Dear Ann

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “I found Lewis Carroll,” Ann said.

  “Dope fiends all,” said Chip.

  ANN HEARD SOMETHING new each time she listened to the album, and hearing it everywhere made her feel she was part of a vital movement that was grabbing the future. So when Jimmy again suggested they take LSD together, she consented.

  “Sex on acid,” he said. “I’m tingling just thinking about it.”

  “What will it be like?”

  “You’ll come for about five hours,” he promised. “We will. Together.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Just imagining.”

  She knew he had once had a girlfriend named Martha, but except for their comical adolescent confessions, Ann and Jimmy never mentioned their sexual history. Although she knew people had bad trips, she trusted Jimmy and thought sharing an acid trip would bring them even closer together. It would be an adventure into a dreamworld of new stories.

  CHIP ARRIVED AT Jimmy’s early on the chosen Tuesday, wearing his jumpsuit like an official uniform.

  “Sergeant Pepper here, reporting for duty,” he said. “Are you ready, Ann?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Are you sure?” Jimmy said, for the fifteenth time.

  “I’m ready. Yes!”

  Chip, their guide for the trip, had assembled some special items—a kaleidoscope, a book of Escher drawings, a Stockhausen album. He patted Ann on the head.

  “Remember, if you freak out, I’ll be here. Jimmy will be here. This woolly blanket will be right here if you’re cold. I will make hot, soothing tea. I will bring giant sandwiches and milkshakes. Your wish is my command.”

  “Oh, cut it out, Chip,” said Jimmy, laughing. “It will be a nice, quiet, loose day—very ungrammatical. You’ll be bored out of your gourd. You can sit there with your slide rule and calculate the universe.” He mimicked Chip working his slide rule like a guitar. Jimmy said to Ann, “And at the end you can sleep with Chip if you want to.”

  “Don’t be absurd.” She laughed.

  “Why not? Chip’s a good guy. He’s taking care of us. I can share.”

  “You’re teasing. You’re teasing, aren’t you?”

  Jimmy grinned and fluffed her hair. “I’m just kidding.”

  “Don’t be a prude, Ann,” she remembered someone saying. Pixie?

  Ann had been holding in her mind the thought of sex on acid with Jimmy. Jimmy had spruced up his bedroom. From the overhead light fixture and along the walls he had draped an orange-and-white silk emergency parachute he had gotten from army surplus. He had anchored the billowy silk along the walls with chairs, books on the bookshelves, and safety pins on the blinds. It was a haphazard canopy over a love nest. And he had scattered some colorful pillows on the bed.

  Chip disappeared for half an hour, returning with a lavish bouquet from the florist. Jimmy found a milk jug for the flowers. The bouquet was a grand assortment, like a Flemish still life.

  “For texture and color,” Chip said.

  Jimmy made bacon and eggs for the three of them.

  “Start out with a good breakfast,” Chip said. “My mom always said start every day with a good breakfast.”

  “One thing I do know is how to make breakfast,” Jimmy said.

  “I’m just going to hang out here and work on some data analyses till you feel like going to the redwoods,” Chip said later.

  The acid was on postage stamps, one for Ann and one for Jimmy. She licked the stamp, rolled her tongue around her mouth as Chip instructed, sipped some water.

  “I want to save the stamp for my collection,” she said. She set it on a shelf above the bathroom sink to dry. She wondered why the stamp was a ten-cent stamp and not a penny stamp. It seemed extravagant.

  Jimmy swished water in his mouth.

  “Anything happening?” he asked.

  “So soon?”

  He held her close to him. “I’m right here. It’s going to be superlative, magnolious! I’m here all the way.”

  Jimmy was good to her. She would do something about that emptiness of his. She felt herself letting go. But Jimmy’s arm was shrinking. His shirt was falling off, its shape turning into a cloud shifting in a fast wind. It slithered to the floor, a white formless thing.

  Then, a surprise heave. Her breakfast shot to the floor, barely altered. Chip was sopping it with paper towels.

  “A Pollock painting,” he said, as Ann watched yellow and brown colors mix and disappear. The colors were fascinating, rich in their transmogrification.

  “Are you all right?” Jimmy said. “Let’s steady ourselves. Sit here. Do you feel better?”

  “I’m just ducky.”

  Jimmy’s face was a frog staring at her bug-eyed. Then the big eyes were those of a cat, smiling knowingly like the slyboots Cheshire.

  “Let’s study the flowers,” he said.

  “Is there a quiz?”

  California flowers! A mountain of them, grand and intricate, multiple jigsaw puzzles, like a millefiori paperweight. She was lost on the petal of a daisy. A drop of water glistened on it. Tiny flecks of pollen had dispersed on the surface of the petal and their absorption by the drop of water was imminent. She would wait to observe this phenomenon from her perch in eternity. Knowing she had all of time, she relaxed, flooded with euphoria.

  Suddenly the Lonely Hearts Club Band appeared through the doorway, marching in place, then marching forward. Sgt. Pepper was directing the band with his slide rule.

  “Billy Shears sounds just like Ringo,” she said. Her words seemed yellow and brown, like her eggs and bacon.

  She would get by with a little help from her friends! They were looking out for her. She had never felt so secure, so loved. It was like being in a bassinet with a baby rattler. A toy rattle, not a snake! The rattler coiled into a tight little comfortable pillow—lovely, pink, benign. She was not afraid.

  John, Paul, and George sang behind Ringo in a high-pitched refrain, loving and innocent. They sang out of another age, when there were bandstands and Sousa tubas and kind neighbors. At the end of the song, Jimmy stood and gave Sgt. Pepper a military salute. Chip, saluting too, retreated into the kitchen. The word synchronicity waggled on his butt, and “Poetry is not conversation” hovered above. Ann smirked. Jimmy rocked her on the bed in his arms. They were beneath the parachute, drifting.

  During “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” Chip handed Ann the kaleidoscope and she watched the geometric dazzle through Lucy’s eyes. He lit a strobe candle on the bedside table. Ann and Jimmy were lying on the bed, eyes to the flickering canopy. A spherical paper lantern that had covered the light fixture rolled on the bed like a tumbleweed. Inside it, dust fluttered in strings. Shadows roamed the silk walls.

  “I’m burning a strobe candle at both ends,” Jimmy said.

  “She’s Leaving Home” was ineffably sad. It was effably Ann. She had left home. On a Wednesday morning, very early, tiptoeing out of the house with her handkerchief, her parents finding her note and blaming themselves. What could they have done better? Didn’t they know her? How could they have misunderstood? She felt tears—for the girl in the song, for the bereft parents, for the man in the motor trade. But then it was clear that this man would treat her badly—use, rob, jilt, abandon, hurt. The parents were right. The girl went with the man to the carnival, of course. Mr. Kite was the headliner, jumping, sailing through hogsheads, hoops of fire, which Ann could clearly envision, but Mr. Henderson’s ten somersets would be a true wonder. She loved doing somersets when she was little. In college she learned that people did somersaults, not somersets. But now it thrilled her to realize that the Beatles had no doubt done somersets as children and played hide-’n’-go-seek. The record seemed to turn itself over. “Within You Without You” ambled slowly, a brittle sound, with sparkles. The song lasted for about two months. Her eyes ranged through every pore and fold of the silk ceiling, a mere spot on a giant’s face. Then it became an immense sea of agile pollywogs.

  She couldn’t fath
om being sixty-four. It was such a funny idea. Paul sang so sweetly, as if from an imagined time, some distant future—maybe on the deck of a large ship cruising to a balmy isle. Her laugh led her to lovely, happy Rita. Maybe it was Rita who had run off to meet the man in the motor trade. Now she was happy and free of him, but still in the motor trade, so to speak. Checking her line of meters and then having tea.

  Ann was hardly aware of Jimmy until “Good Morning Good Morning” began, with the farmyard sounds. Jimmy and his drawings of Bugs and Porky and the farmer Fudd. Pigs, chickens in the henhouse in Kentucky, gamboling spring calves. Home was far away. That home—undulating, blue and green, the scent of gardenias on the porch. She could hear her mother calling the pigs. Soo-eeee!

  A pitch-black thought interrupted the holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. A field of land mines, helmeted figures running across, strafing sounds above. Strafing. There had been so much strafing lately. She said that aloud. “Don’t worry about strafing,” Jimmy said, lying beside her, staring at the ceiling. She had to pee. Didn’t she?

  By the time the last note of the last song faded, she felt she had been on a phantasmagoric journey in Wonderland with Alice.

  They flung darts at Jimmy’s dartboard until Chip stopped them. Then they ate peaches and sucked the pits. Later Chip gave them fascinating orange Popsicles. Ann hadn’t realized Chip had brought them.

  “I bought them,” Jimmy explained when she inquired. “What difference does it make? Why do you have to get everything straight? All worked out, in rows. Maybe they brought themselves. Maybe they flew.”

  “Shut up, Jimmy,” said Chip.

  Ann didn’t like what Jimmy said. She didn’t speak for a while. Maybe she was too organized. But she hadn’t realized that bothered him.

  “Here, let’s listen to Stockhausen,” said Chip. “A change of mood.”

  Ann and Jimmy sat on the couch and closed their eyes while Stockhausen played—freaky tape loops and eerie graveyard sounds. Ann couldn’t tell whether to cough or swallow. Her breathing was off, not quite right. She felt that something was trying to get out.

  “Oh, man,” said Jimmy.

  “Man oh man,” said Jimmy.

  SHE HEARD THE whales singing to Stockhausen of the ancient history of fabled sea serpents. If sound waves could wend through outer space they could also descend into the ocean’s deeps. All the songs of 1967 were traveling, sonar-motivated melodies bearing secrets. A sinking bathysphere was scouting the ocean floor to collect all those songs. You don’t know what’s happening, do you?

  You are out of your depth, girlie, she heard.

  FROM THE OBSERVATION platform at the top of Hoover Tower, they searched for a distant clock that once had a face but now had only an empty circle. When Ann squinted through Chip’s binoculars, she could see a blue clock face. It was ten minutes past two. They should hurry. Below the platform, students were rushing along.

  Jimmy said, “The whole fucking universe is out there.”

  He waved at the people below them on the walkways. Suddenly Ann and Jimmy, at the same moment, looked down at themselves to see if they were dressed. It had been completely irrelevant till that moment. They laughed at their simultaneous realization and fell onto each other.

  CHIP WAS DRIVING. Jimmy was in the front and Ann lay alone in the back seat. The roller-coaster curves that had been so intimidating on a motorcycle now seemed quietly rhythmic, soft and unthreatening. Ann was rocking in a cradle and rolling in a sling hammock. What Jimmy said might be true, she thought. She would have to change. She couldn’t be a slave to order. But she wasn’t! Not at all. Her books had been in haphazard piles until Jimmy brought the planks and blocks. Her struggle for order was only because she was so naturally disordered. Entropy was her middle name.

  THE REDWOOD TREES in the park were too large to see, and there were mossy stumps the size of her kitchen. She and Jimmy were Hansel and Gretel, leaving a trail for Chip. The redwoods were run by the Brothers Grimm. Her eye lit on a spider on the bark of a tree. The spider was green and gold, glistening benignly, glowing like a jewel in a narrow sunbeam. Everything here was friendly. The redwoods reached upward like Jack’s beanstalk, aspiring, grasping, groping for sun. She tried to hug a redwood, but it was magnelephant. She had to let it hug her. Where was Jimmy?

  He grasped both her hands and said, “This is like the Garden of Eden—after Bob Dylan came through.”

  “Xanadu,” she said.

  “Xanadu to you too, Toots.”

  Everything was beautiful. The spider, the leaves, the moss, the ferns, the decay, bugs. There was too much to see. Trying to look at a large view was dizzying. The trees were too large. If she stared at a small patch of bark, a redwood was implied. That was enough. She sat on a fallen limb with her head aimed between her knees at an intricate universe of bugs and fungus. She thought she was at the movies. The arduous plot went on and on.

  A large branch of a fallen redwood was the Golden Gate Bridge. Jimmy was walking on the immense log, balancing himself on it, teeter-tottering his way along. Chip, sprawled on a stump, reading his book, called, “Be careful, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy was beckoning. “Come on up here!” He made his way back to Ann and pulled her up. He held her hand as they walked along the big log. The log was still strong and hard, not rotted, even though they saw that it had fallen long ago. “Redwoods don’t rot,” Jimmy had told her. “Your bookshelves will last longer than I will.”

  They were in the redwoods for hours, days. The light dimmed. Chip, their sergeant, kept them on the path through colonies of ferns. They poked along slowly. Ann’s mind was sharp. She saw Keats here, Shelley there. She tried to remember something Jimmy had told her about Coleridge, about his wonderful mind squeezed shut by his buddy Wordsworth’s high-handed twaddling.

  “Xanadu,” she said. “Do Xanadu.”

  Obligingly, Jimmy began reciting “Kubla Khan.”

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree:

  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

  Through caverns measureless to man

  Down to a sunless sea.

  So twice five miles of fertile ground

  With walls and towers were girdled round . . .

  “There he goes again,” said Chip, tucking his book in his leg pocket. “Rafting down the River Ralph.”

  Ann had been rereading the poem lately, savoring the mellifluous but dramatic tones, the sensuous melody. She had forgotten she had been looking forward to sex on acid. But then that thought escaped. If you felt disembodied, what could you do? Desire was like an envelope she had dropped into her purse. Where was her purse?

  Jimmy, pointing to her, meant that she was the damsel with the dulcimer—who else? She was wailing for her demon lover!

  A savage place! as holy and enchanted . . .

  Jimmy was tottering and weaving on the log.

  Five miles meandering with a mazy motion . . .

  Ancestral voices prophesying war!

  Coleridge the poet seemed a seer, envisioning all the wars to come, she thought. He wouldn’t be surprised at all by Vietnam. Ugly thoughts scattered.

  By the end of the poem, though, she felt the sensuous pleasure of the milk of Paradise. She was in Paradise, with Jimmy. She was “meandering with a mazy motion.” It was true—the earth was breathing in “fast thick pants,” and even the fallen redwood tree was breathing. She laughed. All she could say was “Wow.”

  “Let’s go,” Jimmy said. “I feel the dark coming on.”

  “‘At one stride comes the dark,’” Ann quoted out of nowhere. She was seeing a horror movie: Coleridge’s ancient mariner meets the spectre-woman on the skeleton ship.

  “I almost know that damned ‘Kubla Khan’ by heart myself,” said Chip, as he hustled them along the trail towards the car.

  “Keep your ‘fast thick pants’ on, Sarge,” Jimmy said. “Hark! What’s that? A patch of sunlight?”

  Ann could see a bright yellow
stump just off the trail. “What is that? Let’s go see.”

  The surface of the stump was alive, dozens of slimy blaze-yellow creatures wriggling together. A mass of little snakes. Ann grabbed Jimmy’s hand.

  “It’s banana slugs!” cried Chip. “They’re mating.”

  “How do you know?” Jimmy asked.

  “I’ve studied mating,” Chip said. “I’ve been studying it all day.”

  “Then it’s an orgy,” said Jimmy.

  Ann touched a slug. It was slippery.

  “Don’t touch,” Chip said. “Salt from your sweat will have a chemical reaction. A pinch of salt would make it melt.”

  “Are they like snails?” Ann asked. Salted snails would melt in your stomach.

  They stared at the slithery creatures, stretching and touching, glomming onto one another. They were over six inches long, in tangles. Jimmy had a smile on his face, his lips curved in the same shape as one of the slugs, the curve of a banana.

  “Slugs on drugs,” said Jimmy. He slapped his forehead as if he had just divined the key to the universe. “‘A flash of golden fire.’”

  Bright yellow. Ann saw clouds of bright yellow.

  “They’re fucking,” she said aloud.

  AT AN INDIAN restaurant later, the familiar smells of Sanjay’s cooking blared like horns. Ann thought she was supposed to chew each bite thirty times, sip tea, fold more naan, plop on chutney. The meal was long and funny, and the flavors were deep and sensuous—clever, Ann said. Yellow and cinnamon. Then somewhere there was a movie. What’s New Pussycat? Each scene was a dreamlike world of its own, like Dante’s rings of hell but intensely real. She forgot at times that Jimmy was beside her. He was holding her hand like a potato. The theater lights gleamed on, and she was with Jimmy in a slow-moving throng, cows heading into the barn for milking. Chip had gone ahead to get the car. Or maybe he had gone to church.

  Jimmy was quiet. His face sagged. He shooed Ann into the back seat and shoved himself into a heap beside her.

  He jerked his head away when she tried to touch his face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Just a headache,” he said. “Are you O.K.?”