HOWARD WALDROP


  Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna
         Dance?
  Howard Waldrop is widely considered to be one of the best short-story
writers in the business, and his famous story "The Ugly Chickens" won
both the Nebula and the World Fantasy Awards in 1981. His work has
been gathered in two collections: Howard Who? and All About Strange
Monsters of the Recent Past: Neat Stories by Howard Waldrop, and
more collections are in the works. Waldrop is also the author of the novel
Them Bones, and, in collaboration with Jake Saunders, The Texas-Israeli
War: 1999. Another solo novel is coming up. He lives in Austin, Texas.
  Here he gives us a hilarious, high-energy look back at the '60s, a look as
funny, poignant, and quirky as one would expect from Waldrop, who has
been called "the resident Weird Mind of his generation."




        DO YA, DO-YA, WANNA DANCE?
                         Howard Waldrop


  The light was so bad in the bar that everyone there looked like they had
been painted by Thomas Hart Benton, or carved from dirty bars of soap
with rusty spoons.
  "Frank! Frank!" the patrons yelled, like for Norm on Cheers before they
canceled it.
   "No need to stand," I said. I went to the table where Barb, Bob, and
Penny sat. Carole the waitress brought over a Ballantine Ale in a can, no
glass.
  "How y'all?" I asked my three friends. I seemed not to have interrupted
a conversation.
  "I feel like six pounds of monkey shit," said Bob, who had once been tall
and thin and was now tall and fat.
  "My mother's at it again," said Penny. Her nails looked like they had
been done by Mungo of Hollywood, her eyes were like pissholes in a
snowbank.
  "Jim went back to Angela," said Barb.
   I stared down at the table with them for five or six minutes. The music
over the speakers was "Wonderful World, Beautiful People" by Johnny
Nash. We usually came to this bar because it had a good jukebox that
livelied us up.
  "So," said Barb, looking up at me, "I hear you're going to be a tour
guide for the reunion."



  There are terrible disasters in history, and there are always great
catastrophes just waiting to happen.
  But the greatest one of all, the thing time's been holding its breath for,
the capo de tutti capi of impending disasters, was going to happen this
coming weekend.
   Like the Titanic steaming for its chunk of polar ice, like the Hindenberg
looking for its Lakehurst, like the guy at Chernobyl wondering what that
switch would do, it was inevitable, inexorable, a psychic juggernaut.
  The Class of '69 was having its twentieth high school reunion.
  And what they were coming back to was no longer even a high
school—it I had been phased out in a magnet school program in 74. The
building had been taken over by the community college.
  The most radical graduating class in the history of American secondary
education, had, like all the ideals it once held, no real place to go.
   Things were to start Saturday morning with a tour of the old building,
then a picnic in the afternoon in the city park where everyone used to get
stoned and lie around all weekend, then a dance that night in what used to
be the fanciest downtown hotel a few blocks from the state capitol.
  That was the reunion Barb was talking about.



  "I found the concept of the high school no longer being there so
existential that I offered to help out," I said. "Olin Sweetwater called me a
couple of months ago—"
  "Olin Sweetwater? Olin Sweetwater?" said Penny. "Geez! I haven't
heard that name in the whole damn twenty years." She held onto the table
with both hands. "I think I'm having a drug flashback!"
  "Yeah, Olin. Lives in Dallas now. Runs an insurance agency. He got my
name from somebody I built some bookcases for a couple of years ago.
Anyway, asked if I'd be one of the guides on the tour Saturday
morning—you know, point out stuff to husbands and wives and kids,
people who weren't there."
  I didn't know if I should go on.
  Bob was looking at me, waiting.
   "Well, Olin got me in touch with Jamie Lee Johnson—Jamie Lee
Something hyphen Something now, none of them Johnson. She's the
entertainment chairman, in charge of the dance. I made a couple of tapes
for her."
   I don't have much, but I do have a huge bunch of Original Oldies,
Greatest Hits albums and other garage sale wonders. Lots of people know
it and call me once or twice a year to make dance tapes for their parties.
   "Oh, you'll like this," I said, waving to Carole to bring me another
Ballantine Ale. "She said 'Spring for some Maxell tapes, not the usual four
for eighty-nine cents kind I hear you buy at Revco.' Where you think she
could have heard about that?"
    "From me," said Barb. "She called me a month ago, too." She smiled a
little.
  "Come on, Barb." I said. "Spill it."
  "Well, I wanted to—"
  "I'm not going," said Penny.
  We all looked at her.
  "Okay. Your protest has been noted and filed. Now start looking for
your granny dress and your walnut shell beads." I said.
  "Why should I go back?" said Penny. "High school was shit. None of us
had any fun there, we were all toads. Sure, things got a little exciting, but
you could have been on top of Mount Baldy in Colorado in the late '60s
and it would have been exciting. Why should I go see a bunch of jerks
making fools of themselves trying to recapture some, some image of
themselves another whole time and place?"
  "Oh," said Bob, readjusting his gimme hat, "You really should hang
around jerks more often."
  "And why's that, Bob?" asked Penny, peeling the label from her Lone
Star.
   " 'Cause if you watch them long enough," said Bob, "you'll realize that
jerks are capable of anything."



   Bob's the kind of guy who holds people's destinies in his hands and they
never realize it. When someone does something especially stupid and
life-threatening in traffic, Bob doesn't honk his horn or scream or shake
his fist.
   He follows them. Either to where they're going, or the city limits,
whichever comes first. If they go to work, or shopping, he makes his move
then. If they go to a residence, he jots down the make, model and license
plate of the car on a notepad he keeps on his dashboard, and comes back
later that night.
   Bob has two stacks of bumper stickers in the glove compartment of his
truck. He takes one from each.
   He goes to the vehicle of the person who has put his life personally in
jeopardy, and he slaps one of the stickers on the left front bumper and one
on the right rear.
  The one on the back says SPICS AND NIGGERS OUT OF THE U.S.!
  The one he puts on the front reads KILL A COP TODAY!
   He goes through about fifty pairs of stickers a year. He's self-employed,
so he writes the printing costs off on his Schedule A as "Depreciation."
   Penny looked at Bob a little longer. "Okay. You've convinced me," she
said. "Are you happy?"
  "No," said Bob, turning in his chair. "Tell us whatever it is that'll make
us happy, Barb."
  "The guys are going to play."



  Just the guys. No names. No what guys? We all knew. I had never
before in my life seen Bob's jaw drop. Now I have. The guys.
  Craig Beausoliel. Morey Morkheim. Abram Cassuth. Andru Esposito.
Or, taking them in order of their various band names from junior high on:
Four Guys in a Dodge. Two Jews, A Wop, and A Frog. The Hurtz Bros.
(Pervo, Devo, Sado, and Twisto). The Bug-Eyed Weasels. Those were when
they were local, when they played Yud's, the Vulcan Gas Company, Tod's
Hi-Spot. Then they got a record label and went national just after high
school.
  You knew them as Distressed Flag Sale.
  That was the title of their first album (subtitled For Sale Cheap One
Country Inquire 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue). You probably knew it as the
"blue-cake-with-the-white-stars-on-the-table-with-the-red-stripes-formed
-on-the-white-floor-by-the-blood-running-in-seven-rivulets-from-the-dead
-G.I." album.
  Their second and last was NEXT! with the famous photo of the Saigon
police chief blowing the brains out of the suspected VC in the checked
shirt during the Tet Offensive of 1968, only over the general's face they'd
substituted Nixon's, and over the VC's, Howdy Doody's.
  Then of course came the seclusion for six months, then the famous
concert/riot/bust in Miami in 1970 that put an end to the band pretty
much as a functioning human organization.
   Morey Morkheim tried a comeback after his time in the jusgado, in the
mid-70s, as Moe in Moe and the Meanies' Suck My Buttons, but it wasn't
a very good album and the times were already wrong.



   "I can't believe it," said Penny. "None of them have played in what,
fifteen years? They probably'll sound like shit."
   "Well, I'll tell you what I know," said Barb. "Jamie Lee—Younts-Fulton
is the name, Frank—said after his jail term and the try at the comeback,
Morey threw it all over and moved down to Corpus where his aunt was in
the hotel business or something, and he opened a souvenir shop, a whole
bunch of 'em eventually, called Morey's Mementoes. Got pretty rich at it
supposedly, though you can never tell, especially from Jamie Lee—I mean,
anyone, anyone who'd take as part of her second married name a
hyphenated name from her first husband that was later convicted of mail
fraud just because Younts is more sophisticated than Johnson—Johnson
Fulton sounds like an 1830 politician from Tennessee, know what I
mean?—you just can't trust about things like who's rich and who's not.
Anyway, Morey was at some convention for seashell brokers or
something—Jamie says about half the shells and junk sold in Corpus come
from Japan and Taiwan—he ran into Andru, of all people, who was in the
freight business! Like, Morey had been getting shells from this shipping
company for ten years and it turns out to belong to Andru's uncle or
brother-in-law or something! So they start writing to each other, then
somehow (maybe it was from Bridget, you remember Bridget? from UT?
Yeah.) she knew where Abram was, and about that time the people
putting all this reunion together got a hold of Andru. So the only thing left
to do was find Craig."
  She looked around. It was the longest I'd ever heard Barb talk in my life.
  "You know where he was?"
  "No. Where?" we all three said.
  "Ever eat any Dr. Healthy's Nut-Crunch Bread?"
  "A loaf a day," said Bob, patting his stomach.
  "Craig is Dr. Healthy."
  "Shit!" said Bob. "Isn't that stuff baked in Georgetown?"
  "Yeah. He's been like thirty miles away for fifteen years, baking bread
and sweet rolls. Jamie said, like some modern-day Cactus Jack Garner, he
vowed never to go south of the San Gabriel River again."
  "But now he is?"
  "Yep. Supposedly, Andru's gonna fly down to Morey's in Corpus this
week and they're going to practice before they come up here. Abram
always was the quickest study and the only real musical genius, so he'll be
okay."
  "That only leaves one question," said Penny, speaking for us all. "Can
Craig still sing? Can Craig still play? I mean, look what happened after the
Miami thing."
  "Good question," said Bob. "I suppose we'll all find out in a big hurry
Saturday night. Besides," he said, looking over at me, "we always got your
tapes."



  The name's Frank Bledsoe. I'm pushing forty, which is exercise enough.
  I do lots of odd stuff for a living—a little woodwork and carpentry,
mostly speakers and bookcases. I help people move a lot. In Austin, if you
have a pickup, you have friends for life.
   What I mostly do is build flyrods. I make two kinds—a 7' one for a #5
line and an 8'2" one for a #6 line. I get the fiberglass blanks from a place
in Ohio, and the components like cork grips, reel seats, guides, tips and
ferrules, from whoever's having a sale around the country.
   I sell a few to a fishing tackle store downtown. The seven-footer retails
for $22, the other for $27.50. Each rod takes about three hours of work, a
day for the drying time on the varnish on the wraps. So you can see my
hourly rate isn't too swell.
  I live in a place about the size of your average bathroom in a real
person's house. But it's quiet, it's on a cul-de-sac, and there's a converted
horse stable out back I use for my workshop.
  What keeps me in business is that people around the country order a
few custom-made rods each year, for which I charge a little more.
   Here's a dichotomy: as flyfishing becomes more popular, my business
falls off.
  That's because, like everything else in these post-modernist times, the
Yups ruined it. As with every other recreation, they confuse the sport with
the equipment.
   Flyfishing is growing with them because it's a very status thing. When
the Yups found it, all they wanted to do was be seen on the rivers and lakes
with a six hundred-dollar split-bamboo rod, a pair of two hundred-dollar
waders, a hundred-dollar vest, shirts with a million zippers on them, a
seventy-five-dollar tweed hat, and a patch from a flyfishing school that
showed they'd paid one thousand dollars to learn how to put out enough
fly line to reach across the average K-Mart parking lot.
   What I make is cheap fiberglass rods, not even boron or graphite. No
glamor. And the real fact is that in flyfishing, most fish are caught within
twenty feet of your boots. No glory there, either.
  So the sport grows, and money comes in more and more slowly.



 All this talk about the reunion has made me positively reflective. So let
me put 1969 in perspective for you.
   Richard Milhous Nixon was in his first year in office. He'd inherited all
the good things from Lyndon Johnson—the social programs—and was
dismantling them, and going ahead with all the bad ones, like the War in
Nam. The Viet Cong and NVA were killing one hundred Americans a
week, and according to the Pentagon, we were killing two thousand of
them, regular as clockwork, as announced at the five P.M. press briefing in
Saigon every Friday. The draft call was fifty thousand a month.
   The Beatles released Abbey Road late in the year. At the end of the
summer we graduated there was something called the Woodstock Festival
of Peace and Music; in December there would be the disaster at the
Altamont racetrack (in which, if you saw the movie that came out the next
year, you could see a Hell's Angel with a knife kill a black man with a gun
on camera while all around people were freaking out on bad acid and
Mick Jagger, up there trying to sing, was saying "Brothers and sisters, why
are we fighting each other?"). On the nights of August 8 and 9 were the
Tate-LaBianca murders in L.A. (Charles Manson had said to his people
"Kill everybody at Terry Melcher's house," not knowing Terry had moved.
Terry Melcher was Doris Day's son. Chuck thought Terry owed him some
money or had reneged on a recording deal or something. When he realized
what he'd done, he had them go out and kill some total strangers to make
the murders at the Tate household look like the work of a kill-the-rich
cult.) On December 17, Tiny Tim married Miss Vickie on the Tonight
Show, with Johnny Carson as best man.
   The Weathermen, the Black Panthers and, according to agent's reports,
"frizzy-haired women of a radical organization called NOW," were
disturbing the increasingly senile sleep of J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. He
longed for the days when you could shoot criminals down in the streets
like dogs and have them buried in handcuffs, when all the issues were
clear-cut. Spirotis T. Agnew, the vice-president, was gearing up to make
his "nattering nabobs of negativism" speech, and to coin the term Silent
Majority. This was four years before he made the most moving and
eloquent speech in his life, which went: "Nolo contendere."
  We were reading Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, or rereading The
Hobbit for the zillionth time, or Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar. And
on everybody's lips were the words of Nietzsche's Zarathustra: That which
does not kill us makes us stronger. (Nixon was working on that, too.)
  There were weeks when you thought nothing was ever going to change,
there was no wonderment anymore, just new horrors about the War,
government repression, drugs. (They were handing out life sentences for
the possession of a single joint in some places that year.)
  Then, in three days, from three total strangers, you'd hear the Alaska
vacation—flannel shirt—last man killed by an active volcano story, all the
people swearing they'd heard the story from the kid in the flannel shirt
himself, and you'd say, yeah, the world is still magic . . .
  I'll really put 1969 in a nutshell for you. There are six of you sharing a
three-bedroom house that fall, and you're splitting rent you think is
exorbitant, $89.75 a month. Minimum wage was $1.35 an hour, and none
of you even has any of that.
  Somebody gets some money from somewhere, God knows, and you're all
going to pile into the VW Microbus which is painted green, orange, and
fuchsia, and going to the H.E.B. to score some food. But first, since there
are usually hassles, you all decide to smoke all the grass in the house,
about three lids' worth.
  When you get to the store you split up to get food, and are to meet at
checkout lane Number Three in twenty minutes. An hour later you pool
the five shopping carts and here's what you have:
   Seven two-pound bags of lemon drops. Three bags of orange
marshmallow goobers. A Hostess Ding-Dong assortment pack. A
twelve-pound bag of Kokuho Rose New Variety Rice. A two-pound can of
Beer-Nuts. A fifty-foot length of black shoestring licorice. Three six-packs
of Barq's Root Beer. Two quarts of fresh strawberries and a pint of Half
and Half. A Kellog's Snak-Pak (heavy on the Frosted Flakes). A five-pound
bag of turbinado sugar. Two one-pound bags of Bazooka Joe bubble gum
(with double comics). A blue 75-watt light bulb.
  It fills up three dubl/bags and the bill comes to $8.39, the last
seventy-four cents of which you pay the clerk in pennies.
  Later, when somebody finally cooks, everybody yells, "Shit! Rice again?
Didn't we just go to the grocery store?"
  PS: On July 20 that year we landed on the Moon.
  Now I'll tell you about this year, 1989.
  The Republicans are in the tenth month of their new Presidency,
naturally. After Cuomo and Iacocca refused to run, the Democrats, like
always, ran two old warhorses who quit thinking along about 1962. ("If
nominated, I refuse to run," said Iacocca, "if elected, I refuse to serve. And
that's a promise.")
  We have six thousand military advisors in Honduras and Costa Rica. All
those guys who went down to the post office and signed their Selective
Service postcards are beginning to look a little grey around the gills.
   There are 1,800,000 cases of AIDS in America, and 120,000 have died
of it.
  On Wall Street the Dow Jones just passed the 3000 mark after its
near-suicide in '87. "Things are looking just great!" says the new
president.
  Congress is voting on the new two trillion dollar debt ceiling limit.
   Things are much like they have been forever. The rich are richer, the
poor poorer, the middle class has no choices. The cities are taxing them to
death, the suburbs can't hold them. Every state but those in the Bible-belt
South has horse and dog racing, a lottery, legalized pari-mutuel Bingo and
a state income tax, and they're still going broke.
 Everything is wrong everywhere. The only good thing I've noticed is that
MTV is off the air.
   You go to the grocery store and get a pound of bananas, a six foot
electric extension cord, a can of powder scent air freshener, a tube of
store-brand toothpaste and a loaf of bread. It fits in the smallest plastic
sack they have and costs $7.82.
  Let me put 1989 in another nutshell for you:
   A friend of mine keeps his record albums (his CDs are elsewhere) in
what looks like a haphazard stack of orange crates in one corner of his
living room.
   They're not orange crates. What he did was get a sculptor friend of his
to make them. He got some lengths of stainless steel, welded and shaped
them to look like a haphazard stack of crates. Then with punches and
chisels and embossing tools the sculptor made the metal look like grained
unseasoned wood, and then painted them, labels and all, to look like
crates.
  You can't tell them from the real things, and my friend only paid three
thousand dollars for them.
   Or to put it another way: And Zarathustra came down from the hills
unto the cities of men. And Zarathustra spake unto them, and what he
said to them was: "Yo!"
  PS: Nobody's been to the Moon in sixteen years.



  MY TRIP TO THE POST OFFICE by FRANK BLEDSOE AGE 38
   I'd finished three rods for a guy in Colorado the day before. I put the
clothes back on I'd worn working on them, all dotted with varnish. I was
building a bookcase, too, so I hit it a few licks with a block plane to get my
blood going in the early morning.
   It was a nice crisp fall day, so I decided to ride my bike to the post office
substation to mail the rods. I was probably so covered with wood shavings
I looked like a Cabbage Patch Kid that had been hit with a slug from a .45.
  I brushed myself off, put the rods in their cloth bags, put the bags in the
tubes with the packing paper, and put the tubes in the carrier I have on
the bike. Then I rode off to the branch post office.
  I'm coming out of the substation with the postage and insurance
receipts in my hand when I hear a lot of brakes squealing and horns
honking.
   A lady in a white Volvo has managed to get past two One Way Do Not
Enter signs at the exit to the parking lot and is coming in against the
traffic, and all the angles of the diagonal parking places. She has a look of
calm imperturbability on her face.
  Nobody's looking for a car from her direction. As they back out,
suddenly there she is in the rear-view mirror. They slam on their brakes
and honk and yell.
  "Asshole!" yells a guy who's killed his engine in a panic stop. She gets to
the entrance of the lot, does a 290 degree turn, and pulls into the Reserved
Handicapped spot at the front door, acing out the one-armed guy with
Disabled American Vets license plates who was waiting for the guy who
was illegally parked against the yellow curbing in the entrance to move so
he could get in.
  She gets out of the car. She's wearing a silk blouse, a set of June Cleaver
double-strand pearls and matching earrings, and a pair of those shorts
that make the wearer look like they have a refrigerator stuffed down the
back of them.
  "Are you handicapped?" I ask.
   She looks right through me. She's taking a yellow Attempt to Deliver
slip out of her sharkskin purse. She has on shades.
  "I said, are you handicapped? I don't see a sticker on your car."
   "What business is it of yours?" she asks. "Besides, I'm only going to be
in there a minute."
  That's what you think. She goes inside. I shrug at the one-armed guy.
With some people it was their own fault they went to Korea or Viet Nam
and got their legs and stuff blown off, with others it wasn't.
   He drives off down the packed lot. He probably won't find a space for a
block.
  I take my bike tools out of my pocket. I go to the Volvo. In deference to
Bob, I undo the valve cores on the left front and right rear tires.
  Then I get on my bike and ride down to the pay phone at the bakery
three blocks away, call the non-emergency police number, and tell them
there's a lady without a handicap sticker blocking the reserved spot at the
post office substation.
   After mailing the rods and using the quarter for the phone, I have
eighty-two cents left—just enough for coffee at the bakery. It's a chi-chi
place I usually never go to, but I haven't had any coffee this morning and I
know they make a cup of Brazilian stuff that would bring Dwight D.
Eisenhower back to life.
   I go in. They've got one of those European doorchimes that sets poor
people's nerves on edge and lets those with a heavy wallet know they're in
a place where they can really drop a chunk of money.
  The clerk is Indian or Paki; he's on the phone talking to someone. I start
tapping my change on the counter looking around. Maybe ten people in
the place. He hangs up and starts toward me.
  "Large cuppa—" I start to say.
  The chime jingles and the smell hits me at the same time as their
voices; a mixture of Jovan Musk for Men and Sassoon styling mousse.
  "—game." says a voice. "How many croissants you still got?" says the
voice over my shoulder to the clerk.
   The counterman has one hand on the coffee spigot and a sixteen ounce
styrofoam cup in the other.
  "Oh, very many, I think," he says to the voice behind me.
  "Give us about—oh, what, John?—say, twenty-five assorted fruit-filled,
no lemon, okay?"
   The clerk starts to put down the styrofoam cup. In ambiguous
situations, people always move toward the voice that sounds most like
money.
  "My coffee?" I say.
  The clerk looks back and forth like he's just been dropped on the planet.
  "Could you sort of hurry?" says the voice behind me. "We're
double-parked."
   I turn around then. There are three of them in warmup outfits—gold
and green, blue and orange, blue and silver. They look maybe twenty-five.
Sure enough, there's a blue Renault blocking three cars parked at the
laundromat next door. The handles of squash racquets stick up out of the
blue and orange, blue and silver, gold and green duffles in the back seat.
  "No lemon," says the blond-haired guy on the left. "Make sure there's no
lemon, huh?"
   "You gonna fill our order?" asks the first guy, who looks like he was
raised in a meatloaf mold.
  "No," I say. "First he's going to get my coffee, then he'll get your order."
  They notice me for the first time then, suspicion dawning on them this
wasn't covered in their Executive Assertiveness Training program.
  The clerk is turning his head back and forth like a radar antenna.
  "I thought they gave free coffee at the Salvation Army," says the blond
guy, looking me up and down.
  "Tres, tres amusant" I said.
   "Are you going to fill our $35 order, or are you going to give him his big
fifty cent cup of coffee?" asked the first guy.
  The ten other people in the place were all frozen in whatever attitude
they had been in when all this started. One woman actually had a donut
halfway to her mouth and was watching, her eyes growing wider.
   "My big seventy-five cent order," I said, letting the change clink on the
glass countertop. "Any time you come in any place," I went on, "you
should look around the room and you should ask yourself, who's the only,
only possible one here who could have taken Taiwanese mercenaries into
Laos in 1968? And you should act accordingly."
  "Who the fuck do you think you are?" asked the middle one, who hadn't
spoken before and looked like he'd taken tai-kwon-do since he was four.
  "Practically nobody," I said. "But if any of you say one more word
before I get my coffee, I'm going out to the saddlebag on my bike, and I'm
going to take out a product backed by 132 years of Connecticut Yankee
know-how and fine American craftsmanship and I'm coming back in here
and showing you exactly how the rat chews the cheese."
  Then I gave them the Thousand Yard Stare, focusing on something
about a half mile past the left shoulder of the guy in the middle.
   They backed up, jangling the doorbell, out onto the sidewalk, bumping
into a lady coming out with a load of wash.
   "Crazy fuck," I heard one of them say as he climbed into the car. The
tai-kwon-do guy kept looking at me as the driver cranked the car up. He
said something to him, jumped around the car and started kicking the
shit out of the back tire of the twelve-speed white Concord leaning against
the telephone pole out front.
  I heard people sucking in their breaths in the bakery.
  The guy kicked the bike three times, watching me, breaking out the
spokes in a half moon, laughing.
  "My bike!" yelled a woman on one of the stools. "That's my bike! You
assholes! Get their license number!" She ran outside.
   I turned to the clerk, who had my cup of coffee ready. I plunked down
eighty cents in nickels, dimes and pennies, and put two cents in the TIPS
cup. Then I put saccharine and cream in the coffee.
   Out on the sidewalk, the woman was screaming at the
tai-kwon-do-looking guy, and she was crying. His two friends were talking
to him in low voices and reaching for their billfolds. He looked like a little
kid who'd broken a window in a sandlot ball game. People had come out of
the grocery store across the street and were watching.
  I got on my bike and rode to the corner unnoticed.
  A cop car, lights flashing but with the siren off, turned toward the
bakery as I turned out onto the street.
  It was only 9:15 A.M. It was looking to be a nice day.



   I got two-and-three-fourths stars in the 1977 Career Woman's Guide to
Austin Men. Here's the entry: Working-class bozo, well-read. Great for a
rainy Tuesday night when your regular feller is out of town. PS: You'll have
to pick up all the tabs!



   I'm still friends with about two-thirds of the women I've ever gone with,
which I'm as proud of as anything else in my life, I guess. I care a lot, I'm
fairly intelligent, and I have a sense of humor. You know, the doormat
personality.



   At one time, in those days before herpes and AIDS, when everybody was
trying to figure out just who and what they were, I was sort of a Last
Station of the Way for women who, in Bob's words, "were trying to decide
whether to go nelly or not." They usually did anyway, more often than not
with another old girlfriend of mine.
   (It all started when I was dating the ex-wife of the guy who was then
living with my ex-girlfriend. The lady who was then the ex-wife now lives
with a nice lady who used to be married to another friend of mine. They
each have tattoos on their left shoulders. One of them has a portrait of
Karl Marx and under it the words Hot to Trotsky. The other has the
Harley-Davidson symbol but instead of the usual legend it says Born to
Read Hegel.)
  No one set out an agenda or anything for me to be their Last Guy on
Earth. It just happened, and expanded outward like ripples in a pond.



  About two months ago at a party some young kid was listening to a
bunch of us old farts talk, and he asked me, "If the Sixties were so great,
and the Eighties suck so bad, then what happened in the Seventies?"
  "Well," I said. "Richard Nixon resigned, and then, and then . . . gee, I
don't know."



  Another woman I dated for a while had only one goal in life: to plant the
red flag on the rubble of several prominent landmarks between Virginia
and Maryland.
   We used to be coming home from the dollar midnight flicks on campus
(Our Daily Bread, Sweet Movie, China Is Near) and we would pass this
neat old four-story hundred-year-old house, and every time, she would
look up at it and say "That's where I'm going to live after the Revolution."
  I'm talking 1976 here, folks.
  We'd gone out together five or six times, and we went back to her place
and were going to bed together for the first time. We were necking, and
she got up to go to the bathroom. "Get undressed," she said.
  When she came back in, taking her sweater off over her head, I was
naked in the bed with the sheets pulled up to my neck. I was wearing a
Mao Tse Tung mask.
  It was wonderful.



  Friday. Reunion Eve.
   It was one of those days when everything is wrong. All the work I started
I messed up in some particularly stupid way. I started everything over
twice. I gave up at three P.M.
   Things didn't get any better. I tried TV. A blur of talking heads. Nothing
interested me for more than thirty seconds.
  Outside the sun was setting past Mt. Bonnell and Lake Austin. Over on
Cat Mountain the red winks of the lights on the TV towers came on. A
Continental 737 went over, heading towards California's golden climes.
   I put on a music tape I'd made and tried to read a book. I got up and
turned the noise off. It was too Sixties. I'd hear enough of that tomorrow
night. No use setting myself up for a wallow in the good times and peaking
too early. I drank a beer that tasted like kerosene. It was going to be a cool
clear October night. I closed the windows and watched the moon come up
over Manor, Texas.
   The book was Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel. I
tried to read it some more and it began to go yammer yammer yibble
yibble Twain, yammer yibble Hemingway. Enough.
   I turned the music back on, put on the headphones and lay down on the
only rug in the house, looking up at the cracks in the plaster and listening
to the Moody Blues. What a loss of a day, but I was tired anyway. I went to
bed at nine P.M.
   It was one of those nights when every change in the wind brings an
erection, when every time you close your eyes you see penises and vulvas, a
lot of them ones you haven't seen before. After staring up at the ceiling for
an hour, I got up, got another beer, went into the living room and sat
naked in the dark.
   I had one of those feelings like I hadn't had in years. The kind your aunt
told you she'd had the day your grandfather died, before anybody knew it
yet. She told you at the funeral that three days before she'd felt wrong and
irritable all day and didn't know why, until the phone rang with the news.
The kind of feeling Phil Collins gets on "In the Air Tonight," a mood that
builds and builds with no discernible cause.
   It was a feeling like in a Raymond Chandler novel, the kind he blames
on the Santa Ana winds, when all the dogs bark, when people get pissed
off for no reason, when yelling at someone you love is easier than going on
silently with the mood you have inside.
  Only there were no howling dogs, no sound of fights from next door.
Maybe it was just me. Maybe this reunion thing was getting to me more
than I wanted it to.
  Maybe it was just horniness. I went to the VCR, an old Beta II, second
one they ever made, no scan, no timer, all metal, weighs 150 pounds,
bought at Big State Pawn for fifty bucks, sometimes works and sometimes
doesn't. I put in Cum Shot Revue #1 and settled back in my favorite easy
chair.
   The TV going kskkssssssssss woke me up at 4:32 A.M. I turned
everything off. So this is what me and my whole generation come down to,
people sleeping naked in front of their TVs with empty beer cans in their
laps. It was too depressing to think about.
  I made my way to bed, lay down, and had dreams. I don't remember
anything about them, except that I didn't like them.



  I've known three women the latter part of the twentieth century has
driven slapdab crazy.
  For one, it was through no fault of her own. Certain chemicals were
missing in her body. She broke up with me quietly after six months and
checked herself into the MHMR. That was the last time I saw her.
   She evidently came back through town about three years ago, after she
quit taking her lithium. I got strange phone calls from old friends who had
seen her. Her vision, and that of the one we call reality, no longer
intersected. Having destroyed her present, she had begun to work on the
past and the future also.
  Last I heard she had run off with a cook she met at a Halfway House;
they were rumored to be working Exxon barges together on the
Mississippi River.



   The second, after affairs with five real jerks in a row in six months,
began to lose weight. She'd only been 111 pounds to begin with. People
whispered about leukemia, cancer, some wasting disease. Of course it
wasn't—in the rest of the world, dying by not getting enough to eat is a
right, in America, it's a privilege. She began to look like sticks held
together with a pair of kid's blue-jeans and a shirt, with only two
brightly-glowing eyes watching you from the head to show she was still
alive. She was fainting a lot by then.
  One day Bob, who had been her lover six years before, went over to her
house. (By then she was forgetting to do things like close and lock the
doors, or turn on the lights at night.)
  Bob picked her up by her shirt collar (it was easy, she only weighed
eighty-three pounds by then) and slapped her, like in the movies, five
times as hard as he could.
   It was only on the fifth slap that her eyes came to life and filled with
fear.
  "Stop it, Gabriella," said Bob. "You're killing yourself." Then he kissed
her on her bloody, swelling lips, set her down blinking, and walked out her
door and her life, and hasn't seen her since.
   He saved her. She met another nice woman at the eating disorder clinic.
They now live in Westlake Hills, raising the other woman's two boys by her
first marriage.



  The third one's cat ran away one morning. She went back upstairs,
wrote a long apologetic note to her mother, dialed 911 and told them
where she was, hung up and drank most of an eleven-ounce can of Crystal
Drano.
  She lived on for six days in the hospital in a coma with no insides and a
raging 107° fever.
  Her friends kept checking, but the cat never came back.



   "Yo!" said Olin Sweetwater. He and two or three others were standing
outside the community college on the cool Saturday morning. He had on a
sweatshirt, done up in the old school colors, that said Bull Goose Tour
Guide. We shook hands (thumbs locked, sawing our arms back and forth).
He was balding; what hair he had left had a white plume across the left
side.
  The two women, Angela Pardo and Rita Jones when I'd known them,
were nervous. Olin handed us sweatshirts that said Tour Guide. We
thanked him.
   I looked at the brick facade. The school had been an ugly dump in 1969;
it was still a dump, but with a charm all its own.
  (One of the reasons Olin asked me to help with the tour is that I'd lived
with a lady artist for a year who had worked part-time as a clerk in the
admissions office of the community college. I guess he thought that
qualified me as an Expert.)
  The tours were supposed to start at ten A.M. Sleepy college students
who had Saturday labs were wandering in and out of the two-and-a-half
story building or some of the other outbuildings the college leased. Olin
had pulled lots of strings to let us guide people without any interference,
or so he kept telling us.
  Around 9:45 people started wandering up, trailing kids, shy husbands,
wives, lovers. God, I thought recognizing a few here and there. We're so
fucking normal looking. We look like our mothers and fathers did in 1969.
  (Remember in 1973 when you saw American Graffiti for the first time
and everybody laughed at the short haircuts and long skirts, then when
you went back to see it in 1981 those parts didn't seem so strange
anymore?)
  I was talking to one of the few women who'd been nice to me in high
school, a quiet girl named Sharon, whose front teeth then had reminded
me, sweetly and not at all unpleasantly, of Rocket J. Squirrel's. She was
now, I learned, on her second divorce. She introduced me to her
kids—Seth and Jason—who looked like they'd rather be on Mars than here.
   Sharon stopped talking and stared behind me. I saw other people
turning and followed their gaze toward the street. "Jesus," I said. A pink
flowered VW Beetle pulled up to the curb as a student drove away. Out of
it came something from Mr. Natural—the guy had hair down to his
butthole (a wig, it turned out), headband, walnut shell beads, elephant bell
pants with neon green flash panels, a khaki shirt and wool vest, Ben
Franklin specs tinted Vick's Salve blue. There was a B-52 peace symbol
button big as a dinner plate on his left abdomen, and the vest had a
leather stash pocket at the bottom snaps.
  Something in the way he moves . . .
  Seth and Jason were pointing and laughing, other people were looking
embarrassed.
  "Peace, Love, and Brotherhood," he said, flashing us the peace sign.
  The voice. I knew it after twenty years. Hoyt Lawton.
   Hoyt Lawton had been president of the fucking Key Club in 1969! He'd
worn three-piece suits to school even on the days when he didn't have to
go eat with the Rotarians! His hair was never more than three-eighths of
an inch off his skull—we said he never got it cut, it just never grew. He
won a bunch of money from something like the DAR for a speech he made
at a Young Republicans convention on how all hippies needed was a good
stiff tour of duty in Vietnam that would show them what America was all
about. Hoyt Lawton, what an asshole!
  And yet, there he was, the only one with enough chutzpah to show up
like we were all supposed to feel. Okay, I'm older and more tolerant now.
Hoyt, you're still an asshole, but with a little style.
  By about 10:10 there were a hundred people there. Excluding husbands,
wives, Significant Others and kids, maybe sixty of the Class of '69 had
taken the trouble to show up.
   Olin divided us up so we wouldn't run into each other. I started my
group of twenty or so (Hoyt was in Olin's group thank god) on the second
floor. We climbed the stairs.
   "You'll notice they have air conditioning now?" I said. There were
laughs. Austin hits ninety-five by April 20 most years. We'd sweltered
through Septembers and died in Mays here, to the hum of ineffectual floor
fans. The ceilings were twenty feet high and the ceiling fans might as well
have been heat pumps.
   "How many of you spent most of the last semester here?" I said,
pointing. Two or three held up their hands. "This used to be the
principal's office; now it's the copy center. Over there was Mr. Dix's office
itself." Lots of people laughed then, probably hadn't thought of the
carrot-headed principal since graduation day. He'd had it bad enough
before someone heard him referred to as "Red" by the Superintendent of
Schools one day.
   "That used to be the only office that was air-conditioned, remember? At
least you could get cool while waiting to be yelled at." I pointed to the
air-conditioning vents.
   That there air duct I didn't say is the one that Morey Morkheim got
into and took a big dump in one night after they'd expelled him one of
those times. Only in America is the penalty for skipping school expulsion
for three days.
  Mr. Dix had yelled at him after the absence, "What are you going to do
with your life? You'll never amount to anything without an education!"
  In seven months Morey was pulling in more money in a weekend than
Dix would make in ten years—legally, too.
   We moved through the halls, getting curious stares from students in
classrooms with closed glass doors.
  "Down here was where the student newspaper office was. Over there
was the library, which the community college is using as a library." We
went down to the first floor.
  "Ah, the cafeteria!" It was now the study room, full of chairs and tables
and vending machines. "Remember tomato surprise! Remember macaroni
and cheese!" "Fish lumps on Friday!" said someone.
  Half the student body in those days had come from the parochial junior
highs around town. In 1969, parochial was the way you spelled Catholic.
Nobody in the school administration ever read a paper, evidently, so they
hadn't learned that the Pope had done away with "going to hell on a meat
rap" back in 1964. So you still had fish lumps on Friday when we were
there.
  The only good thing about having all those Catholic kids there was that
we got to hear their jokes for the first time, like what's God's phone
number? ETcumspiri 220!
  "Down there, way off to the left," I said "was the band hall. You
remember Mr. Stoat?" There were groans. "I thought so. Only musician I
ever met who had absolutely no sense of rhythm."
   Ah, the band hall. Where one morning a bunch of guys locked
themselves in just before graduation, wired the intercom up to broadcast
all over school, and played "Louie, Louie" on tubas, instead of the National
Anthem, during home room period. It was too close to the end of school to
expel them, so they didn't let them come to the commencement exercise.
In protest of which, when they played "Pomp and Circumstance," about
three hundred of us Did the Freddy down the aisles of the municipal
auditorium in our graduation gowns.
   We passed a door leading to the boiler room, where all the teachers
popped in for a smoke between classes, it being forbidden for them to take
a puff anywhere on school grounds but in the Teachers' Lounge during
their off-hour.
   I stopped and opened it—sure enough, it was there, dimmed by twenty
years and several attempts to paint over it, but in the remains of
smudged-over day-glo orange paint on the top inside of the door it still
said: Ginny and Ray's Motel.
   Ginny Balducci and Ray Petro had come to school one morning ripped
on acid and had wandered down to the boiler room and had taken their
clothes off. My theory is that it was warm and nice and they wanted to feel
the totality of the sensuous space. The school's theory, after they were
interrupted by Coach Smetters, was that they had been Fornicating
During Home Room Period, and without hall passes, too!
  After Ginny came down, and while her father was screaming at Ray's
parents across Dix's desk, she said to her father, "Leave them alone. They
didn't have their clothes off!"
  "Young lady," said Dix. "You don't seem to realize what serious trouble
you're in."
   "What are you going to do?" asked Ginny, looking the principal square
in the eye, "Castrate me?"
  I answered some questions about the fire escape that used to be on the
south side of the building. "They fell on a community college student one
day four years ago," I said. "Good thing we never had to use them." We
were outside again.
  "Over there was the gym. World's worst dance floor, second worst
basketball court. Enough sweat was spilled there over the years to float
the Big Mo.
  We can't go in, though, they now use it to store visual aids for the Parks
and Rec department."
   There was the morning when Dix had us all go to the gym for Assembly.
His purpose, it went on to appear after he had talked for ten minutes, was
to try to explain why the Armed Forces recruiters would be there on
Career Day, along with the realtors and college reps and Rotarians who
would come to tell you about the wonders of their profession in the Great
Big World Out There. (Some nasty posters had appeared on every bare
inch of wall in the building that morning questioning not only their
presence on Career Day but also their continuing existence on the third
rock from the sun.)
   He was going on about how they had been there, draft or no draft, war
or no war, every Career Day when a small sound started at the back of the
ranked bleachers. The sound of two stiffened index fingers drumming
slowly but very deliberately dum-dum-thump dum-dum-thump. Then a
few other sets of fingers joined in dum-dum-thump dum-dum-thump, at
first background, then rising, louder and more insistent, then feet took it
up, and it spread from section to section, while the teachers looked around
wildly. Dum-Dum-Thump Dum-Dum-Thump.
  Dix stopped in mid-sentence, mouth open, while the sound grew. He
saw half the student body—the other half was silent, or like the jocks led
by Hoyt Lawton, beginning to boo and hiss—rise to its feet clapping its
hands and stamping its feet in time—
  DUM DUM THUMP DUM DUM THUMP
  He yelled at people and pointed, then he quit and his shoulders sagged.
And on a hidden passed signal, everybody quit on the same beat and it
was deathly silent in the gym. Then everybody sat back down.
  I think Dix had seen the future that morning—Kent State, the
Cambodian incursion, the cease fire, the end of Nixon, the fall of Saigon.
  He dismissed us. The recruiters were there on Career Day anyway.



   I'd almost finished my tour. "One more place, not on the official stops,"
I said. I took them across the side street and down half a block.
  "Ow wow!" said someone halfway there. "The Grindstone!"
  We got there. It was a one-story place with real glass bricks across the
whole front that would cost $80 a pop these days. The place was full of
tools and cars.
  "Oh, gee," said the people.
  "It's now the Skill Shop," I said. "Went out of business in 1974, bought
up by the city, leased by the community college."
   Ah, the Grindstone! A real old-fashioned cafe/soda fountain. You were
forbidden on pain of death to leave the school grounds except at lunch, so
three thousand people tried to get in every day between 11:30 and 12:30.
   One noon the place was packed. There was the usual riot going on over
at UT ten blocks away. All morning you could hear sirens and dull
whoomps as the increasingly senile police commissioner, who had been in
office for thirty-four years, tried dealing with the increasingly complex late
twentieth century. Why, the children have gone mad, he once said in a TV
interview.
  Anyway, we were all stuffing our faces in the Grindstone when this guy
comes running in the front door and out the back at two-hundred miles an
hour. Somebody made the obvious stoned joke—"Man, I thought he'd
never leave!"—and then a patrol car slammed up to the curb, and a cop
jumped out. You could see his mind work.
  A. Rioter runs into the Grindstone. B. Grindstone is full of people.
Therefore: C. Grindstone is full of rioters.
  He opened the door, fired a tear-gas grenade right at the lunch counter,
turned, got in his car and drove away.
   People were barfing and gagging all over the place. There were screams,
tears, rage. The Grindstone was closed for a week so they could rent some
industrial fans and air it out. The city refused to pick up the tab. "The
officer was in hot pursuit," said the police commissioner, "and acted
within the confines of departmental guidelines." Case closed.
  "Ah, the Grindstone," I said to the tour group. "What a nice place." A
wave of nostalgia swept over me. "Today, shakes and fries. Tomorrow, a
lube job and tune-up."
   I was so filled with mono no aware that I skipped the picnic that
afternoon.



   The Wolfskill Hotel! Scene of a thousand-and-one nights'
entertainments and more senior proms than there are fire ants in all the
fields in Texas.
   A friend of mine named Karen once said people were divided into two
classes: those who went to their senior proms and went on to live fairly
normal lives, and those who didn't, who became perverts, mass murderers
or romance novelists.
   If you were a guy you got maybe your first blow job after the prom, or if
a girl a quick boff in the back seat of some immemorial Dodge convertible
out at Lake Travis. The hotel meant excitement, adventure, magic.
  I hadn't gone to my senior prom. A lot of us hadn't, looking on it as one
more corrupt way to suck money from the working classes so that orchids
could die all over the vast American night.
  There were some street singers outside the hotel, playing jug band
music without a jug—two guitars, a flute, tambourine and harmonica.
They were fairly quiet. The cops wouldn't hassle them until after eleven
P.M. They were pretty good. I dropped a quarter into their cigar box.
   You could hear the strains of the Byrds' "Turn! Turn! Turn!" before you
got through the lobby. The entertainment committee must have dropped a
ton o'bucks on this—they had a bulletin board out front just past the
registration table with everybody's pictures from the yearbook blown up,
six to a sheet.
   It was weird seeing all those people's names and faces—the beginnings
of mustaches and beards on the guys, we'd fought tooth and nail for facial
hair —long straight hair on the women—names that hadn't been used, or
gone back to three or four times, in the last twenty years.
  I paid my $10.00 fee (like in the old days. Dance Tonight! Guys fifty
cents Girls Free!).
   Inside the ballroom people were already dancing, maybe a hundred,
with that many more standing around talking and laughing in knots and
clumps, being polite to each other, sizing up what Time's Heedless Claws
had done to each other's bodies and outlooks.
   Bob and Penny were already there. He was in a bluejean jacket and
pants and wore a clear plastic tie. Penny was stunning, in a green velour
thing, beautiful as she always is early in the evenings, before alcohol turns
her into a person I don't know.
   I was real spiffed out, for me: a nice sport coat, black slacks, a red silk
tie with painted roses wide as the racing stripe on a Corvette.
  There were people there in $500 gowns, $300 suits, tuxes, jeans,
coveralls. Several were in period costumes; Hoyt had on another, much
better than this morning's nightmare, but still what I describe as Early
Neil Young. He was, of course, with a slim blonde who had once been a
Houston cheerleader, I'm sure.
   I saw some faculty members there. They had all been invited, of course.
Ten or so, with their husbands or wives, had come. Even Mr. Stoat was
there. It hit me as I looked at them that most of them had been in their
twenties and thirties when they were trying to deal with us on a daily
basis, much younger than we were now. God, what a thankless job they
must have had— going off every day like going back up to the Front in
WWI, trying to teach kids who viewed you as The Enemy, following along
behind everything you did with the efficient erasers in their minds! Maybe
I'm getting too mellow— they had it easier with us than teachers do
now—at least most of us could read, and music was more important than
TV to us. Later, I told myself, I'll go over and talk to Ms. Nugent who was
always my favorite and who had been a good teacher in spite of the chaos
around her.
   There were two guys working the tapes and CDs up on the raised stage.
I didn't recognize the order of the songs so knew they weren't playing one
of my tapes. On the front part of the stage were a guitar and bass, a drum
set and keyboards.
  So it was true, and seemed the main topic of conversation, although as I
passed one bunch of people I heard someone say "Those assholes? Them?"
   Barb showed up, without a date, of course. She took my hand and led
me toward the dance floor. "Let's dance until our shoulders bleed," she
said. "Yes, ma'am!" I said.



  I don't know about you, but I've been hypnotized on dance floors before.
Sometimes it seems as if the tune stretches out to accommodate how long
and hard you want to dance, or think you can. The guys working the decks
were switching back and forth between two cassette players and the music
never stopped—occasionally songs only I could have recorded showed up. I
didn't care. I was dancing.
  (I've seen some strange things on dance floors in my life—the strangest
was people forming a conga line to a song by the band Reptilikus called
"After Today, You Got One Less Day To Live.")
  "Ginny's here," I said to Barb. Barb looked over toward the door where
Ginny Balducci's wheelchair had rolled in. One weekend in 1973 Ginny had
gone off for a ski weekend with an intern, and had come back out of the
hospital six months later with a whole different life. "I'll say hi in a
minute." said Barb.
   We danced to the only Dylan song you can dance to, "I Want You,"
"Back in the U.S.S.R.," Buffalo Springfield, Blue Cheer, Sam and Dave,
slow tunes by Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke, then Barb went over to talk
to Ginny. I was a sweating wreck by then, and the ugly feeling from the
night before was all gone.
  I started for the whizzoh.
  "You won't like it," said a guy coming out of the men's room.
   The smell hit me like a hammer. Someone had yelled New York into one
of the five washbasins. It was half full. It appeared the person had lived
exclusively for the last week on Dinty Moore Beef Stew and Fighting Cock
Bourbon.
  A janitor came in cursing as I was washing my hands.
  I went back out to the ballroom. Mouse and the Trapps "Public
Execution" was playing—someone who doesn't dance recorded that. Then
came Jackie Wilson's "Higher and Higher."
  "Dance with me?" asked someone behind me. I turned. It was Sharon.
She must have Gone Borneo that afternoon. She'd been somewhere where
they do things to you, wonderful things. She had on a blue dress and
seamed silk stockings, and now she had an Aunt Peg haircut.
  "You bet your ass!" I said.
   About halfway through the next dance, I suffered a real sense of loss. I
missed my butthole-length hair for the first time in ten years. The song, of
course, was "Hair" off the original Broadway cast recording, Diane Keaton
and all, and Joe Morton's wife Patricia, who had never cut hers, it grew
within inches of the floor, suddenly grabbed it near her skull with one
hand and whipped it around and around her head, the ends fanning out
like a giant hand across the colored lights above the stage. Joe continued
his Avalon-ballroom-no-sweat dancing, oblivious to the applause his wife
was getting.
   Then they played the Fish Cheer and we all sang and danced along with
"I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die-Rag."
  Then the lights came up and the entertainment director, Jamie Younts/
Fulton, came to the mike and treated us to twenty minutes of nostalgic
boredom and forced yoks. The tension was building.
  "Now," she said, "for those of you who don't know, we've got them
together again for the first time in nineteen years, here they are, Craig
Beausoliel, Morey Morkheim, Abram Cassuth, and Andru Esposito, or, as
you know them, Distressed Flag Sale!"



  It was about what you'd expect—four guys in their late thirties in
various pieces of clothing stretching across twenty years of fashion
changes.
   Morey'd put on weight and lost teeth, Andru had taken weight off.
Abram, who'd been the only one without facial hair in our day, now had a
full Jerry Garcia beard. Craig, who came out last, like always, and plugged
in while we applauded—all four or five hundred people in the ballroom
now—didn't look like the same guy at all. He looked like a businessman
dressed up at Halloween to look like a rock singer.
  He was a little unsteady on his feet. He was a little drunk.
  "Enough of this Sixties crap!" he said. People applauded again.
"Tonight, this first and last performance, we're calling ourselves Lizard
Level!"
  Then Abram hit the keyboard in the opening trill of
"In-a-Gadda-da-Vida" for emphasis, then they slammed into "Proud
Mary," Creedence's version, and the place became a blur of flying bodies,
drumming feet, swirling clothes. The band started a little raggedy, then
got it slowly together.
  They launched into the Chambers Bros.' "Time Has Come Today,"
always a show stopper, a hard song for everybody including the Chambers
Bros., if you ever saw them, and the place went really crazy, especially in
the slow-motion parts. Then they did one of their own tunes, "The Moon's
Your Harsh Mistress, Buddy, Not Mine," which I'd heard exactly once in
two decades.
  We were dancing, all kinds, pogo, no-sweat, skank, it didn't matter. I
saw a few of the hotel staff standing in the doorways tapping their feet.
Andru hit that screaming wail in the bass that was the band's trademark,
sort of like a whale dying in your bathtub. People yelled, shook their arms
over their heads.
  Then they started to do "Soul Kitchen." Halfway through the opening,
Craig raised his hand, shook it, stopped them.
  "Awwwww," we said, like when a film breaks in a theater.
  Craig leaned toward the others. He was shaking his head. Morey
pointed down at his playlist. They put their heads together. Craig and
Abram were giving the other two chord changes or something.
  "Hey! Make music!" yelled some jerk from the doorway.
   Craig looked up, grabbed the mike. "Hold it right there, asshole," he
said, becoming the Craig we had known twenty years ago for a second. He
leaned against the mike stand in a Jim Morrison vamp pose. "You stay
right here, you're going to hear the god-damnedest music you ever heard!"
   They talked together for a minute more. Andru shrugged his shoulders,
looked worried. Then they all nodded their heads.
   Craig Beausoliel came back up front. "What we're gonna do now, what
we're gonna do now, gonna do," he said in a Van Morrison post-Them
chant, "is we're gonna do, gonna do, the song we were gonna do that night
in Miami . . ."
  "Oh, geez," said Bob, who was on the dance floor near Sharon and me.
   Distressed Flag Sale had gone into seclusion early in 1970, holing up
like The Band did in the Basement Tapes days with Dylan, or like Brian
Wilson and the Beach Boys while they were working on the never-finished
Smile album. They were supposedly working on an album (we heard
through the grapevine) called either New Music for the AfterPeople or A
Song to Change the World, and there were supposedly heavy scenes there,
lots of drugs, paranoia, jealousy, and revenge, but also great music. We
never knew, because they came out of hiding to do the Miami concert to
raise money for the family of a janitor blown up by mistake when
somebody drove a car-bomb into an AFEES building one four A.M.
  "It was a great song, man, a great song," said Craig. "It was going to
change the world we thought." We realized for the first time how drunk
Craig really was about then. "We were gonna play it that night, and the
world was gonna change, but instead they got us, they got us, man, and we
were the ones that got changed, not them. Tonight we're not Distressed
Flag Sale, we're Lizard Level, and just once anyway, so you'll all know,
tonight we're gonna do 'Life Is Like That.' "
   (What changed in Miami was the next five years of their lives. The
Miami cops had been holding the crowd back for three hours and looking
for an excuse, anyway, and they got it, just after Distressed Flag Sale made
its reeling way onstage. The crowd was already frenzied, and got up to
dance when the guys started playing "Life Is Like That" and Andru took
out his dong on the opening notes and started playing slide bass with it.
The cops went crazy and jumped them, beat them up, planted heroin and
amphetamines in their luggage in the dressing rooms, carted them off to
jail and turned firehoses on the rioting fans.
  Everybody knew the bust was rigged, because they charged Morey with
possession of heroin, and everybody knew he was the speed freak.
  And that was the end of Distressed Flag Sale.
   It was almost literally the end of Andru, too. What the papers didn't tell
you was that, as he was uncircumcised, he'd torn his frenum on the strings
of the bass, and he almost lost, first, his dong, and then his life before the
cops let a doctor in to see him.)
  That's the history of the song we were going to hear.
  Notes started from the keyboard, like it was going to be another
Doors-type song, building. Then Craig moved his fingers a few times on
the guitar strings, tinkling things rang up high, like birds were in the air
over the stage, sort of like the opening of "Touch of Grey" by the Dead, but
not like that either. Then Andru came in, and Morey, then it began to take
on a shape and move on its own, like nothing else at all.
   It moved. And it moved me, too. First I was swaying, then stomping my
right foot. Sharon was pulling me toward the dance floor. I'd never heard
anything like it. This was dance music. Sharon moved in large sways and
swings; so did I.
   The floor filled up fast. Everybody moved toward the music. Out of the
corner of my eye I saw old Mr. Stoat asking someone to dance. Other
teachers moved towards the sound.
  Then I was too busy moving to notice much of anything. I was dancing,
dancing not with myself but with Sharon, with Bob and Penny, with
everyone.
   All five hundred people danced. Ginny Balducci was at the corner of the
floor, making her chair move in small tight graceful circles. I smiled. We
all smiled.
  The music got louder; not faster, but more insistent. The playing was
superb, immaculate. Lizard Level's hands moved like they were a bar
band that had been playing together every night for twenty years. They
seemed oblivious to everything, too, eyes closed, feet shuffling.
   Something was happening on the floor, people were moving in little
groups and circles, couples breaking off and shimmying down between the
lines of the others, in little waggling dance steps. It was happening all over
the place. Then I was doing it—like Sharon and I had choreographed every
move. People were clapping their hands in time to the music. It sounded
like steamrollers were being thrown around in the ballroom.
  Above it the music kept building and building in an impossible spiral.
  Now the hotel staff joined in, busboys clapping hands, maids and
waitresses turning in circles.
  Then the pattern of the dance changed, magically, instantly, it split the
room right down the middle, and we were in two long interlocking linked
chains of people, crossing through each other, one line moving up the
room, the other down it, like it was choreographed.
  And the guys kept playing, and more people were coming into the
ballroom. People in pajamas or naked from their rooms, the night
manager and the bellboys. And as they joined in and the lines got more
unwieldy, the two lines of people broke into four, and we began to move
toward the doors of the ballroom, clapping our hands, stomping, dancing,
making our own music, the same music, more people and more people.
  At some point they walked away from the stage, joining us, left their
amps, acoustic now. Morey had a single drum and was beating it, you
could hear Andru and Craig on bass and guitar, Cassuth was still playing
the keyboard on the batteries, his speaker held under one arm.
  The street musicians had come into the hotel and joined in, people were
picking up trash cans from the lobby, garbage cans from the streets,
honking the horns of their stopped cars in time to the beat of the music.
   We were on the streets now. Windows in buildings opened, people
climbed down from second stories to join in. The whole city jumped in
time to the song, like in an old Fleischer cartoon; Betty Boop, Koko,
Bimbo, the buses, the buildings, the moon all swaying, the stars spinning
on their centers like pinwheels.
   Chains of bodies formed on every street, each block. At a certain beat
they all broke and reformed into smaller ones that grew larger,
interlocking helical ropes of dancers.
  I was happy, happier than ever. We moved down one jumping chain of
people. I saw mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, dinosaurs, salamanders,
fish, insects, jellies in loops and swirls. Then came the beat and we were in
the other chain, moving up the street, lost in the music, up the line of
dancing people, beautiful fields, comets, nebulae, rockets and galaxies of
calm light.
  I smiled into Sharon's face, she smiled into mine.
   Louder now the music, stronger, pulling at us like a wind. The cops
joined in the dance.
  Up Congress Avenue the legislators and government workers in special
session came streaming out of their building like beautiful ants from a
shining mound.
  Louder now and happier, stronger, dancing, clapping, singing.
  We will find our children or they will find us, before the dance is over,
we can feel it. Or afterwards we will responsibly make more.
   The chain broke again, and up the jumping streets we go, joyous now,
joy all over the place, twenty, thirty thousand people, more every second.
   As we swirled and grew, we would sometimes pass someone who was
staring, not dancing, feet not moving; they would be crying in
uncontrollable sobs and shakes, and occasionally committing suicide.



                               The End