A Hard Act To Follow

by Troy Conway

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locals, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 1968 by Hachette Book Group

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any from or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Popular Library

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: May 2008

  ISBN: 978-0-446-54046-9

  Contents

  BOOKS IN THIS SERIES BY TROY CONWAY

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  “Sturdy”, tireless Rod Damon gives his all to prevent a band of beautiful hippies from turning the government onto an all-time high—on LSD.

  From the tips of their sandled feet to the tops of their lovely acid-heads, these chicks are in a white heat of rebellion. And Rod Damon is the only man with enough cool to quench their fiery demands.

  Set against New York’s psychedelic East Village scene, A HARD ACT TO FOLLOW is a racy romp through the beds of the kookiest enemy agents ever to drop out of The Great Society!

  Books In This Series

  by Troy Conway

  A Hard Act To Follow

  The Billion Dollar Snatch

  The Wham! Bam! Thank You, Ma’am Affair

  It’s Getting Harder All The Time

  Come One, Come All

  Last Licks

  Keep It Up, Rod

  The Man-Eater

  The Best Laid Plans

  It’s What’s Up Front That Counts

  Had Any Lately?

  The Cunning Linguist

  All Screwed Up

  It’s Not How Long You Make It

  The Penetrator

  A Stiff Proposition

  I Can’t Believe I Ate The Whole Thing

  Eager Beaver

  A Hard Man Is Good To Find

  Published By

  WARNER PAPERBACK LIBRARY

  CHAPTER 1

  Her name was Lola, and her game was love.

  She was, in other words, a hippie—a member of the vast underground army of bearded guys and long-haired dolls who burst on the American scene in the last few years and waged war on The Establishment using the one weapon that no one ever has been able to defend himself against: love.

  She was a hippie and she wanted love.

  And I wasn’t about to challenge her, especially since the present object of her affections happened to be me.

  My name’s Damon, Rod Damon. Or, more precisely, Dr. Rod Damon.

  I hold a Ph.D. in sociology and I’m an associate professor at a major university in the northeastern United States.

  Also, I’m founder, director and chief researcher for the League for Sexual Dynamics.

  The League is more of a pleasure than a business. It’s something I conceived during my pre-doctoral days when I was trying to figure out a way to have my sociological cake and eat it too.

  I applied for grants form knowledge-hungry foundations and used the money to research the sexual mores of various segments of contemporary society. My findings have been published in all the major journals, earning me a reputation as one of the country’s most distinguished behavioral scientists.

  And my field studies have brought me into contact with some of the grooviest chicks ever hatched. As Benny Goodman might have put it, nice work if you can get it.

  My first project was a study of the sexual behavior of American coeds.

  My next was a study of parallels between sexual behavior of American coeds and contemporary non-college females.

  Subsequently I studied the sexual behavior of female graduate students, of female Ph.D.’s, of female college dropouts, of suburban housewives, of urban housewives, of rural housewives, of New York career girls, of Los Angeles career girls, of Washington (D.C.) career girls, of London career girls, of Paris career girls, of Rome career girls and of prostitutes in West German brothels.

  Then I began studying the sexual behavior of female hippies.

  As I described the project on the application to the foundation which financed it, I intended to investigate: “(a) motivational factors operative among females of the so-called ‘hippie’ community in the selection of males to whom they relate sexually; (b) characteristics of the males so selected; and (c) the nature and extent of sexual practices which transpire once selection has been made.”

  Translating the jargonese into English, I wanted to know who the hippie chicks swung with, them, and how they swung—especially how.

  To find out, I went to New York’s East Village, rented a coldwater flat, stopped shaving, let my hair grow and bought a closetful of second hand clothes. In short, I made every effort to become assimilated into bearded, hippie society. That’s how I met Lola.

  It happened in a bar on St. Mark’s Place—a Crazy psychedelicatessen where strobe lights play hell with your vision, twanging guitars play hell with your hearing, and pushy bartenders play hell with your bankroll.

  I’d been researching the joint without a bite for more than three ear-shattering hours when she sauntered in, looked around and made a beeline to where I was sitting.

  “Want to make it?” she asked.

  “Huh?” I replied, caught off guard by her approach.

  “DO YOU WANT TO MAKE IT?” she repeated, this time loud enough for the entire bar to hear. And just in case there was some doubt in my mind as to what she was talking about, she ran her tongue around her full, red lips like a scene out of the Tom Jones movie.

  Her bluntness should not have caught me off guard. I’d been in the East Village for nearly three weeks, and I knew that hippies like to get to the point without any preliminaries.

  But Lola was no run-of-the-mill, flat-on-top, flabby-on-bottom, frayed-at-the-edges, down-at-the-heels hippie.

  She was an eye-popping, mind-blowing, passion-pro-voking picture of pulchritude—an exciting super-chick with a face like a Botticelli Madonna and a body that made it hard for a guy to think about her as just a simple flower child.

  Her eyes were ice-blue and her hair was moonlight-gold. Her moist, pink lips sheathed a set of pearl-white teeth that was a promise of things to come. Beneath her baggy shirt was a full bosom and the skin-tight, cut-off blue jeans that hugged her hips and things left nothing to the imagination.

  “Your pad or mine?” I asked.

  She wrinkled her nose, and the corners of her mouth darted downward in a saucy little pout. She groaned, “If we’ve got to have a big debate about it, forget it.”

  “My pad,” I said, polishing off the remains of a Scotch and soda. “It’s right around the corner.”

  A few minutes later we were in the fourth-floor walk-up penthouse of the tumbled-down tenement I called home, and a few minutes later we were in bed.

  Undressed, Lola looked even better than she had with her clothes on. Her milk-white breasts were impressively large, admirably high and as firm as a pair of sun-ripened melons. In the center of each was a pink rosette and a distended nipple. Beneath, her waist tapered gently into what had to be the most curvaceous hips in creativity, and her long golden legs w
ere a sweet promise.

  But she didn’t give me much time to admire the view. No sooner had I shucked the last of my duds than her hands were on me—probing, pulling, tugging, squeezing. Her kiss was a cushion of velvet and her love play became a crescendo of passion. Her tongue, a tip of fire, flickered at my navel, my chest, my thighs and the tip of my passion. Then she moved on top of me. Her womanhood contacted me like a thousand hungry tongues. Her legs shot forward in a trembling letter-V, then closed around my head, clutching me to her. She writhed frantically like a jockey. Then our bodies fell into a passionate rhythm of the act.

  Her eyes were shut, and her face was screwed up in an expression of exquisite pain-pleasure. She moaned and mumbled.

  I frankly wondered just what the hell she was talking about, but I didn’t give it very much thought. The sensations she was stirring inside me were far more interesting.

  Her body quivered with excitement and her fingernails dug feverishly into the muscles of my shoulders.

  “Love me!” she gasped, “Love me!” Then, digging her knees into the mattress, she pressed her advantage. The force of the attack made me tremble and twitch. She leaned over and dug her teeth into my neck, and twitch. She leaned over and dug her teeth into my neck, and my back arched high into the air. I grabbed her by the hair, jerked her head back and violently kissed her mouth. Then my fingers found their way along her sides until they had a tight grip on her writhing, squirming buttocks. I pushed against her with all the strength I could muster.

  “Love me!” she cried.

  With studied casualness, I slowed the tempo to a lazy largo. Taking her legs in my arms, I lifted them high above her body, almost bending her in two. Then I teased her as I came to a halt. She opened her eyes. Then I was off again up to the hilt. At the same time, my mouth found her left breast and I bit hard into it.

  “Oooooohhhhh, baby! You’re killing me! I can’t stand it!”

  Each piston stroke sent new ripples of excitement through her luscious, trembling body. Each ripple produced another desperate groan.

  Finally she could take it no longer. Hooking her calves around my buttocks she squeezed me against her and we rolled over. Her mouth found mine. She thrust once, twice, a third time. Then, with loud gasps and together, we abandoned ourselves to the sweet, shattering spasms of climax.

  When it was over, she lay limply beneath me. “Like, wow,” she said wearily. “And I thought you were a square.”

  I let the compliment go unacknowledged. It wasn’t that I was unappreciative. It was that I’d learned in my travels around the East Village that hippies place a premium on playing it cool. “Why this free sex?” I asked, casually changing the subject. “Like, since when is sex a charity affair?”

  She buried her face against my neck, and her fingers toyed playfully with my hair. “Well, you know,” she murmured affectionately. “I mean, it’s all part of the movement and everything. I mean, it’s the thing to do.”

  My furrowed brow told her that I didn’t have the vaguest idea of what she was talking about.

  “I mean,” she went on, “you’re not from around here, are you? I mean, you’re a tourist.”

  “In a manner of speaking,” I conceded, failing to see the connection.

  “I knew that you were a tourist as soon as I saw you. I mean, when I came into the bar and saw you sitting there with your drink, I just knew you couldn’t be one of us. You looked okay and you were dressed okay, but I could tell you really weren’t part of the scene.”

  “Then why’d you come over to me?”

  “That’s the whole point. I wanted to turn you on, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know. Like you said, I’m a tourist.”

  She slithered over to the side of the bed and tugged a pack of Kents from the pocket of her jeans, which were heaped on top of her shirt and sandals on the floor. “Well,” she explained, “the key to the whole hippie movement is love. I mean, that’s what’s wrong with the world. There isn’t enough love in it. People get all hung up on materialism, and they forget the basics. You know?”

  “An interesting analysis,” I admitted.

  “Well, it isn’t original. I got it from The Big Head, and he got it from philosophers of ages past.”

  “The Big Head. Who’s he?”

  “Who’s he? Just the high priest of the Church of the Sacred Acid, that’s all. You mean you never heard of him?”

  “Now that you mention it, the man sounds familiar.”

  “Pretty soon there won’t be a person alive who doesn’t know who he is. He’s going to be one of the foremost leaders of all time.”

  “I’ll take your word for it, but I still don’t see what this has to do with me.”

  “Well, not long ago I was a self-centered, spoiled little brat. I mean, my parents had bread and I got everything I wanted. I had my own car and all kinds of clothes and even my own private telephone, and I lived in a decadent, materialistic suburb on the North Shore. Get the picture?”

  “So far, yeah.”

  Anyway, I started running with the Village crowd. That’s when I discovered grass and acid and everything. Then I heard one of The Big Head’s sermons. That’s when I found out where things were really at.”

  “Stop the train. I know that grass is marijuana and acid is LSD, but how could sermons teach you where things are at?”

  “You know. I mean, it’s love and everything. The Big Head showed me that my car and my clothes and my private telephone were all part of the materialistic rat race. Like, they’re not important. All that’s important is love.”

  “And that’s why you went to bed with me?”

  “Exactly! I mean, now that The Big Head showed me where it’s at, all I think about is love. Whenever I meet a lonely somebody, I try to give him all the love I have. When I saw you in the bar, sitting there looking deprived and everything, I knew you needed love. So I went up to you and told you you could have me. I mean, that’s the way the whole world should be. If it was, there wouldn’t be any wars or poverty or anything, would there?”

  “Perhaps not,” I granted. “Anyway, thanks. And I’m glad you enjoyed it as much as I did.”

  “Oh, I did! It was beautiful! You really have a lot of love in you. You ought to stop by the Church sometime. The Big Head would really dig meeting you. You’d be such an asset to the movement.”

  “I’ll make it a point to look him up tomorrow. Meanwhile, speaking of love . . . ,” I started saying, then rubbed her belly, obviously at the ready.

  “You do have a lot of love in you. I never met anyone with so much love to give away.”

  Actually I hadn’t pooped out because I’m afflicted with a bizarre variety of the physiological disorder known as priapism. In other words, I practically have a perpetual erection.

  Most priapists suffer a fate worse than death. While they’re constantly rarin’-to-go, they can’t do anything once they get there. That is, they don’t experience orgasm. It’s sort of like owning a sleek new automobile that can’t be taken out of the garage.

  I’m different. Thanks to fate biology or what-have-you, I’m not only ready to go, I’m fully capable of enjoying the trip. Medical science calls the situation unique. I call it groovy.

  Of course, I didn’t bother explaining all this to Lola. If she wanted to attribute my stamina to an abundance of love, I wasn’t going to try to change her mind. I began kissing her lightly on the lips, neck, bosom, and other interesting places. She began to kiss me all over, discovering new erogenous zones. Then I proceeded to take up where we had left off a few minutes before.

  But this time things didn’t go quite so smoothly.

  No sooner had we started moving then she stopped cold. Her eyes went glassy, and her face went pale. Her body stiffened.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Unnhhh,” she replied, her voice filled with fright.

  “Huh?”

  “Unnnnhhhhhh!!!”

  I touched her face. I
t was rigid.

  Finally I slapped her lightly across the cheek. She found her voice. “Behind you!” she whispered urgently. “Look what’s behind you!”

  CHAPTER 2

  I looked.

  Then I looked again.

  No wonder she had said “what” and not “who”

  Fortunately I hadn’t taken any mind-expanding drugs or I might’ve thought I was flipping out. Even without drugs I found it hard to believe I hadn’t propped my cork.

  The guy was tall, gaunt and lean as a swizzle stick. Judging from the wrinkles in his weather-beaten face, his age was sixty-plus. Judging form the bags under his eyes, he hadn’t slept for months.

  He wore and orange leather shirt, madras bermuda shorts and calf-high black riding boots. Hanging from his neck was heavy silver Iron Cross. Rounding out the ensemble was a pair of blue-tinted, steel-rimmed glasses—the kind Benjamin Franklin used to favor. And, as if this get-up weren’t weird enough, he also was wearing what had to be the most obvious hairpiece ever assembled.

  A very familiar smile peeked out form under his walrus-like mustache. “Good evening, Damon,” he said amiably. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”

  It’s a good thing blood doesn’t really boil, or mine would have. “Interrupting!” I thundered. “What could possibly make you think you’re interrupting?”

  His smile broadened and the ends of his walrus-moustache danced playfully in front of his yellow, horse-like teeth. “Well, in my line of work, one often gets the feeling that people aren’t happy to see one. I suppose one becomes slightly paranoid after a time.”

  “Also slightly rude.” I nodded toward Lola, who was still lying stiff as a corpse beneath me. “You frightened the poor girl out of her wits. Couldn’t you have waited until we were finished?”

  “Knowing you, that might not have been for days. In my line of work, every minute counts. Besides, you left your door unlocked In my line of work——”

  “Yeah, I know. In your line of work, and unlocked door is an engraved invitation.”

  His line of work, as I had discovered some time before, was espionage. He was a high-ranking representative of an all-powerful, top-secret and, so far as I could discern, nameless U.S government agency which specialized in saving the world from the forces of tyranny.