Drop City

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  They sat there, staring through the windshield, and smoked. When the roach was burned down to nothing, Norm lit a cigarette and passed that to Marco and Marco took a drag and passed it back. The road was like any road, burning silk in a sheen of fire, the trees like bombers coming in low. Marco settled back in his seat as the van rocked and swerved, even as the smoke climbed up the windows and Norm kept pushing at the frames of his glasses as if they’d been oiled. He was wearing a braided rope belt that couldn’t contain the spill of his gut, there were spiky black hairs growing out of his ears and nostrils, and his arms were whiter than any farmer’s ought to be. He talked and Marco listened, his voice a hoarse high yelp that plummeted into the noise soup of the radio and careened off the clacking whine of the engine.

  “So like my parents?” (This by way of prelude, though Marco hadn’t said a word about anybody’s parents—they’d been talking nothing, talking good shit and groovy and the like, the radio hissing static as Norm manipulated the dial with his battered blunt fingers.) “Like my mother that gave me suck and my old dirt-blasted redneck cowboy of a father? They died. Bought the farm. Head-on collision with a truck full of Grade A fryers coming out of Petaluma on Route 116, and that might sound funny, the irony and all like that, but it isn’t, because the old turd-dropper was blind drunk and my mother deserved better than that, but anyway, the son and heir gets the rancho in the hills—that’s me, yours truly—and he’s thinking he’s feeling some kind of discomfort over this whole trip of ownership of the land, because nobody owns the land and he’s thinking like Timothy Leary, Let’s mutate, man, and so I come up with the concept of Voluntary Primitivism, and let me spell it out for you, man, LATWIDNO, Land Access to Which Is Denied No One, dig? You want to come to Drop City, you want to turn on, tune in, drop out and just live there on the land doing your own thing, whether that’s milking the goats or working the kitchen or the garden or doing repairs or skewering mule deer or just staring at the sky in all your contentment—and I don’t care who you are—you are welcome, hello, everybody—”

  Two hours. So it went. Marco was in that phase where every high expectation gives way to something grimmer, darker, older, but when he saw the standing grass flecked with mustard and the oaks drinking up the earth, when he saw the milling dogs, goats, chickens, the longhaired men so attuned to what they were doing they barely glanced up, and the women—the women!—he felt something being born inside him all over again. He leaned forward and watched it all unscroll, huts, tents, truck gardens and citrus trees, a geodesic dome—or was that a yurt? Then the van came round a bend and the house leapt out at them from behind a screen of trees. It was there, and then it was gone. When it came into view again, Marco saw a two-story frame house with a sprawl of outbuildings, no different from what you’d see in Kansas or Missouri or any other place where farmers tilled the earth, except that somebody had painted the trim in Day-Glo orange and the rest a checkerboard pattern of green and pink so that the house wasn’t a house anymore but a kind of billboard for the psychedelic revolution. The van lurched, dust rose up and killed the air, Norm grinning and flashing the peace sign all the while and a pair of yellow dogs loping along beside them, and then they were pulling into a rutted lot behind the house and Norm was shouting, “Home for the holidays, oh yes indeed!”

  Holidays? What holidays? And Marco was wondering about that, about what holiday it might have been in the middle of May—he wasn’t sure what the date was, but it couldn’t have been later than maybe the fifteenth or sixteenth—when Norm turned to him with a grin. “Just an expression, man—and I want to be the very first to wish you a Merry Christmas! But really, every day’s a holiday at Drop City, because the straight world is banned, absolutely and categorically, do not pass through these gates, Mr. Jones, dig?”

  What could he do but smile and nod and lend a hand as his benefactor began to unload supplies from the back of the van, cans of ketchup, peanut butter, honey, sacks of bulgur wheat, sesame seeds, brown rice, raw almonds and rolled oats, tools, a rebuilt generator, a whole raft of bread—“Barter, man, barter, broccoli for bread, cukes for bread, eggplant, and can you say rutabaga?”—and two big brown-paper bags that must have had thirty record albums in them. And where was it all going? In the main house, four steps up onto the foot-worn back porch and into the kitchen, arms full, a homemade table, crude but honest, potted herbs in the window, shelves from ceiling to floor and institutional-sized cans of everything imaginable stacked up as if they were expecting a siege. And women, three of them: Merry, Maya and Verbie.

  All three looked up when Marco followed Norm through the door and set his packages down on the table, smiling, yes, but he’d seen those smiles before—at Morning Star, Olompali, the Magic Farm, Gorda Mountain—and all but the last lingering residual flecks of brother- and sisterhood had been rinsed out of them. They were meant to be welcoming, these pale dry-lipped worried-over-the-porridge-blackened-into-the-bottom-of-the-pot brotherly-and-sisterly smiles, but how many had been welcomed already? He was new. A new cat. Another mouth to feed, and would he contribute, would he stay on and weed the garden, repair the roof and snake out the line from the plugged-up toilets to the half-dug septic field, would he be worth the investment of time and breath or would he just work his way through the women, smoke dope and drink cheap wine all day and then show up for meals with a plate in his hand? These were smiles with an edge, and they made him feel shy and unworthy.

  He must have come up the steps six or seven times, arms laden with groceries, before anybody said anything to him. It was Merry, tall, dark-eyed, a sprig of baby’s breath tucked behind one ear, who lifted her eyes and murmured, “Been on the road long?”

  Norm wasn’t there to answer for him—he’d wandered off shouting into the next room, tearing at the shrink-wrap on one of the new record jackets, and he left a vacuum behind him. Maya and Verbie were in the corner by the sink, leaning into the mounds of green onions, peppers, zucchini and carrots they were dicing for the pot and talking in flat low voices, and Merry had slipped across the room on bare feet to lift things out of the grocery bags and find places for them on the shelves. She was right there, two feet from him, smelling of garlic and cilantro, her eyes chasing vaguely after the question. Marco shrugged. The correct answer, more or less, was two years. But he didn’t say that. He just said, “I don’t know. A while.”

  And that was the end of the conversation. Merry’s back was to him, the spill and sweep of her hair that floated on its own currents, the white knuckles of her hands as she lifted cans to the shelves, sun pregnant in the windows, the potted herbs uncurling like fingers and a cat (a feline, that is) Marco hadn’t noticed till that moment lifting its head from its perch atop the refrigerator to fix him with a steely yellow-eyed gaze. The silence held half a beat more, till it was broken by the super-amplified hiss of a worn needle dropping on immaculate vinyl and a manic blast of drums and guitar filled the house. Two beats more. Then he ducked his head and edged back out the door.

  Outside, beyond the dirt lot where Norm had parked the van, there was a more-or-less conventional backyard, with a pair of lemon trees, a flower garden and an in-ground pool that flashed light as a single swimmer—at this distance, Marco couldn’t tell whether it was a man or woman—swam laps with the kind of loopy tenacity you see in caged animals. Dark head, tangled hair. Back and forth, back and forth. He had a sudden urge to strip down and plunge in, relieve himself of all the oils and stinks of the road and the lingering funk of the sleeping bag, but he didn’t know anybody here and he was tentative yet—what he needed to do, before he got caught up in the rhythms of the place, was to decide where he was going to sleep for the night at least, and maybe beyond. Norm had pointed out a pile of scrap lumber behind one of the outbuildings as they came up the road—“Build,” he’d shouted over the radio, “go ahead, build to suit, and I’m not going to be a policeman, I’m not going to be mayor, you do what you want”—and Marco thought he might have a look at it, to see w
hat he might do. He wasn’t exactly a master carpenter, but he was good enough, and aside from a couple of days on a construction crew in San Jose, he hadn’t done any real labor in weeks. Why not? he was thinking. Even if he didn’t stay, it was a way to pass the time.

  He left his rucksack and guitar under one of the big snaking oaks in the front yard, then strolled back up the road to inspect the lumber. It wasn’t much. A nest of two-by-fours weathered white, a couple of sheets of warped plywood, some odds and ends, most of it charred, and you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that Drop City had lost at least one dwelling to fire. He was separating the good stuff from the bad when a man in his early twenties came rolling out of the high grass on lubricated hips, walking as if he was dancing, his head too big and his feet too small. “What’s happening?” the man said, bobbing up to him, and Marco saw that he was balancing a spinning rod in one hand and a stringer of undersized smallmouth bass in the other. His eyes were glassy and fragile, as if he’d just shuffled out the doors at the very end of a very long concert. What else? Deep tan, choker beads, cutoffs, huaraches, the world’s sparsest beard.

  Marco nodded, and gave back the tribal greeting: “What’s happening?”

  The man stood there studying him a minute, the faintest look of amusement on his face. “I’m Pan,” he said, “or Ronnie, actually, but everybody calls me Pan . . . and you’re—?”

  “Marco.”

  “Cool. Going to build?”

  “I guess so.”

  Ronnie frowned, rotating the toe of one sandal in the dirt. “With this shit?”

  “From humble beginnings,” Marco said, and he said it with a smile. “Hey, Thoreau paid something like twenty-eight dollars for his place on Walden Pond, and that was good enough to get him through a New England winter—”

  “Yeah,” Ronnie said, “but prices have gone crazy since then, right?”

  “Right. This stuff is free. Talk about deflation, huh?”

  But Ronnie didn’t seem to get the joke. He stood there a long while, watching Marco bend to the pile of mismatched lumber, the fish already stiffening on the stringer. It was hot. A flock of crows sent up a jeer from somewhere off in the woods. “So what you building, anyway?” Ronnie asked finally.

  It came to him then, and it took the question to elicit the response, because until that moment there was no shape before him. He saw the oak tree suddenly, the spread and penetrant shade of it, roots like claws, acorns, leaf litter, and beneath it, his guitar and rucksack propped casually against the trunk. He dropped a board at his feet.

  “A treehouse,” he said.

  3

  Pan was taking the day off. Pan was just going to stroke his shaggy fetlocks and blow on his pipes and mellow out, no sex today—he was rubbed raw from it—and no hassles, not with Merry, not with Lydia, not with Star. Not today. The morning had already been a kind of nightmare, nine A.M. and crawling up off the mattress in the front bedroom with a taste like warmed-over shit in the back of his throat, everybody piling into the rusted-out ’59 Studebaker he and Star had bombed across the country in and then on into Santa Rosa to the county welfare office to apply for food stamps. It must have been a hundred degrees, the streets on fire, the tie-and-jacket TGIF world closing in, big-armed mothers going to the supermarket in their forty-foot-long station wagons and nobody with even so much as a roach to take the pain away.

  It was late afternoon and Ronnie was stretched out by the pool, his hair greased to his head with the residue of a whole succession of dunkings in the vaguely greenish water—and shouldn’t somebody dump some chlorine in it, isn’t that the way it’s done?—the sun holding up its end of the bargain, birds making a racket in the trees, the sound of somebody’s harmonica drifting across the lawn along with the premonitory smells of dinner firming up in the big pots in the kitchen. Last night—or was it the night before?—it was veggie lasagna with tofu and carrots standing in for meat, and that was one of the better nights. Usually it was just some sort of rice mush flavored with stock and herbs and green onions and whatnot from the garden. He wasn’t complaining. Or actually, he was. His food stamps were going into the communal pot along with everybody else’s, and that he could live with, but Norm—Norm was insane, because Norm insisted on feeding anybody who showed up, even bums and winos and the spade cats from the Fillmore, who incidentally seemed to have taken over the back house in the past week, with no sign of leaving.

  They’d come up over the weekend, seven of them crammed into an old Lincoln Continental with fins right off a spaceship that could have taken them to Mars and back, very cool, very peaceful, just checking out the scene. Ronnie had been on the front porch with Reba, Verbie, Sky Dog and a couple of others, watching the light play off the trees and doing their loyal best to cadge change off the tourists who always seemed so timid and thankful to be able to do something to support the lifestyle, because they really believed in everything that was going down here, they really did, but their mother was sick and they were behind in their house payments and the orthodontist was threatening to rip the wires off their kids’ teeth, and could they just sit here a minute on the porch, would that be cool? Some of them would bring cameras, and Sky Dog would charge a quarter for a picture with a real down and authentic hippie in full hippie regalia, and the braver ones would stay for supper and line up with a tin plate in their hands and maybe even take a toke or two of whatever was going round once the bonfire was lit and the guitars emerged from their cases. They’d even sing along to Buffalo Springfield tunes or Judy Collins or Dylan, if anybody could remember the words. Just like summer camp. Then they got in their Fords and Chevys and VW Bugs and Volvos and went home.

  The spades were different. They didn’t so much emerge from the car as uncoil from it, all that lubricious menacing supercool spade energy—and Ronnie wasn’t a racist, not at all, he was just maybe a bit more experienced than the rest of his brothers and sisters here at Drop City, who, after all, were maybe just a wee bit starry-eyed and lame—and they came across the dirt lot in formation, like a football team. Lester was the name of the one in charge. He was soft-looking, small, with a face made out of putty, and he was wearing a red silk scarf and high-heeled boots. “Peace, brother,” he said, spreading wide his middle and index fingers and looking Ronnie in the eye. Ronnie didn’t say anything, but Sky Dog and the rest flashed the peace sign and made the usual noises of greeting in return. A heartbeat later Lester was sitting on the steps of the porch, taking a hit from the pipe that was going round, his black bells hiked up to show off red socks and the elastic tops of his Beatle boots, while the others milled around in the dirt, looking needful.

  “So this is the famous Drop City,” Lester said, exhaling. His voice was so soft you had to strain to hear it, and that was a kind of trick, not so much an affectation as a device to make you pay attention.

  Verbie, who never shut up for long, said, “Yes it is.”

  “We, uh—me and my amigos here—we heard all sorts of out of sight things about this place, like from the Diggers’ soup kitchen? You know, in the Fillmore?” Lester gave a quick glance around the porch, then handed the pipe to one of his amigos, and then it went around to all of them and back again up onto the porch, and it was exactly like two tribes meeting on the high plains, peace, brother, and circulate the pipe. “Is it really as cool as they say it is? Like all brothers are welcome?”

  The hippies on the porch fell all over themselves assuring him that that was the case, and everybody was thinking Hendrix, Buddy Miles, Free Huey, except Lester, because he just stretched out his legs and settled in.

  Now, though—now Ronnie was crashed by the pool, just taking the day off from everything and everybody, never mellower, the smallest little hit of mescaline wearing down the sharp edges of things. Reba’s kids—Che and Sunshine—were making a racket with one of those plastic trikes, humping it up and down the strip of concrete on the far side of the pool, and the communal horse—they called him Charley, Charley Horse, wh
at else?—was stomping and snorting up a storm because some head from Daly City whose name escaped Ronnie at the moment was trying to get him to jump a shrunken sun-blasted strip of oleander at the base of the lawn, but that was all right, that was nothing. Ronnie drank it all in, feeling magnanimous. He was Pan. He was stoned. The sun was in the sky and the earth was a good place, a groovy place, a place designed by some higher power—higher power—for the sensory awakening and spiritual uplift of every one of his brothers and sisters.

  Until nightfall, that is. The night came seething and festering up out of the shadows that bunched themselves in circus shapes at the feet of the trees and in the clotted scrub that chased the hillside round and round. He was feeling a little—well, a little jittery. There’d been an interlude there where he’d let things slide, a second hit of the mesc, a bottle of red wine and a couple of hits of something somebody had been smoking after dinner, and he hadn’t even made dinner, had he? Dinner. Big pots full of mush, women with their tits hanging, health and simplicity and the good rural life. The pool glistened like oil, like blood, in the fading light. He wasn’t hungry.

  He had a sudden urge to see Star, to just sit with her someplace quiet and talk about home, the little routines and reminiscences that had kept them going all the way across the flat shag of the Midwest and into the Rockies and beyond—Mr. Boscovich and tenth grade biology and how he would call everything material, as in these cells are constructed of cellular material, the way the books in the school library smelled of soap and burning leaves, the afternoon Robert Stellner, the straightest kid in the school, stuck his head in a bag of model airplane glue and carved the mysterious message Yahweh into his chest with a penknife while standing in front of the mirror in the boys’ room, all of that—but Star was up in the tree with the new guy all the time, and that rankled, it did, all the shit about Free Love and the Keristan Society notwithstanding. He pushed himself up off the pavement, but that was a bit much, so he sat back down again. The pavement was warm still, and that made him think of the rattlesnake somebody had seen out here just two nights ago. “They come for the warmth,” that’s how Norm had put it, “—and you can deal with that or you can kill ’em, skin ’em and eat ’em, but then you’ll have bad snake karma your whole life and maybe into the next one, and do you really want that?”