A Hard Act To Follow

by Troy Conway

  “I’m showing you the picture,” he replied. “on the remote chance that we’ve misgauged the firmness of her right-wing commitment—or on the less remote chance that the Chinese Reds have brainwashed her into joining their team. In either event, you may come across her in your travels.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Well, as I mentioned earlier, she’s biochemist and the plot to pollute the Washington water supply is essentially a problem in biochemistry. LSD is an American discovery, and so far as we’ve been able to learn no communist country has produced it. It’s not out of the question that the Reds might have kidnapped her and forced her to g to work for them.”

  “Still, it’s unlikely that I’d run across her. After all, she could do anything she had to do in Peking as well as here. Would the communists, if they had kidnapped her, take the chance of letting her loose in America?”

  “Presumably not. But that’s just one more of the curious puzzles about this case. You see, we believe that she’s presently here in New York”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Two things. First of all, during her last three months in Hong Kong, she drew unusually large sums of money from her account with the Coxe foundation—all told, something like twenty thousand dollars. When questioned on it, she said that she needed the money to bribe her sources. We found this acceptable, and her reports were so valuable to us that we gave her all she asked for. Still, suspicious creatures that we are, we recorded the serial number of every bill we gave her. Lately, a great many of these bills have popped up at Federal Reverse banks in New York. Secondly, while in Philadelphia she had a boyfriend, an accountant named James Hartley. Last week Mr. Hartley abruptly walked off his job and moved to Manhattan. He presently resides in a sleazy rooming house on Twenty-Third Street.”

  “Very interesting,” I quipped. “A no-account accountant.”

  Walrus-moustache took back the photo of Corinne and handed me one of a slender, boyish type with steel-rimmed glasses and a mole on his right cheek. “This is Hartley. The address of the morning house is on the back of the picture. You’d be tipping our hand if you approached him directly, but memorize the address. You never can tell when it might come in handy.”

  “Done,” I said.

  He took back the photo, slipped it into his shirt and got up from the bed. “And that, Damon,” he told me, “takes care of tonight’s business. You know what we’re after. Go get it. And”— he raised a warning finger —”don’t smoke the grass or let it grow under your feet. As I said earlier, the hippies almost certainly have overcome the technical problems surrounding the pollution of the Potomac—or soon will. They can strike at any moment. Your country is counting on you to deliver the goods before they do.” He straightened his leather shirt, hoisted his bermuda shorts, smoothed out his toupee, adjusted his Ben Franklin spectacles and tugged at the ends of hi Walrus-moustache. “Now, as they say in the movies, I must be off. Ta-at and all that.”

  I didn’t bother to show him to the door. As far as I was concerned, he had found his way in, so he could find his way out. I waited until the click of the latch testified to his departure. Then I shucked my robe and returned to Lola.

  Her smooth, succulent body wriggled awake as soon as I touched her. Her pretty blue eyes popped open, and a sexy smile lit up her face. “Baby,” she purred. “I can still feel the tingles. What did you give me?”

  “A pill,” I replied, cupping one of her breasts in my hand.

  “I’m still flying,” she cried.

  Her fingers found their way up my thigh. She quivered with delight at my readiness. She began to lick my body and then me. Slowly she scraped her teeth up and down and I held my breath. Would she bite it off? The scraping stopped and she licked it, then we joined normally.

  Her long legs coiled around mine, and her fingernails dug into my back. “Oh, baby,” she moaned. “We’re going to make it and make it and make it. We’re going to make it until you’re so down you’ll never come up again.”

  There was no harm in letting her try.

  CHAPTER 3

  It was six a.m. when Lola finally threw in the towel. Smiling weakly, though in ecstacy, she flopped over on one side of the bed and fell asleep. Since I couldn’t do much to save the nation at that hour of the morning, I joined her.

  When I woke up it was noon. The blazing New York sun had turned the apartment into a warm oven. Lola was in the kitchen, trying gamely to whip up a batch of scrambled eggs. I showed her how to do it. Then we breakfasted, and I made a date with her for eight that evening to take in one of The Big Head’s sermons at The Church of the Sacred Acid. She promised that after the sermon she’d arrange for me to meet the great man personally. She mumbled something about moving in.

  After she left, I showered, dressed and subwayed uptown to the Forty-Second Street branch of the public library. I was sure that there’d be something on The Big Head in their files of old magazines and newspapers, and I wanted to find out as much about him as I could.

  What I found wasn’t exactly an intimate biography, but when all the odds and ends were pieced together, a pretty clear picture emerged.

  Color it kooky.

  The Big Head’s real name was Worthington Matthew McGee. According to Time, he was the scion of an old-line family of Ohio industrialists. According to Newsweek, he was the scion of an old-line family of Pennsylvania industrialists. Whatever the case, both mags agreed that his parents had always had more loot than they knew what to do with. And they spent a sizable chunk of it putting him through school. He had prepped at Groton, taken his B.S. at Yale and picked up his Ph.D. in experimental psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

  During the Korean war, he had served as a lieutenant in the Army’s Adjutant General Corps. Curiously, he had been discharged in 1952 while the war was still going full tilt and all discharges were supposedly frozen. No enterprising journalist had seen fit to look into this inconsistency, but it was safe to assume that the discharge had come under other-than-honorable conditions.

  After the war, he went into research. His specialty was planarians, or flatworms. He published one monograph and two journal articles demonstrating that the slimy creatures could learn to work their way through a maze faster after being fed certain chemical compounds than they could without the compounds. The scientific community was quite impressed with his findings, and he was offered a professorship at a major university in the West.

  He took the job, but he didn’t keep it. Nor did he keep any of the others which followed it. Between 1955 and 1960, for reasons unexplained by any of the news accounts, he was on the faculty of no fewer than six different universities, each of lower academic standing than its predecessor. Finally he wound up at a nondescript teachers’ college in Massachusetts.

  It was in Massachusetts that he learned about the work being done with LSD by Drs. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert at Harvard. He tried the drug himself, experimented with it on some students, got fired by the college, and in 1963 took to the road touting the glories of love.

  As an itinerant love-touter, his career was nothing short of spectacular. He had preached in twenty-odd states and had been arrested in at least five of them on charges ranging from “possession of marijuana to “lewd and indecent behavior.” Two of the arrests had resulted in convictions and were presently under appeal.

  Meanwhile, between 1954 and 1962, he had been married and divorced four times, and none of his wives had stayed with him for longer than a year. Some batting average for a guy who roamed the country talking about love!

  Tucking away the biographical sketch in my mental filing cabinet, I headed back to my apartment. I took another shower and changed into the East Village version of evening clothes—dark jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. I met Lola and treated her to dinner at one of the hippie restaurants and hailed a cab for The Church of the Sacred Acid. Tickets for two cost five bucks.

  The so-called church was nothing more than a huge loft
gone psychedelic. Strobe lights flashed madly back and forth across the ceiling. Movie projectors hurled bizarre images like copulating amoebas against the walls. The smoke of burning incense fined the air.

  At one end of the room was an elevated platform surrounded by a black velvet curtain. When the audience was assembled on the wooden benches which served as pews, the house lights went out and the curtain opened, revealing a low wooden table-presumably the altar. It was painted white and stood in stark contrast to the black walls behind it. Except for a gleaming silver microphone stand, the rest of the platform was bare.

  Suddenly four loudspeakers crackled to life. A low voice said, “Testing, one, two, three, four.” Then, amidst murmurs of awe, a white-robed figure opened a door at the rear of the platform and stepped into the spotlight.

  He carried a hand microphone and a small bouquet of roses. His robe reached the tops of his sandaled feet. Around his neck was a string studded with pointed ivory objects resembling oversized hound’s teeth. His long, steel gray hair shot up from his head like a crop of wild grass, and his bright blue eyes glowed with the intensity of burning coals. Handing the flowers to a pretty brunette who sat at the edge of the platform, he went into his spiel.

  “All right, man,” he began, “you’ve got hang-ups. There’s nothing wrong with that. Everybody’s got hang-ups. But what’re you gonna do about your hang-ups? That’s the question.

  “You tried booze, didn’t you? You slopped up the old foam like a pig at a trough But it didn’t work, did it?

  “So you tried downies. Tranquilizers. You took ’em three times a day, just like the doctor said. And that didn’t work either, did it?”

  “So now you’re asking me.

  “And I’m gonna tell you, baby.

  “The answer is love.

  “That’s right love.

  “I say LOVE.

  “Do you hear me?

  “LOVE!!!”

  Getting into the spirit of things, I draped my arm over Lola’s shoulders and let my fingers come to rest on her breast In reply, she brought her hand to my lap, but the gesture was perfunctory. Her real interests lay on the platform where the white-robed high priest of The Church of the Sacred Acid was spouting off like an updated Elmer Gantry.

  “Are you listening to me?” he bellowed. “I’m talking about love.

  “Do you know what it is?

  “It’s the morning and the evening star, that’s what it is.

  “It’s not new. It’s been around for a long, long time.

  “But there isn’t enough of it. There’s never enough.

  “Jesus had the answer.

  “Buddha had the answer.

  “Moses had the answer.

  “They all had the answer.

  “But nobody listened. The thieves and the hypocrites distorted their words and sold a bum bill of goods to the multitudes.

  “Jesus said, ‘Love.’ He said, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’

  “Then the phoney-baloneys in the black robes changed it. They said, ‘Never mind your neighbor, baby. Go to church on Sunday and don’t eat meat on Friday. That’s where it’s at.’

  “Now you’re asking me, ‘Where’s it really at?’

  “And I’m telling you.

  “It’s in your head, baby.

  “It’s up there in your head, just waiting to come out.”

  I had my own ideas about where it was—and my head wasn’t the place. I tried to get the message across to Lola by maneuvering her fingers into position around the pillar of my manhood. She clutched me dutifully, but she was too wrapped up in The Big Head’s eloquence to put any feeling into the gesture.

  “Yes, baby,” he continued, “it’s in your head.

  “And I’m gonna tell you how to bring it out. All you gotta do is listen.

  “Hello, Jesus. Say-hey, Moses. Good evening, your aggregate holiness, whatever your race, color or creed. Are you listening to me? I have some people here who want to know how to love. And I’m going to tell them.

  “Are you listening, people?

  “I want love.

  “I want LOVE!

  “I want the Ten Commandments—and not by Harvey and the Moonglows.

  “I want the real Ten Commandments.

  “LOVE! LOVE! LOVE! LOVE! LOVE! LOVE! LOVE! LOVE! LOVE! LOVE!”

  The more he talked about it, the more I wanted it too. But I wasn’t getting it from Lola Her eyes were riveted to The Big Head with the concentration of a hypnotic subject. With the first “LOVE” she loosened her grip on me. With the third she let go of me completely. And, by the time the tenth had rolled around, her hand had slithered off my thigh and was between her knees. So much for the Ten Commandments of Love!

  Then suddenly another girl’s hand found its way into my lap. It came from my left, the side opposite Lola, and headed straight for home plate. When it got there, it gripped me vigorously. The soft purr of appreciation that came from the throat of its owner let me know that she was delighted to find me in the state I was always in. I was glad we were off in a corner, back in the last—and empty—row.

  I slid closer to her, feeling the soft firm flesh of her thigh against mine. I couldn’t see her too clearly in the dim light of the darkened loft, but what I saw I liked.

  Her long black hair toppled wet her shoulders. Her pretty face was set in a feigned expression of rapt attention to the proceedings on stage. She wore a tight white sweater that displayed her small, round breasts to maximum advantage. And the bare legs that stretched out under her miniskirt were smooth, shapely and oh-so-caressable.

  I reached around her and massaged the gentle curve where her left thigh met her belly. In response, she shifted her weight and eased her right thigh and buttock over my leg.

  I moved farther to the left.

  She moved farther to the right.

  I moved still farther.

  She moved still farther.

  Then she was directly on top of me, her legs straddling mine, her fingers tugging desperately at the zipper.

  My palms found the insides of her thighs and worked upward. She wore nothing underneath. In seconds I was exposed and she was wriggling to sit on my lap as we both faced the rostrum. There was a moment’s hesitation. Then she bore down and the throbbing engine steamed into port.

  On stage, The Big Head was still mouthing off on the glories of love.

  “Yes, baby,” he was saying, “love is all you need, and I’m gonna tell you how to get it.

  “You can’t steal it.

  “That twisting string of cash won’t buy it, because cash is the curse of materialistic society.

  “So how do you get it?

  “I’ll tell you how you get it.

  “It’s in your head, man. It’s right up there in your head.

  “And how does it come out?

  “It comes out at night. It comes out at night because it’s afraid. The cash-crazy world wants to buy and sell it and it doesn’t want to be bought or sold.

  “So it’s afraid. Like, can you blame it, man? Wouldn’t you be afraid?

  “But it doesn’t have to be afraid. We can make it unafraid.

  “And how can we do that?

  “By transforming the world, that’s how.

  “Yes, man, we’ve got to transform the world

  ’We’ve got to stamp out hate and war and money. Then the world’ll be ready for love.

  “LOVE!

  “That’s what I’m telling you.

  “LOVE!!

  “Do you hear me?

  “LOVE!!!”

  Each time he said “LOVE” a ripple of rapport surged through the audience. My new-found friend expressed her empathy by squeezing tightly. I silently hoped The Big Head would say “Love,” more often.

  He did. In fact, he said it all of twenty times. With each repetition, the audience grew more inflamed. Soon a chorus had begun to chant with him: “LOVE. LOVE, LOVE!” My partner’s contractions kept time with the chanting. Her gri
p was so tight I thought my circulation was going to be cut off.

  Deep inside me, a hot ball of excitement swirled to life. I thrust harder. My miniskirted mate struggled to keep up with me. Her buttocks churned furiously. Her breasts strained against my hands.

  My excitement mounted. She turned her head around toward me and I found her lips with mine. She thrust her tongue between them. With one hand I cupped her breast. With the other I reached beneath her skirt and rubbed vigorously against the mound of Venus.

  A moment passed.

  Then another.

  Then our bodies exploded.

  When it was over, we stayed in position. I kissed her neck and savored the heady aroma of her perfume. She squeezed harder, eager to consume every last ounce of passion. I held her to me and continued kissing her until her body went limp in my arms.

  On stage, The Big Head, with flawless timing, had climbed out of the love bag and into the peace bag. He was saying that money was the root of all evil and that people would have to purge themselves of materialistic desire before the world could know lasting peace. He advocated unilateral disarmament, abolishment of taxation and a welfare program whereunder every man, woman and child would have a guaranteed annual wage. He never got around to explaining how a disarmed nation could protect itself against aggression or how a society without taxation could operate a welfare program. But if the congregation was aware of his inconsistencies, they didn’t let on.

  I tuned out the lecture and turned back in on my partner. Evidently she had just discovered the one exception to the rule that whatever goes up must also come down. She was rocking back and forth.

  My hands found her hips and tried to slow her down. Actually I was ready to play an encore, but I didn’t want to press my luck. So far Lola hadn’t taken her eyes off the stage long enough to notice that I was cuddling with another cutie. If she did notice, she might decide that I wasn’t sufficiently interested in The Big Head’s sermon to merit a personal introduction to him afterward. And if she refused to introduce us, I’d have blown the only real lead I had on The Big Freak-Out.

  “Coll it,” I whispered into my pretty sexmate’s provocatively perfumed ear. “We’re going to attract an audience.”