Chapter 2
Rocinante and Old Ghosts
Rocinante’s left headlight came nosing around the corner of Jerry’s Pasadena place like a suspicious eye, catching the afternoon sun and flicking once behind a row of half-dead bushes as I rode up the block on my motorcycle. A strip of cracked concrete ran straight through his weedy, sun-scalded lawn, a patchwork of brown spots and stubborn crabgrass that looked as if it had given up sometime during the Nixon administration.
I slid in beside my childhood friend Jerry’s eternally “almost restored” Nash, shut off the engine, and walked past Rocinante, letting my hand trail along the cool fiberglass flank of the beast that had carried me through more chaos than any machine had a right to endure. I hadn’t just come for the camper van. I was circling old haunts, driven by the larger question of why Floey had not shown at her own opening.
The day we first parked it here, Jerry and Mark swore they hated RVs, then spent six hours wiring speakers into it because Floey said it would be “more fun that way.” They always did that around her. Argue first, obey second, and only later, sometimes, notice their own ready obedience, which always seemed to happen under Floey’s spell.
Floey bought that rig for me, a thirty-foot, diesel-guzzling recreational vehicle, as a high school graduation gift. She got a supermodel discount. People did things for her the way iron filings line up for a magnet. Realtors, mechanics, and one stunned banker all seemed to wake up in the middle of helping her buy it, wondering when they had agreed. It should have cost her more than we could afford, except for the deal she got. She carved the funds out of her cut from selling our ranch house, the one we unloaded when she married Eugene ‘Carl’ and I was exiled to boarding school.
I named the bus Rocinante, after Steinbeck’s rig, which was itself named after Don Quixote’s horse, so it carried layers of borrowed madness before I ever turned the key.
Nobody answered the front door, so I let myself in. The living room looked the same: the couch Mark had bought after one of his better tipping weeks, and the television gutted and replaced with an aquarium, as if the house had given up on artificial narrative and settled for fish. The water was murky, and a single large orange goldfish with a swollen, lumpy head drifted inside like a tiny convict in an orange jumpsuit doing time in cloudy water.
A faint dirt trail showed on the carpet from the front door to the hallway, the same path we had been wearing down for years. The tables were clear. No soda cans, no fossilized mystery food. That meant Mark was still enforcing his sterile neatness, but the neglected fish tank suggested something in his new order was already rotting. The place felt stalled, like the gallery that morning. The most important piece was missing.
I remembered one afternoon when I was sprawled on the couch with my feet on my jacket, using it as a buffer against the upholstery. Mark came through, took one look, and told me I had to put the jacket away immediately, no grace period between taking it off and stashing it in my territory. He policed the ashtrays too. He would empty them religiously, but if he ever spied a butt that was not a Marlboro, or a roach that was not his, he would start in about “Who’s using the ashtrays?” as if he held a franchise on them. Mark was territorial in the way of nervous dogs and minor dictators.
Once I borrowed his big Webster’s, the one he never cracked open, shelved with a pristine set of American classics he also never read. They were there to make his bookcase look like it belonged to a serious man. I read science fiction, mostly, and tried to avoid anything too excellent or profound, because if the writing cut too deep it left me depressed and tempted to steal the style. I’d devoured every Mark Twain book I could find, and suddenly “betwixt” and “bric‑a‑brac” started squatting in my sentences. When I was done with the dictionary, I put it back, though not precisely enough for Mark’s internal calibration. He came home from his waiter job, spotted the tiny shift in shelf placement, and exploded into a rant about my invading his room and touching his things.
I moved down the hallway and stole a glance into Mark’s room—antiseptically neat, every object in its slot, like a motel staged for a photo shoot. Rock music bled into the house from outside, so I cut through the musty laundry room and followed the noise across the backyard to the bomb shelter hatch. Sound came pouring up through the steel vents, a messy tangle of guitars and percussion with a flute riding on top like a small, crazed bird. I probably should’ve stayed upstairs working the phone for news of Floey, but the music from my past—and everything it meant—pulled me downstairs instead.
The bomb shelter had been built by a previous owner with a reputation for high-functioning paranoia. It was late-fifties vintage, heavy steel and concrete, stocked with survival gear, canned food, and enough guns to start his own war. When Jerry’s father bought the property, Jerry stripped out the fallout fantasies and turned the bunker into a musician’s den: waterbeds at one end, an elaborate sound system wired into every corner, and his arsenal of instruments set up for maximum volume and minimal sleep. Back in high school, when I was stagnating in the dorms at Beverly Paige, I would escape and spend nights down under all that steel and concrete, listening and getting stoned.
The clamshell hatch sat propped open with a two-by-four, a steel maw set to trap youth. Music blasted up the stairs in warped echoes, the whole staircase ringing with every beat. I could pick out Randy’s flute over Jerry’s rhythm guitar and Mark’s bass, three familiar signals in a storm of feedback.
Randy lived down the street, a boyish figure with a long-running chemical résumé. He used to keep a handwritten list of his acid trips on Jerry’s refrigerator: a couple of orange sunshines, some microdots, a week lost to windowpane, then a downhill scribble of barrels and blotter until the record slid off the page. He graduated Beverly Paige “most likely to be found unconscious in an alley,” summa cum junkie.
I clanged down the welded steel stairs and turned into the curved corridor, stepping into the shelter’s cylindrical belly like a buried submarine. The three of them were jamming exactly the way I’d left them a year ago, locked into an eternal practice session. Only one thing was off: the room was musty and stale, but the sweet, spicy cloud of marijuana that had always been part of the air was gone. In its place hung a sour vegetal edge, the smell of something green left too long in the dark.
For a second I wondered if times had gotten so hard they couldn’t score weed, but if the world ended, those three would find a joint in the rubble.
Randy stood in the middle of the room with his flute, jerking and swaying with the rhythm, eyes half-lidded. Mark and Jerry reclined on the waterbeds, guitars in hand, sending notes into the overloaded speakers. Jerry had his hairy legs propped on a cabinet, wearing cut-off jeans and no shirt, the way he preferred it whenever the temperature rose half a degree. Clothes were a problem for Jerry, something that came between him and the air. If he could have gotten away with it, he would have lived in nothing but skin and a guitar strap.
Randy set the flute down on top of an amp, and Mark and Jerry looked up as I stepped in. Mark kept his fingers ghosting over the bass strings, as if he did not want to stop long enough to acknowledge my arrival.
“Hey, Cutty, you’re back,” Randy said. “Give me five.” We slapped hands. “When’d you get in?”
“This morning,” I said. “Just came back from Floey’s exhibit.”
“She said she was trying to set one up,” Randy answered.
“Didn’t think it’d actually happen,” Mark added, pausing the bass line. “How’d it go?”
“The paintings are selling,” I told them. “Could bring in serious money. When did she tell you about the show?”
“She came by to borrow your bus,” Jerry said.
“What?”
“To haul her paintings,” Randy explained. “But Mark had it out, so she couldn’t.”
I could picture it: Floey in the doorway of the bunker, curly hair backlit, talking about a real show on La Cienega, and three grown men tripping over each other to find her extension cords and a loading ramp. With her, everybody volunteered before they knew the job description.
“He what?”
“I took a little trip to Lake Arrowhead,” Mark said. “Hope you don’t mind.”
“You’re always telling me I should ask before I use anything of yours,” I said.
“But I’m responsible,” Mark replied, as if that explained cosmic order.
“Really,” I said.
Mark got up and opened a cabinet I didn’t remember, some new addition to the bunker since I’d gone north. He pulled out a glass so dirty it looked as if it had been aging in the dark, the inside coated in dried green sludge. Next he lifted a pitcher from the blender base, its sides crusted with remnants of something that had once been violently green, at least a year and several health fads ago.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
“Cabbage juice,” Mark said, pouring the viscous liquid into the glass. The vapors hit the inside of my nose like lawn clippings left in a plastic bag until they turned mean.
“Floey turned us on to it,” Randy said. “You drink a few glasses a day and you don’t need drugs anymore. Changes your whole outlook.”
It sounded like Floey’s effect, making them believe something was powerful with nothing but her charisma and smile.
“Must be powerful,” I said.
“It is,” Jerry chimed in. “Randy’s gonna be getting a job. With his dad’s insurance company.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said.
“It’s true,” Randy said. “I start Monday. Haircut, suits, the whole act.”
I shook my head. “You’re selling out.”
“We haven’t been screwing Eskimos, if that’s what you mean,” Jerry said. “This stuff improves your sex life too. Sharpens all the senses. You ought to try it.”
I edged away from the cabinet and drifted closer to Randy, keeping the green sludge in my peripheral vision.
“So what are they like?” Mark asked.
He always wanted details about my sex life, or lack of it. Mark liked to probe until he found the tender spots and then pick at them, the way a bored child pulls the wings off flies. Everyone else was supporting cast, fabricated to keep him amused, and he had decided that my continued virginity, real or imagined, was a defect worth revisiting.
The truth was tangled and ugly, rooted in my father’s suicide and a fogged-out stretch of years before that, from thirteen back to whatever I couldn’t quite recall. Dreams and half-conscious questions suggested a trauma blocking my way forward. I had half planned to talk to Floey about it, if I could overcome my reticence, and get her perspective. Or perhaps being normal and in touch with my emotions was not for me. Maybe I should just move on to new friends and new places.
“The Eskimos are not for me,” I said. “I’m not eating whale blubber and seal oil.”
“Uh huh,” Mark said, giving me a look that translated to: you’re not a real man, Cutty.
“You hear what the Animal’s been doing up in Santa Barbara?” Jerry asked. He moved to stand beside Mark, who was lifting the glass of cabbage juice toward his mouth with the caution of a man expecting bad news.
“No,” I said. The Animal was Mahesh Kamal Davis, old crew and the only one of them I ever really trusted. We had known each other since sixth grade, when he was the kid reading the Wall Street Journal at his desk while everyone else doodled.
Mark slid back onto the waterbed, letting it slosh around him. “He’s studying music at UCSB,” he said.
Mahesh had always been a better musician than Mark or Jerry, and they did not like admitting it. He was the only one of our old crew I ever really rooted for. He outplayed Randy too, though Randy’s raw talent might have been stronger. Randy just never had the drive to turn it into anything except more sound in more basements. His life strategy was minimal effort, maximum kicks, so whatever miracle was in that cabbage juice would have to be strong to drag him into a real job. I should have been using this time to track Floey down, not tallying old scores in an underground bunker.
“Sold his first piece to some big rock star last month,” Jerry said, filling up a filthy Mason jar from the same toxic pitcher.
“Was it the one with my lyrics?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Mark said, with a small twist of his mouth. He probably did. “Anyway, the Animal’s living in a new house Mr. Davis bought in Santa Barbara. And he’s got this neighbor. Cynthia.”
I leaned against Randy’s speaker and resigned myself to listening, the gossip already being sharpened for use.
“Cynthia’s father is loaded and never home,” Mark went on. “The Animal met her—”
“He got hired to tutor her,” Jerry cut in.
“Right. She’s sixteen.” Mark savored the number. “He started hanging out with her even when he wasn’t tutoring.”
“So,” I said.
“You’ll never guess what he did. Always the Animal, you know?” Mark shook his head, drawing out the punch line. “I walk in and there he is in bed with Cynthia. She’s naked, and she’s, well, busy.”
“Mark enjoyed watching that part,” Jerry said.
“I bet,” I said.
“Sixteen,” Mark repeated. “First time I saw them, I backed out of the room and pretended later I’d never seen it.”
“Or he might be going queer on us,” Jerry said.
Mark shot me a look that said: like you.
The story mattered less to Mark than the way he could use it to hammer at me.
“I’m not interested in Mahesh’s sex life,” I said. “If there’s something he wants known, he’ll brag about it himself.”
“That’s the point. He wants this to be secret,” Mark said. “He told me not to tell anyone.”
Jerry knocked back his cabbage juice in one gulp and grabbed another jar, a relatively clean one with only dust and a small black stain at the bottom. “I’m fixing you a cocktail, Cutty,” he said. “This stuff’ll cure everything.”
“Floey’s the one who put us onto it,” Randy repeated, as if her name legitimized the science.
“No thanks,” I said.
“It’s full of vitamins and trace minerals,” Jerry insisted.
“I’m not above taking vitamin pills,” I said.
“What’s wrong?” Mark asked, now propped on one elbow in the waterbed. “Afraid it’ll fix you too fast?”
There was no winning against this kind of logic. Group pressure did not even pretend to be rational.
“Maybe later,” I said. “Right now I need to call my brother-in-law about Floey. She wasn’t at the exhibit, and I’m worried.”
I kept the tombstone painting to myself, thinking they would not understand.
“Can I use your phone, Jerry?”
“Anytime,” he said.
“Hey, Judy and Tricia said they’d be dropping by about now,” Jerry added as I headed for the stairs. “We should line up some coke or something.”
“They’re bringing a couple of girlfriends too,” Randy said. “Marsha is really cute and told me she’s going to get mushrooms at the source in Palenque. She’s flying down there with her uncle in a private plane. A lot of us are going for the scene. He’s already made a couple of trips.”
“Too bad Braughn won’t be interested,” Mark murmured as I headed upstairs.
They hadn’t changed much in a year, except maybe Randy and Jerry in small, crooked ways. I had never really fit with them, even back in high school. I didn’t play an instrument. I just got stoned and listened. At best, they were tolerant around me. With Floey, the same guys turned into unpaid roadies and spiritual consultants, eager to carry her canvases and rearrange their schedules because she needed “a hand.”
When I joined them getting stoned, their chaotic music almost sounded good and their personalities blurred into something tolerable. Now that I had quit, everything was too sharp. Their flaws stood out in ugly relief, and I made a conscious decision to ignore the story about my old friend Mahesh until I could ask him directly.
Walking back across the yard, I felt as if I were leaving a stalled rehearsal behind. It was time to continue my search for Floey.
The phone sat on the coffee table between the couch and the fish-tank television. One of Floey’s letters had said she would never go back to Carl, but I had to be sure. He had divorced her in a courtroom in Austin, Nevada, with a friendly rancher-judge presiding, and walked away with their two kids.
I dialed long distance, knowing Jerry’s father would swallow the bill along with the others. The line clicked and hissed, long stretches of static between rings. The Magnin ranch sat between Austin and Tonopah, in the same Big Smoky Valley where my family’s place used to be, just a bit farther north. I had lived there after my father died, folded into Floey and Eugene Carl’s household, until he sold our ranch and shipped me off to school.
“Hello,” a small voice finally said.
“Hey, Davy. It’s Cutty,” I said.
“Daddy says I’m not supposed to talk to you anymore,” he answered.
“Why not, buddy?”
“’Cause he doesn’t want you corrupting me,” he said, stumbling over the word.
“How do I do that?”
“I don’t know. He just says. Maybe with those Zen books.”
“Then you better get him before I corrupt you,” I said.
He called for Carl in his little voice, and after a moment I heard him breathing on the line.
“You’ve got a lot of nerve calling here,” he said.
This was the place that used to be my home, but that fact was dead weight between us now. I knew when I had been exiled.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m trying to find out if Floey came back there.”
“She hasn’t,” he said. “And she won’t. The place is locked against her.”
“Have you heard from her at all? Any idea where she is?”
“She’s in L.A., trying to sell her psychotic psychedelic paintings.”
“Today was the opening,” I said. “She didn’t show.”
“Keep her away from me,” he said, and there was something new in his voice. Fear.
“I don’t know where she is,” I answered. “But I’ll give her your love when I find her.”
“You tell her to stay away from me and the children,” he said, and hung up.
When I lived with him, Eugene ‘Carl’ had seemed like a man carved from dry wood, no visible emotion, no cracks, no release. Floey stayed loyal to him for eleven years, soldiering through whatever storms he brought to the valley. In her letters she described a chain of accidents and bizarre events that led to his final blowup and her leaving. It always seemed to me that part of her had nudged those accidents along, subconsciously sabotaging the situation until she had enough wreckage piled up to justify escape.