Shedding Skin

by Robert Ward

  “Phantom, I want that girl up there,” I say; it occurs to me that the Phantom will be able to do the impossible. The crowd will open like the Red Sea and I will run to embrace her in slow motion.

  “Sure,” he says, and starts manhandling people right and left.

  I follow close behind him, and in a second I am breathing down on her hair, the blackest, shiniest hair I have ever whiffed.

  Phantom is smashed up next to me, trading insults with the sandwich man. The girl turns and stares directly into my face. Her eyes are like almonds, but cloudy, and stoned.

  “This is not my bag,” she says gently.

  “Mine either,” I say, looking straight into those eyes. I am so excited that I can barely breathe.

  “You need some more mayonnaise on dat sanwich,” says Phantom to the man. “You ain’t got enough on your chin.”

  I am smiling at her, trying to think of something to say, and she is staring back. I begin to think how we must look like an advertisement on television, and how all around us the action would fade until only our eyes were left and then over our eyes would come an image of a cake of soap or some deodorant, and that thought nearly ruins this for me, but not quite, for she is smiling now, and saying in a low voice that for a march devoted to peace she has never seen so many people filled with hostility, and bad karma, yes, I am agreeing, feeling like Henry Aldrich as I stare into those fathomless black eyes, swirling pools of water in sunburst Maryland woods….

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

  “My name is Mal,” she says. “Mal?”

  I put my arm around her to shield her from a fist which is flying past Phantom’s head.

  “You pig,” says Phantom, kicking the man in the shins.

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

  I watch the man drop his sandwich, yell and reach for his foot.

  “Jesus, Phantom,” I say. “We gotta get outa here.”

  “O.K., baby,” he says, and starts back the other way.

  I am holding Mal’s arm, pushing her along. The crowd is growling at us, and Phantom is screaming at them:

  “Peace? You want peace? There ain’t no peace comin’. Do you dig? The world is all going up in flames, can you dig that? Flames, worldwide rebellion of youth, no more of your comfortable peace marches, can you understand?”

  “Your friend is amazing,” says Mal in my ear as we follow Phantom.

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

  Then we are running through a gauntlet of store owners, bankers, teachers, who are yelling things at Phantom and he is yelling back, and one old man with white hair, which is blowing wispy off the top of his pink head, is standing in front of Phantom, blocking our path, and he is calling us Fascists, saying that he has seen it all before in the 1930s, and Phantom is telling him that if he doesn’t step aside there will be blood all over the dove on the poster in his old hand.

  “What the hell are you doing, man?” I say, grabbing Phantom.

  “There can’t be no peace, man. This old dude doesn’t understand. Unless we are revolutionaries there can never be any peace.”

  “Fascists,” yells the old man, hitting Phantom with the poster.

  I am terrified that this will come to blows and that the whole peace march will come down on us. I don’t know what to do.

  Then Mal steps between them. She stares first at the old man, and then at Phantom. I watch, amazed and electrified, as she leads Phantom away.

  “Beautiful,” I say to Warren. “She’s stone beautiful.”

  “Cheap theater,” he says, but I don’t hear a word, only watch her hips sway as she walks alongside Phantom, her hand gently guiding him away from his private rage.

  XXVIII.

  A Dinner Debate and the Signs of a Curse

  I sit on the grass across from Phantom and Mal. All around us people are ladling out rice soup, eating thick yellow slices of homemade Digger bread. The Diggers are an organization which is trying to feed the “community,” and Mal says they are beautiful. Every day she walks up to their big ramshackle house on Page Street, helps boil the soup and beats the dough into shape. Now as we fill our stomachs and listen to a boy named Lizard play a soft, beautiful song called “Country Kites,” Phantom tells us we are being deluded.

  “Don’t you see?” he says, jamming the bread into his hand. “This is bullshit. It’s like the peace march, man, pure bullshit. How long do you think this scene can last, man?”

  He is looking at me, but I am unable to reply.

  “It’ll last about six months, maybe a year. Then the hoods will move in, the punks, the commercial scene, and you can kiss Haight-Ashbury good-bye.”

  “There are ways to prevent that,” says Mal softly.

  “No way,” says Phantom.

  He is on his feet now, towering above us.

  “Sit down, Phantom,” says Mal. There is a tough edge to her voice which surprises me, a huskiness which makes me think of docks, and bars with nets on the wall, and Mal dressed in black mesh stockings and a low-bodiced blouse.

  Behind Phantom is the setting sun. It makes a frame for his long head, for his twisting lips.

  “Hey, man,” he says, “you say something; you got a good head.”

  “Mal’s right,” I say. “This is the beginning of a huge thing. It’s a spiritual thing.”

  I don’t know why I say this. Perhaps it’s to score a few points with Mal. I am so in love with her eyes, clothes, voice, that I am beginning to believe there could be a spiritual revolution. On the other hand, no sooner do I say that to myself than I feel like the words came from somewhere else, from some Time magazine article on the hip scene.

  Now Phantom is roaring.

  “Lemme tell you something, man. I was in this flower scene before either of you dudes ever got away from the playpen. I went up to cops and kissed them in Chicago, and got my head stuck in a piss bucket. And in the East Village, in Tompkins Square Park, I seen my chick get her face busted open with the butt end of a riot gun, and you tell me this scene is forever? Hey …”

  Phantom is so exasperated that he cannot continue. I am deeply moved by his eloquent anger, and want to tell Mal that she is a fool, that because she is a woman she is kidding herself with sentimental ideas about life, about the fact that people can be changed with kisses and flowers. But before I am able to say a word, she has given Phantom and me a deep smile.

  “Do you want to hear a torture tale, Phantom?”

  We say nothing, but look at her, perfectly composed, her skin relaxed, her earrings tinkling slightly in the wind.

  “When I was younger I lived in Dallas. I believed in what all of us believed in—mom, flag and apple pie—only I really believed in it. My father is the vice-president of an oil company and my mother is in the DAR.”

  We sit quietly, watching Mal turn a flower around in her fingers, listening to her voice, soft and sad, tell us of her love affair with a guy in her father’s office. I watch Phantom stare at the ground, biting his huge scarred lips as Mal speaks of her plane trip with the married man. They had gone to New York and stayed in a hotel, and he was going to leave his wife, the oldest story of all time, but she fell for it because she knew she was too smart to fall for the story, it was too obvious and couldn’t be happening to her, and all that weekend he showed her off to his slick friends inside a Mercedes-Benz, her mouth on his cock, they would be married, yes, and never go back to Dallas, never. But, of course, they did go back and, of course, she was sick in the plane, feverish and hysterical, and she grabbed the controls and tried to kill both of them, and when he slapped her senseless, she tried to leap out of the plane, all her Bible Belt religion coming back on her in a flood of guilt and twisted broken fragments. And later she would go to sleep and dream of the American flag coming to life, twirling and breathing through the stripes, as it coiled around her neck.

 
“It sounds funny now,” she says, “a flag … sounds corny even, but it was what went down for me, it was my own absurd horror, and I was frigid for years because of it. Don’t you see?”

  “So what’s that prove?”

  “That proves nothing,” says Mal, “but the fact that I now ball and enjoy it, the fact that I am no longer hung up on that experience but can tell it to you like this, means a lot. And what means more than that is I got this way through the Krishna culture.”

  “Yeah, I dig where those people are at,” says Phantom. I am not certain if he is approving or putting them down.

  “It’s the only way,” she says, and then she looks right past us, as if she is no longer trying to convince us of anything, but is communicating with the infinite.

  “There is only one way to get out of this culture—through the mind and through the body, through utilizing the godhead which is in all of us—and this is what we must strive for, communion between people on this deepest awakened level. Anything short of this will simply result in new tyrannies, new violence under a new banner, plane trips to New York for all of us, but like it was for me, the city will be ashes….”

  I am too tense to eat, and stare at Phantom. He still holds his eyes to the earth. There is an incredible silence, a silence which is at first dramatic, but then spills over into embarrassment, melodrama and disgust. I feel confused, ecstatic. I want to tell them both something that will clarify it once and for all. I begin to speak, but something smacks me in the head.

  “What the hell?”

  I run my hands through my hair and look on the ground. Lying in a puddle of spilled Kool-Aid is a football. “You gotta take it back,” says a voice. “What?”

  Coming toward me, in rags, is a familiar shape. It is the fat boy I threw the winning pass to in the speed-freak football game.

  “What’s the big idea?” I say, feeling lame.

  “If you don’t take the ball back, I’ll leap off of Golden Gate Bridge,” he says. “What?”

  Phantom is smiling hugely and rubbing his hands together.

  “You threw me the ball,” says the skinned-up, filthy teammate. “You threw it and I caught it just like you said, and I sat in the bushes all night taking STP, and I knew that your throwing it meant something, meant a curse, a heavy curse, don’t you see, and you gotta take it back or I can’t get rid of it, you gotta.”

  “Beat it,” says Phantom.

  “It’s made from the skins of animals, and I caught it,” says the end.

  “That makes you a killer,” says Phantom.

  “Take it back. Take it back. Take it back….”

  Then he is screaming and dancing around in front of us, always keeping his eyes on the football, and I take it from him slowly and put it in my arms, and he asks me if I intend to sneak back into his pad at night and put it in his bed, did I know that it had a microphone in it, that football, and that voices come out of it You gotta take it back, gotta….

  Mal starts to get up and comfort him, but he pushes her and runs into the bushes, still screaming about the curse.

  I flip the ball in the air and stare at Mal and Phantom. We are all certain that this is the beginning of something strange.

  XXIX.

  In Which the Narrator Is Exposed to the Charms of Howard K. Zucker

  I am in the street, peering through the slats of Lucky Red’s Bar and Grill. Behind me, in the back seat of the car, are the Feldstars, the Air Kings and the Zircons. Inside the bar, hunched on the stool and talking in low, confidential tones, is the Phantom. He is showing one of the Feldstar watches to a sophisticated-looking middle-aged couple. I don’t like the looks of it. The last person we conned with this hustle was a half-drunk workman named Buzzy. When he realized he was going to “get himself a bargain,” his huge arms tensed and his breath oozed from his big lips like smog. I liked the smell—stale beer, smoked sausage and pure greed. He gave us twenty dollars and showed the Feldstar off to every other stooge in the place. By the time we left, we had sold three more.

  But this time it’s going to be difficult. This couple is too well dressed, too sophisticated. Him with his gray hair curling fashionably over his pink ear and his French cuffs twinkling in the hazy light. And her (his wife? his mistress?), all done up in a red and gold miniskirt and big golden earrings. Just seeing them there, under control, no trace of greed on those bland faces, makes me tremble. Just the same, I am not going to bite my wrist; and I am going to do my part.

  Now that time has come. After adjusting my red-striped rep tie and dusting off my sport coat (both expertly stolen by Phantom just for this hustle), I walk through the door. Once inside, I move my head in a complete arc, as if hunting for a friend. After moving my head back to its original position, I take a stool at the bar, three down from Phantom.

  He is really into his pitch:

  “It’s like I told you, Howard. These watches fell off a truck. I was just lucky enough to find a few.”

  Howard’s cheeks puff as he smiles. He swishes his drink, puts it to his lips and takes a long sip. The woman smiles and does the same thing. They place their drinks down simultaneously. Howard smiles at her condescendingly. My right leg is doing little nervous hops and sweat is pouring down my forehead. I order a drink from the short, swarthy bartender.

  “Let me she … see the watch again,” says Howard.

  Phantom looks over his shoulder as if he can’t be too careful and slides the box across the bar. Howard fumbles with it and drops it to the floor.

  “Christ, mister,” says Phantom, getting up. “You wanta draw the heat?”

  Howard says he is sorry and then turns and stares at the woman. Her small face shrivels up as if she has tasted something sour. Then she reaches down to the floor and picks up the box.

  “Thank you, my dear,” says Howard. He opens the box, takes out the watch and holds it up to the red light. “Attractive mechanism, highly attractive,” he says.

  I sip my martini and feel better. He is obviously loaded, an easy prey. I am filled with a veritable cornucopia of love and respect for Phantom. He never misses.

  “Isn’t this a beauty, my dear?” says Howard.

  The woman nods her head and smiles weakly. Howard then holds the watch toward me and looks out from behind it.

  “Handsome, sir?”

  Is he mocking me? I feel panic. I look away, down at my drink, up again at the tropical-fish tank.

  “Only one thing,” says Howard in an overloud voice, as if he was trying to get my attention.

  “The only thing is that I’ve never heard of a Feldstar.”

  This is my cue. But I can’t respond. A dead giveaway.

  Phantom explains that the watch is British and is just being introduced to the States.

  Howard smiles and pulls a big wad of bills from his pocket. He orders another drink for the three of them. Is he teasing us? If I ran away now, I could hide out in a mission and eat old doughnuts. I hate my cowardice.

  “British, hey?” says Howard, sneering openly now. “Yes, I am a great admirer of the English peoples. We owe them so terribly much.”

  Again he looks at me. I am going to crap myself.

  “But just the same, I never buy something I haven’t heard of. It’s just not sound business, as they say.”

  Phantom shrugs.

  “All right by me, my man. You don’t buy it, some other dude will. I’ll catch you later.”

  Phantom gets up to leave. Thank God. We can go to another bar, start over with dummies.

  “Wait,” I say. “Is that a real Feldstar?”

  I could knife myself. Now I’ve got to play out the part. All three of them are looking at me. Here comes the martini right up on the walnut bartop.

  “Ah, I couldn’t help overhearing you,” I say in my British voice. Oh, Christ, why did I use that?

  Smiling like a madman, I move down the bar, sliding from one stool to the next. On the second one, my legs wrap around it and I almost fall over.


  “Ah ha … one too many,” I laugh, recouping. “Excuse me. Wife tells me not to imbibe; but anyway, my liquor has never interfered with my business sense. I mean, I know a Feldstar when I see one. Do you mind?”

  Phantom shrugs again. I think he is overdoing shrugging. He hands me the watch.

  I hold it to my ear, twist the minute hand, strap it to my wrist.

  “I say, that is a Feldstar. How much do you want for it?”

  Phantom looks at Howard, begins to laugh bitterly. “What is this?” he says through clenched teeth. “You guys some kinda team or something? Plainclothes scene?”

  “Marvelous,” says Howard. “Aren’t these boys marvelous, Alice?”

  “I’ll give you fifteen dollars for this watch,” I say in falsetto.

  “Oh, fifteen, is that all you want?” says Howard. “That is too much. I mean, really. You two went through all this for fifteen lousy bucks?”

  He knows. He knew all along. The fat beaver. I feel a sickening panic. Howard will have the big bartender grab us, while he calls the racket squad. I should have stayed in Baltimore and made a home for Susan. Why didn’t I capitalize on my educational opportunities? Beatings in the cell. Walls that keep closing. Oh, I am a disgusting bourgeois.

  Phantom is smiling, patting Howard on the head. “So you are hip to us, huh?” he says. “Too much.”

  Howard is doubling over with laughter. He is mocking me: “ ‘Oh,’ “ he yells, holding up the watch. “ ‘A Feldstar, a real Feldstar.’ That’s wonderful, simply marvelous. You boys have made my night. Isn’t that right, Alice? I mean, here we were sitting here, drunk and bored, and then you two clowns come along. Really a miracle of timing. Fantastic.”

  I begin to laugh too. What a pathetic ruse. How could I have ever let Phantom talk me into it?

  All of us are at the bar laughing, even Alice.

  Suddenly Howard stops laughing. Alice continues. Howard looks at her and I can see their faces in the wall mirror. She is trying to stop, her face is contorted. Howard keeps staring. She stops.