Shedding Skin

by Robert Ward

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to say it. You and Phantom would think I’m simpleminded.”

  Me and Kirk. Me and Walter. Me and Phantom. I want to strangle.

  “Say it, will you? I want to hear it. God knows, I can’t talk.” Now Mal stops. She puts her arms around me. “That’s the first honest thing you have ever said.” I nod my head, throw away my cigarette. I look at my feet. The toes are pointed in like Randy’s. I am a rag doll made of parts of my friends. Mal holds both my hands and looks into my eyes. “You should come with me to Big Sur,” she says. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” Her voice is gruff, like my own. “Are you mocking me, madam?”

  “No. It’s just … well, why do you always come off like the Phantom, or like some Zachary Scott desperado from an old movie? You’re cheating yourself.”

  I sit down and light another cigarette. The breeze is blowing through me. Transparent.

  “You know you don’t have to,” she says, “not with me. If you’ll pardon the cliché, I know you’re good; and you don’t need games.”

  I shrug my shoulders. I didn’t want to.

  “Let me tell you about Big Sur, Bobby. You really ought to go there. There’s a farm there, a commune, called Taurus. It’s run by my friends, Gary Biffel and some others.”

  And I sit there and listen to her, watch her hands moving back and forth and her eyes lighting up, reflecting the waves as they slosh in over the beach. Another Susan? Another Lily? No …

  “You see,” she says, “you can’t get anywhere unless you stop and slow down. Adventures, dreams, it’s all intoxicating, but it’s all illusions. The Head …”

  “Wait a minute,” I say. “You aren’t going to start quoting the Head to me, are you? I already read his shit in the papers. Talk about illusions … that guy is throwing out stone lies.”

  “How do you know?” she says. “All you’re doing is racing about. Gary Biffel—the guy I was just telling you about—well, he is the Head, and he’s about the most enlightened person I’ve ever met.”

  So we are sitting still, very still now, and Mal is telling me how the Head and his friends have learned to live together and share things, which enables them to beat the private-property hang-up, and how personal identity is just an illusion anyway, because you are nothing more than your relationships with the world. And though I have heard all this before, now, with the moonlight glancing off Mal’s golden bracelets and her black hair twisting around her neck, somehow it all makes perfect sense.

  “You see, Bobby, if you think of yourself as an individual, separate and unique from others, and then suddenly you realize that this isn’t so, it can throw you into a kind of panic. I mean, you start realizing that you are picking up bits and snatches from everyone else, and you can’t hear your own voice at all. But what you have to realize is that you can never do anything about it unless you give up the entire idea of individualism. It’s an illusion.”

  “I see,” I say. And I do see. Perfect. Her skin, her almond eyes, her black hair. I hold her hand tightly and pull her closer to me.

  “You have to go somewhere, Bobby, where people will let you be yourself, where there is a kind of peace, and an atmosphere of trust and friendliness. Someplace where you don’t have to be on stage all the time …”

  “Yes,” I say, breathless. The moon and the stars and this incredible girl who knows what she is talking about.

  “And when you stay there for a while, you’ll find yourself realizing, hearing your own voice, but you’ll realize it’s the common voice of all the other people, and that fact won’t bother you at all. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” And I am pulling her close and kissing her forehead. Boy, would I like to jam my cock up her ass. It’s terrific. I’ll kill myself if I think that way again, I swear it.

  “You just take acid out in the woods, or even like this, down on the beach, and you understand, the way the old Romantic poets understood, about nature and our relationship to it.”

  Not just her ass, but my cock whammmmo! tight in her mouth. I mean, it looks like her mouth has been made expressly for my cock. How can I think shit like this? Am I an animal?

  “And, Bobby … ohh … I mean, once you … ohh … once you learn about the community thing you’ll realize how silly, how ridiculous … wait a minute … the whole idea of a unique personality is anyway.”

  If I had two cocks I could have one in her mouth and another up her ass. If I had three cocks … What if arms were cocks or could be transformed into cocks at any moment? Say you reached a certain level of horniness, and your arms just whoof! turned into cocks. If I can get these pants off with my teeth …

  And she is throbbing now, moving her ass up in the air, and my mouth is on her thigh, and my tongue licking her beautiful juicy cunt, and the ocean is sloshing in, and she is still talking:

  “And finally … ohhhhuhhh … once you have gotten to your deepest self and into the group’s deepest self, oh my goddddd … you will … see—oh Jesus, Bobby, eat me … that the whole thing … that’s it, come up here, I want to kiss you, put it in me … that the whole thing is just like a big global village, and oh Christ I love your cock … we all come from the same godhead … love your fucking cock …”

  And we are pounding away, and the moon is coming down, and the surf is roaring in, boomalay boomalay boomalay boom, and now just when I am ready to really turn it on, just as she is moaning and her wonderful mystical ass is three feet off the sand, I start thinking of those rotten fucking movies we saw tonight, and all the rotten fucking movies with this amazing, beautiful scene in them, and I am Burt Lancaster, and she is Deborah Kerr, and there it goes, the surf, and the moon and the crabs, and my cock is melting melting melting like an icicle left out in the sun.

  “Ah fuck,” I say, throwing sand into the air.

  “It’s all right,” she says, holding the two dried prunes under my limp dick.

  “Soon we go to Taurus, and it will be all right.”

  XXXI.

  In Which the Narrator Suffers from a Bad Dream

  I wake up in the middle of the night. The Taco is above me. The worker’s gold watch is gleaming and his mouth is drooling spittle. I am not awake. This is a dream. I am awake. I can see him lifting the Taco onto his own back. I am inside his skin. Phantom is across our single room. Mal’s room is three doors down. We are living in a huge, broken-down hotel in the Japanese sector of San Francisco. Yesterday, Phantom and I went into Japanese homes not three blocks from where we live. We sold them Air King air-conditioners for seventeen dollars apiece. The Air King consists of a metal box with three shiny dials on it. The dials are from old radios. I am inside the worker’s skin, and he is holding the Taco above his head. I am directly beneath the Taco. I am praying that he will not choose to drop it on me. I open my mouth to plead, but suddenly I see the watch. Two weeks are almost up. The watch is making buzzing noises. The worker’s teeth are clenched. The Taco is dripping hot sauce. Every drop singes my skin, leaving black marks. I want to scream, but when I open my mouth, all that comes out is a stream of old Colt tickets. The Taco is bursting, showering. Phantom is right behind the worker. In his hands are Zircons. He is telling this Japanese store owner that these are real diamonds which he heisted, and the cops are on his trail. He will leave these diamonds with the Japanese store owner because he knows that Orientals have a tradition of personal honesty and a complete disdain for material wealth. The Japanese store owner looks at the Zircons and then at Phantom’s face. He says he will be glad to keep the diamonds for Phantom until such time as Phantom deems it safe enough to return from his mountain hideout to pick the jewels up. Phantom says he completely trusts the Japanese store owner, but asks him, as a token of good faith, to please give him a small retainer. The Japanese store owner’s eyes are the eyes of the workman are the eyes of Baba Looie are the eyes of myself as I cringe and plead that the workman not drop the Taco on my head. I have never learned to tread meat. The wat
ch is smoking on the workman’s hairy wrist, and I know that begging is useless. Phantom stop. Japanese store owner stop. The face of Japanese mother stop. All of them the same eyes. All of them the same smell. Every pore emitting greed gases, and I am in an old hotel, not awake, not asleep. The Air King consists of a metal box, radio dials. Inside is a stainless steel pan filled with three inches of water. Above and behind it is a little electric fan. The Japanese mother is shelling out seventeen dollars to Phantom and me, while her kids sweat in the background. She plugs it in, complains that it doesn’t seem cool enough. We tell her that it takes an hour to warm up. She smiles. Her children surround her and wait for great gusts of kamikaze winds. We thank her and bow ceremoniously.

  I am in a hotel. This is a dream from which there is no waking, no way to wake up…. “Don’t drop it,” I yell. “Don’t drop it.”

  “Hey, hey, hey, what the hell?”

  Mal is above me, and Phantom. I am trembling now for real, and my eyes are open. I can’t remember where I am.

  “Bummer,” says Phantom, slapping my face.

  Mal is kneeling on the floor in front of me.

  “What’s wrong, Bobby?” she is saying. “Hey, it’s O.K.”

  I open my eyes. I don’t remember where I am. I can’t think of my name. The reels are running in the back of my head again.

  “Jesus,” I say, hugging her. Then I get embarrassed. Is this Mother Freda compensation?

  “I can’t take no more hustles,” I say to Phantom. “There is no way.”

  He nods his head. From downstairs I can hear the Jefferson Airplane. Yeah, I am living in the Greta Garbo Hotel for Boys and Girls. Speed freaks downstairs. A little guy named Red who shoots Methedrine all day and talks endlessly about white lights.

  “I, ah, yeah, I’m all right.”

  They nod, smile, move away from me. Mal opens the window and I look out across the skyline at the Bay Bridge.

  “Yeah,” says Phantom, “I have had enough of this criminal bag myself. You have to hang around with too many low-lifes. Ugh … that Howard Zucker. What a disgusting cat. I’m going to make it to Berkeley tomorrow.”

  The mention of Howard Zucker makes my skin melt. I feel as though my body is turning to water. I am afraid to talk because my voice is disappearing. I don’t want to hear myself doing Phantom.

  “Wait, Phantom. Before you go to Berkeley, let’s take acid together. I think it would be like starting all over. You know?”

  Phantom smiles at Mal. There is no trace of bitterness and, what’s more, I recognize the smile. It’s my own.

  “O.K.,” he says. “All right, my brothers. Tomorrow.”

  Then he smiles at me.

  “You stay here with this creep awhile,” he says. “I got to go take back a few of those old Feldstars.” When he leaves, Mal walks toward my bed. “He’s really all right, you know?” she says. Then she drops off her dress and eases into bed.

  XXXII.

  A Buffalo with Kissable Lips

  The acid comes on like an elevator which is going twenty times as fast as the speed of light and you know it’s going to go right through the roof, you know that when it does you will be blown to hell, and there is a moment, as we stand in front of the buffalo cages across from the polo fields in Golden Gate Park, that you are going to give way to panic, to no control, but suddenly you have gone through that roof, and yes, it was only a paper roof anyway, and you are with your friends, your closest friends in the world, Mal and Phantom, and you are certain, certain that there has never before been a beauty to equal this, never.

  “So, dig those buffaloes,” says Phantom.

  And yes, I am standing here behind the wire mesh, my nose pressed up to it actually, and I am rushing, rushing with a color kind of pleasure that is incredible blue, funny, profound, sad and wide, all at once and I am watching this great, hairy monster with impossibly little pinny legs standing in a field. “Isn’t it beautiful?” says Mal.

  “Yeah, beautiful,” says Phantom. His mouth is hanging open, Phantom’s that is, and his skin is changing right here in front of me, folks, see the Phantom with the changing skin, and I shut my eyes and am reminded of the skin of someone else, so long ago, someone whose skin changed without acid, and then I remember. Yes, it was the skin of Johnny D., who was a disk jockey in Baltimore, an incredible disk jockey who had an incredible contest called Miss Kissable Lips, which Freda entered when I was so small I did not know what was happening; but I saw Freda spend one entire afternoon blotting her lips on a piece of tagboard to send to Johnny D.

  And then we were in the studio auditorium, and Johnny D. had golden bleacho hair, and he was presenting all the finalists for the Miss Kissable Lips contest.

  “Look, there’s the young buffalo.”

  I stare out of my 1958 dream world and in front of me is a little buffalo, right in front of me, how can this be?

  I place my hand through the mesh, not afraid that this animal will take it off, not afraid of anything, but why does Phantom’s skin, all red and blotchy, remind me of Johnny D., for now I know that Johnny D. had perfect baby-pink skin, like all those 1950s announcers. Then I see what it is. Phantom’s skin reminds me of Johnny D.’s dark 1950s soul. That is it, the soul of the 1950s and early ‘60s. This is what I am seeing, hearing, total re-creation, when I shut my eyes and see Mother Freda turning turning around on this high, velvet-covered pedestal with the name Red Night Shoes on it.

  “Look at their eyes,” says Mal.

  And I am out of that scene and staring into the bloodshot, yellow-phlegm eyes of the American bison. I know that Mal wants the animal to be something mystical for me, and I strain to see it her way.

  “The Indians worshiped this animal,” says Phantom.

  All our noses pressed to the wire, mine, Phantom’s and Mal’s, and the buffalo is looking like some great, grotesque clown to me, with that huge, hulking, hairy body and those little weeny legs, and now, oh now, he is standing up on those legs, and Johnny D. is asking all the judges, all dapper men in gray 1950s pin-stripe suits with pictures of Eisenhower smiling moronic from the soaked golf courses of their 1950s hearts, and Freda is still twirling, what a weird revelation to have on acid, but I know I can turn it off, soak myself into the sounds of the park, the grass so green it looks like pea soup pictures in Family Circle magazine ads, I know I can leave 1950 but there is some secret there for me, some horror that I must uncover, buffalo come back into view, still standing on those little pin legs, and now Freda still turning turning around, dressed in a long, one-piece bathing suit made of terry cloth, and her stomach sticking out so far I am afraid she will suffer from permanent skin stretch, and have to fold the skin over and pretend it’s her apron when she goes off to Methodist Women’s League.

  “Oh, it’s so mystical.”

  And I am back with the buffalo, which is standing on those pin legs, and beginning to ooze out a huge, liquid shit, so brown that it looks like soft chocolate ice cream found in every drive-in all over the U.S.A. But what is flipping me most is the reaction of both Mal and Phantom. They are in a mystical ecstasy about this.

  Mal: “Oh God, look at it. It’s overpowering.”

  Phantom: “Stone beautiful.”

  Then I realize that they are lying. They must be lying. Maybe Mal thinks it’s beautiful and Phantom is agreeing with her because he knows he has hurt her before. Or maybe not. Maybe it is beautiful. Maybe I cannot see. And I stick my face closer to the fence and watch the buffalo’s little paws shaking as the goo rushes from his asshole onto the greenest grass under the stars, and I am more aware of the fence, its coldness, which seems more of a miracle to me than buffalo shitting. But I want to share this with them. God, I want it. Absurd, senseless, ridiculous, but I want to share this buffalo shit with them so bad, as bad as Freda wanted Johnny D. to make her Miss Kissable Lips, and she went around and around on that pedestal her stomach gonna burst through her skin, leaving long lines of entrails, and God I want to share it with the
m, God I love them, these my friends, and I am laughing at the buffalo, crying for Mother Freda’s kissable lips, and all around us are the fog and crickets, all over the park.

  XXXIII.

  Moving Down the Coast with Kevin Balso

  Standing at the entrance to the freeway, Mal with her thumb stuck in the air, and we are singing “Break On Through”: We have not even gotten through the first chorus when a car stops for us, and in a flash we are sailing over the curvy highway at seventy miles an hour. The driver is a fat, thirtyish man named Kevin Balso. He sells Hotpoint ranges, “the kind you see on all them TV game shows, you know?”

  “Sure,” says Mal, lighting a joint.

  “What are you doing?” I whisper to her. “You can’t smoke in this dude’s car.”

  But she only smiles and hands it to me. The man is so busy wiping the sweat off his round, deep-ridged forehead that he hasn’t noticed what’s going down. But I am certain he will, and then we’ll be thrown out of the car. Resigning myself to a short ride, I take a deep drag off the joint, and look at the man’s head. He has interesting hair, which looks like little

  Steps on the way up to heaven. I imagine the hair latching onto a star. The man will be walking into his house and his wife will throw her hands up to her face, certain that she has married a god.

  “Your hair, Kevin. It’s got stars….”

  But he will not hear what she is saying or care, for in his hands is the latest in Hotpoint All Electric Ranges, cooks the food for you, sticks it in your mouth and wipes your ass right after you take a crap.

  “I’m from Saint Louis myself,” the man says, turning on a station which is playing a song which is a sequel to “Ode to Billy Joe.” It’s about a girl who really knows why Billy Joe jumped off the bridge, and of course Kevin Balso cannot tell the songs apart.

  “That’s a great song,” he says, humming along off key.

  “Too much,” says Mal. I look at her and realize that she likes Kevin Balso and his simple, moronic happiness. Come to think of it, I like him too. After all, he did pick us up, and he is singing, and the car is going along eighty-five, and the telephone poles are sailing by like broomsticks from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, so what the hell?