Drop City

Rain.”
    “Let nature take care of it, right?”
    “Yeah, that's right: let nature take care of it.”
    Most of the brothers and sisters had already eaten--dinner was at six--but they lined up nonetheless, all except for Merry and Alfredo and a couple of the hard-core vegetarians like Verbie. (That hurt him--_Merry__--but she was adamant, every creature is sacred, wouldn't slap a malarial mosquito if it was perched on her wrist, and did he know about the Jains in India who went around with gauze over their faces so they wouldn't inadvertently inhale so much as a gnat?) Norm was there, though, glad-handing and effusing, ripped on something and shouting “Loaves and fishes! It's a miracle!” every two minutes. Somebody dragged the big speakers out onto the back porch and dropped the needle on _Electric Ladyland,__ and pretty soon people were dancing out across the lawn in a kind of meat frenzy, and by the time it was over the steaks were gone, and a good time had by all.
    At one point, stretched out on the grass with his plate, a transient joint and the dregs of a jug of wine he kept swishing round the bottom of his fruit jar in the hope a little _circulation__ would make it taste less like recycled lamp oil, Ronnie found himself hemmed in by the professor and his old lady, the one who'd let out that stone-cold shriek when he'd come staggering out of the woods with the deer wrapped round his shoulders, and if anybody thought _that__ was fun they were out of their minds. Star was there too, and Marco, Lydia, Jiminy, a whole little circle of people off the main circle, and they'd been discussing weighty matters like is Hendrix an alien and how many heads fit on the pin of an angel. And suddenly here was this _professor__ sitting right there at his elbow with a plate full of gnawed gristle, and the professor was saying things like “So, when did you drop out?”
    Ronnie wanted to tell him to fuck off and go back to Berkeley with the rest of the tourists--_Can't you see we're having a party here, man?__--but there was something about the guy--the gray in his beard, the fruity rich mellow tenor that brought back all those somnolent afternoons in English class--that just made him duck his head and mumble “A year and a half.” And it wasn't just that he was mumbling, he was exaggerating too--six months was nearer the truth. But the professor didn't want any six-month hippies, he wanted the genuine down-in-the-trenches peripatetic lifetime dirtbags he could awe and thrill the _reading public__ with. He had a notepad. He had a--no, yes--tape recorder.
    “You mind if I tape this?” the professor was asking.
    Hendrix rode the night, supreme, astral, totally mind-blowing, and Ronnie mumbled _Sure__ and the professor's old lady moved in, thick legs in a long skirt and the joint pinched in her fingers like a deadly writhing South American bushmaster with its fangs drawn. Did she take a hit? Yes. And then she passed it on.
    “You're how old? Here, talk into this.”
    “Into this?”
    “That's right, yeah.”
    “I'm twenty-two.”
    “Family problems?”
    “No more than usual.”
    “Ever run away from home?”
    “Not that I can remember. Or maybe once. Or twice.”
    “You were how old then?”
    “I don't know--nine. I went to the bowling alley and hid behind the pinball machine.”
    “Both parents alive?”
    His parents were alive, all right, but so was Lon Chaney Jr. in _The Mummy's Ghost.__ They were just like that, staggering from one foot to the other and grunting out hostile messages to the world and the trashed wind-sucking son they saw only at dinner because he needed that dinner to stay alive. Might as well wrap them up in mummy's bandages too, because they were both walking disasters, his father's nose like a skinned animal pinned to his face with the shiny metallic tackheads of his eyes, his mother a shapeless sack of organs with a howling withered skull stuck atop it. Come to think of it, she could have starred in _Screaming Skull__ herself. And they nagged. Nagged and grunted. Pan looked into the professor's eyes and then away again. “Yeah,” was all he said.
    “Any abuse? You use marijuana? Hard drugs? Booze? What about Free Love? Any social diseases? You vote in the last election?”
    Pan fell into it. He warmed, grew effusive. He told the professor about scoring dope on South Street and cooking it up in whatever semi-clean receptacle that happened to be handy and wouldn't catch on fire, a spoon