moistened her lips. “I think I can help.”
Eagerly he leaned forward. “How?”
“You need to tear down the walls, just like the song says. You need to open up your mind.”
She fumbled for a moment in a pocket of her embroidered denim jacket, held out her closed hand, palm up. “Sunshine.” She opened her hand. A nondescript white tablet rested on the palm. “Acid.”
He stared at it. Here it was, the object of his long vicarious study: quest and quest’s goal alike. The difficulty of obtaining LSD legally-and his deeply engrained reluctance to attempt to attain it on the black market, along with his instinctive fear that his first attempt to purchase any would land him in San Quentin-had helped him put off the day of reckoning. Acid had been offered him before in hip camaraderie; always he refused it, telling himself it was because you never could be sure what was in a street drug, secretly because he’d always been afraid to step beyond the multiplex door it presented. But now the world he yearned to join was surging about him like the sea, the woman he loved was offering him both challenge and temptation, and there it sat slowly melting in the rain.
He grabbed it from her, quickly and gingerly, as if suspecting it would burn his fingers. He poked it well down into a hip pocket of his black pipestem trousers, now so thoroughly imbued with mud they resembled an inept experiment in tie-dyeing. “I’ve got to think about it, Sunflower. I can’t rush something like this.” Not knowing what more to say or do, he started to untangle his lanky legs and stand.
She caught him by the arm again. “No. Stay here with me. If you go home now you’ll flush it down the john.” She drew him down beside her, closer than he’d ever actually been to her before, and he was suddenly acutely aware that her usual blond vanguard fighter was nowhere in evidence. “Stay here, among the people. Right beside me,” she husked beside next to his ear. Her breath fluttered like an eyelash on his lobe. “See what you have to gain. You’re special, Mark. You could do so much that really matters. Stay with me tonight.”
Although the invitation wasn’t as comprehensive as he might have wished, he settled himself back into the mud, and so the night passed in cold communion, the two of them huddling inside the dubious shelter of her jacket, shoulder to shoulder, while orators thundered revolution-the final confrontation with Amerika.
By early-morning gray the demonstration began to autolyze. They drifted together to a little all-night coffeehouse near the campus, ate an organic breakfast Mark couldn’t taste, while Sunflower spoke urgently of the destiny lying in his reach: “If only you could break out of yourself, Mark.” She reached out and took one of his long, pale hands in a tan compact one. “When I ran into you at that club last fall, I was glad to see you because I guess I was homesick for the old days, bad as they were. You were a friendly face.”
He dropped his eyes, blinking rapidly, startled by her open admission that she sought him out because of what he was rather than who he was. “That’s changed, Mark.” He looked up again, tentative as a deer surprised in an early morning garden, ready to flee at the slightest hint of danger. “I’ve come to appreciate you for what you are. And what you could be. There’s a real person hiding beneath that crew cut and those horn-rimmed glasses and uptight Establishment clothes you wear. A person crying to be let out.”
She put her other hand on top of his, stroked it lightly. “I hope you let him out, Mark. I very much want to meet him. But the time’s come for you to make the decision. I can’t wait any longer. The time has come to choose, Mark.”
“You mean-” His tongue tripped. To his fatigue-fogged mind she seemed to be promising much more than friendship-and at the same time threatening to withdraw even that, if he could not bring himself to act.
He walked her home to the backstairs apartment. On the landing outside she grabbed him suddenly behind the neck, kissed him with surprising ferocity. Then she vanished inside, leaving him blinking.
“They finally taught them little Commie fuckers a lesson. Right on, I say; right fuckin’ on.”
Standing to one side of the base of the skyscraper-inprogress, sipping hot tea from a thermos, Wojtek Grabowski listened to his coworkers discussing the news they’d just heard on the omnipresent transistor: the National Guard had fired into a rally on Ohio’s Kent State University campus, several students known dead. They seemed to think it was high time.
He did too, but the news filled him with sadness, not elation.
Later, walking the beams up above the world so high, he reflected on the tragedy of it all. American soldiers were fighting to defend American values and rescue a brother nation from Communist aggression-and here were fellow Americans spitting on them, reviling them. Ho Chi Minh was portrayed as a hero, a would-be liberator.
Grabowski knew that was a lie. He had bled to learn just what Communists meant bv “liberation.” When he heard them hailed as heroes, his murdered friends and family rose up in a chorus at the back of his mind, crying denunciations. It just wasn’t what the protesters stood for, it was who they were. Children of privilege, overwhelmingly uppermiddle-class, lashing out with the petulance of the spoiled against the very system that had given them comfort and security unparalleled in human history. “America eats its young,” they screamed-but he saw it differently: America was in danger of being devoured by its young.
They were led by false prophets, led horribly astray. By men like Tom Douglas. He’d read up on the singer since his song had so shocked him, last November. He knew now that Douglas was one of the tainted, marked by the alien poison released that afternoon in September of 1946, a child of the evil new dawn whose birth Grabowski himself had witnessed from the deck of a refugee ship moored off Governor’s Island. No wonder the children rose like serpents to strike their elders, when they were counseled by men Satan had marked his own.
“Hey,” shouted the huge ex-Marine with the radio. “Them hippie bastards are filling the streets down at city hall, bustin’ windows and burnin’ American flags!”
“The fuckers!”
“We gotta do something! It’s revolution, right here and now.”
The young vet pulled on his Levi’s jacket and settled his steel hat on his crew cut head. “It’s only a few blocks from here. I don’t know about you, but I am gonna do something about it.” He led a rush toward the lift cage.
Grabowski would have shouted, No, wait, don’t go! You must leave this to the authorities-if brother begins fighting brother, the forces of disorder will have won. But speech was denied him.
Because he was as furious as the rest, and fearful, for he alone had seen firsthand the consequences of this revolution everyone talked about. And in his emotion he had gripped a girder with all his might.
His fingers had sunk into the steel as if it were the soft sticky paste Americans called ice cream.
He was himself marked with the mark of the Beast.
Mark passed the rest of the day in a strange haze compounded of lust, hope, and fear. He missed the word from Kent State. While the rest of America reacted in horror or approbation, he spent the night locked in his apartment with a plateful of cookies, poring through his papers and wellthumbed books on LSD, taking out the acid tablet, turning it over and over in his fingers like a talisman. When the sun was weakly established in the sky a transient surge of resolution made him pop it in his mouth. A quick slug of flat orange soda pop washed it down before nerve could fail him again.
From his reading he knew acid generally took between an hour and an hour and a half to kick in. He tried to slide past the time by flipping from the Solomon anthology to Marvel comics to the Zap comix he’d accrued in his pursuit of understanding. After an hour, too nervous to await the drug’s effects by himself any longer, he left his apartment. He had to find Sunflower, tell her he’d found his manhood, had taken the fateful step. Also, he was afraid to be alone when the acid hit.
Finding Sunflower was always like tracking a flower petal kicked about by the breeze, but he knew she gravitated toward UCB, which had long since replaced the moribund Haight as the locus of hip Bay Area culture, and she worked spasmodically at a head shop near People’s Park. So, at about nine-thirty on the morning of May 5, 1970, he wandered into the parkand straight up against the most spectacular confrontation between aces of the entire Vietnam epoch.
For one brief shining moment, everyone, Establishment and enemies alike-knew the time had come for fighting in the streets. If the revolution was coming, it was coming now, in the first hot flush of fury following the Kent State massacre. Bay Area radical leaders had called a mammoth rally that morning in People’s Park-and not just the police forces of the Bay Area but Ronald Reagan’s own contingent of the National Guard had turned out to take them on.
By a quarter to ten the police had withdrawn from the park, establishing a cordon sanitaire around the campus area to prevent conflagration from spreading. It was just the kids and several deuce-and-a-half trucks spilling National Guardsmen in battle dress and gas masks from under their canvas covers forty meters away. With a loose clattering squeal and diesel chug, an M113 armored personnel carrier pulled to a halt behind the line of fixed bayonets, treads chewing at the sod like mouths. A man in captain’s bars sat stiff and resolute in the cupola behind a fifty-caliber machine gun, wearing what looked like a Knute Rockne football helmet on his head.
Students ebbed from the green line like mercury from a fingertip. They’d been shouting to bring the war home; like their brothers in Ohio, it seemed they’d succeeded in doing just that. The Guard was regularly called in to break up demonstrations-but the boxy, ugly shape of the APC represented something new, a note of menace even the most sheltered couldn’t miss. The crowd faltered, buzzing alarm.
Into the space between the lines a single figure stepped, slim in black leather. “We came to be heard,” said Thomas Marion Douglas, his voice pitched to carry, “and were damned well going to be heard.”
Behind him the crowd began to solidify. Here was a superstar-an ace-taking his stand with them. Across the bayonet hedge the eyes of National Guard troopers flickered nervously behind the thick lenses of their masks. They were mostly young men who’d joined the Guard to avoid being drafted and sent to ‘Nam; they knew who was facing them. Many owned Destiny records, had Douglas’s haughty features staring down from posters on their bedroom walls. It was harder, somehow, to use bayonet or rifle-butt against someone you knew, even if it was only as a face on a record jacket or in a photo spread in Life magazine.
Their captain was of sterner stuff. He barked an order from the cupola. Tear-gas guns coughed, a half-dozen small comets arched down around Douglas and among the crowd surging up to join him. Billows of thick white smoke, CS gas, hid the singer from view.
Taking a shortcut through an alley, Mark had managed to miss the police lines. At this moment he emerged to a perfect sideline view of his very own idol standing with smoke swirling around him like a medieval martyr at the stake. He stopped and stared openmouthed at the confrontation shaping up before him.
The acid kicked in.
He felt reality’s collagens dissolve, but the scene before him was too intense for hallucination. As the stiff morning breeze tattered the curtains of gas, a man standing with legs braced and fists raised appeared, auburn hair streaming back from a broad face that somehow flickered, interspersed with the head of a giant cobra, scales gleaming black, hood extended. The Guardsmen drew back; the Lizard King was in their midst.
The King moved forward in a sinuous glide. Uniforms gave way. Someone jabbed at him with a bayonet, or maybe just didn’t back off quickly enough. A flick of the wrist, seeming lazy and disdainful but delivered with superhuman speed, and the rifle went spinning away as its owner stumbled backward to the grass with a yelp of terror. The captain in his iron box shouted hoarsely, trying to pull together the fraying strands of his, men’s determination.
But as he assumed his Lizard King aspect, Douglas loosed his mind games upon them; their eyes began to wander, seeking visions of desperate beauty or mind-numbing horror, each affected in his own way by the Lizard King’s black aura. The crowd was advancing now, chanting, shouting, menacing. The Guard captain did the only thing he could-his thumb pulsed once against the fifty-caliber’s butterfly trigger. The gun vomited noise to bust glass and a Volkswagen flame, streaming tracers over the protesters’ heads.
Triumphant an eyeblink before, the crowd came apart in screaming panic. The noise of the shots struck Mark like a giant pillow and spun him backward along endless, twisting corridors. But the scene stayed before him, light at the end of a tunnel, terrible and insistent. No one had been hit by the burst, but the protesters, like Mark himself, had come up for the first time against the reality their prophet Mao had tried to impress on them: where power comes from.
Tom Douglas was standing so close that muzzle-flash singed his eyebrows. He didn’t flinch, though the noise struck him with a force a truckload of speakers couldn’t match. Instead he met it with a roar of his own that sent Guardsmen tumbling like frightened puppies.
A prodigious leap and he stood on the upper deck of the APC. He bent, grasped the gun’s barrel, heaved. The heavy Browning came away from its mounting like a sapling torn up by the roots. He held the weapon above his head, bothhanded, then with a single convulsion of shoulders and biceps bent the barrel almost double. Having displayed his contempt for the Establishment and its war machines, he tossed the ruined machine gun after the troopers, now in full rout, and bent forward to pluck the now-terror-stricken captain from the cupola by the front of his blouse. He held the man up before him, legs kicking feebly.
And was struck down from behind by a blow driven with the full awesome strength of an unknown ace.
Mark snapped. With a shriek his soul vanished into swirling dark. His body turned and blindly ran.
Wojtek Grabowski saw the sinister serpent figure in black leap onto the APC and tear the weapon from its mountings and knew it had been the right choice to live.
Only devout Catholicism had stopped him from throwing himself to his death. He’d hurried from the site-already deserted as the workers rushed to attack the demonstratorsand home to his cramped apartment to a nightlong vigil of misery and silent prayer.
With dawn had indeed come Light; and he knew with a warm rush that his ace affliction was divinely sent, a blessing not a curse. Revolution threatened his adopted home, led by those who’d sworn allegiance to the forces of darkness. He had washed, dressed, made his own way to the park with peace in his heart.
Now he was confronted with a beast that seemed to have many heads, knew that he was face-to-face with the hated Tom Douglas himself.
Fury blasted into him. The ace transformation overtook him, bulking his muscles hugely to fill his baggy clothes to the bursting point. The steel hat of his profession was on his head, a yard-long pipefitter’s wrench in his hand. Lingering doubts about using his strength against normal humans vanished; here was an enemy worthy of him, an ace, a traitor-a servitor of Hell.
He raced forward, vaulted onto the vehicle even as the snake-headed creature in black plucked its commander from the hatch. Students cried warnings Douglas didn’t hear.
Hardhat raised his wrench and struck at the back of a head now bushy-haired, now black and glabrous and obscene.