Drop City

'em, skin 'em and eat 'em, but then you'll have bad snake karma your whole life and maybe into the next one, and do you really want that?”
    From the main house, the sounds of laughter, conversation, music, all blended in a murmur that was like some sort of undercurrent, as if that was where the real life was, the only life, and this out here, this nature and this crepitating dark, was for losers--losers and snakes. Lydia was in there, and Merry, Verbie and the rest of them. Maybe he'd get up and go inside, just for the human warmth and companionship, because that's what Drop City was all about, companionship, a game of cards maybe, or Monopoly--but then the image of Alfredo clawed its way into the forefront of his brain, and he thought maybe he wouldn't.
    Alfredo was one of the founding members of the commune, one of Norm Sender's inner circle, one of those sour-faced ascetic types, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, Reba's old man. He was always going on about natural childbirth and how Reba had cooked up the afterbirth and everybody shared a piece of it and how Che and Sunshine had been born outside under the moon and the stars, but he was an uptight, tight-assed jerk nonetheless, and two days ago Ronnie had gotten into it with him over some very pointed criticism about _volunteering__ to do wash-up or haul trash or dig a new septic field because all these _people__ were clogging up the commune's only two working toilets until they were rivers of _shit,__ and he wouldn't mind, would he? Hell, yeah. He minded. He didn't come all the way out here to California to dig _sewers.__ Jesus Fucking Christ.
    That was what he was thinking, sitting there on the warm snake-loving pavement with the night festering around him, just a little shaky, but pissed off too, royally pissed off, when Lester and one of the other spade cats--Franklin, his name was Franklin--appeared out of nowhere with a jug of wine. “Hey, brother,” Lester breathed, easing himself down beside him, “--what you doing out here, swimming?”
    “I don't know. Yeah. I guess. I was swimming before--earlier, you know?” The words seemed to be stuck in his mouth, like the crust at the bottom of a pan. “Kind of cold now, I guess. But what's happening with you?”
    Franklin was just standing there, the jug of wine--Cribari red--dangling from his fingertips like a big glass bomb. Lester grinned. “Same old shit,” he said. “We're having a party in the back house, brother, and you're welcome to join us--we'd be real pleased about that, in fact; I would, at least--how about you, Franklin?”
    Franklin said he'd be pleased too.
    “By the way,” Lester said, and they were already gathering themselves up, “you wouldn't happen to have a couple of hits of that mescaline I heard you got left, would you?”
    Well, he did. And two minutes later he was in the back house and there were six or seven cats sitting around listening to Marvin Gaye out of a battery-powered portable stereo with a blown bass, thump, thump, _blat,__ thump, thump, _blat.__ Sky Dog was there, cradling his guitar, somebody had lit a couple of scented candles because there was no electricity in the back house, and there was a new girl there--a chick--and she couldn't have been more than fourteen or fifteen. A runaway. What was her name? Sally. Where was she from? Santa Clara. And what was her father like? He was a son of a bitch. They probably got twenty a week just like her, and none of them stayed more than a night or two, as if this whole thing--Norm Sender, Alfredo, Reba, Drop City itself--was no more than a kind of extended slumber party.
    Ronnie introduced himself as Pan, gave her a little brotherly and sisterly squeeze, and then settled in on the floor against the back wall and took it upon himself to make sure the jug kept circulating. All was peace. Silken voices murmuring, Marvin Gaye, Sly and the Family Stone, Hendrix, thump, thump, _blat,__ and Pan was in the middle of an elaborate story about a free concert in Central Park and the good and bad drugs he'd done that night and how somebody had vomited all over the windshield of his mother's car, which he'd borrowed with every warning and proscription attached, when Sally, the skinny-legged fourteen-year-old runaway in the patched jeans and stretch top, cried out. Or she screamed, actually. “Get off me, you freak!” she let out in a piping wild adolescent vibrato that shot up the scale like feedback, and Ronnie glanced away from his