Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  Then everyone started rolling joints and passing them around. I did the natural thing without thinking; I just reached up and took my first toke in almost a year, and everything went crazy. I suddenly had no idea where I was, and I propped myself up on my mattress on my elbows to try to get a sense of it all. I saw New York City from a strange, topsy-turvy, childlike view. I saw the city at wildly swinging angles as the bus made big sweeping turns and skyscrapers swung into view and then disappeared into sky. Then we plunged into the darkness of the Lincoln Tunnel. Suddenly I relaxed. Suddenly nothing mattered. I abandoned myself to Jacob and Floyd and thought, Leave the driving to them. Thank God I’m not driving this bus across America.

  By dusk The American Dream had passed into the rolling hills of Pennsylvania and everyone had slipped into a comfortable and convivial mood. People began breaking out their little dinner treats: their granola bars, their bean sprout sandwiches, their yogurt, their bananas, their nuts. Music was playing constantly over the two little speakers above Floyd’s head as he drove. The song that I remember most vividly, perhaps because it played over and over again like it was on a loop, was “Only the Good Die Young,” and I took that to be some sort of message for the trip.

  So there I was, way in the back of the bus with the two Norwegian physed teachers. I was really terrified of taking out the nuts and cheese I’d bought in public because I noticed that anytime anything was passed around the bus, in traditional hippie sharing fashion, it never came back to the owner. Of course I had to remember there was really no “owner”; but whenever I’d see sunflower seeds go out or nuts or even joints, they would all disappear before they came full circle. I was afraid if I took out my bag of nuts, everyone would look at me until I passed them around and then I wouldn’t have enough to last me for the trip.

  The whole trip was one long drone that went on day and night for four days, and the worst of it was that we were all condemned to lying down, which in its own way is just as bad as having to sit up for a whole cross-country trip. At times, particularly in the heat of the day, I felt like a child sick in bed with fever, propped up on his elbows looking out the window. Outside, everything looked like a flat diorama that was being rolled by while the bus stood still. After about three and a half days of this we were suddenly spat out of a tunnel into Oz. There it was, San Francisco, bright white, peeking through a blanket of rolling fog. The entrance over the Golden Gate was spectacular; the fog was whipping across the bridge like a white brushfire. The wind off the Pacific rocked The American Dream as we crossed.

  Beautiful as San Francisco was, I had had enough of cities and decided to hitchhike immediately to Santa Cruz. I had no problem getting rides.

  As soon as I rolled into Santa Cruz, I knew it was the right town for me. I knew it as soon as I saw the clock in the clock tower in the center of town and was told how it had stopped years ago at ten past two, never to be started again. I knew it was the right place as soon as I saw that the town was small enough to walk around and that there was a big bookstore with a wonderful coffee shop named Purgalasi right behind it. It was the perfect place to learn to hang out, I was sure. If you didn’t know how to hang out, the town would soon teach you.

  I had called Wally from San Francisco to warn him that I was hitching down, and he told me to call him as soon as I got into town and he’d come pick me up and take me to his place, where he had an extra bedroom for me. And Wally did pick me up, in an outrageous car. It was a big pink two-door ’54 Chevy, with large white polka dots all over it.

  It was good to see Wally again. I hadn’t seen him since he left New York City four years before. He looked the picture of health: slim, firm legs from obsessively riding his ten-speed bike; sun-bleached hair; red shorts; Hawaiian shirt; and most of all, a great, broad, natural smile, something I never remembered him having in New York. Oh, and then of course there were the Birkenstocks.

  Wally’s setup was perfect for me. He lived in an old Victorian house, not far from the center of town, which in the old days, when there were such things as large extended families, had served as a home for one. But now it was subdivided for single men like Wally, all bachelors, resisting growing up, perpetual boys of summer, all waiting to meet the right woman, and who, perhaps because there were so many available women, had not found her yet. It was as if the endless possibilities of women stunned these men into indecision.

  The following day was Sunday. Sunday morning the entire communal kitchen at Wally’s house was abuzz and filled with mellow and relaxed guys, all hanging out with their dates and live-ins. People were lounging, laughing, and eating French toast with fresh fruit and sipping mimosas and even passing around an after-breakfast joint. Why, I wondered, did such a relaxed gathering leave me so anxious? I just wanted to have a bowl of granola and get out of there, go to the beach or something. But they all wanted to welcome me and initiate me into their pleasure dome. One of them, a real sweet guy in cut-offs, who worked in a bicycle shop on weekdays, offered Wally and me a teaspoon full of powdered psilocybin, just as a Sunday-morning brunch treat. I was surprised and demonstrably thankful, but Wally seemed even more surprised and told me to be flattered. “Frank,” he said, “must have really taken to you, because he never gives his drugs away.” “Then in that case,” I said half jokingly, “do you think it’s safe to take?” He just laughed at my paranoia. I decided not to take any drugs and just get out of there, go downtown to the Purgalasi to sit in the sun, sip a cappuccino, and read a little more Norman O. Brown.

  I was trying at last to get to the end of the book and see how it resolved itself. But all the time I was reading Norman O. Brown’s descriptions of polymorphous delight, I was watching what looked like the living example of it out of the corner of my eye. I kept watching this divine little blond six-year-old passing from table to table. When he got close to me I found that I was completely taken in by him—“mesmerized,” I think would be the word. It was as if he were a living example of all that Norman O. Brown was theorizing about. There he was, this expansive, irresistible little Dionysian boy moving between tables like the spirit of eternal delight. He sat right down beside me and as soon as he sat down, I asked what he wanted. He said, “Cherry phosphate,” just like that, all bright and decisive, and I thought I’d gone right back to the turn of the century. A cherry phosphate? What could that be? But I ordered it anyway and it came, cherry syrup in soda water, all stirred up into the most beautiful color. He put a straw in and went at it. He looked like a color drinking a color. He was barefoot and dressed in faded overalls and a yellow T-shirt. His face was a healthy pink framed by long blond hair. It was a wonderfully bright face which had a crazy devil-or-angel ambiguity combined with a great openness. It seemed he’d already seen a lot, but it had not harmed him or shut him down. He could not be an average six-year-old, I thought—and then again I wouldn’t have known what that was, an average six-year-old, had one sat down on my lap.

  We talked a little about his life and how he wasn’t in school yet, but soon would be, because he and his mom had only just arrived in town and hadn’t been able to work it out yet. When I asked him where he came from he told me that it was a real long, long way off, that he and his mom had hitchhiked for lots of days and nights to get there. As we were talking his mom came over and said, “Oh, I see you’ve met Shanti,” and I said, “Oh, Shanti?”

  And she said, “No, Om Shanti. That’s my son, that’s Om Shanti Karma.” And she said it just like that, like it was one of the most common names in town. Perhaps it was.

  “Come on, Shanti, we have to get going. Thank the nice man for the soda and let’s head out,” his mother said to him. Shanti jumped up without thanking me and ran to his mom and took her hand. She stood there, a woman about my age, with some premature graying hair like me. She just stood there, wearing her kung fu shoes and a full dark skirt and white blouse, and looked back at me. Her face was far from sweet or demure, like the other hippie mothers I’d seen there. Her face was very out
of place there in that sunny outdoor coffee yard filled with clean and squeaky blondes with peach complexions, creatures you felt you could eat without washing or cooking, just eat them raw.

  Shanti and his mother turned and started off, but Shanti stopped and looked back, melting me with one glance. Then he looked up at his mother and said, “Isn’t someone coming with us, Mom?”

  His mom turned to me and said, “Shanti wants to know if you’re coming with us.”

  At that moment I wanted to drive them wherever they wanted to go, just so I could see Shanti’s face when he saw that big, pink, foolish car. I said, “Do you need a ride anywhere?”

  “Oh, that would be nice, wouldn’t it, Shanti?” his mother said.

  Shanti’s face lit up just the way I hoped it would when he saw Big Pink sitting in among the generic Rabbits, hatchbacks, and fast-backs. We all piled into the front seat, Shanti between us, instantly and madly playing with the radio knobs as his mother asked me, pulling out her pack of Camel Regulars, if I minded if she smoked. That was another big surprise that made her, like me, not quite fit into the way things were in that town. She was the first person I’d seen smoke a cigarette since I arrived.

  “Not at all,” I said. “Smoke away,” and smoke away she did, as I drove very slowly to the house they called home.

  “By the way, my name is Mustang Sally,” she said, taking another deep drag of her Camel, exhaling the smoke and with a fine finger removing a piece of tobacco from her thin lower lip.

  “What’s that?” I asked, and she said it again, “My name is Mustang Sally.”

  “Oh yes, of course,” I replied. “But what should I call you?”

  “Call me Mustang,” she replied, taking another drag and exhaling the smoke straight up into the air.

  In that short, slow drive to their little tract house she told me a bit of how they had come to be there, and I just tried to listen without judgment.

  “Shanti and I are just staying with friends now until we can find the right place to pitch our teepee. We want to pitch it up in the Santa Cruz hills. We haven’t found our spot yet, but it will come,” she said, giving me a knowing look. “It will come in time.”

  Mustang Sally spoke with an educated East Coast accent, which I couldn’t place, but it was definitely familiar to my ear. She went on to tell me how she and Shanti had hitchhiked down from Washington State with their teepee. “You mean you hitchhiked with a teepee? How did you ever get it into the cars?”

  “Oh, no problem,” Mustang said. “We got picked up by vans and trucks mostly, and with cars we just put it on the roof. People are still real open and nice, at least on Highway 1, and they even let us stay in their homes.”

  The house they were staying in was on a little side road not far from the beach. It was cozied in among a lot of other bungalows without much character or distinction. I pulled Big Pink up in front of the house and stopped. “Do you want to come in and smoke a joint?” Mustang asked. Her words went through me like an arrow. I wanted to do it and yet was afraid. Smoke a joint in the middle of the day? I’d only done such a thing once before, on The American Dream, and that had been so confusing. It had made me so anxious. I had felt very much out of control; but then again, here I was in a small little town with a car and Wally’s safe haven waiting for me, so why not? I knew for the time there were no strings attached to me except in my memory, which I’d been able pretty much to beat off for the day. So why not go in and try to relax? If anything went wrong I could always just walk out and drive to the beach or go see Wally at work in his photography store. I was free. No one had any power over me, except perhaps Shanti; and besides, I wondered what it would be like to be stoned with Shanti and Mustang. But most of all I was not ready to say goodbye to Om Shanti Karma. I had fallen in love at first sight.

  I did not like the feel, or “vibe,” as they say, of that house. As soon as I got inside, it felt weird. It was dark and cluttered. The furniture was an odd collection of Ethan Allen, junk picked off the street or the dump, and a big Castro convertible couch. All the window shades were pulled down in the living room, and clothing was scattered everywhere. But the kitchen saved the day. The kitchen was big and bright and not too cluttered, although the dishes in the sink looked like they were beginning to grow a fine green moss.

  Mustang put the kettle on for tea and got a plastic bag of marijuana out of the kitchen cupboard. Shanti sat at the kitchen table and beamed up at me like a bright shining light. He seemed to be the main source of light in that house, and I secretly hoped that he’d never burn out. He sat there playing with a pot holder and looking up at me with that outrageous and incredible trust, and he asked me where I came from. When I said, “New York City,” Mustang responded by saying, “You remember New York City, Shanti. It was the place with all the big buildings.”

  “Oh, you’ve been there?” I asked, happy now that some shared history outside of Santa Cruz might be possible.

  “Oh, yes,” Mustang said. “Shanti and I hitchhiked there to visit his sisters once.”

  While Mustang was rolling our first joint, a tall, lanky, very tough-looking woman dressed in a dungaree outfit came into the kitchen and plopped down at the table between us. “Oh,” Mustang cried with bravado, “let me introduce Ankh.” Then Mustang struck a match and lit the joint. Holding her first toke deep in, she passed it to me and, after exhaling, said, “Ankh, this is … Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

  “Oh, it’s Brewster … it’s Brewster North,” I said, almost embarrassed by the sound of it, or by the way it came out of me, so sort of uptight and preppy.

  I took the joint from Mustang and took a deep drag. It was smooth, sweet, and mild and didn’t make me cough. “Mmmm, good,” I said, holding the smoke deep in. “Nice.”

  “Yeah, that’s local stuff. It came down from the hills just outside of town,” Mustang said, with a wry smile.

  I passed the joint on to Ankh, who moved in slow motion to take it from my hand and then, lifting it to her lips, also took a very deep drag and, holding her breath, said, “What kind of name is Brewster?” The marijuana had already begun to confuse me, and I wasn’t at all sure what she meant by “what kind of name.” But I just played along and said, “Well, I guess it’s English. It’s really a family name,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, well, sure, but what does it mean?” Ankh asked, holding her breath to keep the marijuana smoke in her lungs, sounding like she was about to explode. “So what kind of name is it? What does it mean?” she said, now at last exploding all over the place and blowing marijuana smoke out over Shanti’s head while he looked up, glowing.

  “Well, I’m not really sure,” I said. “But if you sort of break it down, I guess it’s obvious what with the word ‘brew’ in ‘Brewster,’ that it must have come down from a long line of English brewers or something like that. As for ‘North,’ I guess it just means the direction on the compass, so I guess quite simply ‘Brewster North’ means brewers from northern England—that’s the most I can make of it,” I said, now almost confusing myself.

  This crazy, chatty explanation of my name made both Ankh and Mustang laugh in that kind of manic, inappropriate marijuana response, something that started in a laugh and then went into a raunchy cough and finished with a real long stretched out, “Oh, wowww, toooooo much! This guy is toooooo much!”

  Shanti glowed right beside me, happy, perhaps at his mom’s acceptance of me, or maybe because he saw that I felt at ease enough in their presence not only to make them laugh, but allow them to laugh at me. It never occurred to me to ask what the name “Ankh” meant or “Mustang” or “Shanti” for that matter, although at the time I remember the names all struck me—or at least “Ankh” struck me—as something Turkish.

  “Ankh used to be named Bernice, and then I renamed her,” Mustang said, to try to clear up my obvious confusion.

  “Oh, really?” I said, more curious now. “What on earth for?” And both Mustang and Ankh let out with an
other one of those hacking bursts of laughter which was followed by another big “Oh wow, oh wow”; then they said, “Oh wow, he got it!”

  “Yeah, right,” said Ankh. “He got it, he got the ‘what on earth’ exactly. You are a very tuned-in individual, Mr. Brew,” Ankh said with a great stoned grin.

  “Ankh is the earth sign,” Mustang said. “Ankh is the ancient Egyptian symbol of life.”

  “Earth sign?” I asked.

  “Yeah, you know, the figure eight. Show it to him,” Mustang said, and Ankh reached down her black T-shirt and pulled out a silver-plated figure eight that was on a chain around her neck. “You see,” Mustang said, as she passed the joint to me again, “Ankh—” Then she broke off, stopped, and turned to Ankh and asked, “You don’t mind if I tell him, do you? You don’t mind if I tell him how you got your name?”

  “No, no,” Ankh laughed, “tell away, tell him. I love to hear you tell it, babe.”

  “Well, anyway,” Mustang went on, “it’s really not such a big story. You see, Ankh used to be Bernice, and she used to also hang out with a lot of Angels.”

  “Angels?” I asked, somewhat stunned. And they both went into another round of long, hacking laughter, which was beginning to make me feel extremely lonely, or as innocent as Shanti, who still just sat there between us, not laughing, but radiating contentedness as he continued to watch, listen, and finger a ragged pot holder like it was his new security blanket.

  “You know—‘Angels’ as in ‘Hell’s Angels,’ ” Mustang said, after she managed to stop laughing.

  “Oh yeah, of course,” I said. “And then what? Did they give her the name?” This question of mine made them both start laughing again, and Ankh, who now seemed almost unable to breathe, said to Mustang, “Can you imagine Bobby Giraffe knowing what the Egyptian earth sign was?” and then they both laughed some more.

  By this time I was beginning to feel a little uneasy, and I wanted to ask if I could excuse myself and take Shanti home with me, or just take him out to the backyard to play; but then Mustang, who was really quite observant, noticed my discomfort and went on with the story, which I thought was actually very short and could have been told without all this laughter.