Acid Rock

CHAPTER FOUR

Vickie Stoner was alive and rapping on the side of Route 8 just outside Pittsfield when she could have sworn she heard an explosion down the road.

«It's the revolution,» wheezed one of the boys, a lanky blond with shoulder-length hair wrapped tight around his forehead with an Indian band that somehow combined the signs of the Mohawk and Arapaho, an accomplishment that eluded history but not Dibble manufacturing of Boise, Idaho.

«Not now. Maggot's at North Adams,» said Vickie. «I'm going to ball Maggot.»

«Maggot's bitchen,» said another young girl, her legs straddling a knapsack. They had been waiting in the Berkshires' morning sun for hours, as processions of bicycles, painted Volkswagen buses, and straight cars passed them by. Some of the girls suggested they were passed up because the boys didn't paint the signs with the right karma. The boys said it was because the girls didn't get up on the side of the road and do some work.

«Like what?» asked Vickie.

«Show a boob or something,» said one of the boys.

«You show a boob,» one of the girls said defensively.

«I don't have one.»

«Then show what you've got.»

«I'd get busted, man.»

«Well, I'm not getting up there like some piece of meat.»

So in the early afternoon, they waited for transportation just twelve miles short of the end of their journey-the rock festival known as the North Adams Experience. The town may have claimed it as its own. The promoters may have claimed the profits. But the experience belonged to those who would be part of it. You didn't attend it like some movie, sitting in a seat and letting the screen lay all sorts of stuff on you. You were part of it and it was part of you and you made it what it was with the Dead Meat Lice and the Hamilton Locomotives and the Purloined Letters.

It wouldn't begin at eight o'clock that night like the ads said. It had already begun. Coming to it was part of it. The wheels were part of it. Sitting on the side of the road waiting for a ride was part of it. The pills and pouches and the little envelopes were part of it. You were part of it. It was your thing and no one else could tell you what it was, man, especially if they tried.

Vickie Stoner refused to discuss whether the loud noise was the beginning of the revolution, a world war or a car backfiring. She had had enough of that crap, man. Up to here and beyond.

The whole thing was a bummer, all the problems with her father and now all the mess of the past few days.

It had started simply too. A simple, reasonable, nonnegotiable demand. All she had wanted was Maggot. She had had Nells Borson of the Cockamamies, all of the Hindenburgh Seven and what she needed, really needed, all she needed, was Maggot.

But when she told her father, he had locked her in their Palm Beach home. That coffin with lawns. That slammer with butlers. So she split and was brought back. She split again and was brought back again.

All right, daddy wanted to negotiate. She'd negotiate. She got these papers and ripped off some of the tapes her daddy made of all his telephone conversations and she had said:

«You wanna deal? Let's deal. What will yon give me for the papers and tapes on the grain deal? What am I bid? I'm bid. I'm bid. I'm bid. Do I hear laying off me? Do I hear laying off me? What do I hear? I'm bid. I'm bid.»

«Go to your room, Victoria,» was the bid, so Vickie Stoner pretended to go upstairs and then she split. With the tapes and papers, which she took to the U.S. Attorney's office in Miami. And what a trip it was. All of Daddy's friends, all of them, with lawyers, nervous breakdowns and sudden excursions around the world, saying how could anyone do anything like that. That was a high all right, but then the straights started laying it on her and this guy Blake was all right, but he was a downer.

And then Denver and that crap on the balcony and in the room and the bad vibes, man. So she just split again and here she was on the side of Route 8, waiting for the last few miles of the North Adams Experience. And down the road, maybe that crap was starting again.

«It's the revolution,» said the boy with the Indian head band.

But he had said that the night before when the pop bottle fell and cracked open, and when they saw a squadron of jets overhead, he said it was the fascist pigs going to bomb Free Bedford Stuyvesant.

«Just keep the sign moving,» said Vickie, and she rested her head on her knapsack, and hoped her father did not worry too much about her. At least, though, when she talked to him now, he was becoming reasonable.

A gray Lincoln Continental with a real straight at the wheel breezed by them and Vickie closed her eyes. Suddenly, there was a screeching of tires. A brief silence. The car backed up,

Vickie opened her eyes. He was an ugly straight, all right, with a big scar across his nose and he was looking down at something, then back at Vickie, and down at that thing which he then put into his pocket.

«Youse want a lift?» he yelled through a lowered car window. Funny-looking car, all marks on the right side of it, like someone had gone at it with fifty nails or something.

«Right on,» said the boy with the Indian headband and they all piled into the luxurious car with Vickie last.

«You're Mafia, aren't you?» said the boy with the headband.

«Why you wanna say something like that?» said the driver, his eyes on Vickie in the rearview mirror. «That's not nice.»

«I'm all for the Mafia. The Mafia represents the struggle against the establishment. It is the culmination of hundreds of years of struggle against oppressive government.»

«I ain't Mafia. There's no such thing,» said Willie the Bomb, his eyes still on Vickie, his brain now convinced he had found the right girl. «Where you kids gonna sleep?»

«We're not going to sleep. We're going to be. At the North Adams Experience.» «Out in the air you're gonna sleep?»

«Under the stars, if the government hasn't fucked that up too.»

«Youse kids, I like. You know the best place to sleep?»

«In a hayloft?»

«No,» said Willie the Bomb Bombella. «Under a maple tree. A nice, straight maple tree. It absorbs the bad things from the air. It really does. You sleep under a maple tree and you're never gonna forget it. Really. I swear to God.»