Drop City

Talk about deflation, huh?”
    But Ronnie didn't seem to get the joke. He stood there a long while, watching Marco bend to the pile of mismatched lumber, the fish already stiffening on the stringer. It was hot. A flock of crows sent up a jeer from somewhere off in the woods. “So what you building, anyway?” Ronnie asked finally.
    It came to him then, and it took the question to elicit the response, because until that moment there was no shape before him. He saw the oak tree suddenly, the spread and penetrant shade of it, roots like claws, acorns, leaf litter, and beneath it, his guitar and rucksack propped casually against the trunk. He dropped a board at his feet.
    “A treehouse,” he said.

Drop City
    3
    Pan was taking the day off. Pan was just going to stroke his shaggy fetlocks and blow on his pipes and mellow out, no sex today--he was rubbed raw from it--and no hassles, not with Merry, not with Lydia, not with Star. Not today. The morning had already been a kind of nightmare, nine A__.M__. and crawling up off the mattress in the front bedroom with a taste like warmed-over shit in the back of his throat, everybody piling into the rusted-out '59 Studebaker he and Star had bombed across the country in and then on into Santa Rosa to the county welfare office to apply for food stamps. It must have been a hundred degrees, the streets on fire, the tie-and-jacket TGIF world closing in, big-armed _mothers__ going to the supermarket in their forty-foot-long station wagons and nobody with even so much as a roach to take the pain away.
    It was late afternoon and Ronnie was stretched out by the pool, his hair greased to his head with the residue of a whole succession of dunkings in the vaguely greenish water--and shouldn't somebody dump some chlorine in it, isn't that the way it's done?--the sun holding up its end of the bargain, birds making a racket in the trees, the sound of somebody's harmonica drifting across the lawn along with the premonitory smells of dinner firming up in the big pots in the kitchen. Last night--or was it the night before?--it was veggie lasagna with tofu and carrots standing in for meat, and that was one of the better nights. Usually it was just some sort of rice mush flavored with stock and herbs and green onions and whatnot from the garden. He wasn't complaining. Or actually, he was. His food stamps were going into the communal pot along with everybody else's, and that he could live with, but Norm--Norm was insane, because Norm insisted on feeding anybody who showed up, even bums and winos and the spade cats from the Fillmore, who incidentally seemed to have taken over the back house in the past week, with no sign of leaving.
    They'd come up over the weekend, seven of them crammed into an old Lincoln Continental with fins right off a spaceship that could have taken them to Mars and back, very cool, very peaceful, just checking out the scene. Ronnie had been on the front porch with Reba, Verbie, Sky Dog and a couple of others, watching the light play off the trees and doing their loyal best to cadge change off the tourists who always seemed so timid and _thankful__ to be able to do something to support the lifestyle, because they really believed in everything that was going down here, they really did, but their mother was sick and they were behind in their house payments and the orthodontist was threatening to rip the wires off their kids' teeth, and could they just sit here a minute on the porch, would that be cool? Some of them would bring cameras, and Sky Dog would charge a quarter for a picture with a real down and authentic hippie in full hippie regalia, and the braver ones would stay for supper and line up with a tin plate in their hands and maybe even take a toke or two of whatever was going round once the bonfire was lit and the guitars emerged from their cases. They'd even sing along to Buffalo Springfield tunes or Judy Collins or Dylan, if anybody could remember the words. Just like summer camp. Then they got in their Fords and Chevys and VW Bugs and Volvos and went home.
    The spades were different. They didn't so much emerge from the car as uncoil from it, all that lubricious menacing supercool spade energy--and Ronnie wasn't a racist, not at all, he was just maybe a bit more _experienced__ than the rest of his brothers and sisters here at Drop City, who, after all, were maybe just a wee bit starry-eyed and _lame__--and they came across the dirt lot in formation, like a football