The Butterfly Kid

by Chester Anderson

  Sean was there before me, looking just about as puzzled as usual, but Mike was still involved with the machines. “C’mon,” I yelled. “Let’s split, man.”

  The smoke was getting thicker, the ozone was stinging my nose and eyes, and the fires were beginning to crackle a lot. I didn’t really want to stick around much longer. “Kurland!” I yelled again, but still Mike didn’t move. Dropping my boots, I ran over and shook him. Hard.

  “Oh,” dazedly. “Sorry ’bout that.”

  He came peacefully.

  Halfway down the stairs I remembered my boots, Too late. The fire was already roaring, and the fourth floor didn’t seem to be a healthy place to visit anymore. Those boots’d always been too tight anyhow.

  When we reached the street, Mike said, “Torture machines?” He was still pretty dazed.

  “When I tell you about it, you’ll cry,” I promised. “Sean, why don’t you hail us a cab?”

  Once he’d caught a whiff of us, the cabby didn’t want our business, but it was too late. We were already aboard and in motion. He turned his air conditioner up as high as it’d go and drove on, muttering Brooklynoid curses.

  “Hey, you stink,” I told Mike. He was coming out of his trance.

  “That’s cool. So do you. What happened?”

  “When I tell you,” I repeated, “you will weep.” Then I told him.

  I was still telling him when we pulled up in front of the pad. I gave the cabby a five without interrupting my report and didn’t linger for the change. All the way up the stairs I talked and into the living room. Still talking, I tore off my stained and fragrant clothes and ran for the shower.

  “Yeee!” Sativa screamed.

  “Sorry.” I jumped in. She yelped and jumped out. “My need is greater than thine,” I explained. Then I went on with the report.

  Mike took a shower next, and then Sean, so I remained in the bathroom, talking a blue and lobster-ridden streak.

  When, mod-ishly garbed in paisley towels, we returned to the living room, I was still talking.

  “Hmph!” Sativa snorted. “Men!” She stomped off to finish her bath. We sat down and I continued to talk. It was a long story.

  I wound it up over my second plate of poached eggs and kelp. “And that’s it. They’re on their way to the reservoir now. What are we going to do?”

  “Is it okay if I just, you know, go back to Fort Worth?”

  Mike sniffed. Then, “We’ve got to stop them. Obviously.”

  “Groovy,” I observed. “With what army?”

  Sean said, “I’m gonna call the cops. Right now!”

  “Cool it,” Mike cooled him. “They’ll never believe us. And all the evidence is going up in smoke, too. We just have to do it ourselves, that’s all.”

  I repeated my question.

  “Easy,” he said. “There are how many — twelve of them, right?”

  “Plus Laszlo.”

  “Twelve and a half then. So we’ll get all our friends to help.” He sounded perfectly rational — but our friends? “We’ll outnumber them, for one thing. And we shouldn’t have any trouble anyway, not if these lobster critters are as nonviolent as you claim they are.”

  “Oh, they’re nonviolent, all right. But I don’t know, Michael: our friends?”

  “Who else?”

  “You mean Andrew Blake? Gary the Frog? Our friends? Are you sure?”

  “Well, some of our friends. I’ll start calling them now.”

  18

  HAVE YOU ever tried to talk a bunch of hippies into helping you save the world? Forget it. Next time I save the world, by Starky, I’m gonna do it solo. Easier that way, less work.

  To begin with, it was a little after three on a warm summer’s Wednesday afternoon, which meant that almost everyone was hanging out in Washington Square and almost no one was home to answer vidiphone calls. When you’re trying to collect an army in a hurry, it slows you down something fierce if Andrew Blake’s the only person you can reach by vidiphone.

  “I don’t believe it,” Andrew told us several times. “You’ve all been taking chemicals. You’re on a trip. It’s pretty, but I don’t believe a word of it.”

  That’s the sort of thing that discourages people who’d otherwise be more than glad to save the whole world daily, twice on Sundays.

  I tried to explain. I knew better, but I tried. “We’re not on anything, Andy. We’re not even high. This is really Happening, cross my heart. It’s real. It’s just like your halo, only worse.”

  “Halo?” His voice changed from bassoon to oboe. “What halo?”

  So I gave up. When Andrew doesn’t believe in something, he’s thorough. I did persuade him to meet us at The Garden of Eden at five, though, which would’ve been an accomplishment if it weren’t that he was planning to be there at five anyhow.

  So we hit the street, the four of us. Sativa was now a member of the Army of Deliverance. While we were phoning, she’d had her daily mystical experience and decided it was her karma to save the world single-handed, but she was willing to let us come along and watch. Sativa always appreciates an audience.

  Except for a half million strangers, St. Mark’s Place was empty. We’d expected that. But we wasted half an hour in Tompkins Square discovering that it was empty too, which we hadn’t expected. Tompkins Square was home turf for the Psychedelic Conspiracy that year, full of almost everyone we knew.

  “Dere aw oba dere inna Village,” the Good Humor Man growled. “Dere aw oba dere watchin’a balLett, y’unnastan? All dem dencers.”

  So Sativa, little Sean, and I trotted west on St. Mark’s Place, moving much too quickly for the temperature and trying not to notice, and Mike cut out for the garage, two blocks away in the other direction, to pick up The Tripouts’ bus.

  That was our most treasured possession, that bus. It was an old Army surplus ground-effect troop carrier, made in 1969 or so and obsolete before delivery, that we’d converted into a mobile rock-n-roll dream pad. It could seat sixteen and sleep dozens, depending on how friendly they were, and was equipped with hot and cool running everything. The roof was a sun deck, planted with grass and dandelions. The back third was a fully stocked practice studio, complete with battery-powered duplicates of our regular instruments that couldn’t play as loudly as the real things but were otherwise quite satisfactory. We’d toured the Midwest in it last summer, getting citations for maintaining a nuisance (the blowers weren’t too well shielded, and produced authentic hurricane effects uninterruptedly as long as the motors were on), disturbing the peace (the battery-powered instruments weren’t all that quiet), and general suspicion (the bus was painted in the highest psychedelic style, even to glowing in the dark) in every town we passed through. It was a great old bus. Well, it’d do to get our army to the reservoir, at least.

  Washington Square contained one avant-garde ballet company — free-form antigrav dancing to memorized but unplayed music — one dissociated light show that couldn’t quite cope with the afternoon sun, and the entire population of the Greater New York region. The piquant tang of caprylic acid hung over everything like a panning review.

  We stopped in the uncrowded east side of the park and planned. “Separate,” I told my trusty aides. “We’ll work through the crowd individually, Otherwise we won’t get through at all. Look for The People.” That’s what we called our expanded peer group in those days, when we were still a minority. “Tell them — it’s four-ten now — tell them to meet us in The Garden at five. Got that?”

  They had it.

  “Groovy. And be sure you’re there at five, too. Don’t forget.”

  They promised to be there.

  “Then there’s nothing left to tell you but Good Luck,” I told them. Then I yelled, “Charge!” and we charged.

  The Square was as jammed as a subway at rush hour. Everyone was pushed into the most intimate and compromising physical contact with everyone else whilst nervously pretending there was nothing going on — a kind of casually erotic situation
of which I’m generally quite fond, but hell to hunt for people in. You can’t push through such a press, you either have to climb over it (which will rapidly impair your popularity) or get down on your hands and knees and crawl through a forest of anonymous legs (not the best way to find specific people, unless you’ve made a fairly close study of legs).

  Naturally, I crawled. Sean, I later learned, tried the other approach, but was soon converted to mine. Anyhow, I crawled, and no one even tried to kick me. America is losing its spirit of fun.

  By a winning blend of luck and intuition, I located Stewart Fiske and Pat Gerstein standing together near Holley’s bust, just beyond the stage where all that unheard music was going on. Stu’s boots didn’t match — same color, nothing else the same — and Pat was barefooted.

  I popped up in front of them, told them what was happening, explained as little as possible, and got them to promise to meet me at The Garden. Then, after a quick look at the dancers — they were awful — I submerged again and went on with my search.

  Sativa and Sean were going through much the same routine, with only minor variations. Sean, for instance, had his hand stepped on by a moderately ugly girl. “I think she done it on purpose, man. You know, like tryin’ to strike up a conversation. Didn’t hurt me none.”

  Sativa discovered three male teenyboppers squatting in a circle in the middle of the leg-forest, unconcernedly smoking what they firmly believed was marijuana, which was still illegal then. “They were nice. Pretty! They wanted to turn me on, but I told them I only smoke pot.”

  Michael, too, had his share of quaint adventures, wrestling the Tripsmobile — our bus — from the far east crosstown to MacDougal Street and fighting against impressive odds to park it within walking distance of The Garden.

  “She’s still got a tendency to try to go over traffic instead of through it. In fact, she got halfway up a police car before I caught on. I thought she was just being friendly.”

  Nevertheless, we were all safely established in The Garden of Eden’s supercooled darkness by quarter to five, and almost everyone we wanted was either there or coming. It was really quite a feat, considering.

  19

  “SERIOUSLY, CHESTER,” droned the double reed of Andrew Blake, “What’s this really all about? You can tell Me.”

  “Wait a bit.” I was tired of repeating my long, involved story, and even more tired of trying to condense it for popular consumption. “Mike’ll tell you all about it. Just wait till five, okay?”

  The Kallikak box was playing our old arrangement of “Love Sold in Doses,” and I was trying to remember the arrangement I’d pulled on Ktch and his fellow crustaceans last night, but I couldn’t. In fact, I couldn’t even remember the tune, not even while I was listening to it. This was a very odd sensation.

  “Chester? Mr. Anderson?” That sweet and worried voice belonged to Karen Greenbaum, who was still going around in not quite circles with Saint Andrew, though by now you’d think she’d know better. “Is something wrong?”

  “Wrong?”

  “You look so — Funny. You know.”

  “Oh. I’m just trying to remember something that I know too well to recall.”

  That seemed to satisfy her.

  The Garden was full of our people, a professionally motley crew, with more coming in all the time. It was rather flattering to see how large a crowd our people were. I mused idly that it would pay some Village businessman to open a coffeehouse catering pretty exclusively to our crowd, then I remembered that that’s what The Garden of Eden was and gave up musing for Lent. It was three minutes to five.

  I turned to Michael the Theodore Bear and said, “Do you have some kind of speech worked out?” He looked worried. If it were anyone else, I’d say he looked nervous.

  “That’s the trouble,” he fretted. “I’ve got three of ’em, and I don’t know which one to use.”

  “Don’t sweat it. You’ll probably have a chance to use ’em all.”

  Sean and Sativa were holding hands and things, oblivious to the crowd and The Garden and Sativa’s current karma — unless maybe Sean was part of that — an island of horny serenity in a lake of curious hipsters. Stu, Pat, and Kevin were huddled off in a nearby corner singing four-part harmony.

  Four-part harmony? That brought me up. Oh: they had Little Micky with them. It’s fairly hard to see Little Micky when there’s anybody else in the room, unless you’re looking for him. He’s quite small. (He was also singing flat, which made him even harder to see.)

  Sandi Heller and her old man Leo were sitting with a bunch of people named David several tables away from mine. Leo was grinning like a dentist’s testimonial. Sandi, assisted by years of drama study and dance experience, was totally failing to communicate with me by means of beautifully expressive gestured and neat pantomimes. Nicely picturesque.

  “What’s happening?” I yelled to her when it became obvious that she really did want to tell me something.

  “Mutter jumble mutter garble Baby,” she explained.

  “Oh.”

  And then it was five o’clock. Joe pulled the plug on the kallikak box, which had next to no effect on the noise level of the room. Michael, having previously obtained permission to do so, climbed up on the table. He spread his hands wide like an old-time revivalist and said, “Ladies and gentlemen!” in stentorian tones I’d never before suspected he possessed.

  Nothing happened.

  He said it again, even more loudly, and nothing continued to happen. Somehow he wasn’t communicating. He tried it again, to be fair, and when it didn’t work that time either, he puffed out his chest, stood on tiptoe, arched his spine, threw back his head, opened his mouth too wide, and hollered, “COOL IT!” so loudly the whole room rang like a cymbal.

  Instant silence.

  Highly gratified and showing it, Mike launched into whatever speech he settled on, but most unusually oddly. His mouth moved convincingly, his gestures seemed apt and well chosen, but no sound came out. This lasted for what would have been one and a half sentences, during which his face went through an amazing series of changes on the general theme of absolute dismay. Then he bent over, brought his lips as close to my ear as he could without exciting comment, and whispered tonelessly, “You tell them. I can’t talk. Lost my voice.” I was careful not to laugh.

  So I got up on the table, waited for Michael to get down and some whispering to fade, and then with great solemnity said, “Laszlo Scott has finally gone and done it.”

  I told them about the invasion, playing Laszlo up and the lobsters down. They knew Laszlo, after all, and were ready to believe anything villainous of him, even to consorting with blue lobsters that they wouldn’t’ve believed in otherwise. I dwelt at length on the horrible consequences of turning everybody on to the Reality Pill.

  “Remember what happened last Saturday? Butterflies and chaos and confusion and the National Guard and what have you? Remember that? And that was just a handful of people high, less than a dozen. I mean, all it took was one cat from Texas to make all those butterflies!

  “Now, what if Everyone was like that? The whole city of New York, ten million people, all of ’em high on Reality Pills at the same time. And it only took one cat to make all those butterflies. Think about that.”

  A few of them whistled approvingly at the notion, but then it sank in. They didn’t like the idea any more than I did. It’s nice to have friends who think the way you do.

  Then I told them what the lobsters were planning to do, heavily stressing Laszlo’s willing treason against the human race. I don’t think I ever quite mentioned that the lobsters looked like lobsters. “Nonhumanoid blue aliens,” is the closest I recall coming to a description of them. Laszlo or not, this particular audience might think that giant blue talking lobsters were a bit too much to be believed.

  I was speaking quite rapidly, but very clearly and with great intensity, and I had the crowd in the palm of my hand all the way. Indeed, I was doing much better than I had any righ
t to expect. Even Andrew Blake looked about to be convinced.

  So I swung into a glowing peroration, saying — almost chanting — “And no one in the whole world knows what’s happening but us! Nobody’s hip enough to believe it but us! By the time anybody else can figure out what’s happening, it’ll be too late for everyone.

  “We’re all alone with this thing, babies, and here is where it’s at: We-Have-Got-To-Save-The-World-Ourselves! Us! Save the world from Laszlo Scott! Save…”

  That’s as far as I got. They were cheering and yelling and shouting things, and it didn’t seem worth my while to go on. I’d been talking for under ten minutes.

  I bent down and said, “Hey, Michael, voice back yet?”

  “Just about.” Actually, not quite. He could be heard, but his voice sounded tattered and shopworn.

  “I didn’t mean to get them all so excited,” I said. “I just wanted to get enough volunteers to fill the bus. Now what’ll we do?”

  “Pick,” his voice was really pitiful, “and choose. Tell the rest to alert the authorities.”

  “Groovy. That’ll keep ’em hopping.”

  And that’s the way we did it. When the noise died out, I recruited the mixed bag of warriors Mike and I had tried to phone a few hours back, sixteen heads including ourselves, and sent the rest, some forty-five or fifty, jabbering hippies, out to warn the unsuspecting world.

  And then it was five forty-five, ninety minutes till sunset and darkness.

  ’It’s time, gentlemen, it’s time,” said Michael, beginning to regain some vocal strength. “Let’s get moving.” And off we went.

  “Hey, Andy,” Joe stopped me at the cash register. “Jeez, that was really Some Show you put on there, Andy. Honest to God.”

  “You liked it?”

  “Like it? You was Great, Andy. Great. I ain’t never heard nothin’ like that in my whole life. Jesus Christ! You know what? You almost got Me believin’ all that stuff. Honest to God!”