Shaman's Blood (9 page)

Cannabis smoke and incense hung in the air of the small upstairs room. Ned sighed and lay flat on the bare wood floor with his hands locked behind his head. The familiar pot-disconnect fuzziness began to steal over his body and brain. He’d only just rolled out of bed when Tripper and his entourage had descended on him with the grass, so it didn’t take him long to drift away.

“—and my brother said it took him over a month to get out of jail,” the black guy was saying. “Selma, Alabama, man. It was a fucking scene like you can’t imagine.”

“At least he’s not in Nam,” said the woman in paisley. “My son is.”

“Bummer,” said the teenage boy.

“Now, that is a serious governmental crock of shit,” observed Tripper. “They draft me, man, I’m over the border in two seconds!”

In Ned’s mind, soldiers with machine guns morphed into oriental faces being clubbed by blue-uniformed police with Dobermans on leashes, then faded to images of the ocean pounding against rocks on the shore. He lay for a long time, thinking about a lot of things and about nothing. Definitely first-class weed.

It had come as a pleasant surprise to find that he could get a little high from smoking pot without rattling the cage of his personal demon. Unlike alcohol, ganja seemed to dull their connection rather than enhance it. The creature hadn’t bothered him in a long time anyway, so he rarely thought about it these days.

“Later, man.” Tripper, once known as Wayne, was leaving with his old lady. The other three were nowhere to be seen. Ned hadn’t noticed them make an exit, but that fact worried him for less time than it took to heave to his feet and pad down the hallway to the communal bathroom.

A high-ceilinged, oak-paneled room containing a claw-footed bathtub of nineteen-twenties vintage, the bathroom belonged to the third-floor denizens of the house on Fulton Street, mostly unemployed musicians and artists like himself. The couple who lived in the larger suite of rooms on the ground floor actually held regular jobs and made sure the rent was paid. He knew their first names, but that was all.

Ned relieved himself, thinking about food. He had a serious case of the munchies, but no money. It was sad. He zipped up his faded brown cords and tucked in his equally faded work shirt. Ned regarded his rumpled image in the mirror on the back of the door—a tall lean young man with hair like a bird’s nest. It was just long enough to brush the tops of his shoulders and thick as a lion’s mane. About the same color, too. Ned ran his fingers through the tangles. It had taken Tripper several years to grow the unkempt blond ponytail that reached halfway down his back. Ned wasn’t about to let his hair get that long.

Yawning, he wandered back into the room he marginally called his own. Because he only occasionally donated rent money, he couldn’t really claim the room all to himself; anybody who moved into the house and at least pulled their share of kitchen duty or other chores could stay, as long as there was a vacant mattress or couch to sleep on.

He’d found the third-floor room with its westward-facing window much to his liking because it was good for painting or drawing in the afternoon when San Francisco was bathed in soft natural light. He’d parked his few belongings under the room’s single rollaway bed and pushed it against the westward wall. Over the head of the bed he’d taped his two best watercolors, alien landscapes with broken scarps and scudding cloud formations in brilliant reds and deep magentas. Friends told him he should be doing science fiction book covers or black-light posters. They also wanted to know what he’d been on when he’d done them and where they could get some.

The couch on the opposite wall was variously occupied by the teenaged boy, Tripper, and other heads who knew him—mostly dealers or an occasional runaway. They came and went; the bedroom door was never locked. In fact, it didn’t even have a lock. Ned really didn’t care as long as nobody messed with his paints or brushes. They were his livelihood.

He flopped down on the bed and felt under it for his shoes. In his twenties, he considered himself mobile and self-sufficient. He traveled light, needing only a battered backpack to carry his meager wardrobe and artist’s supplies. He’d been in San Fran for nearly nine years, living first in the North Beach area, not a stone’s throw from the City Lights Bookstore where at age twenty he’d heard the beat poet Allen Ginsberg read from his crazed new poem “Howl,” that had got Ginsberg and the bookstore owner arrested for indecency.

Ned had not understood most of the poem when he’d heard it, but the rhythm of its language and the intensity of its imagery made him immediately shoplift a copy and commit whole passages to memory.

Ned had found it a tough go with his limited reading skills, but he continually pushed himself and was improving daily. When someone had loaned him Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, it had put new words into his vocabulary and scoured his soul. Like many in the literate circles he aspired to belong to, he agreed that Aldous Huxley had probably written the ultimate handbook on the truth of existence. Ned could still quote the line from William Blake that had spawned the work: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." He also still believed that to be true.

But as the beat poets grew in notoriety and rent around their artists’ enclave escalated, Ned had been forced to look for cheaper digs. He’d scoped out other neighborhoods, ending up in Haight-Ashbury in 1962, the same year Timothy Leary founded some research group whose name Ned couldn’t remember to promote LSD research. A lot of people around Ned were experimenting with the stuff, but he’d yet to give it a try. His grasp on reality was loosey-goosey just on weed, so he didn’t feel a great need to open his personal doors of perception all that wide. He feared what might come through.

It was Sandy, the female half of the couple who rented the ramshackle Victorian on Fulton Street, who’d invited him home one November night after Joan Baez had sung to thousands of students on the Berkeley campus in support of the Free Speech Movement. After all the speeches and dancing were done and the university Board of Regents had screwed them over yet again, Sandy had commandeered him and some other freaks as company for the long drive home. She’d stoned him, fucked him, introduced him to her husband, and invited him to stay. Together, they’d smoked hashish, drunk a gallon of Ripple, and played and replayed “Masters of War” from Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin’ LP until the people in the next room had banged on the wall. Ned smiled. That had been one fine night.

Now, five months later, he was no longer servicing Sandy, but she remained his friend, as did her husband. But Sandy was heavily into the SDS and some fledgling civil rights group called SNCC, which they referred to as Snick, and Ned, basically apolitical, had not measured up to Sandy’s recruitment standards. When he admitted he’d only been on campus for the free concert and not the cause of free speech, their relationship had cooled. Ned didn’t mind; there were plenty of other chicks more than willing to get chummy with him beneath their Indian-print bedspreads.

He found his battered desert boots and extracted the socks he’d stuffed in them. He’d walked miles in those boots and although most of the suede had eroded from them long ago, he cherished them like extensions of his body. He resolved to get them resoled as soon as he had enough money. Toward that end, Ned finished dressing, gathered his art materials, and headed downstairs.

Ned took off at a brisk walk downhill, his backpack over one shoulder and two folded campstools under his arm. Reaching the intersection of Ashbury and Haight, it didn’t take him long to hitch a ride out to his old stomping grounds around Telegraph Hill. By noon, he’d set up shop on a stretch of Fisherman’s Wharf thick with tourists and aspiring bohemians. Within an hour, he’d made a couple of quick-sketch portraits and nearly forty dollars. Ned stretched and took in the blue horizon reaching out beyond the Bay Bridge. At this moment in time, life was damned near perfect.

“Neddy. How’s it going, man?” Tripper slid onto the stool beside him.

Ned grinned. “Working the crowd, same as you.”

“You wound me, friend. I never offer anything to anyone that they don’t need. It’s Zen archery, man—I put myself in the right place and the target appears.” Tripper pulled off his T-shirt and sat bare-chested in the afternoon sun, letting his hair fall loose down his back. “Ain’t life great?”

Ned nodded. “Where’s your old lady?”

“She had something to do that didn’t involve me. No sweat.”

Tripper's fidelity seemed questionable, but then maybe his girlfriend's was, too. At first, Ned had been a little annoyed at Tripper’s interruption, but now it occurred to him that he couldn’t ask for a better advertisement of the San Fran hedonistic lifestyle, and sure enough, a trio of nubile maidens from out of town was snapping their picture and approaching them. He looked at Tripper.

“Good job, man.” 

“Do I get a commission?”

“Like hell. Hello, there.” Ned smiled up at the nearest girl. “Want your portrait done?”

She smiled back. “How much?”

“Just ten dollars for a charcoal sketch. Or twenty, depending on how detailed a likeness you want, and if you want it in color.”

“Are you a famous artist?” She looked at him sideways.

Tripper laughed. “Our Neddy is quite famous, among some circles. As an artist, he is untouchable.”

“Well, okay, then. Just a sketch.” She looked at Tripper with the same questioning expression. The other two girls hung behind her, their eager faces taking in the total experience of being in San Francisco and talking to real hippies.

Ned removed Tripper from the second campstool and seated the girl so that the direct sun was out of her eyes and her face was at a three-quarter angle to him. With a charcoal pencil, he began to sketch quick, deft lines that within ten minutes resembled the subject remarkably well.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Linda.”

With a flourish, he wrote For Linda, welcome to SF, March 25, 1965—N.W. underneath the portrait and handed it to her. The others crowded around to see.

“Far out. That’s amazing,” said the one whose ample thighs were barely contained by her new bell-bottom jeans.

Linda was blushing. “You made me better looking than I really am.”

“Let me see,” said Tripper. Kneeling down beside her, he draped his bare arm around her shoulders, drawing her close. “Perfect likeness.” He gave her a squeeze. She beamed at him, her shyness evaporating as quickly as fog on the bay. Ned grinned. Old Trip was a master; with a little luck, they might score some entertainment for the rest of the day.

“Where are you girls from?” said Tripper, settling on the ground and pulling Linda into his lap.

“Arizona,” said the one in tight jeans.

“Flagstaff,” said her companion, a slip of a girl with a high giggly voice. Ned had serious doubts about the legality of that one, but her green eyes were quite beautiful. He offered her a sip from his thermos.

“What’s in it?” She adjusted her peasant blouse over her slim shoulders and reached for the thermos.

“Just water,” he said, charmed.

“Okay.” She took a drink, and watched him from under long lashes.

Ned retrieved the thermos and kept hold of her hand. “You have a great profile. Want me to paint you?”

“Uh uh.” She shook her head. “No money. I spent it all already.” The girls laughed as a unit. “I love your tattoos,” she said, pointing at his arm. The scale pattern had been fading over the years and was barely visible now. Occasionally someone noticed it enough to comment, but they had to look up close in just the right light to see it. Ned didn’t mind—it was cool.

“Where are you staying tonight, and do you want company,” said Tripper, his arms around Linda.

Ned admired his approach. No use dallying with them unless it was going somewhere.

Tripper wriggled back into his T-shirt. “Want to get turned on?”

The girls exchanged quick glances.  “Um, yeah, why not?” said Linda.

The others agreed, nodding and shuffling their feet, as if they’d been hoping for such an offer but had been too embarrassed to ask. Ned knew this body language all too well; he saw it repeatedly as more seekers of hippie heaven flowed into the city each summer.

Ned began packing up his paints. “Where to?”

“We have a hotel room near Union Square,” said Linda. She named an older hotel near the Powell Street cable car line.

“Cool.” Ned folded the stools and handed one to Green Eyes, as he’d named her in his mind. “Hope you girls don’t mind walking.”

They assured him they didn’t.

“I’m Ned, and this is Tripper.” The girls laughed on cue.

“Gloria,” said the one in the tight jeans.

“Mary Catherine,” said Green Eyes.

They moved as a gang down the Embarcadero, laughing and flirting and barking back at the sea lions, heading generally toward Union Square.

They rode the elevator in a cozy wad up to the room and immediately ordered out for pizza and sodas. Ned knew that if they waited ‘til after the bong had gone around a few times and the screaming munchies had settled in, it would be next to impossible to order coherently over the phone. They settled onto the two double beds, just talking and getting comfortable with each other, waiting for the food to arrive.

When it came, Tripper paid for the pizza and locked the door. He put the unopened box on the dresser and pulled the curtains closed over the narrow window that looked down on the busy street below.

“Oh cool, a water pipe,” said Gloria, watching Tripper assemble and fill the bong. He puffed on it dramatically, producing the familiar gurgling sound that was music to Ned’s ears. He lay back on the pillows beside Mary Catherine and waited for his turn.

Linda choked and had to be comforted, and, to her credit, gamely tried again. She was red in the face from coughing, but Ned could see by her pupils that she’d gotten a big enough hit. She passed the pipe to him, and he handed it to Green Eyes.

“You go first,” he said. If she needed help, he wanted to be clear-headed. To his surprise, she took in a lungful and held it like a pro. Ned quickly reassessed her possible age and experience level, and considered the possibilities.