A Thousand Steps

35

Matt, Laurel, and Julie climb the canyon path from Dodge City toward Sycamore Flats on Sunday afternoon, where the Summer of Eternal Love is in full swing.

Matt has spent most of Thursday in bed, icing his aching gonads on the advice of Christian. Then Friday and Saturday traipsing the city with Laurel, knocking on what seemed like ten thousand doors. They learned not one thing about where Jasmine might be; got not a hint or sense of her. It felt more like she’d been beamed light years away, like in that stupid new TV show. Late last night, dropping Laurel off at home, Matt has grasped the terrible possibility that their mission will fail and he’ll never see his sister alive again. Maybe at all.

Today Julie wears another of her mother’s hand-sewn prairie dresses, this one a periwinkle blue, and her old lace-up granny boots with the low heels. Her hair is brushed into a mane of dark curls. Laurel has a tie-dye dress, huaraches, and a straw fedora for the sun.

Matt flops along in the black, slightly too-big Converse high-tops and his new-used shorts, and a very cool T-shirt with a faded Disraeli Gears album graphic front and back. His nuts still hurt from the Hessians, but the ice has helped.

Not only that, but this morning’s paper-route collection got him his twice-monthly twelve dollars and fifty cents, and four dollars in tips for good service! Food for days. And maybe a week or two of campground rent. No more financial worries for now.

He does feel gutless and guilty for coming to this BEL “experience” rather than pressing forward with his search for his sister. She’s a prisoner and he’s going to a party. He and Laurel still have hundreds of homes and apartments to deal with. Their search is going slower than he thought it would. He says as much to his mother.

She takes his hand as they walk. “I’m guilty too, Matt, but we can take this time for ourselves, and I’ll tell you why. This event is supposed to be a celebration of love. Let’s celebrate everyone we love, and keep them in our hearts, and prepare ourselves for the days to come. We’re going to find her. Someone will talk. Someone will see her. Something will fall into place. Who knows, we might even get a miracle.”

It might take a miracle, he thinks.

It’s hot and the traffic on Laguna Canyon Road is jammed to a stop, with hundreds of cars parked in both directions as far as Matt can see. He hears Tim Leary’s amplified voice, and the band tuning up, and the war protesters hollering Hell no! We won’t go! over and over as police and news helicopters hover and circle.

People stream like ants along the trails leading up to the meadow, lugging blankets and pup tents and folding chairs and coolers. Many of them have their hot-fuchsia-and-Day-Glo-green invitations out and ready.

Julie has hers in her hippie bag and Matt’s is folded up in his pocket. He doesn’t know what to expect of this “experience,” though Johnny Grail told him it would be mind-blowing.

Scampering up from behind them, a wild-eyed man with a Superman cape and a batch of invitations takes Matt’s arm and whispers into his ear. He says that the orange suns in the upper left corner of the invitations have actually been dipped in pure Orange Sunshine LSD by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and when Johnny Grail says “do it now,” everybody is supposed to tear off the corner and eat it.

“Really?” asks Julie. “How clever!”

“I can sell you three for ten dollars.”

“No thank you, I’ve got mine in the bag.”

“I just heard Dylan’s on his way.”

Superman races ahead. Matt sure hopes Superman is hallucinating because he, Matt, has delivered 250 of those invitations, making him guilty of felony drug distribution. Johnny wouldn’t pull that on him, would he?

Sitting in the Mystic Arts World office that morning, Johnny Grail told Matt that the Hessians were a new motorcycle club that had just started up in nearby Costa Mesa. Very violent, uncool people. Grail knew some of them from his Anaheim street-fighting days. From before he saw God on his first LSD experience and decided to found a church where worshippers could take acid and hear God speak personally to them, too.

The Hessians had been trying to buy large amounts of Orange Sunshine LSD from him for weeks and he had refused. He could barely get enough Orange Sunshine for his congregation, let alone to sell in quantity to a biker gang.

Johnny had then given Matt a sly wink and a gravelly cackle of laughter. But he had turned serious when confiding to Matt that someone had betrayed the BEL and Marlon Sungaard, and that this Judas would be discovered and punished severely. And no, Johnny had not left one dime at Main Beach for the fucking Hessians. The Brotherhood would have four sentries staying at Mystic Arts World after hours, every day from now on until the Hessians backed off. Johnny said most of the brothers had guns and knew how to use them.

At Sycamore Flats the trails converge under a big archway of scaffolding and four-by-fours. A fuchsia-and-Day-Glo-green plywood sign announces:

By its enormity and the way the psychedelic letters seem to move with a life of their own, Matt can tell that Christian painted it. He sees Christian pointing up at it with a little crowd around him, maybe explaining how he did it.

Cops and deputies and plenty of scruffy narcs are clustered at the entrance. Patrol cars and vans and of course Moby Cop. Matt sees Furlong and Brigit Darnell, both in plainclothes.

Chain-link screens and K-rail barricades have been set up to funnel the crowd into the meadow. There are dozens of trash cans under Christian’s sign.

Matt reads the notice as they approach the entrance:

Matt looks into one of the trash cans, sees the ounce-bags and half-pound bundles of weed, scores of tablets of Orange Sunshine, squares of blotter acid with the cartoon of Truckin’ Man printed on, foil-ball mysteries, red, yellow, blue, and two-toned pills, bottles of liquor and wine and beer, baggies of powdered and glistening black shit he can’t even guess the contents of. The trash can is three-quarters full and it’s only one of at least a dozen — maybe more. Around a freshly dug ditch short of the entrance, people are swilling alcohol, then pouring the remnants onto the ground rather than surrender it to the cops, and others toss pills and shake magic mushrooms and peyote buttons loose from baggies, while dogs lap up the concoction and the feral boys from Dodge City form drug-and-alcohol mudballs and throw them at each other.

“Twenty-five thousand idiot hippies here today, and you have to be one of them,” says Furlong, straddling the entrance.

Matt shrugs.

Julie rifles through her bag with an air of annoyance and drops two fat joints into a trash can.

“Is that all?” asks Furlong.

He’s got his aviator sunglasses on and he’s wearing jeans and a yellow Hawaiian shirt with hula dancers. Matt sees the sidearm bulge.

“Oh, hi Bill,” says Julie. “Groovy shirt.”

“What else is in the hippie bag?”

“Just water and my invite and some apples.”

She holds the bag open and Furlong looks in.

“What about you, Matt? Anything to declare?”

“I’m clean.”

“Attaboy.” Furlong lifts his dark shades and gives Laurel an appraising look.

“And you, Miss Kalina?”

“No drugs, no drinks. Is Dylan really coming?”

“I wouldn’t bet on that. But I did hear that the Dead are on their way. If they live long enough to get here.”

Furlong lowers his glasses with a puzzling smile and they pass into the crowded meadow redolent with the smells of coastal sage and marijuana. Julie stops and takes her son by the hand, then Laurel’s too.

“I’d like to give you some good news, Matt. And you too, Laurel. My good news is no more dope. No more dragon balls, pills, nothing. I threw them all away. Everything but a little pot. I was having a problem will all that hard stuff, and now I’m better. I’m done. I’m clean.”

This is news to Matt, but is it true?

He and Laurel trade looks and Matt sees optimism and belief in her. He wishes he had Laurel’s sunny trust in people and belief that prayer works and things happen for a reason.

“Anyway, that’s my news.”

“It’s great, Mom.”

“And look at yourself,” his mother says. “Inches taller and pounds heavier than you were just minutes ago! You are growing up beautifully. I’ll remember this moment the rest of my life.”

Laurel squeezes his upper arm.

He does, in fact, feel much taller with Julie and Laurel by his side. Thinks: I’m pushing six feet.

With this alleged good news from his mother, Matt feels a noticeable lightening inside too, the lifting of a weight. Which makes him feel even taller. The weight also feels like it could drop back into him, fast. Can she really beat opium?

He puts an arm around her shoulder, and the other around Laurel’s, feels protective and proud to be here, towering over them.

Wishes in his unsettled heart that Jazz was here too.

Buddy Miles and his band are cranking a Hendrix song, and the sea of bodies sways. Beneath the sycamores that line the meadow’s edges, Matt sees half-hidden smokers, needle-shooters, snorters, fondlers and fornicators in sleeping bags and under blankets; and wandering naked people, dogs, small children, and Superman, still hawking his phony LSD invites. A naked woman canters on a white horse, followed by air-brushed nudists in rainbow colors. Matt isn’t sure he can trust his eyes but a writhing woman with a huge stomach seems to be giving birth while splayed out on a blue bath towel in the tan grass. Officer Brigit Darnell — in a yellow sundress, her hair freed from its restrictive braid into a single thick ponytail — kneels to help with the delivery. A biplane trails a banner for Rosemary’s Baby.

When the band takes a break, Matt hears the protesters outside starting up their chanting again.

Hell no! We Won’t go!

Make Love Not War!

Kill Hate Not Babies!

We Won’t Fight the Rich Man’s War!

Timothy Leary and Johnny Grail take the stage, leaning in close together and trading off amplified exhortations to the crowd.

“Feel God’s love!” Johnny screams out, spreading his arms, smiling and squinting up at the sun.

It looks to Matt that almost everyone in the crowd is waving an invite in the air, some of them waving handfuls of them. Fuchsia and green flash in the hot, hazy canyon air. If Superman is right, Matt thinks, this is going to be one giant hallucination about an hour from whenever Johnny Grail says to feel it now.

Which he now does, loudly through the mic.

“Feel it now! Feel it now! Breathe the breath of God!”

Matt watches in disbelieving dread as thousands of people eat the Orange Sunshine corner of their invites. All around him he hears the sound of paper being torn and sees hands going to mouths. A canyon full of chomping mandibles.

Julie swallows hers with a swig of water and a guilty grin.

Johnny Grail is leading mass chants now, which rise loud enough to overcome the protesters near the barricades.

Buddy Miles starts playing distorted Hendrix riffs quietly, while Leary plunks himself down center stage on a small Afghan rug and begins meditating.

Through the back-feeding mic, Grail tells a long, rambling story about the time he stole his first LSD at gunpoint because he’d heard it was such a great trip, and later that day when he’d dropped “maybe like ten doses, I saw God and my ego was demolished and I saw wonderful shapes and colors and later I saw that the secrets of the universe were totally attainable through LSD, and that I would found a church to prove it!”

Matt watches as his mother falls in with a group of hippies headed toward the stage. All tie-dye and hair, they dance as they travel. Julie is graceful, her black hair rippling in the sun, and Matt tries to believe that she’s going to be okay after all. The dancers head up the narrow trail toward a sandstone plateau called the Porch, a popular young persons’ place to watch the sunrise. Matt has been there himself, with Kyle and Jazz and friends from school. The last hundred feet are a steep climb, but once you get up there it’s a great view.

After about an hour of this, Matt senses that Superman wasn’t kidding about the Orange Sunshine on the invitations. The general level of revelry hasn’t just increased, it’s taken on a strange kind of urgency. Leary is gone and Grail’s story is finally over and a Black Panthers spokesman takes the stage and tries to get a Fuck Nixon! chant going, but Christian yanks the mic away from him and starts singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” in a good strong tenor, and the bands kicks in, and most of the crowd knows only some of the words by heart so the song dribbles into chaos after that.

Matt watches as three open-bed pickups wobble to a stop just inside the chain-link, loaded with bags of food and plastic half gallons of water.

When the crowd realizes what’s up, they charge the trucks, board them like pirates, and run off with whatever they can carry.

“I’ve had enough of this,” says Laurel, fanning herself with the fedora. “Getting weird.”

“I don’t want to leave Mom here. She ate that paper sun, whatever it was.”

“You don’t really believe it’s acid, do you?”

“Laurel, I believe it really could be.”

“She’s almost there.”

Julie is easy to follow in her periwinkle dress. She’s in about the middle of the group, arms out, dancing between the boulders as she climbs toward the Porch. Matt remembers the rattlesnakes sunning on the rocks in spring but today is too hot for them. Probably.

“We can wait for her,” says Laurel.

Another biplane cruises over the meadow, this one pulling a banner for Sea & Ski tanning lotion.

Matt sees a rush of bodies down near the entry barricades, like a mob surrounding a fight. But it’s not a fight at all, as two skinny, shirtless men emerge carrying a naked girl who is either unconscious or dead. One man has her under the arms, the other by her ankles. Out of Matt’s sight, behind the scaffolding, a siren shrieks alive.

“My God,” says Laurel.

“Probably overdosed,” says Matt, trying to see the girl’s face through her hair, and thinking of the seaweed in Bonnie Stratmeyer’s hair down at Thalia that morning.

By then Julie and her band of dancers are swirling on the Porch. There must be thirty of them, Matt thinks, remembering the deep-cut rain furrows in the sandstone and hoping his mother won’t turn an ankle.

The crowd swells. Most are on their feet, swaying in rhythm — or no rhythm at all — to the music. People are still pouring in past the drug-filled trash cans and the cops and the barricades, many of them heading straight for the crowded, trampled meadow dance floor. The band has segued into a dreamy jam that keeps changing melodies, then drifts away from any melody that Matt can follow, while the rhythm guys plunk away in a heavy groove.

Julie lifts her arms and pirouettes, the long prairie dress swirling nicely. Then another, and another and another, to the front edge of the Porch which, Matt remembers, is sandy and treacherous. He reads the caution in the cant of her head. Julie looks down at that edge, plants a boot, and leans back in retreat, but it looks to Matt that his mother’s boot is the jackhammer that parts the crumbly sandstone, and down she goes.

In free fall.

At first her body descends in near perfect perpendicularity, like a kid stepping off a diving board and trying not to splash. Her dress billows and her hair lifts. But then she bursts into motion, arms and legs clawing at the air as she crumples into the boulders below. Some of the crowd realize what has happened and close around her.

Matt takes Laurel’s hand and they run through the swaying acid-jam dancers toward the Porch.