Chapter 9
He didn't know where he was when he got off the bus.
In the city, San Francisco.
That was all that mattered. It had become early evening, twilight time, and as he looked down the streets, all of which seemed to go right down like ski-jumps to the bay, hauling the imaginary or would-be skiers back up by means of quaint little cable cars, he could see the burnished copper water between buildings as the sun slowly extinguished itself in the bay.
You were always walking on a slant, it seemed. Maybe it was his imagination, but that kind of continuous exercise seemed to have done nice things to the local women's legs. A flexed calf-muscle can be the prettiest sight in the world.
Natural.
There were also buildings, old brownstones and new modern office and apartment structures, and he looked at them, too.
The buildings and the people. Girls.
Girls everywhere, it seemed-fashion-plates out for a walk with a pet poodle; young high school chicks with freshly painted faces and freshly pointed looks wearing Bermuda shorts and sleeveless blouses, wagging their back ends around like advertisements for themselves.
Nice advertisements.
He wouldn't mind buying that brand any time.
But not now. He got eyes from them, but he was investigating and there was plenty of time to investigate that later. High school girls weren't going out of style right away, he decided. Nice to look at, though.
Tasty.
He wandered around until he found his legs tiring from the exercise, and then got on a cable car and rode all the way to the end of the line, where he got off and rode another, heading back by a different route. The sun did a disappearing act while he rode, and when he got off, the better part of an hour killed off, it was dusky night.
Lights. Lights everywhere; neon signs advertising bars and restaurants, hotels and movie houses; lights in windows and street lights and traffic lights.
In Chinatown again, he stopped in a bar-restaurant and had a bottle of beer which he drank thirstily and then left the place and headed down toward a seedier section near the waterfront where instinct told him things would be happening.
Instinct was no liar. People were out in full force now, and he began to see a procession of weirdoes that made him want to stop and rub his eyes.
The section he was in contained a lot of rundown third-rate real estate, but interspersed among the low rent apartment buildings and cheap hotels and bars were coffee houses. Espresso joints, filling up with bearded characters in beat looking costumes and some of the weirdest, wildest-looking chicks he had ever laid eyes on. Lipstickless, with black mascaraed holes for eyes, stone faced and wearing plain tight dark colored clothing which clung to their well-curved figures, they were escorted by equally odd looking cats with beards and berets, or by tweedy college types, or by each other. He felt a little out of place with his boots, jeans and black leather jacket here.
He stopped in another little place, full of tables and chairs and young people talking about all kinds of strange things he had never heard of. Nuts, some of them acted like. But he had a wine and dug the scene, and then filtered out with the mob to find another place.
The third place he went in had a band. It was more expensive than the others, but the bar was up front and there was no cover or music charge for sitting there.
Jimmy found an empty leaning space against the mahogany and ordered another sour wine, already feeling the effect of the first two drinks. The cats in this place were just as weird, but when the music started up he knew he had hit on a swinging joint.
The bar was packed. An archway at the far end opened up on a floor crammed with tables and people sitting at the tables, and as soon as the musicians came on the stage, everyone in the place seemed to go crazy.
Absolutely wild.
They jumped up on chairs and tables and began clapping and stamping their feet and yelling themselves hoarse before the first note was sounded by the Negro alto saxophonist leading the group.
A low, raspy guttural moaning sound came out of his glittering golden horn, louder even than the shouting going on beneath him, and then an amplified fender bass, drums and piano started up the rhythm behind him.
Jimmy didn't know much about jazz, but he knew that this stuff was pretty far out. They didn't seem to be playing notes at all most of the time, just bleats, wild prairie-sounding howls as a tenor man got up from a front table and joined in with the altoist.
The two of them faced each other, bending backward and blowing crazy sounds through their instruments as though they had a mind to blast each other right off the stage, while behind them the rhythm section went crazy with a thundering, riffling beat of complex rhythms established by bass, piano, drums and cymbals.
The whole place seemed to rock with sound. "Yeah man, go!" someone yelled. Hands began to clap in unison. "Solid, man!"
The music wailed louder and even wilder, somewhere between a twist and a dirty boogie-something Jimmy had never seen quite the likes of before.
Out at the bar where he stood, the sounds came in clear and loud and the frenzy was just as intense.
A doll-faced blonde in a short flare skirt was sitting next to him, a young fierce-looking Negro boy beside her with his arm around her waist and his hand over her amazingly big breast, both of them rocking back and forth to the beat like they were drugged or something.
Suddenly the blonde leapt up onto the bar and began to dance. The other customers gathered around in a circle and began clapping their hands, and the blonde went crazy, kicking over drinks and doing a wild kicking and shuffling step that sent her little skirt flying out and up around her waist.
Standing directly underneath her, Jimmy could see very well.
Very well indeed.
Wild white curvy legs, and a strip of black panty, and breasts that jiggled under her blouse so that they threatened to jump out of the low neckline at any minute.
Her eyes were closed and her pretty face expressionless as she swung, shimmying and shaking in such a wildly exotic way that Jimmy found it necessary to tear his eyes away finally, even before the music stopped.
The din was incredible. He began rocking himself, wishing Matty were with him, wishing any chick were with him right now. He emptied his wine glass and grabbed another at random and emptied that, and when he looked back at the bar he saw hands reaching up and grabbing at the girl, feeling her legs, dragging her down off the bar into the massed customers below. He caught sight of her blonde head hobbling among them, a bare leg, a ripped blouse and then an exposed breast, and then the fight started.
Somebody threw a beer mug into the bar mirror; somebody else screamed, and suddenly he was being thrown backward toward the door as fists started flying and curses and oaths replaced the cheering and clapping.
Knocked to his hands and knees, he managed to crawl through the scuffle without getting trampled, making his way to the door. He got up then and dodged out side, just as a full beer bottle exploded against it beside him.
In the distance he could hear police sirens. He trotted quickly down the street, turned a corner and ran up an alley joining into another street, this one more peaceful and quiet, and only then did he slow down to a walk.
What a crazy city, he thought, laughing to himself. There were going to be a lot of broken heads back there before the police broke it up. He was damn glad he had gotten out of there in one piece.
One more drink and he might have joined in.
But he wanted another drink, he realized. The night was young yet; he wanted to see people having fun, to be with them, to drink himself off his feet it he felt like it.
Remembering the party at Matty's house out on North Beach, he circled back to where the bus had left him off before.
A party was just what he wanted now.
Just the ticket.
A party, and Matty. The wine seemed to thicken the blood in his veins as he thought about her, waiting for the bus. There was something he wanted from Matty, something she had refused to give to him earlier.
Something he'd claim for himself tonight.
North Beach coffee houses were boiling forth their contents when he got there, hipsters and beatniks and in-between-niks spilling out and wandering through the streets holding jugs of wine and cool looking chicks, laughing and yelling and inviting each other to parties or informing each other where there were parties going which could be crashed.
It was quite a scene; an intenser, purer form of the one he had just left.
Jimmy picked his way through the streets, making his way toward Matty's pad near the far end of the Beach.
When he got there the house was blazing with light and activity, upstairs and down. Beat and hippish types were scattered around the yard even, some sitting with their chicks on the crooked front steps leading up to the front door, which was wide open, giving a view of the interior and more people milling around inside. Jazz sounds from a phonograph playing at full volume spilled out into the night, cool West Coast sounds, sensuous to the ear and subtly polyrhythmic but always swinging.
Informality was the style. He hardly even got any glances as he made his way through the yard and around back, stumbling over some couples lying down in darkness under trees, petting and necking or just sitting and smoking, listening to the music.
It looked like one hell of an orgy was going on.
A swinger.
It was a hassle getting up the back stairs, with people on the steps and landing, but he made it, weaving his way through, already excited at the prospect of seeing Matty again. He might have competition, he realized-but he felt up to that. He'd see to it she wanted him before the evening was over.
The kitchen seemed full of people too. Only they weren't drinking.
They were smoking.
Draped around the floor, the table, the chairs, they were sitting or lying down or leaning against the wall, passing a long thin homemade looking cigarette around.
Jimmy realized at once that it must be marijuana.
He had never smoked any, but he had seen a joint once at school, and the guy had offered him a drag but he hadn't taken any.
Pot, they called it. The smell of it filled the room; an odor dry and sweet, something like burning leaves. It was so thick it almost choked him when he walked in.
"Hi man," somebody said, looking up at him. A heavyset guy wearing no shirt, propped up against the refrigerator and smoking. "What's happening?"
"Matty-where is she?"
The cat frowned. "Who?"
"You mean Matilda Jennings, the girl who keeps this pad?" a redheaded chick in slacks and halter asked.
Jimmy nodded. "Yeah, that's her-isn't this her party?
The girl laughed, her breasts shaking. "Who knows by now, baby! But you're cute. Why don't you come over here and smoke a little pot with me?"
"No thanks," Jimmy said.
Disappointed, she lost interest and turned away to talk to another guy. Jimmy pushed through the kitchen into the living room area, and there the scene was even stranger. Only one lamp was lighted, at the far end of the studio couch, and that had a red bulb in it which under the green shade gave off an eerie, murky muddish light that made all objects appear ghostly.
But the room was not filled with ghosts.
It was filled with couples, lying about on the floor and smoking. Not all of them, of course.
Some of them were much too busy for things like smoking.
But the ones who were smoking were watching, and the ones who weren't smoking were doing.
A nice division of labor if there ever was one.
The non-smokers occupied the middle space on the floor. The smokers, barely discernible by the lighted tips of their marijuana joints, were seated along the couch and on cushions placed against the wall.
Nobody seemed interested in his intrusion. Everyone seemed completely stoned, dream-like spectators of a live action show going on in the middle of the floor.
There were two couples there. They were providing a hell of a good show for the spectators, the kind of show you usually expect to see only on film, at a men's smoker or a very, very private kind of party. This was hardly a private party, since he had been able to walk right in, but that fact didn't seem to inhibit the two couples on the floor.
Not a bit.
They were stripped, naked, nude, unclothed, and in the reddish light their bodies looked demonic, like a scene from Dante's popular poem. Satyrs and nymphs, sporting in the dusky glen of a secret wood cave by the light of the dying embers of a fire. Something like that. The living room, at any rate, was obviously no longer just a living room.
Jimmy sat down on an empty cushion, forgetting for the moment his search for Matty. If this was the kind of party it was going to be, he might as well dig some of it, since nobody seemed to object to his presence.
The couples on the floor weren't making love. Not yet. But they were going through a lot of interesting things, drawing that out to a point where it became hard to understand how they could restrain themselves. His eyes fell on the nearest pair, fascinated, and when somebody, a girl next to him against the wall, passed him a joint, he took it automatically, without thinking.
Pot. He didn't know much about it except what he had heard. He held it a second, wondering if he should. But they might take it as an offense if he didn't, so he put it to his lips and drew on it the way he had seen the others in the kitchen doing, drawing the smoke straight down along with air, like breathing.
He was surprised to find the taste not at all unpleasant. He held it down a few seconds and then let it out slowly, passing it over to a guy squatting with his chick on his right. The guy took it and Jimmy's eyes returned to the scene in front of him.
The girl on the floor had an amazing body; the biggest set of boobs he had ever seen, a narrow waist and a tremendous set of muscles. She was kneeling on all fours beside a guy whose head would bob up and kiss first one breast, then the other. Then she would lean down and smother his face with those gigantic boobs, rolling them around, and rise again, and the process would be repeated. They too must have been stoned, because their motions seemed to have a slow deliberateness, as if they were drugged.
Jimmy began to feel the effects of the pot as he watched. A tightening feeling in the pit of his stomach; an intensified perception of everything, as though he were detached from himself somehow. Each little sound, a breath, a cough, a groan, the scuffle of feet, a girl's moan, became clear and distinct like a physical sensation against his tightening ear drums. The loud music below pulsed against the floor, seeming to add life to it. The floor moved under him.
The joint came around again and he took another, deep drag this time.
Suddenly he felt like stone, unable to move. But it was a pleasant sensation because there was no need to move, realty.
Why move when you could just sit in one place forever and watch interesting things going on?
He watched. He was the aloof observer of all things, and all things became equally interesting.
Fascinating.
Big things and little things. The girl's boobs were big things, and they were very interesting indeed. He touched and caressed them with his eyes, experienced a warm glowing excitement as he identified with the guy. He realized now that the rhythm of their movements was timed to the beat of the music coming from below.
Crazy.
He felt great, high, stoned; involved in everything and detached from everything at the same time. This was a weird, eerie experience and he was a little afraid of it, but this was a great big kick just the same.
The girl with the amazing breast development had moved now, and her face dipped down to kiss the guy she was with.
Jimmy felt very excited by all this.
Naturally.
He wished Matty were with him, but Matty wasn't with him, so he forgot the wish as soon as he had wished it.
Now the lovers were really grooving, swinging into fast and furious action as the music picked up tempo. Both on the floor now, curled up together like two bugs in a rug.
They looked funny. Jimmy wanted to laugh. They looked funny but they also made him want a girl, any girl. His eyes switched then to the other couple, to see what they were up to.
They were up to plenty. They had been busy all the time Jimmy had been watching the first pair, and now they had reached the stage of complete stimulation. This girl was bigger bodied, like a big, sleek jungle cat, and Jimmy noticed for the first time in the funny light that she was a Negress. Light-skinner, big-hipped and busty, beautiful.
The guy with her was white, or at least seemed to be. He was chunky, big-muscled, with the build of a weight-lifter.
The Negro girl seemed to appreciate him greatly. She was showing her appreciation by caressing him with her lips, her eyes closed and a dreamy expression on her face.
But he soon tired of that. Impatiently, he moved away from her, and pushed her forward onto her hands and knees, the way the other girl had been at first, and Jimmy thought they would do the same thing.
But they didn't. Hercules had reverse ideas about making love to his tawny goddess.
Almost knocking her over, he began at a fantastic rhythm, becoming a blur before Jimmy's eyes. In fact, everything was becoming a blur before Jimmy's eyes, and he began to wonder if all this was really happening to him.
Was this the pot?
Or was this really real, and if it was really real, why was he wondering if it was real?
Everything seemed suddenly confused, uncertain. He had to get out of this room, but it seemed to take a monumental effort just to get up. He tried several times, getting little more than a muscled twitch in his legs for all his efforts.
This was crazy, insane. He didn't want to smoke any more pot, but when another joint came around his way again, he did. The thought occurred to him that he was being silly about this; he was in a room where a perfectly fine orgy was going on, so why should he worry about little things like getting to his feet?
He stopped worrying about them and got to his feet, weaving his way out of the room into the kitchen again. The bright light hurt his eyes, so he backed away back into the living room and tried the bedroom instead.
That was a mistake. The bedroom also was occupied. Two lovers were on the bed that he and Matty had slept on together, making love in a very interesting fashion. He stood watching them with great interest until one of them raised his head and said: "Want to join us, dearie?"
Disgusted, he backed out, through the living room again and into the kitchen, where nobody paid any attention to him at all.
Suddenly he felt very lonely and in need of companionship. He remembered what he had come out here for-to find Matty, of course-and looking around and not finding her, he went through the couples sprawled on the floor, teetering this way and that as he walked, his feet seeming to bounce as though they had springs in them. Giddy, he began laughing to himself as he walked through the door and floated down the outside stairs.
The world had turned crazy. Everything seemed to have changed, or else he had changed, or else nothing had changed and he was only imagining things. He couldn't figure out this strange state of mind he seemed to be in where everything was alternately real and an illusion.
Strange.
Weird.
He had trouble concentrating on what he was doing, and several times he got hung up just staring at some ridiculous object-his foot on a stair; a spot on the wall; the top of a tree in the distance. And then he would sort of come to and remember that he was looking for Matty.
Of course.
That was what he was doing here, wasn't it?
Right! Resolutely, he marched through the side yard and around to the front entrance of the house, following the sounds of the music from the phonograph inside. For some reason he identified those sounds with her, feeling that as they grew louder and louder he was coming nearer and nearer to the object of his now intense desire.
Matilda.
Silly. He had been singing without realizing it Now he was climbing another pair of stairs, the front stairs. He knew this because there were less of them. He was going in to some strange place he had never been before, perhaps to see things he had never seen before.
Perhaps to see Matty, Matilda....
Inside in a narrow hallway he shouted at the top of his lungs: "Has anyone seen Matilda?"
Nobody answered him in the crowded room he entered, but he got a lot of strange looks.
The music was blasting in here, loud loud jazz, ear-splitting bop sounds now, and for several minutes he thought he was really going crazy. He grabbed hold of a wall and held on for dear life, the room spinning around him.
But it stopped and finally he was able to control himself. He realized that he was simply high on marijuana, which thought brought him down, back to reality, almost. Suddenly very self-conscious, feeling like he had made a fool of himself, he slithered snake-like along the wall toward the nearest doorway.
He almost tripped over a couple on the floor.
"Excuse me," he said, stepping back. "Have either of you seen Matty?"
The girl looked up over the guy's shoulder and laughed.
"Matty? Sure, honey, she's in there. But you don't want Matty, do you? Jerry will be through in a few minutes and then you can have me. I like you baby."
The guy with her didn't even seem to notice the conversation, but kept right on doing what he was doing.
"Maybe later," Jimmy said, and stepped over them and through the doorway into the next room.
A real nice offer, he thought to himself as he went in. Such courteous people.
The next room was pitch black. Thick curtains separated it from the living room, and once he had fought his way through these he was in almost total darkness. It was as though he had stepped into some kind of a tomb.
But there were live bodies in there with him. He could tell by the heavy breathing going on and the sound of bed springs complaining in the darkness.
He groped along a wall until his knees struck what seemed to be the foot of a bed. Cautiously, he reached out to make sure, and his fingers contacted a naked foot.
A girl's foot.
He didn't know he knew, except that it was a very small, delicately formed foot, like a child's, and he could not quite picture any children being at this party.
Not unless they happened to be very advanced children.
Which was just possible.
Anything seemed possible here, for that matter anything and everything-so he decided that the only thing to do under the circumstances was to act natural.
Naturally curious, he groped his way along the edge of the bed until he ran into the wall, where he found a light fixture.
He turned it on.
The light wasn't red this time, it was a pale blue-green, and it didn't give off a hell of a lot of illumination from the small wattage bulb.
But it gave enough. The shade around it cast a green-blue circle of light over the bed, leaving him in semi-darkness so that he could view the bed's occupants without having them see him. Unplanned as it was, this fact turned out to be very fortunate.
He had found Matilda at last.
Matilda was making love on the bed, or being made love to-it was hard to tell which. And that wasn't very important, really.
Not important at all.
Matilda was with another girl.
Her sleek slim body was against this other girl like the sticker on a Christmas present, not to be opened till New Year's. The other girl had what could have been blonde hair, which now looked like green hair, closecropped in a butch cut around her pretty little head. She had a sexy body, like Matty's; bigger breasts and wider hips, but otherwise much the same.
Like two peas in a pod, Jimmy thought. Funny, Only Jimmy wasn't laughing. His surprise turned into a sickened, nauseous feeling as he watched. Watching seemed to be his role this evening, and being watched seemed to be everybody else's. All the world was a stage and he was its audience.
They didn't even look up, good little Thespians that they were, but continued to huff and to puff.
"We have an audience," the blonde murmured sexily, but this was merely a Shakespearian aside, and the audience, being beyond the footlights, didn't figure in on the action.
This was a play filled with action. His intrusion seemed to spur Matilda on to greater bits of emoting, for that matter. She kissed her lover's sizable breasts like a monkey discovering a lovely bunch of cocoanuts. That was about the size of them. Her lips moved sensuously, and Jimmy had the feeling that she was merely doing a repeat scene of an act they had already rehearsed before his arrival.
If so, they swung into the real performance like experienced old troupers.
They hugged and they kissed, mouth to mouth, breast to breast, mouth to breast....
He felt like running away, but he stood transfixed to the spot, his hands againt the wall like nails had been driven into them.
God, he thought.
But everything fell into place now. The whole bit: her reluctance to go with him the way a normal boy and girl would. Her allusion to not being "straight." Stupid, he had been, not to catch them.
She was a Lesbian. A Thespian Lesbian, a girl whose mouth watered more at the sight of female flesh than at male.
God!
Her kisses trailed over the curvy blonde's lean, luscious body. Said blonde proceeded to turn and holler and generally to go crazy, her vocal chords articulating love-cries that sounded like urgent pleas ... "Please, please, please!"
And Matilda did her damndest to please. And she was succeeding. Eminently succeeding. The blonde was as ready as an about-to-explode bombshell.
Just as Jimmy was wondering what on earth Matilda could be getting out of such a thing, there was a flurry of lovely limbs on the bed, a ripple of smooth flesh as the blonde moved around and Matty moved around, so that eventually he knew the answer.
Jimmy felt sick. Excited, but sick. Sickly excited or excitedly sick-whichever way you put it, he felt at once highly stimulated and highly disturbed. The sight of their beautiful bodies was as exciting a thing as could be seen, but the sight of what they were doing to each other was, in a word, nauseating.
But he had to watch, and he did-right up to the conclusion of the play.
Everything added up now.
Everything was clear.
He doused the light just as he heard their cries of completion, and then he floated out of the room on wings of insanity, looking for he didn't know what.