South on Highland: A Novel

by Liana Maeby

  Johnny inhaled suddenly and leaned back. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He opened his mouth as if paused in oration and gasped with his whole body. Then a sleepy smile spread across his face, and he became very still. The desert cracked. Something scurried on the ground beneath us. I swooped around to get a look at it but saw only shadows. I shivered against the pounding of my heart, wanting to leap up and walk around, but physical activity of any sort seemed the furthest thing from Johnny’s rapturing mind.

  So I stuck out my arm. “What do you say? Can I have some of that?”

  Johnny sat still for a moment, considering. Trying to be human. “You ever done this before?”

  “No,” I said. “But I hear people like it.”

  Johnny laughed. “People tend to.”

  My arm shook a little.

  “Are you sure? This really isn’t something to fuck around with.”

  “I know,” I said, and looked him dead in the eyes. We both held the stare.

  “Okay then.”

  Johnny pulled a fresh needle from his bag and asked me to hand him a cigarette. He ripped out the filter and unrolled it until it was just a small cotton ball. He tied his belt around my arm and repeated his process of mixing and heating.

  I took a deep breath.

  He kissed my vein. I shut my eyes.

  Johnny plunged the needle in, pulled it back to siphon up my blood, and, just like that, released a sucker punch of heroin into my body.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck, holy fuck. I fell backward. I leaned forward. My body was somewhere else. I saw the desert sky come closer, I heard the hum of another world, and I felt bunnies, soft sand-colored bunnies, crawling all over me.

  EXT. FERRIS WHEEL – MORNING

  As their cart reaches its lowest point, Leila and Johnny jump out. A cloud of dust forms as they land, stumbling to the ground. They gather themselves.

  VOICE

  Whoa, whoa, whoa!

  Leila turns and sees a LONG-HAIRED KID running toward them. He is shirtless and holds a piece of wood.

  KID

  Are you guys okay?

  LEILA

  Yeah, I think so. Johnny, you alive?

  JOHNNY

  All good. Just a little dusty.

  The kid looks around.

  KID

  Where did you two even come from?

  JOHNNY

  (deadpan)

  Hollywood.

  They laugh. The kid shrugs and returns to whittling his piece of wood.

  EXT. CAMP – CONTINUOUS

  Leila and Johnny take in the scene as they head toward the camp. Kids in their late teens and early twenties walk around. A NAKED GIRL is lathering herself with a bar of soap as her friend shoots her with a Super Soaker.

  Leila glances down at her leather shorts.

  LEILA

  Why do I suddenly feel overdressed for the occasion?

  With sunglasses shielding our eyes from daylight’s fiery breath, Johnny and I walked through the camp, getting our bearings. Two dozen tan slips of kids in bikini tops and bright tees strolled around. None of them looked older than twenty-five, and most appeared barely a pimple to the other side of teenage. A young guy in a striped tank top and cheap neon glasses waved me over. “What’s up? You look new. Just get here?”

  “We drove up last night. It seemed like no one was around, though?”

  “Yeah, we all went out to the caves to take peyote and try and talk to Gram Parsons.”

  “Did you reach him?”

  “Nah, but our DJ was playing some righteous shit. If he’s out here, he definitely heard us.”

  “I’m Leila.” I stuck out my hand to shake.

  “Rex.”

  I turned to point out Johnny, who was standing a few feet back, smoking a cigarette. A trio of girls were ducked down behind a trash can, staring at him and giggling.

  “You heard of that band Sitting Bull?” Rex asked.

  My answer was a no, but I nodded anyway. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “They’re coming up to play tonight. I’m stage-managing.”

  “Awesome. We’ll check it out. So, um, is there someone in charge here?”

  “Yep. That would be Kennedy. He’s out at the moonshine distillery, but if you’re around later, I’ll introduce you. Kennedy and I went to high school together. I’ve known him forever.”

  I nodded. “That would be perfect.”

  I collected Johnny, and we went in search of shade and a place to sit down. “That was Rex,” I said. “He believes in ghosts and has shitty taste in music. I feel like I’m going to puke again.”

  I ducked back behind a small succulent and vomited up what had to have been the last remaining bits of my stomach. I pulled the bottle of water from my bag and rinsed out my mouth. I felt dizzy and exhausted. Johnny kept lighting cigarettes and squinting off into the distance, like he was waiting for a cowboy gang to ride into town on the backs of chestnut stallions. “Motherfucker,” he said. “I could use some coffee.”

  I rummaged around in my purse and pulled out a box of caffeine pills. I popped a couple out and handed two to Johnny. He swallowed them dry. I took mine with water and threw in an Adderall. The fact that neither Johnny nor I had eaten anything in the last twenty-four hours crossed my mind, as a fact but not as a craving. Truth be told, the only thing my body felt like putting inside of it was more of that sorcerous brown tar. But I fought, or maybe ran from, the urge like it was a stranger in a dark alley. For I was an addict without a doubt—pills and white powders filled my days and nights; amphetamines had so formed my identity that I wasn’t even recognizable without them—but I sure as hell wasn’t a junkie.

  EXT. DESERT – DAY

  Leila wanders around with her cell phone, trying to find service. She does and sees a message: 15 MISSED CALLS.

  She presses “Play” on one of them.

  MARI

  (via voice mail)

  Hey, chica. It’s Mari. Where the fuck did you go? Are you still in the desert with that hot actor? Have you boned him yet? Fucking fill me in already. Jesus. By the way, your agent came by looking for you. I kinda stalled. Said I hadn’t been home much. But he seemed upset. Are you in trouble with him? Oh yeah--and I found rat shit in the silverware drawer, so I threw the whole thing out. Looks like we’re a plastic-fork household from now on--not that you ever eat anything anyway.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Kennedy reached onto a shelf—a ledge in a rock, actually—and pulled down a mason jar full to the brim with clear liquid. He unscrewed the lid and handed it to me. “Bananas, pears, and acai,” he said as I took a swill of the potent moonshine. “It’ll fuck you up and shoot you full of antioxidants at the same time.”

  Kennedy was dressed almost entirely in leather and suede. He had a fringed poncho on over his bare chest, raw denim jeans, and a pair of tan motorcycle boots. His brown hair hit his shoulders in a wavy cascade. His eyes were golden brown and intense, and they smiled at me while his lips tucked over the corners of his own mason jar. I swallowed a cautious gulp of the alcoholic concoction. It was strong and sweet, like some sort of postapocalyptic nectar served only at the finest nuclear-bunker speakeasy in town. “Wow,” I said, letting the potent sip crawl around my insides. “That’s strong.”

  “Not bad, right?” Kennedy asked.

  “Pretty good. Do you guys sell this stuff?”

  “Nah. It’s just our way of being self-sustaining, you know?”

  “Living off the land. All those local acai plants.”

  Kennedy winked at me with one of his amber eyes. As if to make a point, he pulled a bag of mushrooms from his pocket and offered me a stem, which I accepted but didn’t eat.

  Kennedy had made his home inside a giant cave that he’d converted into a dwelling as covetable and cool as any Vice magazine spread. A lofted bedroom jutted out over the kitchen and living area. The space made use of natural ridges in the rock to provide a lopsided array of built-in furniture and storage room for stu
ff like books, records, and seemingly untouched cookware. What wasn’t provided by nature’s Pottery Barn, Kennedy had crafted to fit perfectly within the confines of his modernist cave. He offered me a seat on a driftwood-and-sheepskin couch. I cozied up to a crocheted throw pillow while Kennedy scooted his stool right across from me and hunched forward. “So,” he said, scorching my retinas with eye contact. “What is it that you would like to know about me?”

  I had skirted the issue of why, exactly, I was here, striking the word “cult” from my vocabulary and instead emphasizing the film’s focus on “avant-garde lifestyles.” Kennedy seemed receptive to letting me and Johnny talk to him, but he wanted us to do it separately. Given Johnny’s natural inclination to not give a shit about anything, at all, ever, I was up first.

  As I struggled to find my way into easy conversation, Kennedy glanced at my hand, which was still holding on to that psychedelic mushroom stem as if it were the string of a long-deflated balloon. He held up a finger and meandered over to his kitchen area, returning with a jar of honey and two spoons. He popped a mushroom of his own into his mouth, chewed, then chased it with a spoonful of the sticky substance. He stared into my eyes, clearly waiting for me to follow him inside whatever dripping lava lamp of a world he was headed off to. Resisting my natural aversion to psychedelics (fuck dreamlands—I have a hard enough time simply falling asleep), I gave in and swallowed the bitter mound of dried fungus, saying a silent prayer to fortify my stomach against anything too warm or fuzzy. I ate a spoonful of the honey and then another, once I realized it would be the only foodstuff to hit my digestive system in quite some time.

  “Well?” Kennedy asked again. “Do you want to know my favorite color? What living or dead celebrity I’d most like to have dinner with?”

  “Neon isn’t a color,” I shot back, eliciting a grin inside those golden eyes. “Why don’t you just talk to me about what you’re trying to accomplish out here.”

  I knew it wouldn’t be that simple, but I had to give it a shot anyway. I had tried to gather some sort of a mission statement from the kids at the camp, but no one could come up with anything more substantial than babble about rejecting mainstream society and building something better, and “Have you heard the new track from DJ Robot Horse?” They all seemed to worship Kennedy, but in this abstract way that didn’t line up with an actual person. They spouted the party line of “being a part of something” but had a hard time offering any insight into what that something might be. What I was curious about was Kennedy’s own level of awareness—whether he was manipulating the kids into following along in his little experiment in hipster exile, or if he actually bought into this idea that something important was happening out here.

  “Are you having a good time with us?” Kennedy asked.

  “I am,” I said, answering in earnest.

  “Is there anything you’re missing?”

  I shook my head. “Not really.”

  “Well, what you’re experiencing is pretty much what I’m trying to accomplish. We’re having fun, and no one’s getting hurt. And if we can all become a little less reliant on the bullshit trappings of society in the process, then even better.”

  Kennedy opened up a tin of Nat Sherman cigarettes, black with gold leaf around the filter. I wanted to ask him how much they cost. And for that matter, I wanted to know how much money it took to bring indie bands out into the middle of the desert twice a week. I was curious exactly how many thousands upon thousands of dollars were sitting inside a trust fund with his name engraved on the outside. I guess given our rapport so far, I could have just come out with all that, but I didn’t. And I’m pretty sure that was because I didn’t want any conflict to get in the way of the fun.

  So instead, I flashed a smile and took the cigarette that was offered to me. “Good times aside, we can both agree that the DJ who sampled the Doogie Howser theme kind of sucked, right?”

  Kennedy laughed. “Just wait for the next band. They’ll be up later this week, and they’ll blow your mind.”

  “Let me guess—there are three ukuleles?”

  That was the last question I asked that made any sense. As if cued up by some hidden party producer, the ridges in the rocks started to vibrate, and I felt the warm desert air enter my lungs with a burst of clarity. The crocheted throw pillow in my lap became as interesting as a Pollock painting, and I found myself hopelessly lost—without map, compass, or Magellan GPS—inside Kennedy’s golden eyes. I suddenly wondered if Gram Parsons might be hanging around, after all.

  Kennedy and I spent the next few hours lying around in his cave, watching stuff crawl along the outside of our eyeballs, and laughing at nothing at all. A small lizard wandered in from outside, and we gave him a name and a backstory. Little Ajax had just reached the age of maturity and was on a walkabout to find himself before he could reenter the suburban lizard society from whence he came. I picked him up and let him spend some time crawling along my arm, but eventually my attention fell to other things (you ever notice how truly fascinating split ends can be?), and Kennedy and I lost track of our little reptilian friend.

  When the effects of the mushrooms were starting to wear off, Kennedy pulled a vial of cocaine from his pocket and dumped some out onto a small mirror. “Time for an afternoon pick-me-up.”

  I licked my lips. Seeing my eyes spark with light, Kennedy laughed. “I guess I should have known this was more your speed.”

  “Pun intended?” I asked, as I leaned over to snort up a line.

  “But of course.”

  After my meeting with Kennedy—which ended with the camp’s leader walking me through the grounds with his arm thrown around my shoulders, introducing me as “the Lizard Queen”—the rest of the kids embraced me and Johnny as members of their ilk. They knew about our motivation for being there, the movie we’d come to research, but that didn’t make them wary of us; it just made them feel like they were going to be famous. Johnny and I decided to hang around for a little while longer, so we rented an Airstream trailer owned by a guy named Lennox who had skipped off to Amsterdam to track down the perfect lady of the night and bring her back as his wife.

  Johnny and I would sleep through the sunny parts of the day and emerge a little before dusk, like a pair of go-getter vampires. We spent our nights guzzling lavender wine with the kids—getting high to celebrate the execution of every bottle—and stumbling into cacti like Buster Keaton in Roy Rogers drag. Embracing my role as the Lizard Queen, I’d pull Johnny up to the tallest point of a series of rock formations. From that angle, we could see the camp only in the periphery, and the rest of our field of vision was occupied by a flat vista of stars that seemed to stretch on forever.

  One night, as a DJ played ambient electronica for the coyotes, Johnny and I collected a group of kids to join us at our usual spot. These youngsters were on all sorts of shit at once—pot, peyote, the ancient piss fumes of vintage denim. It was as if all their boundless freedom had turned their drinking and drugging into a facsimile of revelry. The kids were strangely methodical in their need to keep on going. The music never got turned down, and the bottles of wine and jars of moonshine kept appearing—these kids were not going to be caught unprepared for the eventual climax of whatever Kennedy had in store.

  Amidst the drinking, a tiny blonde was trying her damnedest to get Johnny to dance with her. I nudged him until he gave in and conceded to sashay around with the girl, who wouldn’t stop babbling on about how her grandmother used to take her to the ballet in London every year. Evidently, Grandma had box seats. Apparently, the ballet is a place where one can have box seats.

  After a do-si-do-not-fucking-make-me-do-this-again, Johnny snuck off to fix, and the girl sat down next to me. She looked incredibly bored yet was trying incredibly hard to appear both interesting and interested in everything. It was a point on the spectrum of facial expressions I hadn’t even seen before, a gaze so unreachable I felt a stab of pity in my blackened heart. “Is he your boyfriend?” the girl asked,
looping a series of tiny braids into her blonde hair.

  I smiled and avoided the question. The girl continued to play with her tresses.

  “So, how long have you been out here?” I asked, remembering my supposed reason for staying at the camp.

  “About six months,” the girl, Zoemarie, replied. “I met Kennedy at a party and then just skipped out on my last year at Wellesley. He’s so brilliant, you know? Like, I knew I just had to be a part of it.”

  “A part of what?”

  “Um, this.”

  “And what, exactly, is this?”

  Zoemarie just stared at me, like I was a mongrel in need of a safety helmet and a diaper. Johnny returned before the girl had a chance to wipe drool from my chin and send me back to Silver Lake on a converted short bus. He kissed me casually on the top of the head. Zoemarie shifted her attention back to her hair, using individual braids as the strands to make bigger braids, and turning herself into a pint-sized Medusa with a head of Ouroboroses.

  Johnny pulled me up from the rock, and we walked back to our trailer arm in arm. My lanky companion swayed a little as he moved, and I was feeling drunk enough that the amphetamines in my system were dulled to half capacity. They were rocket ships that were fired off at light speed but then boomeranged right back, disappointing a room of NASA astrophysicists, who had been hoping for infinity and beyond.

  Inside the trailer, Johnny kissed me softly for a long time. His eyes were becoming half-lidded. He fell onto the bed, and I helped take off his jeans, running a finger along his sharp hip bones. He smiled dreamily. “How long do you want to stay?” he asked, in a way that made me think it wouldn’t make a difference to him if my answer were for one more day or one more year.