by Jake Packard
Finally, all that hot air paid off. But it wasn’t without the usual intrigue. It happened one Saturday night. Grandma was away with Herbie’s infant dad, off on a visit to Amherst to visit her Mom and Pop, who grew to accept the fact that their hippie daughter was a single mother without a job or a future they could see. They were relieved that at least she didn’t marry Bullmoose.
Alone in Perry Street, Pranan drifted down to the basement where Bullmoose and his band practiced from time to time when they had enough grass. He turned on the PA and stood trembling in front of the mic that was set up for Bullmoose to sing into as he banged away on his Fender Stratocaster pretending he was Bob Weir. Yes, amplification could take the meekest of musical attempts and turn it into something to be reckoned with. That’s what volume is good for. Pranan stood there spellbound and blew wavering and airy sounds into the electronic night, morphing himself into Jethro Tull. He opened his eyes and, to his full surprise, there was Lorraine who had just come home from flirting with her partner-in-crime bartender from the Greek restaurant on Mass. Ave where she sometimes worked. She had batted her eyes and giggled her way into a free souvlaki with dolmades and all the Pepsi syrup she could drink. Lorraine smiled at Pranan, and her teeth and the whites of her eyes glowed in the black light like some strobed-out vampire nymphet gone wild. To Pranan it was sex appeal saturated beyond imagination. Hey man, she said over the hum of the low-level feedback, not bad, not bad, where did you learn to do that? He smiled and shrugged and actually guffawed, and blew another triplet into the mic. They both laughed. A sweet, shared, first-time bond, first-time chemical transaction, and it all seemed so natural, let’s get it on.
Just at that moment Bullmoose appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Far out, he said, dig that crazy flute. He grabbed his Strat and plugged it into his Fender tube amp, banged out a power E chord and gleamed, let’s jam, brother Pranan. Lorraine, much to Pranan’s surprise, gave a rebel yell and, reaching into her handbag, gave them each a tab of pure blotter acid that looked like a corner torn off of a piece of common copy paper. Pranan looked at her in dismay. She laughed and said there were enough milligrams dissolved into his piece to resurrect the entire Mayan Empire. Bullmoose swallowed his without hesitation, which brought a lecherous growling sound from somewhere deep inside Lorraine’s throat, like she was a gasoline-starved Harley Davidson, needing to be gassed up. Not to be outdone, and sensing some barnyard competition about to begin, Pranan, the rooster, quickly shoved the tasteless piece of paper into his mouth and swallowed it down. Lorraine smiled and backed away to watch the show, her unbounding desire directed to these boys of the basement.
Pranan was thunderstruck with his own stupidity. He never jammed before. He didn’t know how to jam. He didn’t even know how to play the flute. To top it off he never took acid before. He has seen those high hippie clowns who took acid and stared obsessively at spots on the wall or laughed incessantly until they cried unremittingly. He certainly didn’t want to turn into that clod who stood naked, hunched over in the Cambridge Commons during the local Sunday afternoon rock concerts, drooling and holding onto his own dick as if afraid it was going to fall off. To make matters worse, the instant Bullmoose plugged in, assorted freaks from all over the neighborhood started wandering down the stairs to check out what was happening. Wow, “far out,” they all said. Joints got rolled in high frequency light speed time, Lorraine helping out with her share of expertise, and they were passed around with bottles of Wild Turkey and Ripple and Southern Comfort. Before he knew it there was a drummer and a bass player mixing in and some big electric sound was getting ready to go down.
All Pranan cared about was Lorraine. He watched her settle down on some pillows in the back of the basement to groove on the music, her long legs wrapped in a colorful peasant skirt, looking like the headliner in a pictorial for Playboy’s issue of hippie girls of the Boston area. There was nothing this girl could do or wear that could take away her claim to being the sexiest chick in any room she was in. Amazingly, as assorted longhaired and sensitive types approached Lorraine to check her gas gauge, for the first time ever she completely ignored them. She only had eyes for Bullmoose and Pranan, her roommates, jamming buddies, world travelers, and defenders of the magic ring.
The acid that they all took a little earlier started warping things. Bullmoose took a very long time to tune his guitar. Even under sober conditions, it never sounded right to him. Especially the B string. Pranan stood in the flickering strobe watching Bullmoose turn different shades of blue and green as the string went flat and sharp and flat again. The guitar was wrapped around Bullmoose’s body like a boa constrictor from Guyana trying to squeeze itself into tune. Bullmoose was huffing and puffing and tightening the string and loosening it and then tightening again and snap, it broke. That’s where real time ended and the immutable laws you can always count on took over.
A groove kicked in and for some reason the backbeat seemed to reciprocate with a love and a lick for anything the bass had to say. For some unknown reason this all made sense to Pranan, who had yet to read the Kama Sutra. Bullmoose made some genuine magic by plucking one of his five strings left, somehow producing a symphony hall environment of just one note for Pranan to explore, breath by breath. Pranan could feel Lorraine’s energy reaching out like some sultry double helix in love with her own design. He leaned into the mic and heard himself start playing things thaumaturgic inside the booming sonic architecture that Bullmoose was building. His prestidigital flute morphed into an extension of not only his lips but also his throat and tongue that looked real weird to his tripping eyes but sounded all right. The street hippies, always looking for a free buzz, seemed to genuinely dig it.
Most importantly, Pranan felt the current of intentional electrons from Lorraine’s magnetic blue eyeballs zero in on him. He felt it tingle in his very special human place that adds soul to mere particles of matter, where the union of DNA, the stuff of eons, and DNA, the immediate message, gathers the most impact, reaches critical density and explodes as it recreates over and over again the original secret to why the universe needs eyes and ears to appreciate itself. In the midst of all this, he knew he needed to remember how he was playing what he was playing, so he could do it again.
After that, he couldn’t remember anything. Until later, when he was pulling out of the long Perry Street driveway, behind the wheel of the VW minivan where Herbie’s dad had been conceived several sun cycles ago as Grandma surfed the immortal and incomparable waves of purple. Bullmoose was on the passenger seat with Lorraine on his lap, tongues burrowing deep down into each other’s throat. But Pranan was not jealous for he knew the night was young. There was going to be time for him. Although her face was lip-locked to Bullmoose, her left hand was mysteriously massaging peewee Pranan, still prisoner, locked up in the crotch of his skin-tight bell-bottom jeans.
It was 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning, and they were rushing to Singing Beach to catch the sunrise over the Atlantic. Pranan, the driver consummate from India, was driving with his own tenuous theory of, what the hey? what the hurry? Every streetlight they passed was a conical light show of infinite variation, every dip and bump in the road a three-dimensional challenge to maneuvering through the ever-evolving wrinkles of inflationary cosmology, and he hadn’t even driven around the block. It was a darn good thing that later on no little blue meanies with flashing red lights stopped this unregistered motor vehicle on Route 128, driven by an illegal alien without a license doing bootleg psychedelics and going only ten miles an hour. There is no limit to the glory and grace of God.
At Manchester-by-the Sea, dashing over sand that whistled with the touch of their feet, they conquered land for Caesar and carved out fiefdoms of their own. As centuries shifted in the Atlantic wind, their tantalizing Guinevere lay breathless before them on the hard dry sand, watching them protect the kingdom as they ran along the dunes fending off dragons and dark sorcerers. Lorraine’s long blond locks were dancing in the breezes blowing in from
the sea. Her lovely long legs were spread outstretched on the sand with the cotton skirt draping between them with barely enough modesty. It lay oh-so-invitingly upon the softest spots of her smooth inner thighs, highlighting the direction to the tunnel to heaven these virile warriors most intended to go. Her marvelous appendages serenaded them as they galloped by on their knightly steeds, like sirens singing, “touch me, don’t touch me, touch me, don’t touch me, lick me.”
A sharp crisp wind accompanied the glorious sun rising out from the mighty sea. The merciful fog rolled back in, darkening the early morn just enough to allow them to sneak back under cover into a sleeping Cambridge town.
Back in Perry Street, Lorraine undressed in her room. Her skin tingled and goosebumped as if it was on an independent search for a perfect match that would smooth every neuron in her body into one undulating wave of passion that could drown out every other need her soul had ever ached for, including painting garbage. The light brushing sound each piece of clothing made, as she removed them and dropped them to the wooden floor, echoed like a lone coyote in insufferable loneliness, howling from a desert peak into the glistening night for her mate to return home and bring her unbounded delight.
There in the early morning light, adrift in a sea of a first-time borderless and exotic sexual fury, Bullmoose stood shoulder to shoulder with Pranan in the bathroom across the hall from Lorraine’s boudoir, both with the same empire-saving idea, which wasn’t just to watch Lorraine pee. Behind the door in front of them was a nude, unbelievably sexy twenty-one-year-old woman in wild passion, whose wanton erotic aura could have been registered as a landscape point of light in the universal ledger of the stars. The smell of urgent sex permeated the entire house and billowed out into the street. Every united blood vessel in each of the two world conquerors was pouring juices into the same location of their young and powerful bodies, their hormones screaming at them to power through the door to where Lorraine was waiting and deliver themselves up to her incalculable concupiscence.
Bullmoose looked at Pranan, in whose eyes he saw the love, power, and destiny. He knew that Pranan, looking back, saw the lust, animal magnetism, and industrialized savage. You never do know what is going to happen next even when you are the one doing it, so, surprising himself in a knightly moment of utter and grand chivalry, smiling his infinitely most famous, and with the greatest of nobility, as if he was passing on the honor in history of finding the Holy Grail, Bullmoose stepped back and let his best buddy go it alone.
Pranan was about to open the door and enter the musky chambers of renowned literary pursuit, where Lorraine was surely putting the finishing touches onto a thick marijuana stogie, when Bullmoose made him pause. He looked him in the eye, tugged the magic ring from off his finger and handed it off with silent ceremony to his best pal in the world, Pranan. “You are going to need it tonight more than me, buddy.”
Bullmoose would always say that she was more than capable of having them both that night, but he didn’t want to ruin it for Pranan. Lorraine to Pranan was more than just a hippie fuck; he wanted her whole thing from bottom to top, inside and out. It was a change your nation, change your religion type of love, that he traveled half way around the world on what seemed like a whim to find. He didn’t need to wake up later that day and find her on her knees with his best friend, Bullmoose.
In that early red morning, wrapped in the soothing northeasterly fog, Lorraine’s searing warmth enveloped his unbounded desire, which in turn pierced right through to a place in her soul that blossomed her life into something so absolutely brand spanking new.
Lorraine of course was ecstatic and in her intuitive heart knew her life had changed within the universal guidelines of number one: nothing can stay the same. Bullmoose was genuinely happy for both of them. It proved once again number two: everything is interconnected. When Grandma got back from Amherst with Herbie’s toddler dad, and watched these two newly connected love birds swooning into each other’s eyes, she relearned with glee all the wisdom of number three: you never know what is going to happen next. And the Defender of the Magic Ring from Mahabalipuram, India, who grew up everyday to the sound of clink-clink-clink cutting through the roar of the wind and the pounding of the sea, who came all the way to Massachusetts on a wing and a prayer as the chauffeur and best friend of the man who might have been the fully undocumented founder of the Mile High Club, where he refashioned the flute to insure the biological success of his own individual genetic existence, had finally gotten it. Pranan now fully believed and understood the count-on-able rule number four: there is truly no limit to the glory and grace of God.
# # #
But of course, Grandma had to have the last word, reminding them all that you have to be very careful with the ones you love. The story of Uncle Pranan and Aunt Lorraine, obviously toned down to a PG rating for young Herbie’s ears, always made him wonder why Grandma had to throw a little cold water over everyone after a great romantic story. After all, she was anything but a cynic. As an adult, he thought maybe this was one place her conservative and pragmatic side showed through because of the trail of her own love life, and her difficult-to-manage entanglement with a bucking king alpha moose she met one night in a summer storm. Sometimes he wondered, when she was alone late at night, or maybe hushed around the kitchen table with Aunt Lorraine in some late afternoon evaluations of their interwoven lives, if she ever reappraised some of her earlier choices, whether she ever second-guessed those long ago instincts that bless us in youth and curse us in the years to come. Or maybe she was just reminding us all that even after happy endings, nothing stays the same.
# # #
The city moved on after its first view of Salem, and with an enormous outpouring of spiritual love caused by the mass mutual witnessing of a modern miracle it seemed like a happy ending indeed. But, heedful always of what his Grandma really meant to say, Herbie acted without delay.
He had a head start on everyone in the city when it came to seeing miracles. As clearheaded as he felt he had become, the miracle recovery seemed to make everyone else a bit woozy, in a giddy way, as though some psycho-bomb had gone off.
It was easy for him to get the stuff he needed out of the equipment room. He didn’t even have to sign it out. The night guy, who was previously known to everyone to be a genuine prick, was glued to his TV watching the Salem clip Herbie had shot in Shantypark, over and over again. The station had put it on a loop and the ignorant brute was dumbfounded with fascination, as if once wasn’t enough, there might be more the next time it went around. He didn’t even look up or bat an eyelash at Herbie as he walked out of the room with two heavy equipment cases filled with remote field production gear. The man was in suspended animation staring at his screen, free fall talking into his head-gear, and non-stop banging out a constant stream of instant messages on his computer. His immediate response to today’s amazing phenomenon was to talk to everyone on his buddy list on every device he owned about how he felt about what he just saw.
At the ABCNN garage, the story was the same. The company guard had simply upped and left his post and could be seen in the locker room near the public toilet by the exit ramp to Broadway, glued to the station’s ongoing transmission, babbling nonstop to the mechanics and parking attendants. His response to the complete rearrangement of reality was to be hand slapping and back patting and talking jive with his pack of dogs about the coming kingdom of heaven.
Strange, but peaceful, like an eerie party with no rules, no form, but everyone at their weirdest. Herbie went about doing what he knew he had to do as fast as he could do it. You don’t know what’s going to happen next.
He pulled up and double-parked his commandeered Hummer outside the station’s perimeter, waiting. The security was anything but secure. Every single one of the small army of private guards had left their posts and were off partying in the streets. Within seconds Maria emerged from the building with Jamal. She immediately saw Herbie as if she was expecting him to be right where he was,
and they darted across the street. In an instant they were all in the protective vehicle rolling away.
Herbie smiled at Maria, a sweet smile. She smiled back to him feeling so new and fresh, and cozy warm indeed.
Seconds after they pulled out and off into traffic, General Pellet’s BMW limo screeched to a halt in front of the station.
Marty and Ira, descended from a long line of money changers and usurers, had recovered from their spiritual experience enough to know it was time to cash in. Marty was already on the computer in their adjoining offices logging in the non-stop hits for the orders coming worldwide for Herbie’s Salem Jones clip, available now with the few amazing moments spliced in when the biopod in the studio revealed the healing. He heard a knock on his office door. Without stopping the directing of the uploads of these spectacular sequences to markets around the world, he heard General Pellet enter. He heard Ira make his usual pleasantries to the general, and then he was dead before his ears could hear the gun go off into the back of his head
* * * * *
Maria and Jamal
Squirrel killers on every corner tried to manage the traffic going uptown towards Shantypark. The televised images of Salem were drawing people closer to where everyone knew he had to be. Traffic congestion in the area was never a problem before the miracle, because ordinary people didn’t go to Shantypark unless it was in an instance of being thrown in and not allowed back out. Now, more than a couple hundred thousand newly energized Salem proselytes were already encamped in the streets of no man’s land immediately surrounding the park. The area had the feel of an outdoor church revival in an oncoming electrical storm, lightning striking the ground here would seem a likely occurrence. Ad hoc prayer meetings chorusing with hallelujahs were gathered around metal garbage cans lit on fire for physical warmth against the unusual cold. Choirs from neighboring cathedrals singing religious hymns written and produced for other generations with different considerations were performing impromptu in the streets and on the sidewalks. The edgy and disjointed Christmas Eve atmosphere was at the same time clogging the flow of all vehicular motion, and it was hard not to notice the menacing glints from the squirrel killers who patrolled in large groups with guns ready and unlocked on their shoulders. But the soldiers were tolerant of the relative peace the mob was exhibiting. They didn’t need to kill Jones freaks yet, until of course they got the word from the general.
