Wildflower Seed

      It was a turn-down day at the side of the Coast Highway and Derrol was sitting on his pack, staring at the Queen Anne Lace growing at his feet... the flushing whiz of the passing cars found him rubbing his thumb against his jacket... wouldn't any of them stop? The cold winter wind and grey overcast fog, unusual for this time of year, only made his desire for a lift more urgent.

     O, the mild and raging child, he waits at the side of the road. Meeting yourself at this point on the roadside, like a stranger you never knew.

     “ I’m not your little daisy” he sang to himself 

     “I’m not the one you thought you knew.”

     He plucked a little on the mandolin which hung around his neck by a green braided cord.

     The destination was the home of a group of people he had met a couple of years before.

     “I once knew many who turned their genitals into bicycle seats, in the service of the corporate gears, they were but ground beef in its cogs, with some rapidity.

     “But leading hippies to work is like fitting shoes on kangaroos.”

     Derrol was not stupid, either, even if he was sometimes deluded. He had a full wallet, last week’s pay stuffing it to the gills, so far as he knew. It was time to exchange green energy for green energy.

     The hash pipe was going round the table when he got there. A nice dude in a silver Corvair had stopped, and they had floated along in the space time continuum, the relativity of the passing highway fences like the blurry wings of a flight of swallows.

     Past the Pizza House, the Rattan Chicken Coop, the Femur Arts Collective, the Corvair cut as if a cutlass through the misty fog, headlights diffusing in the headwind. As they passed the Post Office and Liquor Store he cut the car into the parking lot, to buy a fifth of bourbon and pack of cigarettes. Just another half mile, and he dropped Derrol at the edge of the highway where another street, across the highway, led out toward the ocean. He made a left turn under a pair of century-old cypress, and there he was, at the Tarantula House. The concrete patio clicked beneath his boot heels.

     The Tarantula House was so named because one year, a tarantula came climbing out of the peyote cactus growing on the hearth of an old stone fitted fireplace. It had been home to a revolving panoply of characters over a five year period, some staying the entire time, some coming and going over shifts of two to three years, on average.

     Andy and Darcy were Derrol’s longtime connections. The couple grew a little in their henhouse, disguised with some one way glass utilizing an open–sun roof, as the rest of the spread was at the mercy of a flock of chickens. Darcy and Andy were free-lovers, meaning all and anyone might be subject to a hug, or an invitation to soak in their wooden-shingle hot tub. Their marriage was more open than Pandora’s Box, and attended by about as many goblins. But Derrol was one of the high points, the friendship went back years. Along with the Andy-Darcy Axis were Melange, Nuestra Starre, and Sandra, three single, unattached, and frivoluous women, indulging their freedom in the only way that could be done in the pre-HIV/AIDS era.

As Andy handed over the hash pipe, Melange caught Derrol’s eye.

“Hey there dude, nice to see you again!” she winked at him. Within a few more moments, as Derrol blinked, she seemed to be outright leering at him. She flexed the muscles in her thighs, highly visible beneath a tight corduroy skirt that ended somewhere south of her upper thighs, but just only not very.
     He winked back, took a hit off the pipe, and passed it to Nuestra on his right.

     She began laughing, as she spilled out a billow of smoke which ended leaving her pursed lips in staccato bursts of white-grey smoke cloud. The wisps surrounded her curly hair like the halo round that of a saint. Only her saintliness was underdone, and her main ken was a wanton one. She pumped her legs, shook her ass at him, and giggled.

“If I was you, brother, I’d take on Melange. She’s got in in for you, you know. “

     Derrol looked up. “Really?” he thought. “I’d be lucky as a duck on an ice-cream truck.”

Melange followed his eyes silently, and slowly blinked, herself.

     “Tonight is our Peyote Night, Derrol you came just in time.”

     Darcy drew Derrol a glass of red wine from the half-gallon wine jar that sat at the center of the upturned telephone cable spool which was the dining room table. Darcy took a shoebox from her seat and began counting out peyote buttons for as many as there were, four per person. The hash pipe had made another circle and Derrol smiled as Andy began regaling him of current exploits. He held before Derrol a block of hashish in the form of a shoe heel. It had made it past customs as the sole of someone’s four inch platform disco-heels. Derrol placed a roll of his pay- a small portion, although, in relation to what he was not taking out, as quite a large percentage… and Andy began to work the piece of hashish with a pocketknife. Derrol was patient, and while he watied, Melange and Nuestra Starre kept working him up and down with their eyes.

     "It’s Afghani” said Andy. “Brown. You will see how well it powders up when you want a bowl of it.”

     Derrol thanked Andy and slid the hunk of hash into the side of his own boot. It could live there for the next day or two, when he made it back over the hill in time for another week of avoiding classes.      The peyote was going round, dried apricots and orange juice and water as well as a number of hand-rolled cigarettes went round as the partakers took their turns at button, juice, apricot, drag of cigarette, around and around until each had consumed four buttons and the magic- or trial- was about to begin for them all.

     Amazingly on this round, nobody threw up. Most had had the cactus before, and had begun researching other delicti cacti such as St John’s and Diego Padre. So none were tenderfeet, an this helped the cameraderie considerably, since nobody would feel the sense of betrayal of many a novice, who ingests and resists the urge to puke and let the medicine clear the mind.

     With internal retinal starbursts and constellations, the medicine cleared the mind.

     Melange curled up beside him in the empty space to his right on the eight foot couch.

She began rubbing herself against him, licking his ear and his neck, and soon they were wrapped around each other like a pair of cobras, It would not take much more to get Derrol spinning in his sleeping bag.

     So she led him by the hand behind the glass door to the room just off the living room which was hers. She pressed a button on a ghetto blaster cassette deck, and the sound of Shine On Crazy Diamond by Pink Floyd came on.

     With each rippling blast of Gilmour’s guitar, she pulled off another bit of her clothing. First the turtleneck sweater. Then, out of the just-barely-south of the upper-thigh; tight hiphugging skirt, then the brassiere, and lastly, her panties, now showing the slickness of her excitement and urgency.

     After they had balled Derrol dreamt as he slept in her arms, the peyote visions of his dream seeping in; being indistinguishable now from the waking lands. Benjamin Franklin sat in a chair at the table, his enigmatic smile-frown glancing back at Derrol, unperturbed.
     “ I had a few myself, “ said Ben. “As well as a pipe of that hemp conserve. I am now happy to say you have brought me to a new understanding of insight.”

     Franklin bowed, and stepped out of the doorway. Sunlight in a bright ray flooded down, and Derrol’s mind’s eye shaded it with a free arm, as though he were watching the arrival of the Extraterrestrials. And the next thing he knew…

     In the morning, after he had fucked her bowlegged all night and they had slept the sleep of babes, and she now hobbled around the yard between the main and the hen houses, Derrol came up behind her and gave her an affectionate, gentle squeeze on the ass. “That was something else, thank you.”

     “No, thank you, gentle traveler. Would you like to spend the day out near the cliffs with me?” The coyness in her glance and her dipping eyelashes completed the cow’s moo she played to his rousing bull.

     “Our Lady of the Cosmic Sea”,” he prayed, as they sat at the edge of the cliffs and began the picnic they had made from a few additions from the store and a number of items off Melange’s shelf,      “Please grant us the serenity to accept our minimal immunity and maximum vulnerabilty to the slings and outrageous arrows of our fortune. May we tune our selves to Your Guiding Star, and lead ourselves back home to our Source deep within Thee. Thanks for lunch, Amen.”

     She held his hand and they sat together silent, watching the waves together, for a very long time.

They demolished a loaf of fresh french bread from the bakery in Half Moon Bay and drank a quart of wine and it was not long before, as though materializing from the mist and the wooded green, Nuestra Starre stood before them, a bottle of her own in hand. She walked tipsy through the portulaca at the edge, considering what a swan dive off the edge might do to knock these two chuckleheads together. Pole dancer, striptease artist, and girlfriend of Darcy and Andy’s resident photographer, Lars Darndorff, Nuestra Starre actually contributed the majority of the rent on the backwater farmhouse, and brought a ton of hardcore energy with her when she had moved in. Not that anyone around her were gangsterish enough to deal in automatic weapons. But they were rough customers regardless, with a fondness for black leather, brass knuckles and switchblades, and Harley motorcycles.

     One afternoon the Fronteros- that was their club name- were hanging at the entrance to the spread, pickin’ their teeth with switchblades, thumbs in belt loops, chewin’ the fat with the local dogs., and Nuestra Starre came out of the house and told them all to split, that these hippie freaks was cool, and only to come around if she is doing a shoot, or something. That worked, and just like she planned it, the protection only hung out when Ms. Starre’s microphone-and-videography boom team were by. Which came about once every two weeks. Derrol had never seen one of these, but Darcy and Andy certainly had. Nuestra’s videography team were, in fact, some of the goblins out of Pandora’s box.

     So now, Nuestra had her fun getting high with all of the residents and the residents didn’t have to fear the heat of drawing scrutiny of local law enforcement. No, everyone was about as far away from the surveillance state as they could get, except for when planes flew over forom Half Moon Bay airport to get a good look at the women sunbathing bare-chested on hot clear sunny days.

     And now, Nuestra Starre had joined Derrol and Melange in a menage-a-trois. If Derrol could manage this, he would be luckier than two ducks driving two ice cream trucks.

     “Nuestra, I wonder if you could help me- um- adjust this here?”

Melange was pulling on the strap to her wraparound blouse. It was looking more and more to Derrol like this was meaningful seduction, intended perhaps for his pleasure, but also, maybe more for their own. As the girls kissed Derrol remembered he left some hash in his jeans. He took out the little stone and the pipe and lit up. Over across the tidepools at the entrance of the cove a small trawler was parked. The overlook was brightened by the high sun- yesterday’s inclemence being forgotten in the morning, when they all had sat on the patio drinking after-peyote coffee. Sharing tobacco from the can which sat on the coffee table with a pack of rolling papers for anyone to pinch at need. Sharing more of Andy’s product. A bong as long as an arm served with the coffee and fresh melons and people discussed what thing had meant for them. Derrol recalled meeting Benjamin Franklin in his dream, and everyone laughed and said,yeah, for real, too much, he would go to a peyote meeting, wouldn’t he? Otherwise, he had lain all morning in the bed with Melange, in several varying positions and arrangements befitting two ingenues of the Kama Sutra. Until the light was out and the dew had begun to puddle and the daylight blinking off the green leaves of the cypress left indelible impressions on the brain.

Derrol plucked on his mandolin as the women made out in front of him, but soon, Nuestra had shut off the mandolin by insisting his membership should come to the party, and the afternoon was passed, in plain and public view, the enjoyment of three blips in the pod on the cliffs by the high sea in the midday winter sunshine.

     Meanwhile, Candy Kane-- stuck her tongue in Patricio's ear, sucking and probing, before withdrawing with a playful bite...Patricio's mind was in confusion. Was the parting bite a tease, an invitation, or was it a warning of impending danger?

     A hand, which was Andy’s, grabbed Patricio by the collar, and dragged him into the living room…

     Where he was greeted by the sight of every female in the house disrobed and the SXLR camera of Lars Dorkendorf whiring and clicking like a pulsating hummingbird.

     Patricio had one half of the back half of the Tarantula House, in a room with a dutch door opening out toward the goat pen. The onus was on ‘em. The women were like caged tigers, waiting for their meal of men. It was over pretty fast, the lionesses licking their chops at the spilled lengths of the men in their cups, all of them, from Andy to the Dorkendorff home video tripod, every male was erected, and had been erected only to feed the belly lust of the pride. They purred in contentment, no more contentions, and that night the house was quiet, with the highway bleeding on behind them until rooster crow the next day…

     The men woke up the next day, disoriented, ashamed, and shattered. They had been used, abused, sucked dry, and thrown aside, like so much trash... Never before had any of them ever felt so exploited and objectified. The scene had been so wild; the women had been so vicious- Pat would need many years of therapy before he could even have a normal conversation with a female...and he knew that he would never trust a woman completely, even if she was Mother Teresa. 

     Life is hard…

     as hard as the rocket in the pocket…

     The house steamed in the early morning light…

Derrol had no such problems. The morning after the second night of the weekend, he had been up early sorting out his pack in the kitchen, when Lori came in. Lori was nine years older and trying to  make up for lost time. She walked into the kitchen, took out a skillet and a wooden cutting board and began to slice vegetables while Derrol rummaged his stuff. He hid the hashish a little deeper than usual, so that it would  be hard for him or anyone else to get back into. This would be the afternoon he went home, and he needed things in order just to know they’d remain that way.

     Lori’s long skirt was soft cotton and her ass smooth against it. Her legs smooth against it as well, and the tilt of her nipples perking beneath her tank top was having quite an effect. She noted him noting them. Without saying another word she lifted one of her ample breasts out from beneath it and was offering it to Derrol for his taste.

        Obliging, he took it in his mouth and rubbed his tongue across its swollen aureole. The morning was breaking and the coffee bums would soon be up and clamoring but Lori wanted to share what she was having with him, as well as, continue where she had let off with him the night before. At least where she thought she had. She shrugged him off and began working once more on breakfast. Into the skillet, she dumped a pile of freshly diced onions. After these had sweated awhile, she ladled in a bean, rice, and lentil mixture she had prepared a day or two ahead, and had retrieved out of the fridge. She poured more olive oil over the top of this. After that was smooth, moving and bubbling, she piled in some green vegetable leaves out of the garden and some fresh basil. Then she lowered the heat, put on a lid, and cooked it, stirring it now and then. When she poured it out onto his plate and served it with a piece of fresh bread and a pat of butter, Derrol was in heaven. This was breakfast for a king, done up poor man’s style. And undoubtedly healthy.

     After their meal, they took their own stroll out to the cliffs by the ocean. And something like what happened the day before happened to Derrol, again. This time it was no interruption from Nuestra Starre (who lay back at the shack, hunkered deep down in her bed, sleeping away morning, until sun was tall overhead) but they were met by Patricio and his friend Jock-O.

Jock-O was something of a gadfly lumberjack. At least he was a lumberjack when he was up north, in the Salmon River country, but down here on the Coastside, he was Mad Jock-O, prone to answering the doorbell in his birthday suit. He liked dividing his year into : Summer in the Mountains, Winter at the Ocean. The Tarantula House was owned by his mother, who, being sensitive and empathetic, often visited the place to party with the inhabitants, if all were in the proper mood. Lori found Jock-O insufferable, and wasted little time letting Derrol know.

“Well, you see… he isn’t exactly MY friend, he’s Patricio’s.”
     “I think he’s a little rough around the edges”

     “Like a spiky chainsaw, that’s for sure.”

     “Well, Patricio is one thing, but he’s another. I’m goin’ back to the house.”

Lori gathered up her jacket and her thermos and began walking back toward the Coast Highway and the Tarantula House. That left Derrol to stare toward China with Patricio and Jock-O. They were seated at a picnic table someone had dragged there on a whim, and set back about twenty feet from the cliff ledge. Patricio got up to stretch his legs. As he walked to the ledge, and looked down over, he spotted a man and woman lying together in the portulaca which covered the small rock shelf about twelve feet further down the cliff face. The man was naked, and his loins were working with the woman, and she was moving beneath him, and her eyes met Patricio’s-

     And she smiled.

Patricio smiled back, and she gave a short half-knuckled wave as the man continued his grooving and she continued her own, breaking off the moment. Patricio smiled, felt a little lucky, like, the universe is on my side for once, today, I’m lucky…

Derrol was sitting at the table and Jock-O had walked over to be with Patricio. But when Jock-O saw the couple it was a whole other story.

     “Hey, hey! Yeah!” he shouted, “Now That’s what bein’ outdoors is FOR!” And Jock-O began walking down the trail toward the ledge, As he did so, the couple were hurriedly rushing to put on their clothes. The man was hopping into his jeans, one leg at a time, trying to balance and at the same time not fall to the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. Jock-O continued to make his way to the ledge, but as he did so, the couple finally were confident they could move and ran past him, up the hill, and the smile dropped from Jock’O’s face, as he realized they were not in any mood to share their fun.

     “Man, they were cool, ‘til you did that,” scolded Patricio.

     “Shit-fire man , that chick was HOT!”

     “I thought she was kind of nice.” 

Said Patricio, feeling his disappointment. Now he felt like Jock-O had blown wide apart the trust that the woman’s smile had brought into his mind, and now, he was just another dork like Jock-O, swaggering an hollering his way through the minefields of life.

Derrol had watched the entire thing, or what he could see of it, and shook his head wearily at Patricio as Jock-O had turned his back to take a piss off the cliff. It looked like the afternoon might be a waste. Derrol decided to turn around and walk back to the house. They left Jock-O on the cliff edge, thumbing his nose at the Red Chinese.

     When they got back to the house, they found Andy and Lars the Photographer hanging in the living room with a large fire going, and Beauricardo, a friend of the house from San Francisco, their spade-cred black-hippie-queer friend, was sitting in a rocking chair by the window looking over the creek. “Hey, Patricio!” Beauricado rose from the chair and walked to the doorway where Patricio and Derrol looked in, and hugged him. Beauricardo was affectionate without being cloying, or putting on moves. The Photographer and Andy were looking over a proof sheet from the orgy pics that had been shot the night before.

“Oh, this one, this one of Lori and Darcy- shit!”

“:And that one. Darcy trying to get her arm around Pat’s leg. Hah!”

“Let me see there…”

     Patricio moved closer to the table to observe the pictures. He began to feel like a bird in a cage, or a fly trapped in amber, like his bliss somehow had been captured and preserved to spend a century waiting as flotsam on the shore until someone came along- (some pervert, out of Photographer Lars’s SCREW! magazine collection) and took the moment to incorporate into their own brief wet moments… But these were not bad.

     Darndorff liked using Nuestra for her sexiness, but he also enjoyed funny juxtapositions of people and other people’s organs and genitals and limbs. So this picture, Pat thought, was amusing. In an annoying way. He knew the photographer’s tastes all too well by this point, he’d lived there a good eight or nine months already.

     Beauricardo lit up a pipe of Andy’s hash and passed it to Derrol, who had moved in closer to the fire.

     “You been up to see Crosby last week?” he asked.

     “I did. Derrol didn’t. Some of these folks went.”

     “I seen Crosby one day he was toolin’ down 1 in his red sports car. I waved. He didn’t stop.”

“Well it’s another world folks like that live in. They might be our ‘brothers’ from up on stage, but not brother enough to spare a lift.” Derrol was more than annoyed at the thought of leaving in another couple hours, and dealing with the trip home over the hill maybe needing to take just as long. This was a weekend and most of the traffic would be families in get-back-home mode. Few would be stopping for hairy single males who looked like refugees from the Three Penny Opera.

     His mandolin sat on the hearth, and he picked it up and began playing. From the room in the rear he could hear Lori and Nuestra fighting. They were annoying, catlike sounds, but at least everyone knew the two women would be back at peace in minutes. One of the problems of the Tarantula House was a condition of privacy. While it might not matter to some people who craps while they are showering, for some people, crapping while watching someone shower isn’t the first best choice.         They’re both captives to each other, for the duration.

     The other problems usually arose over who left what in the refrigerator and who was entitled to it when and why. If things were not clearly labeled with a pen and tape then anything could be up for grabs. And the whole gang chipped in together many nights, which would leave a giant bowl of leftovers anyone could go for- except, usually, when someone did, it was someone like Derrol who wasn't planning to make another market trip soon, and was only overnighting.

While Andy and Lars continued perusing the large stack of proofs and Patricio sat at the fire, reading a newspaper, Beuaricardo knitted a wool sweater for his mother. The two women in back had shut up, but now, Melange and Candy Kane were coming through the year, carrying an enormous laundry basket filled tall with clean clothing. Everyone had decided to throw laundry together as well, and the two women, each week, made the round the horn trip to a coin laundry in Half Moon Bay to wash and dry the clothes of all the Tarantulans. 

     “NO, we don’t fold them!” they explained, and so the wash day ritual finished with everyone rummaging through the baskets until they had retrieved everything they contributed, and usually there always was some stray sock or a t-shirt someone didn’t recall that sat all week in the basket and ended up in the next go round.

     Melange dumped the clothes into a pile on the couch, and flopped down beside it. “I am beat, man”

     “You so beat, the eggs in the kitchen are nervous” chuckled Beuaricardo.

     “That’s what you think, faggot!” Melange laughed. Her bicep tattoo rippled with a quick flex of the wrist. “PUMPED!” it read. But she was no body builder. She was one of the most feminine people Derrol had ever yet met, and on top of that, she liked him. The tattoo was ne of those unadvised adolescent whims which some people are prone to. It signified absolutely nothing relevant to her current life. She laughed at Beauricardo mockingly. “Boy you sure ain’t much to write home about- you ain’t even that much to ride home on!”

     The other males around the room laughed or supressed chuckles. Beauricardo didn’t mind, he had known much worse abuse. He sat back and quietly kept knitting, listening to the records he others played on the stereo. Eventually, he got into his own sportscar outside and left.

     When Beuaricardo left, another guest showed up. This was Pippi, Derrol’s friend from UC Santa Cruz. She was a German exchange student. She lived in the hills of Soquel, a small wild woodsy little place just south of Santa Cruz, a blip going by on the highway. Pippi wore orange clothing every day and had a locket with the guru Rajneesh on a string of wooden beads worn round her neck. A pair of regulation People’s Republican Army slippers was on her feet. She had curly blonde hair, blue eyes, and an intense love of nature. She enjoyed the visits to the Tarantula House as many others did- in fact, besides the people who lived there, an average of about (at least) twenty other guests would be in and out over the course of a month. She carried with her a bedroll and small knapsack with the Tolkeinian rune ‘L’ for Legolas embroidered on the flap. She carried her own little hash pipe, and being German, had the bad habit of always smoking her hash with a bit of rolling tobacco. The fact there was always a large tin of free tobacco at the Tarantula house apparently had an appeal for a lot of the broke smokers of the coastside who were part of the Tarantella Circle.

     She gave Derrol a hug and immediately started in with Andy making a deal for her own little hash rock. That being transacted, Andy disappeared into his room and came back laughing loudly.     

“Happiness is finding a gram of weed you didn’t know you had!” and held three large buds spread in his palm. He set them on the rolling and cutting tray that sat beneath the stack of photos, setting all of them aside. Lars demurred and began collecting them to withdraw back into his own lair.

Pippi had a love of nature. This she affirmed at any chance, either fully disrobing or more often, just baring her chest. Andy and the others saw so many tits per day, it was nothing. The fact that their friends might come from miles around just for the chances to do it didn’t phase Andy either. The more the merrier. Hell, the world should let go. Clothes were for protection from the wind and rain. When there’s no wind and no rain what the hell.

     Now that Pippi was here, Derrol contemplated the wisdom of leaving so soon. Perhaps he could stretch things a couple more hours past his projected departure. It would mean getting home after dark, but an afternoon with Pippi was better than an afternoon alone. So he decided he would stay, at least until closer to the six o’clock limit, when the light would begin to fail, and drivers would get even more cocoonish. Pippi dug into her knapsack.

     “ Here, this is for you! Thank you for letting me read it! I love it!” The book was Big Sur and the Oranges of Heironymous Bosch, by Henry Miller. Derrol had lent it to her eight months before and forgotten it completely. In that time Pippi had read it four times.

     Derrol and Pippi went back. They had met in Santa Cruz on a day Deroll had spent busking for change on the mall. She dragged him over to a free spaghetti feed and by evening’s end they had shared a bottle of wine, weed, and a bed. It was very chummy.

Now here she was, and handing back the Henry Miller book. It had become something of a crusade with Derrol and Patrick, turning friends on to these various books which had livened the long dreary fogbound afternoons inside the fishbowl of the Tarantula House.

The Tarantella Circle had basically composed itself of friends of friends of friends of people who had traveled the highways, north south east west, from Vancouver to San Diego and SF to Philadelphia. Andy himself had the habit of picking up hitch hikers and treating them to some of the house’s utopian blessings. Derrol had also given her a copy of Be Here Now, but when he visited her he found he had been surplussed, as she already had that book as well as three other books by Ram Dass on her shelf as it was. Not to mention, everything Rajneesh had ever wrote, and even Gurdjieff’s “Beezlebub’s Letters to this Grandson.” They had hung out frequently for a number of months until one weekend they went skinnidipping together in the local big river and got busted. Pippi had almost ended up deported, and at juts that time, her Heimlat byfriend showed up, and that was that for Derrol in Pippi’s bedroom. But not before they had scared the neighbors once or twice with her sighs and moans of delight.

Bob Dylan and The Band were now screaming out of the stereo “…but you know you could be WRONG!” 

     Pippi loved them. So did Andy, and most of the others. Andy even had the early bootleg “Great White Wonder” comprised of clips form Dylan’s original Basemant Tapes and old recordings from his Minnetsota days. Andy loved bootlegs and bootleggers. He collected everything he could that was pirate vinyl. It was less an obsession to collect everything some artist had ever done, than it was the curiosity to see how that artist had done anything on any particular day. Andy’s record shelf took up an entire line of milk crates across the back wall. Not only one line, but stacks of them atop stacks of them. The Berkeley Farms Dairy Co. would have had an interesting time of it, had they ever chosen to submit Andy to the “Full Prosecution of Law” stamped as a threat on every plastic carrying case.

     That is, if they ever got past Andy’s front gate in the first place.

     Derrol thought it would be better to spend a little time with Pippi than it would be to just take off, after all, Pippi was dear to his heart, in his own way, and even her heimlat boyfriend could not compare, he thought, with all the wild romance he could conjure… being as he was himself a romantic half-outlaw perched on the precarious shoal of the Great Frontier Western Earthquake Coast.

     Andy was playing some of that Dylan record on the stereo, now. Listening to Dylan rasp about a Room 118 in New Orleans and climbing over a barbed wire fence. Pippi was arguing with Andy about Dylan and saying she loved Blood On the Tracks, why was Andy wasting his time with all these old demos? Andy rebutted her saying that anything Dylan did was going to be tons better than most of the crap coming off the radio and that this was a piece of history itself. Pippi disagreed. She felt that the music an artist released meant he felt it passed his own muster. Dylan had never released any of the Basement Tapes because the recordings just weren’t quality. She knew what she was talking about, but, Andy being the dominant male of the house, Andy usually got the last word. Pippi sulked but turned aside and began making out with Derrol. Derrol much preferred that to sitting in the center of another argument with Andy, when in this case, he acually agreed with Pippi.

     Next came the issue of the weekend orgies, and Andy trying to hint to Derrol that if he came back next week, there might be another one. Orgies, he pontificated, are the best fun people can have with their clothes off. What is more, all the party materials are free, since the particpants are already equipped. While Andy continued on this line, there came a yelling and screeching from the room Sandra and Lori shared. Soon they were running from the room, out onto the concrete patio, and within minutes they both had corralled Jock-O and hauled him inside.

     “This frigging peeper! We caught him checking us out through our window!”

     Jock-O was blushing and had little to say. He had been walking outside the house and caught a brief glimpse of female skin, and had come closer to their window and peered in, as Sandra sat nude atop Lori’s face, he pulled back, but not before Sandra had caught a view of his eyes turning aside, and his pale skin showing flush against the window glass.

     “What do we do with the sexist peeping Tom?” she yelled, “can’t he get his rocks off without intruding on us? I am pissed. He might be the landlady’s son but that does not give him the right to peep on us!” 

     Sandra was indignant and began throwing garments from the clothes pile at Jock-O. Jock-O just sat there, smiling, believing Andy would defend him.

     But it was Darcy who spoke out. 

     “Jock-O, you know, you really shouldn’t be so hung up about stuff. You should come to next weekend’s party, too. We’ll make sure… your needs… are considered…” 

     Darcy was always trying to be the voice of moderation and reconciliation.
     Derrol gave Pippi a hug, and as they walked out together to the patio, he told her he’d be visiting her in Santa Cruz within a month or two. As they walked talking along the driveway leading out to the street, that led to the highway, Derrol could hear the continued screams and screeching of Sandra as once more the argument escalated inside. He was glad he had chosen the right moment to depart. Pippi handed him his pack and pulled him close to her and gave him another kiss, then turned, and walked back to the house, as the sun was setting to the west, and Derrol adjusted to the idea and necessity of thumbing down a ride headed south.

     A red Cadillac convertible pulled itself over to the shoulder, blaring Johnny Horton’s Battle of New Orleans. Derrol recognized the driver. It was Angelo Spoonful, on his way to LA, he told Derrol, to become a studio musician. Angelo wore a long ponytail and shades. Derrol grinned and tossed his pack and mandolin onto the rear seat, already holding Angelo’s guitar case flat against the naugahyde cushion.

     Angelo and Derrol did not have a long time to talk before Highway 92 and Derrol’s stop had come up. He told Derrol to say hello to Sandra the next time he saw her. Angelo had been a frequent visitor to the Tarantula House at the time when Sandra had been his girlfriend, and when Sandra had been more interested, as she put it, “in men”. Angelo would travel on down the Coast Highway until he hit LA and from there, would keep on going in a world Derrol hardly made. For the moment, Derrol was happy to be kickin’ it, and played a farewell chorus of “Deal” for Angelo as the Cadillac disappeared off into the growing darkness. Once he had crossed the highway and found a good turnoff spot by the side of 92 he took up his thumbing again, punctuating each passing car with a strummed major chord.

     The peyote had cleansed him, the large stash of hash reassured him, the cameraderie had uplifted him, the surroundings encouraged him, and he was, all in all, gratified to be alive and young.