Drop City

“Hey, man,” he said, as faces picked themselves out of the shadows, “what's happening?”
    Mendocino Bill broke the spell. He rose up off a crude bench by the stove, mountainous in a cableknit sweater his mother or his ex–old lady must have sent him, lifting his feet with the exaggerated care of a deep-sea diver wending his way between the killer octopus and the giant man-eating clam. “Holy shit,” he said, “look who it is. Hey, people,” rotating his head to take in the loft and the thermal-socked feet aggregated there like some sort of fungal excrescence, “it's Pan.”
    Murmurs now. Neil Young went on killing the song, killing everything, people rising like zombies out of the murk, Geoffrey, Weird George, Dunphy, Erika, Deuce, all of them squinting at him as if he were six miles away. Was it Pan, was it really Pan? But where--? We thought--? Holy shit! It's Pan. And there didn't seem to be any hard feelings now, soul shakes all around, and here, man, have a hit of this, and he did, he did, but where was everybody else? This was Halloween, wasn't it--or had he miscounted the days?
    Angela was there, Maya, Creamola, Foster. “We're hip,” Bill was saying, and he backed up against the stove to warm the big palpitating lump of his backside, “it's just that nobody really, I mean, we just didn't get it together. Plus the pumpkins were like the size of grapefruits when that first frost hit--”
    “Snow, you mean,” Creamola said.
    “We carved a zucchini,” Angela put in, and there it was on the windowsill, a collapsed green loaf of a thing with a couple of holes poked in it and a pathetic flicker of candlelight emanating from somewhere in its pulpy depths. “And Reba had Che and Sunshine dressed up like devils--they made the rounds, trick or treating here, and then at Star's cabin and the one I'm sharing with like Erika and George and Geoffrey.”
    He saw now that a few people--the chicks--had made up their eyes and spattered a little glitter on their cheeks and foreheads and Weird George had maybe freshened up his bones and garlic, but it was a far cry from any kind of celebration Pan could have conceived of. But what was happening with _him__? With Dale and Sky? Were they coming too?
    “No,” he said, “they're playing cards,” and even as he said it he knew how lame it sounded. The fact was that Dale and Sky Dog were also personae non gratae here, ushered out by Marco and Alfredo after a couple of halcyon days of screwing, drinking and lying comatose in the sun, and they'd made it clear that Joe Bosky was unwelcome too--Pull Your Weight or Bail, PYWOB, that seemed to be the new motto of Drop City, and you could forget LATWIDNO. “But where's everybody else?” he asked, at the center of a wheel of faces.
    Angela said: “Lydia's back.”
    _Lydia.__ He felt his groin stir. “Where is she?”
    “At Star and Merry's. They're the only ones that would take her in.”
    And he learned this: Lydia, flush with cash and laden down with scotch, chocolate bonbons and cigarettes, had blown in a week ago on the back end of some wild hair's souped-up snow machine, replete with stories about the flesh trade in Fairbanks and the temperament of the Alaskan male, and she'd burned through Drop City like a wildfire. The party lasted two days--people just wanted distraction, anything, anybody, because you could only split so much wood, chow down so many bowls of mush and play Monopoly till you wore grooves in the board before you started wondering _Is this all there is?__ It wasn't even winter yet and already hard times had descended on Drop City. Factions were forming. People were terminally bored, suicidal. They had no snow machine, no way of getting out, unless they wanted to walk the twelve miles to Boynton in subzero temperatures, and Boynton itself was locked in. And what about the wild hair and his snow machine? Rain had slept with him--prostituted herself, fucked him up, down and sideways--and he'd taken her out with him in a trailing blast of exhaust and a flapping curtain of snow. She was probably back in San Francisco by now.
    Pan just stared at them. The joint came round and he took it. There was beer--Tom Krishna's homebrew, and it wasn't half bad. “Hey,” he said, sipping from the jar, “Tom's improving. He gets out of here he ought to go directly to Budweiser, what do you think?” Nobody laughed. People fell back into the shadows. He settled in and just _felt__ things for a while, and when