A Hard Act To Follow

by Troy Conway

  The sex-play, for instance.

  When I took the LSP, I had been fully clothed ad so had everyone else in the roam. When its effects wore off I was naked and so was everyone else—except The Big Head. This, plus the fact that my manhood was as sore as an exposed nerve ending was pretty convincing evidence that I’d had more than my usual quota of sack-action

  But had I really played round—robin with tour different chicks? Or had I just swung with Lola four times and hallucinated the rest.

  And what about Egbert? Had he really started to give me a rundown on the p h for The Big Freak-Out? Or had I hallucinated that too?

  And what about Corinne LaBelle? Had she actually been in the room?

  I could only guess. And in the shape was in, even guessing required mare effort than I had energy for.

  I polished off the beer, then stepped over a couple lying in the kitchen doorway and made my way back to the living room. Everything was exactly as I had left it, except that The Big Head, previously stone-silent, was now mumbling a weird litany of nonsense syllables. I squatted down alongside him. “What’s happening, baby?” I asked.

  Hi head jerked up and he looked at me through glassy eyes. “Shhhh,” he said after a moment. “They’ll hear you.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  He drew his arms more tightly around his chest. His forehead was studded with beads of perspiration and his lips were quivering violently. “Them,” he replied. “Who else?”

  I played the game with him. “Can you see them?”

  He looked around as if he were really trying to. Then he stared straight ahead. All of fifteen seconds passed before he turned to me again. When he did, he wore a look of astonishment, as if he had just noticed me for the first time.

  “Well,” I pressed, “can you see them or not?”

  He took another look. “No,” he said quietly. “But don’t make any noise. They’re around here somewhere.”

  I said nothing. A minute passed, then another, then a third. He was frozen in place, his lips trembling, his body curled up into a fearful-looking foetal ball. I waited a few minutes more, then said, “I don’t hear them now. I think they’re gone.”

  He looked around the room again, then turned back to me. “Do you really think so?”

  “I’m sure of it Otherwise we’d hear them, wouldn’t we?”

  “Yeah, we would.”

  Several more minutes passed, and he seemed to relax. He stretched out his legs and straightened his back against the door. “Wow, man!” he said, yawning. “What a trip!”

  “A good one or a bad one?”

  “A little of both.” He chuckled. “But when it was good, it was very, very good.”

  “And when it was bad it was horrid,” I finished the nursery rhyme for him.

  Several more minutes passed. He blinked and massaged his temples. “Some stuff you handed out I’d like to get more of it.”

  “I’ll lay some on you tomorrow.”

  “Thanks”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Several more minutes. I decided to see if he could shed any light on my vision of Corinne LaBelle. “That brunette you were with,” I said. “The one who didn’t take her clothes off-who was she?”

  He slid forward on the floor until he was h a supine position with only his head propped up against the door. “Just a chick, man. Just another chick”

  I slid into place alongside him. “She had a lot going for her.”

  He yawned. “Ahhh, she was just a chick”

  “Why didn’t she take her clothes off?”

  He turned toward me and his eyes fixed on mine. He seemed to be looking at me from across a great distance. “Ahhh—” he began. Then, sliding down farther on the floor, he rolled onto his side, facing away from me. A few seconds later, he began to snore.

  I headed back to the kitchen for another beer. I considered trying again to get some information out of him, then decided against it. In the shape he was in, he couldn’t tell me much. And even if he could, he wouldn’t, so there was no point pressing my luck.

  I sipped the beer, trying to make some sense out of the little he had told me. One thing seemed certain: there had been a brunette in the room, a brunette who looked like Corinne LaBelle and who didn’t take off her clothes. But was she really Corinne? And if she was, what was she doing at the party? Walrus-moustache seemed to think that she might have been kidnapped or brainwashed into serving the conspiracy. But in either case, would she have been socializing with the acid-heads? It didn’t figure.

  I looked out the window. The sun was coming up over the East River. A glance at my watch told me that it was six thirty. My aching bones told me it was time to go home and get some sleep.

  I finished the beer and ambled back into the living room. Lola was still sitting in the corner, h a face still frozen in an expression of ecstasy. I thought of waking her up, then changed my mind. I had enough problems without taking on the additional burden of playing nursemaid to a freaked out acid-head—specially a freaked out acid-head who, by introducing me to The Big Head had served her only purpose in my present scheme of things.

  On the chance that Corinne LaBelle might still be on the premises, I made a quick inspection tour of all the girls in the apartment. None of them looked even vaguely like her. I slipped through the door and down the stairs.

  Out on the street, the non-hippie citizens of the East Village—the Slavs, the Negroes and the Puerto Ricans whose poverty and/or stubbornness had kept them chained to the neighborhood that rapidly was becoming a hippie preserve—were going about the business of beginning another day. Bleary-eyed men in working clothes and women in baggy dresses came tumbling out of apartment buildings. They queued up at the bus stops and subway kiosks, their faces portraits of patient despair.

  I walked up Avenue D to the corner of Kith Street, bought a newspaper and started the trek westward to my pad. I didn’t glance at the headline until I was in my bedroom and half undressed. Then, when I did, I was too whacked out to really understand what I was reading.

  I yawned, dropped the paper on the nighttable, took off the rest of my clothes and crawled into bed. Then I dosed my eyes. They had been closed for all of a minute before the message hit me and I leaped out of bed like a cat with its tail on fire. I reread the headline.

  “GARROTE MURDER

  NUMBER FOUR

  IN EAST VILLAGE”

  A photograph of a familiar face stared out at me. The name under the picture was that of James Hartley, Corinne LaBelle’s accountant-boyfriend from Philadelphia who had surfaced in New York a few days after she had dropped out of sight in Hong Kong. The caption under the picture was straight and to the point It read, “VICTIM.”

  Hartley’s corpse had been found in Tompkins Square Park at eleven the previous evening. Death was the result of strangulation with a strand of piano wk. Police knew only his name, his Twenty-Third Street address and—thanks to the fact that he carried a Pennsylvania driver’s license—his previous address in Philadelphia They had no theory as to who might have murdered him or why, but they suspected that his death was c o m d to the deaths of the three other hippies who had been garroted m the East Village during the past few weeks.

  A reasonable suspicion, I mused, dropping the newspaper back onto the nighttable and flopping back into bed. Normally I might have thought about the murder longer. But my LSP trip had taken its toll. I was out cold as soon as my head hit the pillow.

  CHAPTER 5

  Sometimes it goes good and sometimes it goes bad. So far it had been going pretty good. During the first twenty-four hours after Walrus-moustache had tapped me to foil The Big Freak-Out, I had:

  (1) Wangled an introduction to the plot’s prime suspect without even leaving my apartment;

  (2) Set up a luncheon date to pump him for information;

  (3) Pow-wowed with a rock and roll musician who, unless I had been hallucinating, knew not only the general plan for the proposed coup but also the exac
t deployment of the troops who would stage it;

  And (4) —again, unless I had been hallucinating—spotted the former U. S. secret agent who seemed to be either the prisoner or the reluctant collaborator of the conspirators.

  Now, according to the law of averages, it was time for things to go bad.

  The law was upheld.

  Bad Break Number One came at Max’s Kansas City. where I had my luncheon date with The Big Head. I got there at one forty-five, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. An hour later, he still hadn’t shown up. At three I began to get fidgety, and by three thirty I had decided to eat alone. I finished eating at four fifteen and he still was nowhere in sight. Then I polished off two beers. Soon it was five thirty and the dinner crowd had started to make the scene. I had another beer and headed home. It was six o’clock, and The Big Head bad stood me up but good.

  I tried not to be too disappointed, I told myself that he probably was hung over from his LSP trip and that he’d be all smiles and apologies when I looked him up that evening at The Church of the Sacred Acid.

  I was wrong. I got to The Church at seven, an hour before the sermon was supposed to begin, and found him not only unsmiling and unapologetic but also indisposed. The longhaired flunky who carried my message backstage returned with word that the great man was too busy to see me, either before the show or after. That was Bad Break Number Two.

  I still didn’t give up. I knew that hippies never placed a premium on politeness, and since The Big Head was the hippiest hippie of them all, it was only logical that he’d be somewhat lacking in the social amenities department. I decided to pay him another visit the following night. Then I chased down my second lead—Egbert, of The Decline of the West.

  I found him at a sleazy coffeehouse called The Ink Well, when The Decline of the West was playing a midweek one-night stand. I suffered through an hour of the band’s so-called music. Then, during the intermission I buttonholed their maestro and tried to get him to resume the conversation I remembered having with him at the party.

  Bad Break Number Three—he seemed completely unaware that the conversation had taken place. When I tried to prod his memory by speaking of the need for a revolution which would turn the United States back toward the peaceable ways of our ancestors, he looked at me as if I had popped my cork. When I described flower power as a militant movement that aims to get the enemy with its own weapon, he told me that I was reading the wrong magazines and suggested that I try Time.

  Finally I took a shot in the dark. I told him that I was part of an organization which planned to overthrow the United States government by polluting the Potomac with LSD, and I asked him to join in on the plot. He let me spell out all the details of the plan, then smiled at me like a kindergarten teacher refusing the request of a well-meaning but hopelessly dimwitted five-year-old. “It’s a wild idea, Damon,” he said, his voice loud and emphatic. “But it’ll never work. If I were you, I’d stop talking about it. Those C.I.A. cats are liable to hear you, and you’ll wind up in the Potomac yourself—with your feet in cement.”

  I was almost convinced that I was barking but the wrong tree.

  Almost, but not quite.

  There was something about his reaction that didn’t sit quite right with me.

  I sensed that he was rebuffing me too emphatically and too fast—as though he was hoping I’d believe our party-night conversation had been an hallucination.

  If my hunch was right, his reluctance to talk was understandable. Four people had been garroted in New York in less than a month. For all he knew. I could be a security man high up in the conspiracy looking for fellow conspirators with loose tongues. And if I had found him to be another blabbermouth, he might become Garrote Victim Number Five.

  In any case, I could see that I wasn’t going to get any more information from him while he was sober. So I invited him to bring a few of his friends to my apartment later in the night for another LSP party.

  He promptly turned down the offer, saying that he had a date with a non-acid-using girlfriend. The refusal left me more convinced than ever that he was part of the plot.

  But how could I get him to open up to me?

  I had no idea.

  I only knew that I was no closer to cracking The Big Freak-Out than I had been that night in my apartment when Walrus-moustache put ma on the case.

  Meanwhile, the hours were ticking away and A-Day—”A” for Acid—was rapidly drawing nearer.

  Angry with myself, angry with the hippies, angry with Walrus-moustache, and angry with life in general, I left The Ink Well and headset east toward St. Mark’s Place. By this time it was midnight. I found a phone booth, gave Aunt Matilda a progress report and asked if she had any ideas about what I should do next. She suggested that my best bat was a good night’s sleep.

  It wasn’t a bad idea, but I usually don’t sleep very well unless I’ve had a little pre-slumber sexercise. So I made the rounds of a few hippie hangouts looking far someone who might be interested in playing the game. After bar-hopping for two born without a nibble, I went back to The Ink Well to invite Lola for an after-the-gig wrestling match. Like they say, any port in a storm.

  Bad Break Number Four—the port was dosed. At least, to my steamboat it was. Lola had found another tourist who needed her love more than I did. I went home—and to bed—alone. It had been quite an afternoon and evening. No runs, no hits and no eros....

  I woke up the next morning at eleven. Since hippiedom doesn’t come to life before sunset, I had the whole day to myself and I knew just what I wanted to do with it. I wanted to get as far away from the hippie scene as possible, if only to reassure myself that the rest of the world was still swinging along per usual.

  I subwayed uptown to the Fifth Avenue business district. Io the past, I had found this turf to be a first class girl-hunting preserve, where models, secretaries, airline hostesses, salesclerks and all sorts of other normal types strut their pretty stuff from nine to five just dying to strike up an acquaintance with the right guy.

  Ordinarily I’d be that guy. But now, thanks to the long hair and beard I had grown to gain acceptance among the hippies. I was about as welcome as H. Rap Brown at a convention of Ku Klux Klansmen. I said “Hi” to a shapely stewardess who was waiting to catch a bus at the corner of Fifth and Fifty-Second. She scampered across the street—against the light, yet—at a speed somewhere near Mach Three. I tried the “What’s-your- name?” approach next, but with a countergirl on Fifty-Sixth Street. She looked at me as if I were Typhoid Mary. Finally I smiled at a bosomy page-girl outside the N.B.C. studios at Rockefeller Center. She all but hollered for the cops.

  It’s a wise general who knows when to retreat. I retreated to the Forty-Second Street branch of the public library and killed the rest of the afternoon reading newspaper accounts of the James Hartley murder case.

  Two days had passed now since the body of Corinne LaBelle’s ex-beau had been found in Tompkins Square Park, and the police seemed no closer to a solution. Only one item in the news stories seemed significant. A short distance from the body, cops had found an envelope containing fifteen pills which under laboratory analysis had proved to be five-microgram tablets of LSD.

  The papers seemed to think that this meant the killer was an acid-head who had dropped the envelope while leaving the scene of the crime. But I found it hard to believe that a hippie going out on a murder mission would carry so much acid with him.

  I wondered if maybe the envelope had belonged to Hartley instead of the murderer. If that had been the case, a very interesting link would have been established between Corinne LaBelle and the hippies. And Walrus-moustache might be able to use that link to persuade the disbelieving cabinet officer who supervised the agency’s operations that The Big Freak-Out was more than just a crazy acid-head’s dream.

  I phoned Aunt Matilda and suggested the possibility. Then I headed back to my apartment, wolfed down a steak, showered and changed. By this time it was seven o’clock, the perfect hour to
make a second try at meeting with The Big Head I taxied to The Church of the Sacred Acid.

  The flunky who had given me the too-busy routine the night before was at the door when I got there. I renewed my request for an audience and got another turn-down. Masking my disappointment with a smile, I wandered into the restaurant next door, ordered a cup of coffee and tried to figure out my next move.

  As thing now stood, I was riding a downhill curve so steep that it threatened to plummet right off the graph.

  I had followed up on my only two leads, and both had led me down blind alleys.

  I would’ve bet my virility that both The big Head and Egbert were in on the conspiracy up to their ears, but I couldn’t get close to either one of them. Much less infiltrate their colleagues, because both were avoiding me as if I were a carrier of bubonic plague.

  So what to do?

  I thought about it.

  And I thought about it some more.

  Before long I had nursed down my second cup of coffee and was starting on my third Still I had no answer.

  Then, suddenly, a light bulb marked “Idea!” flashed to life inside my brain.

  It was a long shot, and a dangerous one.

  But it just might work.

  It revolved around the reversing of an old axiom to read , “If you can’t join ‘em, lick ‘em.”

  Or, put more elaborately—”If the bastards won’t let you play their game. Make them play yours.”

  And I knew just how to do it.

  Gulping down my third cup of coffee, I hurried back to The Church of the Sacred Acid and bought a ticket for the evening’s service. It was an exact rerun of the routine I had sat through the night I went there with Lola. The Big Head knocked materialism, sang the praises of love and promised to demonstrate with Chiquita where things were really at.

  I cooled my heels until the two of them went into their non-contact love bit. Then, while The Big Head was making gestures of benediction over his pretty acolyte’s naked body, I slipped out of my seat and tiptoed through the darkened loft to the door leading backstage. When the lights went out, I sneaked through the door and down a narrow corridor to an oversized bathroom which evidently served as The Big Head’s dressing room. I was waiting there, sitting on the toilet seat, when he and Chiquita came back to change.