Drop City

penis flapping like a metronome to another beat altogether. “Cool,” Ronnie said. And then he turned to her, to Star, and said, “What about it, Star, what do you say?”
    She said, “I don't think so. Not tonight. I'm feeling--I don't know, _weird.__”
    “Weird? What the fuck you talking about?” Ronnie's brow was crawling and his mouth had dropped down into a little pit of nothing--she knew the look. Though he hadn't moved a muscle, though for all the world he was the hippest coolest least-uptight flower-child _cat__ in the universe, he was puffing himself up inside, full of rancor and Ronnie-bile. He got his own way. He always got his own way, whether it was a matter of who he was going to ball and when or what interstate they were going to take or where they were going to spend the night or even what sort of food they were going to eat. It didn't matter if they were passing through Buttwash, Texas, the Dexamil wearing off and eggs over easy the only thing she could think about to the point of obsession and maybe even hallucination, he wanted tacos, he wanted salsa and chiles and Tecate, and that's what they got.
    “No, come on now, don't be a bummer, Paulette. You know what the Keristan Society says, right there in black and white in the _Speeler?__ Huh? Don't you?”
    She did. Because he quoted it to her every time he felt horny. Whoever they were, the Keristanians or Keristanters or whatever they wanted to call themselves, they preached Free Love without prejudice--that is, making it with anybody who asked, no matter their race or creed or color or whether they were fat and old or retarded or smelled like the underside of somebody's shoe. It was considered an act of hostility to say no to anybody who wanted to ball, whether you felt like it or not--it's seven A.M. and you're hungover and your hair looks like it's been grafted to your head, and some guy wants to ball? You ball him. Either that, or you're not into the scene because you're infected with all your bourgeois hangups just like your fucked-up parents and the rest of the straight world. That was what the Keristan Society had to say, but what she was thinking, or beginning to think, in the most rudimentary way, was that Free Love was just an invention of some _cat__ with pimples and terminally bad hair and maybe crossed eyes who couldn't get laid any other way or under any other regime, and she wasn't having it, not tonight, not with Ronnie and what's her name.
    “No, Ronnie,” she said, lifting his arm off her shoulder and letting it drop like the deadweight it was, “n-o.” She was on her feet now, looking down at him, at the tiny dollop of his face and the girl staring up at her with her smile fading like a brown-out. “I don't give a shit about the Keristan Society. I'm going to bed. And don't call me that.”
    He was hurt, put-upon, devastated, clinging to the girl--Merry, that was her name, _Merry__--as if she were a crate on the high seas and his ship had just gone down. “Call you what?”
    Breasts flapping, the little penis swaying, people hammering tambourines against their palms and the smoke of grass and incense roiling up off the floor like fog. “Don't call me Paulette,” she said, and then she was gone, bare feet picking their way through the sprawled hips and naked limbs of her brothers and her sisters.
    It was another morning. This one came in over the treetops with a glow that was purely natural because she hadn't been high for three days now because Ronnie was busy with Merry and the big-tits woman, who was twenty-seven years old as it turned out and worked as a secretary for some shipping company. Her name was Lydia, and she'd found a welcoming mattress or two and decided to stay on and screw her job and the plastic world and her big straining flesh-cutting brassieres and the hair pins and makeup and all the rest. Star was indifferent. It wasn't as if she was in love with Ronnie or anything, she told herself. It was just that he was from back home and they'd been together on the road all that time, through the big bread pan of Iowa, yellow Nebraska, New Mexico in its shield of crumbling brown, brickred Arizona, singing along to the Stones, “Under My Thumb,”
    “Goin' Home,” home, home, home. That was something. Sure it was. But as she maneuvered the bucket in under the first of the goats, she realized she was feeling good, clean and pure and good, without hangups or hassles, for the first time in as long as she