54 – Are you experienced?

 

Dennis reappeared on our door step three days later – and brought some friends: a guy named Chris and a woman named, Doris.

None of them wore business suits or carried clip boards.

Chris was relatively short man with dark curly hair and a thick handlebar style moustache, which curled around the corners of his mouth like a silent movie villain.

Doris was a classic California blonde, though most likely bought out of a bottle, and she had large, uncomfortable to look at brown eyes.

“Al? Louise?” the somewhat dishonestly shy Dennis asked. “Is it okay for us to come in?”

Louise, who had answered the door, stared back at me with the door still ajar as Dennis waited.

“Are you doing another survey?” I asked.

Dennis laughed.

“Hell no,” he said. “The company fired us right after we left you people. We’re out on the town. So how about it? You want to party with us? We brought some beer.”

I felt intruded upon. But I gave a reluctant nod.

In they came with bags and noise.

Doris was still laughing over something Chris had said outside, then sputtered to a stop when she looked at the apartment.

“My God,” she said. “Don’t these people own furniture?”

“Don’t start trouble, Dorry,” Chris said, his deep voice rumbling out from under his moustache.

“But what are we supposed to sit on? They don’t have chairs?”

“That is what’s so cool about it all,” Dennis said. “That’s why I brought you here. This is where it’s at.”

He handed me the bag of beer, which I put on the counter.

“We also brought pot,” Dennis said. “But not a lot.”

I took the beer off the counter and put the bottles into the refrigerator.

Louise leaned close to me, muttering, “These people are strangers and they’ve barged right in here.”

“They may be all right,” I said, though didn’t believe a word I was saying.

Something struck me all wrong about these three; I just couldn’t put my finger on what.

“So what are you going to do now that you don’t have jobs?” I asked, coming back out into the living room where the three of them had settled.

Louise rushed out with ashtrays dumping them near each of them on the floor.

“Nothing,” Dennis said. “That’s the beauty of it. I’ll be able to collect unemployment for the next six months.”

“That’s good?”

“Damned straight it’s good. It means that I can party for a couple of months before I have to get serious again.”

“Like you ever stopped!” Chris said snorting out beer through his moustache as he choked a laugh.

“You know what I mean. Like this. If only we had some acid everything would be perfect,” Dennis said.

“I know where we can get some masculine,” Chris said. “Good stuff, too.”

“Mescaline?” I said, recalling the adventures at the Jersey Shore the previous summer when my friends had ingested a batch, a moving nightmare I still got cold sweats from since I had only been drunk at the time, and saw their alien behavior from the perspective of an outsider.

“It’s a great batch,” Chris said. “A lot of colors.”

“Oh please, lets gets from Mesc,” Doris purred, rubbing herself against Chris as if she was a cat.

“We don’t have money for that,” Dennis said, although I caught a side glance in my direction, a subtle look as if to make certain I had heard.

“I have some money,” Chris said. “It’s only five bucks for each of us. That’s only twenty five for us all.”

“We must have that much if we all put in,” Doris pleaded. “Please, let’s do it. I really want to trip out.”

“Well, I got six left after buying the beer,” Dennis said.

The word “beer” hung in the air like an accusation.

Finally, I sighed. “I have twenty,” I said, digging into my pocket and handing the bill to Chris, although I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to take part in any of this, again remembering the insanity my friends back east underwent that night, and the long terrible ride up the New Jersey Parkway with them struggling to keep to the proper lane, they seeing space ships and other alien things were the other cars should have been.

Chris and Doris left, leaving me, Louise and Dennis to fill in the silence.

Without Doris’ hysterical laugh, the apartment took on an uncomfortable quiet, which I lacked the words to fill.

But I was acutely aware of Dennis’ attention towards Louise and how he watched the rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed.

“I knew you two were good people the moment I laid eyes on you,” Dennis said, staring only at Louise now, his voice soft, almost whispering. “You, Al, and your cat …”

“Bitsy,” I said.

“Ah, yes, Bitsy,” Dennis continued. “You got good vibes.”

“Which is why you decided to join us?” I asked, my voice sounding way too harsh in comparison to his, forcing him to reluctantly look at me. He sipped his beer and nodded.

“But I also thought you two looked so lonely,” he said, his gaze once more shifting towards Louise, “coming all the way here from – where was it – Denver?”

“Yes, Denver,” I said coldly, barely able to remain civil against the smooth talk I heard coming out of him.

But Louise’s earlier doubts seemed to have melted away, and she leaned back against the pillows smiling back at him.

This made me dislike him even more.

Somehow, the same smooth talk he seemed to seduce her with only grated on me, and he didn’t stop. He started telling us about his life, his past and future plans, and the dreams he hoped to realize someday.

Although I had first mistaken him for a college boy, he said he had started life as a steel worker in Pittsburgh.

“I was a chip off my father’s block,” he laughed, and then grew sorrowful, saying that his mother had died of some lung ailment so common in a city with such polluted air, drawing a sympathetic sigh from Louise and a stifled groan from me.

“Have you ever been to Pittsburgh?” he asked, breaking his narrative.

Louise nodded.

“We passed through there on our way west,” she said. “Oh, not me and Al, I meant with my parents. We traveled a lot. We took vacations all over the country.”

“Your parents are rich?” Dennis said with a sudden intense interest.

“Not the way you might think – not Beverly Hills rich – but we were well off. We lived in a better part of Wayne.”

“They’re rich,” I said, remembering my visit to their house just after I got out of the Army, a house with a lake for a back yard, and a county club for entertainment. “Theirs is one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in New Jersey.”

“How can you say we were rich,” Louise protested. “My father went to work everyday.”

“What does he do?” Dennis asked.

“He runs an electronics firm” Louise said.

“Runs it?” Dennis asked.

“He’s president of the company,” she said proudly.

“I’d say that’s rich enough,” he said.

“It’s not rich, but tell me more about you. I want to hear about your life, not my boring life with my parents.”

Dennis went on, telling us about his father, a hard man with hard principles, a man who had worked his way through life and believed that anyone who didn’t make their own money was a thief.

“My old man thought that gambling was like working for nothing and he used to watch his friends blow their pay checks every two weeks,” Dennis said. “He said they were just trying to make some big, fat rich fuck somewhere richer.”

“And you don’t?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I used to sneak off with what I made and blew it, too,” he said. “It seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

“When did you stop?” Louise asked.

“When I was twenty two – three years ago. My old man got crushed under a stack of raw iron rails. Some ass hit it with a fork life. Not a chance in the world him surviving – but somehow, he did. They stuck a tube in him and I used to go up there everyday and see those eyes of his staring up at me. That wasn’t his idea of living. He wasn’t working. He wasn’t anything.”

“Did he die eventually?” Louis asked, her voice dripping with sympathy.

“Oh yeah,” Dennis said. “He died.”

But at that point, Dennis’ smooth talk seemed to falter and he would not elaborate.

Instead, he changed the subject and spoke about his giving up his own gig at the steel mill. No one held it against him. It was just too much to expect him to stay there after that.

At that point, people started talking about going west. He was already into drugs by then, a few ups, he said, some pot, but he’d heard about Haight Ashbury, and something touched him.

He went.

He just put gas in his car and left, leaving the bills for his father’s estate to settle. He didn’t even stay to see if his father had left him anything.

“People back home are probably still waiting for me to come back and straighten everything out,” he said. “But I’m not going back. Let the people from the mil and the insurance company and the hospital get together and figure it out. I’m busy hunting beaver.”

He laughed and looked even harder at Louise.

Louise laughed, too.

If she sensed danger, she didn’t show it or didn’t care or forgot that she wasn’t supposed to be flirting with anybody the way she used to flirt with other men when we both worked at the paper factory back east.

But I felt the threat and got up and went to the refrigerator for another been.

“Get me one, too, while you’re up,” Dennis said over his shoulder.

When I got back, Dennis was back to asking Louise about her past. She talked a little about her parents, and her sister, and Boulder – fortunately leaving out some of the hard core pieces.

When the door bell rang, we all looked over at the door stunned.

“It must be them,” Dennis said, groaning as he stood up.

It was.

And they slid in like conspirators, both of them grinning, but staying silent until Dennis closed the door and asked, “Well, did you get it?”

“Sure did,” Chris said. “And we got a deal – seven tabs for the price of five.”

Dennis grinned. “We’re gonna party!”

Louise came over to where I stood near the kitchen counter and whispered, “Are you sure this is going to be all right? I’ve smoked pot but never did anything like this.”

I didn’t know what to say. Pauly and Hank had told me it was safe, but I couldn’t get over the changes they underwent after they ingested it, turning into strange beings from another planet that I could barely connect with, regardless of how drunk I got.

I shrugged.

Dennis, Chris and Doris laid out the seven capsules on the table. They looked exactly like those that Pauly, Hank and the others had taken, white powder inside clear capsules. Back east, each of the batch of boys had taken a half capsule, turning them crazy for more than 200 miles of driving back up from the shore and then beyond, Alf steering Bill’s car, with Pauly and Bill in the front seat, Rob and Charlie in the back seat with me, everybody except me tripping, but all of us screaming at the top of our lungs.

Although mildly intoxicated now on two beers, I was scared, looking down at the seven capsules as the others debated how to divvy the up, Chris laughing as he opened a beer.

“The guy said this is dynamic stuff,” Chris said.

“If it’s the same stuff from back east, it is,” I said, drawing curious looks from both Chris and Dennis.

I sounded experienced and for the first since coming west, a felt a little cool, and ached to be considered that by these people, even if I didn’t particularly like them.

I wanted them to think I knew what I was doing, and it was this same issue I had with Louise.

As much as I had done in my life up to that point, as much trouble as I had managed to get myself into and often out of, I was still vastly inexperienced when it came to some things – in this case, drugs, and with Louise, sex.

This crew knew drugs, and I knew only those moments when people shoved pills into my pockets or my friends stuff them into their mouths.

I knew how to steal, but even that I did in a cowardly way.

I wanted these people and Louise to look at me differently, more importantly, as if I was significant.

“Can we stop talking about the stuff and take it, please,” Doris moaned, chewing on her wad of bubblegum which she promptly blew into a large bubble and let pop.

“Yeah,” Chris said.

Dennis looked up at Louise, and more vaguely me. “You are going to do this with us, aren’t you?” he asked.

We nodded. Dennis picked up two of the capsules and put them in the palm of my hand. They looked so large and seemed to glow. I handed one of the pills to Louise and she looked at it between her thumb and forefinger as if studying a worm. Then she popped it into her mouth and sipped the last of her beer and put the bottle down.

Everyone else repeated this strange kind of communion. I hesitated, and finally, after everyone else had taken theirs, I took mine.

Then we all looked down at the two remaining capsules.

“I think we should dump the contents of the last two, and split it up five ways,” Chris said.

“I don’t want any more,” Louise said, drawing glances from Chris, Doris and Dennis.

Chris nodded.

“That would make it easier for the rest of us to split up,” he said.

“I don’t want any more either,” I said, feeling a panic starting up in me, as if some center of common sense was scolding me for taking the first pill when I already knew what to expect from it – and had already ingested double the amount that had turned my friends back east into freaks.

I went to get another beer, and while there, put a kettle on the stove, feeling the sudden need for a cup of coffee.

Dennis laughed and took up one of the pills.

“I’m taking their share,” he said and popped one of the two remaining pills into his mouth.

Chris and Doris shook their heads.

“You’re crazy,” Chris said. “That’s too much. You’ll be sorry later.”

“Maybe, but it’s too late now,” Dennis said.

Chris and Doris split the last pill, and then they laid back on the pillows to wait for the drug to take effect.

The radio was on playing The Doors.

But Dennis wanted to hear something else and went over the reel to reel and flicked on the tape. The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour flowed out of the speakers and filled the room with a strange new aura.

Dennis stared down into the carpet at something I could not see – if anything at all.

Something stirred in the room, something invisible and dark, some power rising up from the fabric of our existence that I had not expected to encounter – which I had only seen from the outside prior to this and could not have anticipated, even when witnessing this sudden discovery in the faces of my friends the previous summer. Perhaps they hadn’t experienced anything substantial and to them this was never about traveling anywhere other than from the shore back to Northern New Jersey, and that there was never anything spiritual or supernatural, nothing to write home about once they stopped seeing the colors.

But here, I felt on the edge of a cliff ready to fall off, and I lacked anything to hold onto.

Are you experienced?

Doris closed her eyes and seemed to go to sleep, her face looking incredibly beautiful now that she had stopped talking.

A haze fell across my eyes. But I didn’t feel sleepy, and started pacing the room, as Chris shut his eyes and faded as well, and then, as if he had worn the rug out with his staring, Dennis sat down, leaned against the wall, closed his eyes, and seemed to slip into the same limbo as the others.

Even Louise faded.

I wanted to rush over and shake her away and warn her against going where they were going, a place I dreaded, a place to which I clearly was not invited to go, even though I had taken the drug as well.

I kept thinking it was the beer.

But Dennis had drunk the beer, too, and he was already launched into space.

The tea kettle whistled, and I went to the kitchen where I saw the coils under the kettle glowing with an intensity I’d never seen before.

I spooned instant coffee into a cup, and then poured the steaming liquid on top, watching the crystals turn into mud, boiling up like some creature out of a black lagoon.

I ached to ingest the caffeine, needing to keep myself awake, feeling the tug of something that threatened to lure me into the same stupor as the others.

But when I tried to drink the concoction, it scalded my lips and tongue. I ran cold water from the tap into the cup, and then gulped down the lukewarm result, feeling the liquid pour down inside of me, a warm glow filling my chest, oiling the mechanism of this machine that housed me. I felt that much more like a robot, clunking limbs, carrying me from this part of the room to the next.

My head started to throb. So did my eyes.

My body ached for sleep. But my brain screamed, “No!”

I carried my cup into the living room where I found Louise lying on one side in a fetal position, looking even more the part of a helpless child.

I leaned down and touched her cheek.

He face felt cold, and its chill went through me.

I shook to wake her, but she wouldn’t wake up.

I shook her again, more violently, until she groaned.

Something was wrong.

This is not the way everything had transpired in New Jersey..

Finally, with another groan, Louise woke.

No, she did not wake. Her eyes flickered open, then froze, as if something on the ceiling terrified her.

“Do you see it?” she asked..

I twisted around so I could stare up at the spot on the stucco ceiling she was staring at.

“See what?” I asked.

“The green worms,” she said.  “And now there are purple worms, too, crawling there!”

She pointed to the rough surface of the stucco ceiling, her short finger shivering as if she was excited or scared.

But look as hard as I could, I saw nothing, except the stucco.

Around us, the others began to wake up as well, each of them groaning, and then moaning with a strange awe I did not feel or appreciate.

I was angry. I didn’t understand what was going on or what was happening to Louise, nor did it make sense that she should be in this condition and not me, when we both ingested the same drug. I assumed something was wrong and glared at the others.

“What did you do to her?” I demanded to know.

Was her pill different from mine? Was this something different after all from what my friends had taken back east.

Chris shook his head, but seemed in a fog.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man,” he said, looking around the room, seeing things there that I didn’t see. “This stuff is great.”

They all seemed to think so and grinned at me. Louise grinned at me. But it was hardly the Louise I knew, but some strange new being who had emerged from the cocoon as something alien, her face altered in an alien way, her eyes so dilated she seemed to have entirely black eyes – like the eyes of a bug – absorbing everything around her, sucking in the dim light of the room, she seeing things through them that were as alien as she seemed to me.

“You people gave her something weird,” I said angrily. “This isn’t what I thought we were getting. Tell me what it is. My friends back east didn’t look or sound or act like this.”

“Relax, man,” Chris said. “Let her enjoy it. You don’t want to bum her out.”

The music confused me, bending the air around each of the speakers – going higher and lower, taking strange twists and turns. The voices kept moving from one speakers to the other and back.

I sort of recognized the songs, but I’d never quite heard them in the way I heard them now.

The alternating tones seemed to turn the room’s pale walls into colors, making them drip red or green, as if someone had just come in and repainted them, but slopping on the paint so thick that it dripped down towards the floor like melting wax.

I staggered over to the tape deck and turned the volume now down.

“Hey!” Dennis moaned from across the room, sounding more like a wounded animal than anything human, giving me a look so savage I almost felt his teeth and claws. “What happened to the music?”

“It was too loud,” I said.

“It’s supposed to be loud.”

“My landlord lives downstairs. We’ve got to keep it down.”

“But I can’t hear it,” Dennis groaned. “I can’t hear it. I have to hear it. You understand? I need to hear it in my bones.”

At that point, Dennis managed to drag himself up to his feet, where he wavered for a moment, as if he would fall back down at any moment. Then he took his first staggering step in my direction.

No giant’s steps could have rumbled so loudly. The whole room seemed to shake with each step he took.

“I can’t hear it!” he yelled to be heard over the still too loud music.

“I don’t care. Leave the music alone,” I said, refusing to step out of his way.

He looked angry, and then looked passed me to where Louise was sitting on the floor.

His outrage evaporated, as a new look came into his eyes, a look I had seen from the first time I had seen him, though not so blatantly as I saw it now,

She didn’t notice him. Her dilated eyes seemed preoccupied with some vision in the rug which she could not stop staring at, something so fascinating, it consumed her.

Dennis mumbled something I could not quite make out, and then, he repeated it slightly louder, “woman,” he said, and then attempted to stagger in the direction of Louise.

“My woman,” I said, and stepped in his path again, drawing a vicious glare from him, something so primitive I saw his claws and teeth again, and heard him snarl.

I glanced at Chris, but he seemed unaware of the confrontation. But even Dennis seemed a little too much for me. I didn’t feel strong or stable enough to fight him off. Something was wrong inside my head, something that made me feel a little sea sick.

I stumbled to Louise and grabbed her hands, trying to pull her to her feet. But she resisted, not even looking at me, staring down into that same spot with the look of someone who had found something precious, and I was dragging her away from it.

Finally, I managed to pull her up and propel her towards the beaded curtain that led to the hall and the other rooms.

I needed to get her behind a closed door, where I could better set up a defense, and finally managed to get her into the master bedroom and onto the bed, although she still resisted me, still complained that she wanted to go back into the other room, wanted to see what she saw, although she could only say she had seen fountains with sprays of remarkable colors, and she needed to see the fountains again.

I heard Doris’ voice asking, “What’s the matter with him?”

Meaning me.

But if there was an answer, it was soon drowned out with the rise of volume of music – I am the egg man, I am the egg man, I am the walrus…

Louise ceased resisting and stared up at the wall at a picture of Christ she had hung there, one of those classic images I had seen a thousand times hung in every corner of the Catholic grammar school I’d attended as a kid, the face of Christ as familiar to me as my own in the mirror, and she stared at it with such admiration in her eyes, she might have been hearing Him call to her.

“I see it, Al,” she told me.

“See what?” I asked.

“Heaven.”

“Huh?”

“He’s reaching for me, Al,” she said, suddenly terrified. “Hold me, please. I don’t want to die.”

I held her. But she started to scream, not at me, but at the image on the wall.

“Please! I don’t want to die!”

“You’re not going to die,” I assured her, although I wasn’t sure of anything at that moment, wasn’t sure of what it was that the people in the other room had given her, or me, and what we could do to get it out of us, if we could do anything at all.

What exactly had they done?

Why was Louise acting so strangely, and why did I feel so much in a panic, hearing things rumbling beyond the walls of the room or the apartment, terrible, frightening things, as awesome as the God Louise believe was reaching out to collect her.

Then, she looked me and cringed, pulling away from me, her arms rising up in front of her face as if she expected me to attack her.

“Who… are you?” she asked, in a voice as full of terror at the sight of me as it had been a moment ago at the sight of Christ.

“It’s me. Al,” I said.

“You can’t be. You look like Frankenstein.”

Even in my altered state, this hurt, stabbing into some vital part of me that I didn’t realize was vulnerable.

I didn’t like the idea of being something horrible to her. I wanted to protect her, to make her feel safe.

Perhaps, she saw something deeper, something more honest in my make up in that moment that I realized, some essential truth about me that even I didn’t dare admit about myself.

“It’s me, honest,” I said.

“Who’s that?” she asked, pointing passed me, and I turned to find Dennis standing in the doorway, filling it completely, like a grizzly bear, all fangs and claws, and a look of lust in his eyes.

I heard Louise behind me saying, “He’s beautiful,” which only startled me more.

Dennis heard this, too, and grinned, and lumbered towards the bed.

I jumped up and grabbed his shoulders, and turned him around and steered him back through the door and into the hall.

“She’s not well right now,” I said, and continued to steer him down the hall and through the beaded curtain and into the living room, which was aglow with multicolored lights. Someone had plugged in the Christmas tree and dimmed the other lights.

I went to the tape deck and once more lowered the volume.

“What the fuck?” Chris said from somewhere in the deeper shadow, clearly reacting the lower sound.

Doris was under him. Both of them were naked.

Dennis staggered to the other corner and slumped down into the pile of pillows, rubbing his crotch.

I retreated back through the beads and down the hall and into the bedroom, shutting and locking the bedroom door behind me.

Louise was still on the bed staring at the lamp in the corner.

Then suddenly, with a jolt, the whole blue room jerked, and flashes of light streaked across it in front of me

Something else had started to happen to me, and I gripped the bed frame, thinking I had finally encountered the California earthquake I had heard so much talk about back east.

But it wasn’t that.

It was something much more terrible. Something erupting from inside of me. My eyes burned. My head pounded.

Louise started to moan – or was she singing?

I couldn’t tell. Too many things were happening at once, and then, the music roared up even louder from the living room, the vibrations of which hit me in the back like a blow. I whirled around, yanked open the door again and charged down the hall to the living room, lights that had no source flashing around me the whole way, as if each footfall set loose a flurry of sparks.

“I told you to turn down the music!” I shouted, picturing our landlord and landlady downstairs, a pacing couple of Ronald Reagan conservatives, who ached for any excuse to call the police, poised before their telephone as if waiting for the sound to reach a particular volume so that they could.

My three unwelcome guests moaned, but Dennis got up, staggered over to the machine, and turned the volume down again, and I went back into the bedroom to Louise, who was sitting up. I sat down beside her and held her and rocked her, wondering how long this insanity would last and terrified that things might get worse before they got better.

I could not stop seeing color that some distant logical part of my brain kept telling me couldn’t possibly be there.

But I had not fallen off the edge of the world the way Louise and the others had.

Maybe it was the coffee I had ingested to stay awake. Or coffee combined with the beer. Of maybe it was simply something in me that would not let go, could not let go, was terrified to lose control the way these others seemed to.

Terror coursed through me like a whole different drug.

“I want to look at the Christmas tree,” Louise told me.

“But that’s out there – with them,” I said.

“I don’t care. I want to see it. I want to see more colors.”

Something in her voice sounded less out of control, telling me that she had reached some plateau where some level of sanity had returned. She was no longer calling at God, no longer looking at me as a monster, no longer seeing fountains flowing up out of the rug.

I wanted to think the worst was over.

So I nodded, and helped her to her feet, and led her back out into the narrow hall, and along it through the beaded curtain, into the glowing space beyond where Christmas had turned into something utterly fantastic.

Someone had turned up the music again, but not quite so loud as it was before.

Louise waved her hand in the air, and to my amazement, I saw not one hand and one arm, but a series of hands and arms, each like a still photo of a partial movement, delayed somehow so that I saw them from beginning to end like a fan, the last fading slowly as the hand ceased its movement.

“What is that?” I asked.

“We call them trails,” Chris said, waving his own hand in front of his face.

He was lying on an angle, facing the Christmas tree, the lights of which flickered on and off, each individual light with a halo around it, a halo that lingered after the light went out, and then grew more intense when it came on, so that the whole tree seemed to grow brighter and brighter.

I stumbled over to the tape deck and turned the volume down again.

“Ah, come on,” Chris moaned. “Don’t be such a drag.”

“My landlord will be a drag if he decides to call the cops,” I said.

“He hasn’t complained yet.”

“It only takes one phone call,” I said.

Meanwhile, Dennis groaned, noticing Louise again, and like a bear stirred from sleep, started to crawl toward her on hands and knees.

I stepped in between them. He looked up at me and growled.

“I was just going to turn up the music,” he said.

“No, you’re not.”

“Then you do it.”

“No.”

“Turn up the fucking music!” he yelled, far louder than the tape machine could have gone had he turned it all the way up.

He stood up and swayed.

I felt no more stable than he did, and staggered back a step, expecting him to attack me. But he did not attack. He stumbled to the recorder and twisted the volume up. The music volume rose, vibrating the walls.

I shoved him back and turned the whole thing off.

The sudden silence stunned me, and the others.

Chris rose up on his elbows.

“What the fuck…?”

“Out,” I said.

“Huh?”

“I want the three of you out of here – right now.”

Chris looked stunned. “Out? Like this?”

“Yes. I’m not going to fight you people any more. If you want to cause trouble, do it some place else.”

“But we can’t go out like this,” Doris said. “Look at us. We’re in the middle of a trip.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “You won’t listen to me, so you have to leave.”

Dennis shook his head as if trying to clear it, and then mumbled, “Look, man, we’ll do what you say. If you want the volume down, we’ll keep it down.”

“No, I want you out.”

Chris rose. “All right, we’re going,” he said, grabbing Doris who was only half dressed. “But don’t think we we’ll forget this.”

“I don’t care if you forget it or not,” I said. “I don’t want to see any of you again.”

So they went, staggering out like a pack of dejected gypsies, their heads down, their faces grim, casting only one or two stark glanced back at me.

But I didn’t feel guilty. Theirs was a party I had not asked to become a part of, and the only thing I felt listening to their shuffled steps down the concrete stairs was relief, relief at the fact that I did not have to protect Louise from Dennis, relief that the silence would appease the landlord and keep him from calling police, relief at the fact that everything – or so I thought – could once more return to normal.

But when I closed the door and locked the latch, and turned back to the apartment, something else struck me, a sense of emptiness I hadn’t been aware of before, but knew that it was not something generated out of the drug we had taken or the encounter with Dennis. The emptiness, or whatever it was I felt, had been there, lingering in the background like a hum, waiting for some silence to make it obvious.

Louise was sitting on a pillow in front of the Christmas tree. With no one else around her, she looked smaller than she was, like a child, waiting for Santa Claus to arrive. She seemed content, staring up at the lights, almost unaware of the conflict that had gone on a moment earlier.

Behind me, curtain to the slightly open glass door blew in, stirred by some cool draft of air from outside. It chilled me. And suddenly, I was scared.

I moved across the room to where Louise sat, and I sat beside her, feeling her warmth, and the warmth of the flickering lights, each still with a halo of its own.

Outside, dawn arrived with a blue light of its own, slightly delayed by the line of ridges that marked that side of LA, not mountains, not the way Colorado has boasted of mountains, but a ridge line over which the light of dawn took time to climb.

I lifted my hand and waved it, and the trails filled the space before me.

Louise laughed. Like a child. I laughed, too, but could not exactly say why or what I thought was funny.

Perhaps I was thinking of that trip up from the Jersey shore back in August and how crazy my friends had acted, and how strange I felt, watching them from the outside, not completely understand what it was they were going through.

Now I did. And this knowledge changed me into something utterly different from the person I had been before, and I laughed, but deep down inside I felt great sadness.

And after a time, we both leaned back against the pillow, letting both the lights from the Christmas tree, and the light of dawn peeping through the curtain wash over us, and we faded into sleep and the more familiar, if no less bizarre, land of dreams.

 On the lamb menu

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