Shedding Skin

by Robert Ward

  “Get your papers from the Candy Man,” I say. “Candy Man’s got all the news.”

  Immediately windows roll down and hands come out with change.

  I imagine myself rolling in wealth. Soon I may even have enough money to buy the Band-Aids needed for my infected toes.

  “Candy Man,” I yell again, as a willing customer places some change in my gooey hand and insults my decorated face.

  “Crazy Candy Man give you mystical Oracle,” I say.

  “What else has the Candy Man got to give?” says someone as she taps me on the shoulder.

  “Plenty, baby,” I say, without turning around. This time I will not be taken in.

  When I do turn around, I make certain to shake the hair out of my eyes and assume an uninterested slouch. I fetch several deep sighs and casually rub my hand over my chin. She is a lean chick, with too much eye makeup, and paint all over her face.

  “That candy on your face all you can do, baby?”

  I peel the Bonomos off my cheeks, but am unable to get them off my forehead.

  “No,” I say, sighing and throwing my hair back again; I decide that I do not want to do the latter too often because my hair is just barely long enough to fall into my eyes.

  “Can you screw?” she says.

  “Yeah, man,” I say, so excited I can hardly talk. I’m going to screw a Young Revolutionary. Not a fake hung-up Midwest Jew, but a really freed woman. Still, I manage to outwardly manifest no signs of excitement.

  “Come on then,” she says.

  I make one more mighty effort to pull the taffy off my head, and walk with her down the street. We bob and weave between the thousands of people who are eating loaves of bread, playing guitars, posing for the cameras that are being clicked from the cars lined up in the street, rapping madly at each other about where to cop; actually copping heroin, grass, Methedrine, any drug you want and some you didn’t count on (like oregano). She is telling me about how bad the cops have been around here, and how our hippie brothers are being harassed more and more every day (which brings about a feeling of instant indignation in me). And as we turn up Cole Street and walk by a tall skinny motorcycle boy who is putting his foot into the throat of a dog, she begins to tell me about middle-class fucking and how bad it is, how no middle-class people can ever just say they want to satiate their body needs and go fuck but that they have to act like they love one another, and even get married when all they really want is a piece of ass, and soon after the marriage they get tired of each other, and the dumb fuckers really turn her off. Yes, I say, yes, that’s the truth, and I do agree with her, but I wish she’d tell me her name; it might put things on a slightly more personal basis. We go into a big white house with brown trim around the windows and a God’s Eye hanging in the narrow hallway. She is still raving on about hang-ups, and spins the God’s Eye violently.

  “That’s it, man,” she says. “I won’t ever stop until I can blow God’s mind.”

  “Yeah,” I say, smiling. “That’s very poetic.” Something is happening here. I don’t know what it is exactly but I can feel myself becoming hostile. She is reminding me of something I have seen before, and whatever it is I don’t like it.

  We climb up the gray dirty stairs and open her door, which is covered with action shots of the Hell’s Angels, and she walks directly to her single mattress, pulls off her pants and opens her legs. All the time she is still talking about how little love there really is and how to most men love is this property-ownership kind of thing, and she looks tremendously bored. Then I am balling her, and she is moving up and down mechanically, both her eyes wide open, her mouth sneering at me, and after five minutes I come but she isn’t able to.

  Then she wants to get on top, and I say O.K., and she tells me that a lot of chicks have to be on the bottom to feel dominated but not her, oh no, and her stringy hair smells so terrible in my face, and she is moving up and down on my cock like a locomotive piston, her face straining and her lips trembling, and I am looking past her to the sink where the dishes are piled up with green fungus hanging off the week-old tacos. Then she screams:

  “I can’t come. Jesus fucking Christ.”

  At that moment all the hostility leaves me, and I want to hold her in my arms. But when I try to, she leaps up and screams that she is no Doris Day Barbie Fucking Doll from Butte, Montana, and I know she has been reading Head.

  “Wait a minute,” I say, as she throws on her Levi’s. “It’s all right.”

  I want to make her feel better by telling her about the time I took some amphetamine and my cock shriveled up to the size of a pea, but she won’t hear it.

  “Sure, tell me some condescending pile of shit. Make baby feel better.”

  I offer her my arm, but she spits at it and runs out of the apartment.

  I shrug my shoulders, smash two of her Donovan albums and go back onto the street.

  XXVI.

  The Terror of the Swami and Some Speed-Freak Football

  Here I am in Love City sitting beneath a big purple flower, unable to do anything. It is a depression worse than finding out I am not a clever con man hustler, worse than finding out the Stumps are brutal morons, worse than being a papier-mâché delinquent. It is all these things combined and more. Yesterday, for example, I sat in this exact same spot watching the freaks go by in their army shirts, blue jeans, robes, ostrich plumes. I read from a handbill advertising Swami Krishnamurti. The bill told me Swami Krishnamurti could penetrate into anyone’s real self, make them aware that they were to share this earth with all sentient beings and give them (anyone) the first step toward Total Consciousness. In spite of my bad experience with the Liberated Girl (I saw her again yesterday, whacked out of her skull on Methedrine. She approached me as if we had never met and asked me what it “all meant.” I was clever and told her that it “all had two meanings.” This bit of nonsense delighted her and she went off with some pimply dude, mumbling, “Two meanings … yeah, it’s all got two meanings”)—in spite of my bad experience, I do not intend to give up my search for the deeper meaning of reality. If there is nothing beyond eat, sleep, spin a disk, ball a chick, get a TV, drop dead on your ass … then I will not hesitate to suck in a tubeful of killer gas and let some garbage man find me slumped in a trash can early in the morning.

  But I was speaking of yesterday (I feel vague too, incredibly vague, as if someone had thrown a net over my heart). I was happy with the handbill, and the bearded, sagelike face of the Swami convinced me that he must be real. He had the kind of wrinkles that are earned through many years of hard knocks, and a pair of glow-up eyes, which suggested that somehow he had turned every one of those hard knocks into a victory of the spirit. What is more, the handbill looked expensive and the whole thing was sponsored by Resurgence Youth Movement, a group I have heard much about. It is said that RYM takes no shit and cannot be compromised, which sounds good to me. Yes, I sat here yesterday, a day like today, and pictured the Swami staring deep into my soul. He would whisper some strange magical words, and I would walk from the meeting well on my way to Ultimate Knowledge.

  It was then that I got the fear. For, as if by magic, the sports page of the San Francisco Chronicle appeared at my feet. Without thinking, I picked up the windblown piece of paper, and read this headline:

  UNITAS’ ARM INJURY MAY END HIS CAREER

  The article gave many points of view and all of them agreed that Johnny U. may well be through. Instantly I was struck by a double fear. First, I feared for Johnny U. I felt as if I was losing an organ, an important organ I could not do without. People would notice the departure of the organ, and shake their heads in silent pity. But the deeper fear had to do with the Swami. What would happen if the Swami chanted his chants, burned his incense, lifted his hands above his head, created a fog all over the room, and then in a mocking voice told RYM that my soul was not filled with enlightenment but with dusty, cracked images of a football quarterback. How would that look? I’d try to go to the Fillmore Auditorium
and the Jefferson Airplane would stop jamming and make up a satirical song about me. All the pictures from the Light Show would suddenly be of Johnny U. I would run out in the streets, terrified, but the Mime Troupe would be there on a flat truck mercilessly lambasting my bourgeois tendencies. Yes, it is a bad thing to have a hero you cannot shout about. He chokes you from the inside, digs his cleats into your heart.

  With these absurd but nonetheless real fears, I get up from my bench and walk past hippie hill. Many long-haired people are passing around joints. I sit down, smoke a licorice-papered joint and feel a little better.

  I am learning, I tell myself. I am learning what a mixed-up and fearful person I am, and learning is a painful process, for without pain how do we grow?

  These thoughts give me a wonderful buzz in my head. Then I remember that I have just smoked some grass, and think that the thoughts may have less to do with the feeling of enlightenment than the dope, but this does not stop me from having more thoughts, wonderful thoughts about pain and learning:

  ‘Cause Bob Dylan had a motorcycle accident, which caused him pain, and he had to stay in bed for many months and when he got out he wrote tender songs for the first time because he had been close to death and perhaps that is what I am going through, some kind of death …

  I go farther into the park, walking slow and cool, trying to act as if thousands of freaks all sitting around playing guitars, sitars, vinas, tablas is nothing to me. And when I think of Kirk or Walter back in Baltimore, they somehow look very, very square, and I decide that I will never again admit I am from Baltimore, no, from now on I will simply say “Yeah, ah, like I yam from de, ah, East, you dig?” and people will lower their eyes and think I am from New York. This thought gives me the cramps again. Jesus Christ, I am like some gassy Pinocchio; it’s disgusting.

  Then comes the weirdest scene of all.

  I turn the corner, and see—no, I can’t believe it—a hippie football game. It’s true. They are out there, about twenty skinny, shirtless long-hairs, running and passing a football.

  “Amazing,” I say, “it’s absolutely amazing….”

  Automatically, I drop my shirt on the grass, take off my shoes. In the next second I am in the huddle.

  “I’ll play quarterback,” I say, in an aggressive voice which sounds like Kirk’s.

  “Sure, man,” says a kid who is pulling a little white vial from his pocket.

  “What’s the play?” says another, lighting a joint.

  I watch as the first boy ties himself up and injects the needle into his arm.

  “Is that speed?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  “Gimme a hit,” says a fat boy with wireless spectacles.

  Now we sit in the grass, passing around the Methedrine. I feel agitated, and expect the other team to penalize us for delay of the game. But when I look across the scrimmage line, I see there is little fear of a five-yard walk-off. A huge cloud of smoke rises from the defensive huddle.

  After shooting up the speed, I realize exactly how to run my team; the out-and-out speed freaks must play end and backfield positions. The pot smokers can be decoy flankers (being too hazy to actually carry the ball) and the heroin junkies will be the forward wall. I have a great urge to make a complex offensive which will combine the single wing, straight T, lonesome end, triple wingback flying wedge all at once simultaneous. Also, I feel like I am being swung around by my heels.

  “Unbelievable,” I say, falling backward. My head is bursting with whiteness, the wonderful team is here Yes it’s my team and I am the quarterback of my team you aren’t quarterback I am quarterback. Wonderful speed magnanimity and love of life flow through every single pore.

  I begin to rap to the boy sitting next to me, incredible fantasies, which begin about football but end up in Tangier with the whole team sitting in ominous opium dens never ever doing a thing….

  Finally, I settle down enough to call the play. I get down on my knees and draw a diagram in the dirt, which includes mousetrap blocking, inverted sweeps, fake ball carriers, hidden ball tricks, Statue of Liberty crisscross double reverse whammo handoffs end arounds tackle eligible, three laterals, two cross-field passes and a drop kick, also fake. When I look up from my play, I notice there are few players left.

  “Where is my team?” I ask, speeding steadily.

  “Who knows, man?” says the fat kid. “You been rapping for half ‘n hour.”

  “I have?”

  “Sure, ‘n’ it was a gas. I’d love to see that play run. It’d be beautiful.”

  “Let’s whip those mothers,” I say.

  “Are you ready?” I yell over to the other team (three guys left, all of them lying on their backs).

  I stand in the backfield. Many thousand fans fill the stands. The pennants are blowing inside my head, tickling my eyeballs. Loudspeakers strike up the band in every artery.

  “Eleventy-two, hike,” I yell, the ball spinning to me through the crystal clear San Francisco air, yeah this one for Johnny U., win one for the Gipper, all of this with the utmost importance, ‘cause this ain’t no mere football contest, this is knights at battle with the dark world, and this is speed power bursting through every minute of time and there is the fat kid downfield, look at that arm of solid muscle, you ever see ‘n arm like that and he is way beyond the defenders, this is gonna be touchdown baby touchdown all the way ‘cause when your up your up and when your down your down but when your up against speed you haven’t got a fuckin’ prayer.

  I let the ball go with all the might of Zeus flipping his javelin. It sails soars can’t believe how far it’s going. I sail soar with it, can’t believe how fast I’m going, and he catches it, catches it and keeps right on running, right on into the lilac bushes of Golden Gate Park.

  XXVII.

  In Which an Old Friend Disturbs the Peace

  In the peace march down on Market Street, down among the cassette tape recorders, cheap genuine Japanese radios, army socks, midget cameras for taking pictures anywhere nobody sees what you are up to, brown-suited businessmen, there are commitments being made, commitments which mean the end of goofy rebellions, before leaping back into the mother arms of security. No, this is different. I can feel it. There are clenched teeth, and arms folded tightly, and all of them shouting “Hell no we won’t go,” as the streets flower with young freaky kids all my brothers I think, again whacked out on speed, and grass, “all my brothers,” I mumble to Warren inside my head behind my eyes.

  “I wish your brothers would let you breathe,” he says.

  And it’s true. I’m packed in here, some fat man’s elbow smashing my ribs like popsicle sticks. Yes, these are all my brothers we are gonna change it all electric current of youths out on every street pouring over the world like the paint can picture from Mother Freda’s garage studio, pouring over everything, changing the world through love.

  Speaking of love, there is this black hair twisting around, floating around directly in front of me, and on the other side of the hair I had a glimpse of the eyes, large, black and deep-set. She is wearing this long blue dress, which looks like something Queen Guinevere would have on as the knights gather around the round table in all the dinners at the Town of Thatched Rooves.

  “Hell no we won’t go … Hell no we won’t go … Hell no we won’t go …”

  The hair in the eyes in front of me, and the man’s arm slicing in between the ribs, can’t get my breath too good because of the speed, and I feel crummy, dirty, in love with this dark girl.

  I watch her move away from me, being pushed by the crowd, who seem to be surging toward the other side of the street.

  “They’re burning their draft cards,” someone says.

  A great cheer goes up. It’s a brave thing to do. I know I should not be thinking about this girl now, but should be basking in the aura of self-sacrifice, be making some kind of plans to step out of my own skin and figure out what I am going to do when the draft board finds out I am out of school, but there are th
ese eyes, and cheeks so brown….

  I push ahead, shove a man nearly on his knees to stay behind her. I must not let her get away.

  “Watch where the fuck you’re …”

  I turn my head, making my face all menacing and surly like pictures of the Rolling Stones.

  “Tough toenails,” I spit out.

  Then I feel foolish. I am staring at the Phantom.

  “Tough toenails?”

  “Phantom,” I say, as an arm shoves my jaw out of whack.

  He smiles and pushes at a man who is sticking a big sandwich into his mouth. An onion or two fall down the man’s shirt.