Little Green (12 page)

When they were gone the din wound up again.

“Wow,” Ruby said. “And you never asked her to come back?”

“I did but it was too late.”

“So what did you do?”

“Drove my car off a cliff up on Pacific Coast Highway.”

The food came then. A wild-eyed freckled white woman with a strawberry blond Afro put the plates down in front of us.

“Peace,” the waitress said.

Instead of taking up her spoon Ruby put her hand on mine. I was deeply grateful for the gesture and not sure why.

“I’m from Ohio,” she said. “My folks were born again. I never did anything they said and they hated me. Really they did. My mother told me that I was the devil and their burden. My father said that everybody’d be better off if I was dead.

“On my sixteenth birthday I balled my civics teacher and we ran away in his Pinto to L.A. We had this nice little apartment down on Venice Beach, but then one night he brings home this chick named Sandy. He said she needed a place to crash, but before a week they moved me out in the street. Then they went up to Berkeley and had a baby. They invited me to the wedding.”

“Did you go?”

“No.”

“Well,” I opined, “at least he got you away from parents who wanted you to die.”

Ruby thought about this a moment and then smiled brightly.

“I like you, Easy.”

These words seemed to bring on the exhaustion that was hovering over me. I tried to answer Ruby, but all I could do was sigh.

“You look beat,” she said.

“Still recuperating from the crash. I’m okay for a while, but then the legs are cut out right from under me.”

“Can you make it home?”

I shook my head, realizing that this motion took more energy than saying no.

“I could drive your car,” she suggested.

“It’s down on San Vicente. I couldn’t walk that far.”

Ruby had a young face, its emotions transparent like a child’s. She took a deep breath, held it while concentrating, and then said, “I know. Do you have a dime?”

I handed her the coin and she ran to a phone booth set against the far wall of the diner.

I considered putting my head down on the counter, next to the uneaten hamburger. But I worried that something bad might happen while I dozed. So instead I looked around the long room at the mostly white crowd. That place reminded me of the colored joints I’d frequented in my younger years.

When the Watts Riots had ended I saw the divisions form among the nonwhite races of L.A. I’d also seen a split in our own community, where brother turned against brother and corrupt city officials stepped in to take their revenge. But in that hippie diner there was the hint of something hopeful. There were white people realizing for the first time what it was like to be shunned and segregated, fired for no reason and arrested because of the way they looked.

“He’s on his way,” Ruby said. She took me by the elbow, and I followed her as if she was my mother or some trusted neighbor on the dirt road of my childhood.

“I have to pay,” I said.

Ruby steered me to the cash register, where I gave the freckled waitress seven dollars.

Outside I leaned against a wooden telephone pole, hoping that the police had better things to do than to roust me again.

Life in the form of lights swirled around me, and for a while time passed without my direct involvement. Ruby was standing next to me, but she also was distracted by the gaudy pinwheel of Sunset.

“You Ruby?” a man said.

Looking down I saw an electric blue mid-fifties Chrysler. There was a furry-faced guy leaning out from the driver’s-side window.

“Yeah,” she said. “My friend here and me need a ride just up on Ozeta Terrace a few blocks north.”

“Is he sick?” Furface asked. “You know it’s a bitch cleaning the vomit out from between the cushions and the carpet.”

“He’s just tired. He was in an accident,” Ruby assured him.

The next thing I knew I was being poured into the backseat of the car. Coming to rest was almost a spiritual delight.

“This a taxi?” I asked as the car pulled out into Sunset traffic.

“It’s the Blue Tortoise,” the driver said, “a hippie cab. You got money? Dope?”

“Six dollars?” I said.

“That’ll be fine.”

I don’t remember the ride or getting out of the cab. The next thing I knew I was standing, propped up by Ruby, before a large door in a dark courtyard. This door was the portal to a mansion that loomed above us.

“Where are we?” I asked my new friend.

“A place where I crash sometimes,” she said. “I keep my makeup box here.”

“Oh,” I replied, thinking that I could go to sleep right there, standing outside.

“Here you go, Easy,” Ruby said. “Lean against the wall while I get the key.”

Time passed, crickets sang, now and again a car would drive by beyond the tall hedge that separated the courtyard from the street.

The next thing I knew I was on my back and someone was pulling down my pants. My shirt and jacket were already off, socks and shoes too.

I kind of wanted to resist, but then the final wave of sleep rolled in and dragged me out to unconsciousness on a tranquil and moonlit sea.

Given enough time I can recall each and every sexual encounter I’ve ever had—in some detail; that is, except for that night.

At one point I came halfway to consciousness thinking that I was holding my erection, masturbating on the floor in a strange dark room. But when I willed my hand to stop I realized that someone else was stroking me slowly.

I tried to rise but a hand pushed me back down.

“Sh,” she said, and things went blank again for a while.

The orgasm brought me nearly all the way awake, but just for a moment. Drifting back into sleep I felt a kiss on my lips and a weight being taken off my chest.

“You’re beautiful,” she said, and I luxuriated in the compliment and the slow descent into blissful darkness.

Then there was light, sunlight coming through a tiny window high up on the wall of a room no larger than a long broom closet. I was naked and Ruby was too. There was a blanket draped around both our legs and coming up to her shoulder. She was on her side with her right arm thrown across my chest. I tried to remember what my hands had been doing with the girl, but I couldn’t conjure an image or even a sense memory. This failure made me feel incompetent.

There was something moving. That’s what had awakened me, not the light. On my left side my pants were sliding toward the door, slowly, maybe even stealthily. I watched the maroon leather belt in
the straw-colored trousers move past my elbow down to hip level before I understood what was going on.

“Hey!” I shouted, and then jumped up.

I lunged at the partially open door of the tiny room and grabbed a scruffy-looking guy by the arm.

“Let go!” he yelled back.

His right hand was gripping my suit pants.

“Then let go’a my clothes!” I told him.

“Yancy!” Ruby screamed. “Get the fuck outta here! What’s wrong with you?”

The little hippie guy was pulling on my pants. He was shorter than Ruby and rail thin, but I was still weak and found myself losing the tug-of-war with a ruddy little white guy with shoulder-length black hair and a beard.

“Yancy!” a youngish male voice declared.

The little guy let go of my pants and fell backward on his butt. There was a wacky element to his tumble, like in an Abbott and Costello skit.

Yancy had deep green eyes that opened wide to take in the newcomer.

This was a tall late adolescent with very long and stringy dirty blond hair, bad skin, and a nose that was bulbous and in poor contrast to his long face.

“Terry,” Yancy said. “Hey, man, listen …”

“This motherfucker was tryin’ to steal Easy’s pants,” Ruby said before Yancy could concoct some lie. “We were sleepin’ in the little room and he tried to pull his pants out from under us.”

“I just wanted to borrow a few dollars,” Yancy said. “You guys were sleepin’. I didn’t want to bother you. I just needed some breakfast.”

“There’s food in the kitchen,” Terry said. He looked nineteen, but I would have bet he was younger. Ugliness just piled the years on him.

“I … I … I didn’t know,” Yancy was saying.

“The fuck you didn’t, thief,” Ruby spat.

“You got to go, Yancy,” Terry said as he pushed a lock of moplike hair from his face. “I can’t have people stealing from each other in my house. That’s bad karma, man.”

Yancy got to his feet and focused his angry green eyes on me. His hair was neither straight nor curly; it was more crinkled, like pubic hair.

“Nigger,” he said.

“Oh, no,” Terry said. “Go, go on.”

The tall hippie boy waved his hand in a way that seemed truly regal. Yancy stooped under the weight of this gesture and then scuttled down the stairs.

The fact that there was a downstairs told me that I was above the first floor of the big house. I wondered how Ruby got me to climb in my weakened condition. Reflecting on this thought, I wondered if I was still suffering from concussion. My mind seemed flighty, easily led down any tangent. I should have been angry by the attempted theft; there was anger there, but I couldn’t hold on to it.

“I’m so sorry, Easy,” Terry said, turning to me. “I try to keep my house open to anyone who needs a place to crash, but some people just can’t throw off the straight world.”

“You think the straight world is full of thieves?” I asked.

“It is based on theft.”

Ruby and I were naked. Terry noticed Ruby’s body with some interest. She saw his look and smiled. I experienced a rush of jealousy before remembering where I was and why I was there.

“Come on downstairs and I’ll make you guys breakfast,” Terry said to Ruby.

The girl and I showered together. It was almost platonic except for a kiss or two.

While we were dressing she said, “You’re a surprise, Easy.”

“In what way?”

“Usually when I ball a straight guy he wants to talk about it afterward. You know, to apologize for something or say that he likes me or some lie.”

“To tell you the truth, girl, I was so out of it last night that I don’t remember what it is I should be sorry for.”

Ruby laughed, and I wondered if we would know each other after that morning.

Terry was cracking enormous eggs into a big white ceramic bowl in the kitchen. It wasn’t as big as the kitchen of the place where my family was staying, but there was an eight-burner stove and a table big enough for twelve. The room only had one window, but there was also a door that was open wide, letting in the sunlight that California is famous for.

“Those are some big eggs,” I said, coming up to him at the cream-and-maroon-tiled counter.

“Duck eggs,” the ugly young man said. “I get them from a woman named Nugent. She’s an organic farmer from up around Isla Vista.”

“Never had a duck egg.”

“They taste like chicken eggs should.”

He made cheddar cheese omelets and bacon, buttered toast with apple butter, and fresh squeezed orange juice. He had an electric machine where all you did was drop the orange through a hole in the top and the juice came out of a spout on the side.

He was right about the eggs. They reminded me of the ones I ate when I was a child in Louisiana and my mother’s smile met me every morning at the breakfast table.

“You live here with your family, Terry?” I asked.

“My dad lives back east,” he said. “My mom is dead.”

“And this is your house?”

“When Mom died Dad decided to move back to New York, but I wanted to finish high school, so he let me stay here. He gives me
money in a bank account and I let anybody stay who wants to crash for at least a few nights.…” He glanced over at Ruby. “Or more if they want.”

Ruby was sitting next to me, but she was leaning toward him.

“I haven’t seen you for a long time,” she said to the young master of the crash-pad mansion.

“I was up in San Francisco for three weeks. I just got back day before yesterday. You want to go down to the beach today?”

“Yeah.”

I must have made a sound or moved in some way. Ruby looked at me with the slightest hint of guilt on her face.

“Easy’s looking for the son of a friend’a his that I did acid with the other night.”

“You mean Evander?”

“How did you know that?”

“You brought him here, didn’t you?” Terry asked.

“Yeah, we came over to get my makeup kit after we dropped that acid. But you were up north.”

“He came by right after I got back. He was looking for you. He was scared and kinda nervous. He said he didn’t remember what had happened and wanted to ask you something. I didn’t talk to him much. I was going to the movies when he got here.”

“Where did he go?” I asked.

“He started talkin’ to Coco. I haven’t seen him since then.”

“What about Coco?”

“She almost always sleeps on the third-floor roof outside the White Rabbit room.”

Terry told me that it would be easy to find the White Rabbit room, and I, in my addled state, recast the words:
Easy would find the White Rabbit room
. It didn’t make sense, what I thought I heard, but Terry was right.

The first door I came to on the manor’s middle floor was black with a crude image of a bunny painted with white slashes for its body and bright red for its disconcerting eyes.

There were five or six beds lined up side by side against the wall of the large room. At least nine naked and nearly naked bodies sprawled on and across the mattresses. A young woman wearing big square-framed glasses was reading a hardback book that had a bright blue cover. As I moved past her, headed for the window in the far wall, she looked up, dug in her nose with a finger, and then went back to her book.

I wanted to ask her what she was reading but managed to squelch that question. Then I wondered what time it was, but said to myself,
It’s right now, man. Now move on
.

I climbed through the window thinking about Alice through the looking glass.

Outside the big bedroom was a triangular red gravel-and-tarpaper roof—maybe sixteen feet at its widest point. There was a ten-inch-high ledge along the outer edge. Behind me, above the window, was the domed structure of the upper floors. The outside roof on which I stood was cut out of floors three, four, and five. I had never seen a house like that. It must have, I thought, been built up
slowly over time. Maybe it started out as a normal two-story home and had been added on to until it became this patchwork novelty.