"But I ain't. This is the way it is, Bryon. Angela Shepard is a tough little chick who set out to get a shy guy who didn't know she was alive, so she sweet-talks some dummy into fighting for her, and I happen to be friends with Curtis, happen to be sittin' on the car with him when the dummy picks the fight with him, and I happen to be a little high. So I step in between Curtis and the punk. Now, if Angela wasn't tough, if she was a nice girl from the West Side--maybe she woulda left well enough alone and given up on Curtis. If Curtis was a playboy like you, he woulda picked her up when she wanted to be picked up. If that kid wasn't so dumb, he would have never taken on Curtis, who is no slouch of a fighter, man, I can tell you. If I had had a date that night, I woulda been somewhere else. But Bryon, that ain't the way things went. You can't walk through your whole life saying 'If.' You can't keep trying to figure out why things happen, man. That's what old people do. That's when you can't get away with things any more. You gotta just take things as they come, and quit trying to reason them out. Bryon, you never used to wonder about things. Man, I been gettin' worried about you. You start wonderin' why, and you get old. Lately, I felt like you were leavin' me, man. You used to have all the answers."
"I can't help it, Mark. I can't help thinking about things. Like Mike and Charlie and M&M and you--it's all mixed up and I can't help it."
"You can help thinking about it." He leaned over his bed, reached across the short space that separated us, and yanked my cigarette out of my fingers.
"You're going to go to sleep and burn us alive," he said.
I remember I was going to say, "No I ain't," but I was asleep before I could get the words out.
8
I was real hung over the next morning. Besides that, I had to get up early and go to work. Mark woke me up. He was a human alarm clock and never needed more than five hour's sleep a night. Me, if I don't get at least nine hours, I feel dead. I felt dead that Saturday morning. I wished I was, anyway. I was feeling so bad that I actually stuck a loaf of bread in a grocery bag and dropped three cans of soup on top of it. Bread always goes on top. In a supermarket this is like the Ten Commandments all rolled into one. It was a wonder I didn't lose my job that Saturday.
I carried groceries for this one young housewife type, and when I put the bags in her car she handed me her phone number. I was feeling so bad I groaned, "Lady, you gotta be kidding."
Like I said, it was a wonder I didn't lose my job. It was two in the afternoon before the sound of the cash register quit blasting my ears, and it was quitting time before I finally felt I could eat something. This shows you how sick I was.
I had a date with Cathy that night, but she had to work late. I would pick her up at the hospital snack shop at ten. This was fine with me, as I wanted a chance to go look for M&M. Mark knew where he was.
When I got off work, I found Mark sitting in my car.
"I figured you'd want to hunt for M&M," he said. "How's your head?"
"Better. Man, don't ever let me guzzle like that again."
Mark shrugged. "You wanted to. You had to get good and drunk because I was cutting Angela's hair off and you couldn't take it."
I flipped a remark that I had said many times before, but not to him. Even from my side of the car I felt him tighten, getting ready to spring. The gulf was between us again. For some reason, I was hacked off because he didn't need to sleep nine hours, because he wasn't hung over.
"You sound like Cathy," I said.
"Heaven forbid."
"What have you got against her, anyway?"
"What's she got against me?"
"You're a bad influence." I don't know why I said that, because Cathy sure as hell never said anything like it.
Mark was quiet for a minute, then he said something really rotten. I had it coming for what I'd said to him, but he didn't have to drag Cathy into it. I gripped the steering wheel. "You want to get outa this car and have it out?"
"You don't want to swing on me, do you?" It was partly a statement and partly a request. I was quiet.
"I'm sorry," Mark said, and I kept driving. This was as close as we ever came to having a fight.
*
I followed the directions Mark gave me. We went into this old part of town which used to be a really classy place maybe thirty or forty years ago, with these huge old houses that were probably a big deal when they were built. They just looked gloomy now; most of them were divided into flats.
On Mark's say-so I pulled into a driveway in front of one of them. There was a sign hanging from the porch ceiling that said "Love" in red-and-green letters.
"He's here?" I asked, because I wasn't sure what was going on.
"Last time I was here he was." Mark got out of the car. You can tell when somebody is familiar with a place. Mark had been here many times before. "Come on."
I got out of the car, wondering what in the world Mark could have been doing here. Mark didn't knock, he just opened the front door and walked in. I followed him. The whole inside of the house was freaked out with posters. A girl with long, streaked, blond hair, wearing blue jeans and a paint-splattered shirt, was lying on a beat-up couch. She had the deadest, most colorless face I had ever seen.
"Hello, Cat," she said to Mark. She knew him; she didn't call everybody "Cat."
"Peace, baby," Mark said. I tried not to laugh. I dig hippies O.K.--I mean, they've got some great ideas, but sometimes it was funny.
"Freaked out?" Mark said politely, as if he were saying "How are you these days?"
"'Way out, man." She was staring at the ceiling so intently that I glanced up there, just to make sure the answer to the universe wasn't written across it. If it was, I couldn't see it. Maybe she could.
Mark stepped over a stringless guitar and went upstairs. I stumbled after him, looking around. Somebody was in the kitchen singing. Each of the steps was painted a different color. It was a good effect, but they were awful dirty.
Mark stepped into a bedroom. There were about six or seven kids in it. One kid was lying on a bed watching his fingernails. The others were sitting cross-legged in a circle, talking about some book. I hadn't read it so I didn't get the conversation, but these kids were not dumb. They were all in blue jeans and old shirts and fringed vests. A couple of them were smoking grass.
"Hi, Cat," a guy with a beard and a flowered shirt said.
"I'm looking for M&M," Mark said. "You seen him?"
"Baby Freak? He ain't been around today. The kid's flying, man. He's going to crash."
"You didn't let him take anything, did you?" I said. This may have been against house rules, as nobody had said anything to me yet, but this place was getting on my nerves.
"There isn't any 'letting' here," this fat chick says. "We're free."
I looked her over with the practiced eye of a playboy and popped off with something really good. Then I raised two fingers and said "Peace." This seemed to earn their forgiveness, because they all went back to their literary discussion.
Now the kid on the bed was painting his fingernails with green water-color.
On the way out we passed the blond chick. She was reading a book and smoking grass.
"You see
n Baby Freak?" Mark asked.
She shook her head. "Sorry. See you around, Cat." Even sitting up she looked dead.
When we got back into the car I said, "You dating her?"
"Sometimes. Like the lady said, they're free."
I thought about that a long time. I am the first to admit I've got hang ups. I don't think I'd ever consider myself really free.
But I'm not sure I'd consider them free, either.
"Just because it ain't your bag, don't knock it," Mark said, after we had driven in silence for a while.
"I didn't say anything."
"Grass, rum, both are a high."
"Yeah, well, listen, man, rum's going to maybe get me a weekend in the drunk tank. Grass could get me five years in the pen."
"That law ain't necessarily right."
"It's the way things are." I was puzzled. I had never known Mark to smoke pot. I wondered why he was defending it.
"I don't smoke it, so quit worrying," Mark said, reading my mind as usual. "I just don't like to see you judging people."
"What the hell is bugging you? I didn't say anything."
Mark was quiet. Then he said, "You remember when the Socs used to come through here looking for somebody to beat up?"
"Yeah."
"You remember when me and you beat up that hippie kid in the park?"
"Yeah," I said.
"I'm a tough punk, Bryon, but I ain't dumb." We drove the rest of the way home in silence.
*
I picked Cathy up at the hospital. I didn't tell her about going to the hippie house to look for M&M. I didn't see any sense in getting her all upset. After all, I hadn't found him.
We drove up and down the Ribbon, then stopped by the park on the way home. This was becoming standard procedure. I was getting more and more serious about Cathy, and this was really strange for me. I had always had a love-'em-and-leave-'em attitude. Even with Angela, I guess it was more a pride thing than a love thing. I still hadn't told Cathy I loved her though. It was like my never thanking Charlie for letting me use his car. It was something I just couldn't do when it meant anything.