Summer of Love, a Time Travel

by Lisa Mason

  Stovepipe nods, but the Lizard is having none of it. “I don’t dig this, man. They gotta be taught a lesson. Them and their friends. Nobody screws with us.”

  “Haw,” Stovepipe chuckles.

  The Lizard presses the blade. Starbright closes her eyes.

  Ruby swings the Walther from one pocket, the magazine from the other pocket. In one stroke, she clips in the magazine the way the gun dealer showed her, and aims at the Lizard’s face.

  “Let her go, sonny, or I’ll blow your ugly head off.”

  “Haw, haw,” Stovepipe guffaws. “She’s a love shucker, man. She won’t shoot,” he says to the Lizard. “Go ahead, teach the stupid chick a lesson.”

  Ruby fires.

  The bullet grazes the Lizard’s ear, which sprays blood all over his shoulder. He makes no sound, but drops the switchblade and claps his hand to the side of his head.

  Ruby suddenly understands the graffiti stenciled on the sidewalk. A bullet shot in the air comes down somewhere. You better believe it.

  Chi scrambles across the living room for his jacket, the maser.

  Stovepipe scoops up the switchblade, seizes the Lizard by his elbow, and hustles them both out the kitchen door.

  Ruby chases after them.

  They clatter down the back stairs, disappearing into the night. Police sirens wail, and bongo drums beat.

  A woman is shouting, “It’s hard, it’s hard, it’s so damn hard!”

  Chi comes and helps her back inside and bolts the door shut.

  The damp night makes her throat sore. But will Ruby ever stop shouting?

  August 28, 1967

  Chocolate George’s Wake

  16

  Penny Lane

  Badger and the Bear clink cans of Coors and chugalug beer in one great swallow. Foam streams from their mouths, drenching their beards and dappling their denim vests that say Hells Angels on the back. Badger tosses his can over his shoulder. The Bear crushes his in his fist. They each reach for another from the tub of ice at the back of the funeral parlor, pop the tops with a church key, and guzzle.

  Susan claps her hands and cheers. Chi folds his arms over his chest and scowls. She loves it when he gets hassled by funky old 1967. She threads her hand through the crook of his arm and finds his hand. He wears no prophylak, ha!

  “We’ve got to go to Chocolate George’s wake,” she whispers as they stand at the back of the Daphne Funeral Home behind a hundred Hells Angels in full colors and their old ladies in ratted hairdos. “We’re talking about political solidarity.”

  After the private funeral service for Charles George Hendricks, Jr., also known as Chocolate George, there will be a wake at Lindley Meadow. The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Double Barrel Boogie Band are playing. It will be a scene. The last big scene of the Summer of Love.

  Susan got an invite to Chocolate’s funeral on account of her chalk drawing at the corner of Haight and Shrader. She’d been practicing hands after Chi bought her Gray’s Anatomy and was finally getting them right, thumb and all, when she heard the news. She went down to the spot where Chocolate died and drew a portrait as best as she could recall him—his dark eyes, his fur hat. She drew him astride a horse with wings, one hand holding the reins, the other extended in a peace sign. As an afterthought, she drew motorcycle wheels where horse’s hooves would be, which wound up looking kind of weird. Hairy Harry, one of Chocolate’s best brothers, saw her squatting on the sidewalk, putting the finishing touches on her masterpiece.

  The day after, Sonny Barger, president of the California chapter, rumbled by on his hog as she and Chi strolled in the park. He threw an invite at her and sped away.

  “Political solidarity, my ass,” Chi whispers back. He’s so tall, the Angels don’t try to bully him and, anyway, they all know he’s Susan’s old man. But his hand is ice-cold in hers. “That’s revolutionary-for-the-weekend shuck, Starbright, and you know it. Don’t get radical with me.”

  He glares at the barbarian horde. Isn’t that just like Chi, uptight about the least little thing, though a shiver needles down her spine, too. The air seems thicker around a hundred Hells Angels. They bend the light, like demons of this Now. They are ripe with funk, boasting great unkempt beards and an inimitable attitude.

  At the front of the funeral parlor, Chocolate George lies in state, white as wax, as noble in his final repose as a Cossack prince. His fur hat covers his shattered skull where he hit the pavement after colliding with a tourist’s Ford sedan at one in the morning. Quarts of his namesake and favorite beverage—chocolate milk—line the coffin. His wife sits in the front pew, her bowed head covered by a black lace mantilla. His seven children—Chocolate had seven kids!—sit behind a screen that shields them from the rest of the rowdy congregation.

  “Revolutionary shuck,” she scolds Chi. “You sound just like Ruby.”

  “It’s not political solidarity. It’s a party. A Hells Angels party. We don’t have to go. I don’t think we should. You want to run into Stovepipe and the Lizard? That’s just the sort of scene they’d make.”

  “But Chi, Parks and Recreation is trying to ban free music in the park. We should go show our support. The ban is an attack on the Haight-Ashbury. On our right to be free.” It’s strange and exciting to feel like an outlaw for wanting to dance in the park.

  “Your right to be free,” he says sarcastically. “What about the interests of the people who live by the park? What about the noise? Trespassers trampling and littering their lawns? See, every time you talk about your freedom, you have to consider the next person’s freedom.” His voice is growing so loud, an Angel lady standing next to them in her leather bra, jeans, and cowboy boots shoots him a poisonous look. He lowers his voice. “There’s got to be a balance. The cosmicists—”

  “Chi, it’s the last free concert of the Summer of Love. I want to hear the Dead. I want to hear Big Brother. I even want to hear the Double Barrel Boogie Band. I haven’t heard them play in ages. Besides, Penny Lane might be there. I really need to see her.”

  Since their meeting at the Blue Unicorn Café, Nance has avoided her. Her promise to get the rest of Susan’s money from Stan, forgotten. Susan doesn’t care whether Nance gets her money. She cares about the way things have turned out. Nance was the reason she ran away to the Haight-Ashbury. Nance was the spark. The inspiration. And she’s seen her friend only twice during the Summer of Love.

  Just one more time. If she could see Nance just one more time, maybe she could make something right out of the bad feeling between them.

  Chi refuses to meet her pleading eyes.

  “Be that way,” she says, pouting. She kicks at the hem of the long, black velvet dress she bought at Mnasidika with her last twenty bucks. The twenty bucks, she realizes with a twinge of guilt, that Nance gave her at the Blue Unicorn. “I’ll go by myself. I’m not afraid.”

  But she knows her threat is empty. She goes nowhere without Chi by her side. He won’t let her, not until the Hot Dim Spot closes and no more Prime Probabilities can collapse. He says the Dim Spot will close any day now. But until it does, she’s in constant danger. The nearer they approach the closing, the more dangerous things become.

  Susan finally feels the truth of it. Chi’s paranoia is contagious. He even stands outside the bathroom while she bathes. “You okay?” he says through the door from time to time. “Why don’t you come in and see for yourself?” she calls from the shower. Naughty. But he’s so respectful, she can’t help but tease him. He even curls up on blankets outside her room while she sleeps. Ruby raises her eyebrows, but says nothing.

  Susan is convinced: reality could shake loose at any moment. A hole in spacetime, caused by a t-port gone wrong in the future, could let in the Other Now. And that demon? It’s coming for her.

  But what about the night Stovepipe and the Lizard broke into Ruby’s kitchen and held a switchblade to her throat? Why didn’t the demon manifest then?

  “Ruby had a gun,” Chi said, not m
eeting her eyes. Meaning he’s trying to sound as if he knows the answer, but he’s really not sure. “We know from the Archives a lot of local people were buying guns because of the murders of Shob and Superspade, rising burglaries, general apprehension. So Ruby was part of a macro trend. Probability physics supports the notion that Prime Probabilities are reduced in the presence of a macro.”

  “He held a knife to my throat! I felt the blade!”

  “Yes, but because of the macro, the event didn’t generate enough uncertainty to attract your demon. Even though the Lizard seemed threatening.”

  “Seemed threatening! I was terrified!”

  He took her hand and kissed it. “Let me tell you a story. One day I went to a track to see a podbot race. A field of twelve bots, really beautiful craftwork. There was a titanium sphere with two dozen hoofs sticking out in every direction. A one-legged hopper with a foot like a giant duck. A couple of quadpods, one styled like a unicorn, the other a chimera. The sun shone through the dome. And they were off! The sphere and the unicorn raced neck and neck. Something like neck and neck. But just before the finish line, a flagpole on the railing cast a shadow across the track. The sphere leapt over that shadow! Its perceptuals thought the shadow was real. It leapt and it stumbled and it lost by a nose. Something like a nose. I’ll never forget that. It leapt over a shadow, and it lost the race.” He shook his head. “Lost me a bundle, too.”

  Susan got angry. “A switchblade at my jugular vein is not a shadow, Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco!”

  “But in this timeline, it was, Starbright. It was just like that shadow.”

  What is just a shadow, Susan wonders now, and what will really slit your throat?

  Sonny Barger strides to the front of the funeral parlor and stands beside the coffin. He gestures for silence. “See, I’m gonna rap about the future. The outlaw of a fat society, man, is the dude of the future.”

  “Tell it, Sonny!”

  “What they call the rugged individualist is the cat who is our next hero. Dig Caesar. Dig Napoleon. Dig Alexander the Great.”

  “Great balls o’ fire!”

  “Those cats were outlaws,” Barger says. “They, like, took over and ruled the world, man.”

  “Right,” Chi whispers. “A scheming politician, a voracious general, and a brutal conqueror.”

  “Ssh!” Susan and the Angel lady hiss at him in unison.

  “So wherever you are now, brother George,” Barger says, “ramble on, man. Ramble on.”

  “Chocolate was cool,” Susan whispers to Chi. “He never hurt anyone. I heard he volunteered at the Recreation Center for the Handicapped.”

  “Volunteered twelve years,” the Angel lady snaps. “He loved them little kids. He’d trash anyone who laid a hand on ‘em.”

  Sonny Barger bends over the coffin and kisses Chocolate George’s cheek. Then, with scattered grumbling and nervous giggling, grim mouths and hard eyes, the Angels and their ladies file past the coffin. Some touch or kiss the corpse and lay more things inside the coffin. When Susan files past to pay her last respects, she sees joints and tabs and pints of Wild Turkey, flowers, a switchblade and a pair of brass knuckles. How she remembers the barbarian in the fur hat that first day of the Summer of Love who sang to her, “First there is a Starbright.” She tucks her tribute in the coffin: a Hershey’s milk-chocolate kiss.

  *

  The mile-long phalanx of Harley-Davidson motorcycles follows the hearse out to Cypress Lawn Memorial Park. There they bury Chocolate George with a priest and everything, then parade back to San Francisco. With a growling racket, the hogs wind up and down Dolores Street past ancient palm trees and frightened senoras peeking through their curtains of Spanish lace.

  Susan sits on Chi’s lap in the front seat of the Diggers’ green truck. Gorgon’s pal Cowboy is driving. The flatbed is filled with shaved ice and what looks like a million cans of beer. By the time they arrive at Golden Gate Park, a thousand people are milling around the gentle hills of Lindley Meadow.

  One hill has been staked out by Hells Angels, Gypsy Jokers, Vagabonds, Nomads, Cossacks, Satan’s Slaves, and Misfits. On another hill linger hip folk in their own version of colors, toking, tripping, tooting flutes, ringing cow bells. The Diggers and other tribal chiefs hold court there: Charlie, the Hun, A.J., Slim Jim, and Luther.

  Chi helps her down from the truck and takes her hand.

  Badger and the Bear seize fists of ice from the flatbed and pelt each other with snowballs. Gypsy Jokers join the fracas. Beer is shaken and spewed from cans, punches thrown. Two cops stop and step out of their patrol car, but keep their distance, surveying the scene through their sunglasses. The tension is as thick as the herbal smoke wafting down from Hippie Hill.

  The Grateful Dead ride in like royalty atop an Avis rental truck. Big Brother rolls up. And there, the blue clouds of the Double Barrel van. An electric guitar shrieks, drums roll, a cymbal crashes, trailing off in a sound like waves on a beach. The snowball fight abruptly ends. People start to dance.

  Excitement prickles Susan’s spine. She’s filled with that sense of magic and destiny she’s felt only in the Haight-Ashbury. The last free concert of the Summer of Love. Despite the death and ugliness of the past month, the Scene manifests this afternoon in all its gorgeous lunatic glory. A fitting tribute for Chocolate George, who they say manned the corral for lost children at the first Human Be-In. That was Chocolate’s myth. A kick-ass rebel who drank chocolate milk. The outlaw who cared about kids.

  “Chocolate’s death is like the soul of the Haight-Ashbury dying,” she tells Chi.

  He nods absently and warily looks around, his hand tucked in his pocket where he keeps the maser. She sighs. There’s no point in telling him to take it easy and dig it. She breaks away from his grasp and wanders over to the bands. She’s standing steps away from where she stood two months ago. Two months ago? It feels like five hundred years ago.

  “Say hey, foxy lady. Foxy in black today.” Oh Stan, the mountain man.

  But now Susan knows he’s older than Ruby. He’s just a hip Don Juan whose sleight of hand isn’t very good once you’ve seen through his tricks. What’s wrong with him, anyway? Is he addicted to teenage girls?

  “Where’s Penny Lane?”

  “Don’t I get a hello?”

  Big Brother turns microphones on. With a throaty wail, Janis Joplin launches into “Didn’t He Ramble.”

  “I need to see her.” She peeks through the open doors into the back of the Double Barrel van.

  Stan blocks her view. “Well, well. The flower child is a child no more.”

  No one is inside the van. “Do you know where she is?”

  “A child no more, and with child no more.” He seizes her by the waist and, in an astonishing imitation of that other dirty old man, Mr. G in his art supply store, presses his palm on her belly, down low. “That’s what you were doing when Dirty David saw you at the shyster’s office, isn’t it.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I had to make sure you weren’t turning state’s evidence on me. So I turned Larry on. Clerking in a law office is such a drag. You had an abortion, didn’t you.”

  She twists away. “It’s not your business.”

  He seizes her wrist. “Yeah, it is my business. You were carrying my child, weren’t you, Starbright?” She refuses to answer, but she can’t hide her face. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why should I? It was my decision.”

  “But I would have wanted to share in that decision.”

  “Oh? You want children?”

  “I never did before, but I might have changed my mind.”

  “You would have married me and supported me and the baby while I finished high school?” Susan takes a deep breath. “You would have loved me?”

  “I don’t know about any of those things. But I feel this sense of… .” His eyes turn misty. “This sense of sadness. Like here was a life we created together. With joy. In celebration. And that life
, that human being, never had a chance to happen.”

  “I don’t want to hear this! You rip me off for a hundred dollars. You deceive me.”

  “You’ve deceived me.”

  “You break my heart, and then you cry—cry—over something you wouldn’t have given a damn about!”

  A tear lingers at the corner of his eye. “That baby was a part of me, too.”

  She turns and runs, crashing headlong into Chi hurrying toward her.

  Chi catches her hands. “Starbright! What happened? Are you all right?”

  Stan strides up behind her. “She’ll be all right,” he says to Chi. He shoves crumpled twenty-dollar bills in her hands. “Here’s your bread, Starbright, plus some extra.”

  “Forget it. I don’t want your money.”

  “Take it.” Stan’s voice is harsh. “Your girlfriend, Penny Lane, or whatever she’s calling herself these days, is at the house with Professor Zoom. I don’t think she wants to see you.” He wipes the tear from his eye and touches her cheek with his wet fingertip. “Say hey, flower child. Be cool.”

  Stan stalks away.

  “Bye bye, Chocolate, bye bye,” Janis wails up on the Big Brother stage. “Bye bye, Chocolate, bye bye.”

  *

  The sense of magic and destiny flees. The last concert of the Summer of Love is forever marred. Susan blots Stan’s tear from her cheek and tells Chi she wants to go, which pleases him enormously. They hike through the park to Haight Street. Twilight casts a chill and an ominous feeling.

  “Chi, I’ve got to find Penny Lane,” Susan says and turns up the block before he can protest. She’s avoided this street for two months. It’s strange to see the Double Barrel house again. A gray drizzle slants down. The block is deserted. Their footsteps echo up the front stairs.

  The house is trashed worse than before. Instead of a noisy throng of laughing, cavorting people, the living room is deserted, eerily silent but for the erratic tick-tock of a junkyard clock. The scent of stale incense and pot smoke can’t conceal a stench like rotten meat.