The Children of Hamelin

by Norman Spinrad

  “Uh-huh. But I also know that this one is on Thursday and the last one was on Wednesday, so there’s no fixed schedule for the things, right?”

  “So?”

  “So old Harv calls ‘em when he wants to call ‘em.”

  “I never thought of it that way,” Arlene said. “I suppose Harvey just calls a meeting when he senses something in the air.”

  “Uh-huh. And five’ll get you ten I know what’s in the air tonight: San Francisco.”

  Arlene frowned. “I hope you’re wrong,” she said.

  “Why’s it got you so uptight?”

  “Everything that matters to me is in New York. Everyone I know... you... my family... college.... I’ve never lived anywhere else. I’d be lost in California.”

  I remembered what Dickie had told me this afternoon. Dickie was not one to give away Dirk’s secrets unless under orders to make like a security leak. Therefore, Dirk was really offering me the editorship of Slick by next year. It made a lot more sense from Dirk’s viewpoint that way: with me as full editor of Slick, he would have a permanent friendly outlet for the agency’s stiffener crud. It had been eating on me all evening: why couldn’t I get interested in a real editor’s job, even if it was a sleazy mag like Slick? Sure beat fee-reading. But now Arlene had laid it out for me: I was a New Yorker clean through, everyone and everything I knew—and her too—was here and there was nothing for me in LA but the gaping unknown and a job. I felt much saner knowing that Arlene felt the same way about leaving New York. Cowardice loves company...?

  “So what’s the problem?” I said.

  “The problem is I’d be lost without the Foundation too,” she said.

  “God, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  Way across the carpet of people in front of us, Harvey had seated himself on the dais. He lit a cigarette, took a drag, exhaled and said: “I understand Ted would like to open this meeting. Ted...?”

  I gave Arlene an I-told-you-so look as Ted stood up at the foot of the dais, put one foot up on it, and turned to face the membership, his blue eyes gleaming, his big body hunched forward almost like a quarterback behind his center.

  “Last meeting we kicked around the idea of what it would be like to have the Foundation in San Francisco,” Ted said. “Since then, everyone seems to be talking about it, but we really haven’t discussed it seriously yet. So I think it’s time we did. So to start it off, I’m making a formal motion that the Foundation move itself to San Francisco as soon as possible.”

  Arlene clutched at my hand. I shrugged at her. I had seen this coming a mile away. And I could even see Harvey’s next move....

  “Let me get this straight, Ted,” Harvey said. “You want to put this to a vote of the membership?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But don’t you think it’s a little unrealistic, even unfair, to expect people to make such a monumental decision on such short notice?”

  “No, no, no!” Ted said, shaking his head violently. “I’m not really saying we should decide right now. All I’m saying is that we should really start thinking seriously about moving the Foundation to San Francisco. And I just think the way to do that is to have a formal motion before the membership, dig? Sure we’d be crazy to vote one way or the other right now, but if we’ve got a motion, it gives all the bullshit we’ve been throwing around lately some reality.”

  “Well that seems to be a reasonable way of going about it,” Harvey conceded. “In order to make it a formal motion, though, I think we should have some seconds...?”

  A sprinkling of hands went up: Doris (quickly, but without much obvious enthusiasm), Linda Kahn (surprise!), Charley Dees, Bill Nelson, Tod-and-Judy, Chester White, George Blum, and a few others. And a few mutters: “Second the motion.”

  “Well,” Harvey, carefully not gloating, “it looks like a formal motion to move the Foundation to San Francisco is now before the membership. So let’s chew it over. Since it was your idea, Ted, suppose you tell us why you’re in favor of the move—”

  Ted flashed a big grin out over the room, rose to the balls of his feet, and man, did I recognize that look on his face: Ted the True Believer, fried to the eyeballs on adrenalin, panting to convert the whole world to his latest Big Answer. Old Harv sure knew who to maneuver into playing his mouthpiece—when Ted got wound up like this he could just about sell a lifetime subscription to Pravda to J. Edgar Hoover.

  “Look at us!” Ted nearly shouted. “Maybe forty people who’ve come to the Foundation because we’re not satisfied with our lives and we want to change them by changing ourselves, right? Okay, so we come into this loft, and while we’re here, we do change our consciousness. But then we drag our sorry asses out into the same shitty environment we’ve known all our lives and do the same fuck-up things we’ve always done. So where’s the change? Trouble is, we’re all committed to a whole shitload of useless garbage besides the Foundation: jobs, school, people, ways of fucked-up living. When we should be totally committed to just one thing—Total Consciousness. Deep down we all know that, or we wouldn’t be here. We need to move the Foundation to San Francisco to get rid of all that external crap and make the Foundation the center, the only center, of our lives!”

  Arlene was suddenly on her feet shouting: “This is crazy! Do you realize what you’re asking? We’ve all got lives of our own here, jobs, school, family, friends! Why the hell should we cut ourselves off from everything we care about to drag ourselves across the continent to some city most of us have never seen? It’s crazy!”

  “Ah shit—” Ted began.

  But Harvey cut him off. “That’s a very good point. I don’t think you’ve really thought this through, Ted. You and Doris have no strong ties here, and you can work and paint anywhere. But many of the members have careers, families, are going to college—have deep ties to New York. You don’t seem to understand what moving to San Francisco would mean to them—they’d have to totally uproot their lives. And those that chose to stay behind would lose even more—the chance to develop their consciousness. You don’t seem to realize what this would mean to the Foundation members as individuals.”

  Arlene sat down. “See?” she whispered to me. “You’ve got Harvey all wrong. This insane San Francisco thing can’t be his idea. You are paranoid about it.”

  I shrugged. No point in trying to explain the ins and outs of the old Briar Patch Gambit. She’d have to see for herself.

  “Just watch how the old worm turns,” I told her.

  Ted, who had been dancing around like a kid who was waiting to take a piss while Harvey rapped, shook his head violently, said: “That’s the whole point! In our minds, we know that Total Consciousness is all that really counts, but we don’t live it. We’re all hung up on our dumb little ego-games: jobs and school and all that external shit. If we really want the Foundation to give us Total Consciousness, we’ve gotta give up all that, make the Foundation the center of our lives. We can’t do that here, but we can do it in San Francisco.”

  Harvey made a show of pondering this great revelation. “Mmmm... you’ve got a point,” he said. “Ideally, our only commitment should be to Total Consciousness, through the Foundation. But I don’t see why that would be more possible in San Francisco than in New York.”

  “Dig, it’s not San Francisco that counts,” said Ted, “the important thing is to make a move. San Francisco is just a very groovy place to move to. Dig: if we moved, we’d all be strangers—no jobs, no friends, no outside commitments, no nothing. Like being born again, yeah! But the Foundation would be there, the only thing at the center of our lives—we could put it first without trying because there’d be nothing to get in the way. We can’t do that here because there’s too much competing ego-garbage. But with a clean break from all our pasts, it’d come naturally, dig?”

  Harvey took a long drag on his cigarette, stared at the back wall as if waiting for the handwriting to appear, as if Ted (oh sure!) had opened his eyes to some Great Truth. I was probably the onl
y one in the whole room who saw through the set-up—and who would listen to the Gibbering Dope Fiend!

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?” Arlene hissed at me.

  “Wouldn’t waste my breath.”

  Harvey sighed smoke. “I see,” he finally said. “You do seem to be making sense, Ted. What you’re really talking about is moving the Foundation to San Francisco as a community...”

  Ted’s eyes seemed to suddenly get even brighter, like turning up a three-way bulb. “Yeah! Yeah!” he said. “Sure, if thirty or forty of us moved, as a community, like Harvey says, it’d be no sweat. Among thirty people, we could get at least ten cars together and all drive across the county, what a gas! And when we got there, we could set up committees to find jobs, pads, a house for the Foundation... Hey, we could even find a couple of old houses and set up kind of communes—”

  “I think you’re getting a little ahead of yourself, Ted,” Harvey said gently. “All these details would come much later, assuming we decide to go.”

  “Sure, sure. I’m just saying that once we start thinking of ourselves as a real community, all the little hassles will disappear.”

  Harvey nodded. “Yes, it’s this idea of the Foundation as a community that really appeals to me...”

  “Yeah, like the old wagon-trains going west,” Tod Spain said.

  “A big mobile commune!” said Bonnie Elbert.

  Babble, babble, babble! I could sense the mood of the crowd: maybe a dozen or so of the young itchy-footed ones like Tod and Judy and Bonnie and Rich were really serious, but the majority, suckers that they were, were getting their jollies out of the fantasy of picking up and setting up a giant psychiatric crash-pad in the Golden West. They were grooving behind it because they didn’t have to take it seriously, it was such a crazy idea, and if a vote were taken now, Ted and Harvey would look like assholes. Just a cheap thrill—right now.

  “Well?” I said to Arlene. “Did I tell you so?”

  “You know,” she said dreamily. “Ted may have something there. Didn’t you once tell me that it was important to go into your fear...? Well, leaving New York sure scares me. Maybe it would be good—”

  “Ah shit, you’re not serious!”

  Her mood seemed to break. She laughed. “Is any of this serious?” she said. “Do you really see these people actually leaving everything behind and following the Foundation to San Francisco...?”

  “But what if the Foundation did move? How many of them could give it up? Could you give it up?”

  She frowned, then shrugged. “I don’t know... but I’m not about to worry about it. It won’t happen; the whole idea is impossible.”

  I wondered. People were getting up and milling around and the whole meeting was breaking up into little clots of people, all rapping on the notion of San Francisco. It was all in the timing. If Harvey pushed now, he would probably blow it, but if he let it stay a fantasy until they were good and worked up...

  “I think we had better end the formal meeting now,” Harvey shouted redundantly above the tumult. “Let’s just all talk it over as long as we want to and try a vote on it when the spirit moves us.”

  “Hey Harvey,” Rich yelled, “if we vote to go, would you go along?”

  Harvey considered the smoke dribbling out of his mouth. “Well... If the vote were really overwhelming,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to split the Foundation down the middle. That’s why we should take our time before we even think about a vote.”

  And the scene broke up into general bullshitting.

  Arlene and I got up. “Want to stick around and shoot the shit?” I asked her unenthusiastically.

  “I’d like to...” she said. “But... Look, I’ve got two big tests Monday, and I won’t be able to see you over the weekend—”

  “How about spending the weekend at my pad?”

  “And how much studying would I get done then?”

  “Uh... there is that...”

  “What I was going to suggest,” she said, “is that we go have dinner now and then...”

  “Best offer I’ve had all day.”

  As we made our way out into the hall, Ted caught up with us, his eyes still glazed from adrenalin-fever. “Hey, where are you guys going?”

  “A gentleman never tells,” I informed him.

  “Oh... Look, before you go—what do you think? Wouldn’t it be a gas to—”

  “Ted,” I said, “you’ve got rocks in your head.”

  Ted didn’t even skip a beat. “Yeah, I thought you’d say that,” he said. “You need it more than anyone, Tom. Get away from all this shit—”

  “And right in all that shit.”

  “You know, Tom, maybe Ted has—”

  I dragged her toward the stairs. “Come on baby, let’s get out of this cuckoo-clock!”

  “Hey, at least think it over!” Ted called after us. “It’s not like making the move alone. We’re gonna be a community, man, a fucking community!”

  17 - A Meeting of the Brotherhood

  “Forty-eight, forty-nine-fifty.”

  Terry Blackstone put the last white capsule into the pile on the table, stoppered his big bottle of acid caps, stuffed the bottle back into an inside pocket of his black raincoat, and said: “Fifty caps. Five dollars a cap, that’s two hundred and fifty dollars. A hundred is your cut, baby, so you owe me one-fifty, and I gotta have it by Monday. Can you deal it all by then?”

  “No sweat,” Robin said, scooping up the caps and dropping them into a baggie. She took a drag off the joint and passed it to me.

  I took a short toke and passed the joint to Terry Blackstone, who looked like he needed it. His eyes were invisible behind his black shades, but he was rocking back and forth like an old Jew in a synagogue, and giving off uptight vibes. He toked, passed the joint back to Robin, and said: “Look baby, tell you what... you lay a hundred and twenty-five on me now, and that’s the price, you can keep the extra twenty-five.”

  Robin looked at me, asked the question with arched eyebrows.

  I shook my head. “It’s Saturday afternoon and the bank is closed,” I said. “I don’t keep that kind of cash around.”

  Letting her do her thing in my pad was one thing; fronting bread for her was another, and I wanted no part of that. But it would be gauche to put it that way, so, for the capper, I smiled at Terry Blackstone and said with great sweet innocence: “Unless you’ll take a check, man.”

  “A check?” Terry Blackstone shrieked. “Are you out of your gourd?”

  Natch. A wholly predictable paranoid dealer reaction. Terry Blackstone would rather wait sweating in fear (he probably owed a bigger dealer) till Monday for Robin to lay the bread on him than take a check which he knew he could cash. So, a bluff I knew for openers wouldn’t be called.

  “All right Terry,” Robin said, stuffing the bag of caps into the pocket of her peacoat, which lay beside her on the couch, “a hundred and fifty in cash on Monday.”

  “Okay, baby,” Terry Blackstone said unenthusiastically. “I gotta split. Got another two hundred caps to deal today.”

  I showed him to the door myself for the purpose of securing the police lock behind him (fifty caps of acid in the pad made me a little paranoid). When I got back to the living room, Robin was in the bedroom.

  “What’re you doing?” I called.

  “Using the phone. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, leaning back on the couch and rolling a fresh joint from the nickel bag Robin had left on the table. I took a nice long drag: smooth, sweet shit and it went down nice and easy. Holding the smoke in my lungs, I contemplated the workings of fate. Arlene’s tests on Monday had allowed me Friday night, today, and Sunday with Robin. So I had been able to have my Thursday night Arlene cake and eat Robin too (metaphorically, that is). Question was, did Arlene really have to study all weekend or was she just getting out of the way, sensing that Robin might show up unannounced and being too insecure to be competitive? Or third alternative: could Arlene only take me in small
doses? Were we both pussyfooting around each other? Was ignorance bliss? I exhaled. What the hell, I thought, taking another toke, Saturday and Sunday with Robin were a fact and the thing to do was take the next two days as they came, as a vacation from Arlene-Foundation reality and Dirk-Robinson reality, and smoke enough grass in the process to blow the cobwebs out of my head.

  As I watched Robin emerge from the bedroom, walk across the room, and sit down on the couch, I wondered if maybe Robin gave me the breather I needed to put up with the Arlene-scenes, and vice versa. Reality-contrasts, two separate sides to my head and a different chick for each side, and if I tried to make it all one or the other, I’d either have to turn half of me off or put one of them through some real bummers—not to mention the bummers I would go through trying to relate to Arlene in a Robin-mood or Robin in an Arlene-mood.

  But that was definitely an Arlene-Foundation-navel-contemplation thought, and too heavy for the present reality-style. So I took another BIG hit and handed Robin the joint.

  “Is it okay if we stick around for a while?” she said. “Some people are gonna show up... you might find them interesting.” She took another drag and handed me the joint.

  Well, what the fuck, so a little dealing out of my pad wouldn’t be the end of the world, stay good and stoned and dig how the other half lives. Me-mories...

  “As long as the grass holds out,” I said, taking another toke.

  “Have some grass, man,” I said to the neatly-bearded thirtiesh cat. He wore a brown tweed jacket over a black turtleneck and black-rimmed glasses shielding nervous blue eyes.

  “Thank you,” he said in a soft, uptight voice, sitting down on the edge of the couch as I handed him the joint. He took a very controlled but quite respectable drag.

  “Fred’s a professor at N.Y.U.,” Robin said, sitting down on my other flank. “He’s kind of... a connection for the groovier teachers.”

  Fred puckered his thick lips at the word “connection” and passed the joint to Robin. As a gesture of intelligentsia-solidarity, I asked: “What do you teach?”