Why Aren't You Smiling? (3 page)

The instant I was released from school, I raced directly to the park. I didn't see Rick, but spotted Beth and a few of his friends. They were sprawled out on the grass singing along with a guy who was playing guitar. They'd know where he was. Though mightily impatient, I didn't want to interrupt their song (something about Michael rowing a boat ashore and a lot of hallelujahs), so I sat down a few yards away and waited. Within moments I felt conspicuous and, on wild impulse, removed my shoes and socks. My feet looked blindingly white in the sunshine but the warm grass felt wonderful. No wonder hippies preferred to go shoeless. To kill time I rummaged a copy of Robert Heinlein's
Stranger In A Strange Land
out of my book bag. It was taking me forever to get through it but I instinctively felt the book contained much Truth and Wisdom. Eventually the hallelujah song stopped. Rick's friends immediately began discussing what to sing next so I knew I had to act quickly. Without even putting my shoes on, I walked over to them.

“You're that kid,” said Beth in a raspy voice as she squinted at me.

“I'm looking for Rick. Is he around?”

A man with curly black hair and a Mexican bandito mustache spoke. “You just missed him. He went for rolling papers.”

My throat was constricting. “OK, thanks,” I mumbled. As I walked away I felt Rick's friends' eyes on my back, which made me shiver.

I heard Bandito Man's voice. “Wait, kid, do you like to sing?”

I turned back. “Not really,” I stammered, my throat so tight I could barely get the words out. “I think I'll go find Rick.”

“OK. Peace, man.”

I quickly put on my shoes and walked the half-block down to the retail corridor on the south side of the campus. Its sidewalks were lined with rows of tables selling handcrafted pottery, beaded necklaces, buttons, bumper stickers, wind chimes, incense, hand-tooled belts, Indian fabrics, and novelty candles. The whole area was permanently mobbed with students and hippies, some of them sprawled across the sidewalk so that pedestrians had to step over them to walk by. Normally I found the street dauntingly claustrophobic and stayed away, but the thought of seeing Rick again propelled me through the crowds to the head shop.

I paused outside for just a moment (I'd never been inside such a disreputable place) then pushed open the heavy door. The air inside was thick with spicy incense and soothing sitar music played softly, a pleasant contrast with the noisy bustle of the street. Behind a long glass counter, a sales clerk whispered heatedly into a phone. His eyes rose up to meet mine, but he didn't stop what I guessed was an intimate personal phone call. There was nobody else in the store and I would have left immediately, but worried that walking out without examining at any merchandise might look silly or suspicious. I avoided the counter with its thoroughly incriminating display of pipes and bongs, instead examining the shelves of gifts and toys in back. I was enjoying the double trippy effect of looking at a lava lamp through a kaleidoscope when Rick surprised me by walking out of an adjoining room I hadn't noticed because it was behind a beaded curtain.

“Hey, Little Lenny,” he said. The “little” would have sounded condescending from anyone else, but from Rick it just seemed affectionate. It also made me notice that Rick himself was tiny, only a couple of inches taller than me. I hadn't noticed the other day in the park because he'd been sitting down.

“Hi Rick. Funny running into you here.” I felt myself blush. “I mean, what a coincidence.”

“There are no coincidences,” Rick replied, his head bobbing slightly in agreement with himself.

The fact that I'd been looking for him escaped my mind and I immediately accepted the view that fate had decreed he and I were meant to connect. “Oh, wow.”

Rick gestured for me to follow him out to the street. “Let's split.”

“Do you really think there are no coincidences?” I asked.

“The universe is God's dream,” said Rick. He smiled at a woman in purple velvet robes blowing bubbles as she strolled down the street. She smiled back beatifically.

“So if the universe is God's dream, does that mean he's not in charge of what's going on?” I asked.

“What does it look like to you?”

I'd never followed this line of thought before and had to puzzle it out. Rick didn't seem to expect an answer right away, or maybe at all, so we walked in silence for nearly a full minute before I replied.

“Maybe that's why bad stuff happens, like the Holocaust and Vietnam, because God's having a nightmare.”

“But it's not real,” said Rick, “because it's all a part of the dream.”

“What happens to us when God wakes up?” I wondered.

Rick shot me a funny look, then smiled. “Perhaps the dream and the dreamer are one.”

“Huh?”

Rick explained. “Like God isn't a man, God is God, and we can't even begin to comprehend what that means. God's dreams could be more real than our reality, but maybe he has more than just two states, dreaming and not dreaming, he could have three, dreaming, being awake, and something else. Maybe more than three, maybe sixty, maybe an infinite number.”

“Chuang Tzu dreamed he was a butterfly,” I said, bursting with pride at having something more or less pertinent to contribute, “but then he woke up and asked how did he know he wasn't a butterfly dreaming he was a man?”

“Wow,” said Rick.

“Chuang Tzu was a Taoist,” I explained.

“Cool,” said Rick. “Wanna come over to my place? We can get stoned and read the Bible.”

I froze for a few panicky, blank-minded seconds. I was pretty sure I wasn't going to be the single teenager in all of America who never tried marijuana, so although getting stoned was worrisome (would I have a bad trip?), it would have to be faced sooner or later. The prospect of reading the Bible, however, seriously creeped me out. I'd glanced through a Gideon's in a motel once and been bored to tears by begats and spooked by Revelations. Worst by far was the whole thundering judgment of God thing, which I found teeth grindingly ungroovy. “Uh, I think I have homework to do,” I stammered.

Rick smiled condescendingly, like he thought having to do homework was cute. “OK, maybe next time. This is where I turn.”

Suddenly I dreaded the lonesome, dull hours between getting home and falling asleep. Anything would be better than doing my homework in front of the television while my mother hovered around prying into my personal affairs. “Well, maybe I could come over just for a little while.”

Rick smiled, nicely this time. “Far out. Let's go.”

We walked a couple of blocks to a slightly ramshackle wood-shingled, single story house with a patchy lawn littered with gross, dog-gnawed bones and squeaky toys. Rick turned. “This is it. We're crashing here till we get the cash to leave for Oregon.”

“Whose house is it?” I wondered aloud.

“God's,” said Rick.

I followed Rick up the steps to the porch where a mangy hound sat, ineffectually biting a flea on its leg. It looked up at us with rheumy eyes but didn't stop biting. I followed Rick inside and into the living room.

“Make yourself at home,” he said, plopping down on a threadbare sofa and putting his sandal-clad feet up on the coffee table.

I sat next to Rick, and glanced around. The room was mostly empty except for a pile of backpacks and sleeping bags in the corner and a churchy looking felt banner that hung on the wall. It depicted a white dove with a laurel wreath in its beak flying over a crowd of multi-hued people. I walked over and read: Dream Love, Eat Love, Shit Love, Fuck Love, Read Love, Write Love, Want Love, Love Love, Be Love.

Rick sensed my embarrassment at the dirty words. “Turning your life over to Jesus isn't about getting uptight and refusing to say ‘shit' or ‘fuck'. God created shitting and fucking, too, you know.”

“I know,” I sighed, sitting back down next to him. “But…” I hesitated, not wanting to admit I never swore. “I guess I don't understand…”

“You think you don't understand the Truth of Jesus, but dig this, there's nothing to understand! There's no mystery, Little Leonard. People get confused about God because all these competing churches try to sell God like you'd sell a used car. Like they want Church to be the God store. But you know, God doesn't come with a label or a price tag, like Pepsi or Coke. He's like water. He's everywhere and always free.”

“You don't go to church?” I tried not to sound surprised.

“Hell no!” laughed Rick. “Organized religion exists to channel mankind's innate spiritual impulses to serve the needs of the ruling class. The early Christian churches were radical communities where everyone took care of each other and sought out communion with God in their own way. But that was a threat to the Roman Empire. Those cats were all about power and violence. They tried to kill Christianity by killing all the Christians, but that didn't work 'cause people kept converting, so they adopted Christianity as the state religion and turned the temples into churches. The real Christians were branded as heretics and driven out. The truth of Jesus was still there in the Gospels, though, so the priests threw out a lot of what He said or reworded it to suit their purposes.”

This information was changing my worldview so fast I felt dizzy. “You're saying they
changed
the Bible?”

“Yup,” Rick confirmed. “But God's message is still there if you peel away all the bullshit. Just Love, that's it! It sounds easy, but it might be the hardest thing in the world. Here, this'll help.” He took a tiny package of rolling papers out of his jeans then pulled out a tiny wooden box from under the sofa. I watched nervously as he extracted a baggie of brownish pot from the box, took some, crumpled some into a rolling paper, and expertly rolled a joint.

“I've never gotten high before,” I admitted, relieved to get this shameful secret off my chest.

“Oh wow,” laughed Rick, as he licked the edge of the paper, sealing the joint.

“My brother Danny has,” I babbled idiotically. Why would Rick care?

“This is gonna take you places,” smiled Rick. “Watch what I do.” He held up the flame and started sucking on the end of the joint. After he'd finished inhaling, he motioned to me. I took the joint, my scalp tingling with trepidatious excitement, and repeated the process. The hot smoke immediately made me cough, but Rick put his arm on my back and said, “It's OK.” The touch of his hand miraculously put out the fire in my windpipe. I kept the smoke down for a second then let it escape.

“I think you got a hit,” said Rick. We took a few more tokes then relaxed back onto the sofa. “What I mean is, like, acting all holy and uptight has nothing to do with being a Christian. And it's not about your hair being long and saying you're for peace either.”

“But Jesus had long hair and was for peace,” I said.

“Yeah,” agreed Rick, “Jesus was a hippie, for sure. But you don't have to be a hippie or have long hair to Love. You just have to Love. Love your enemies, your friends, strangers, the animals, yourself. Do you love yourself, Leonard?”

I didn't answer because I was busy noticing that the room was both immensely big and very small at the same time, though I wasn't sure what ‘at the same time' could possibly mean since time was suddenly a foreign concept. “Uh,” I began, “I dunno, I…”

Rick leaned over and examined my face with clinical curiosity. “Yup, you're stoned,” he said with a satisfied smile. What did my stoned face look like? I wondered with an outsized panic that I realized was irrational. It couldn't have changed that much. “Feel OK?” asked Rick in what sounded like slow motion. I couldn't form words, so instead gave him a reassuring smile. Or rather I tried to. I could tell how phony my smile looked from the tenseness of my face muscles. I tried to relax my face, but felt it freeze. I imagined I looked like one of the heads from Easter Island. Those heads were made of stone; I was stoned. What did it mean?

I glanced over at Rick, a poster boy for pot with his relaxed, dreamy expression. I, on the other hand, was pretty sure I could have starred in one of the anti-drug educational films they made us watch at school. The camera would show me sitting frozen on the couch while a voice-over explained, “The side effects of marijuana include short-term memory loss, confusion, paranoia…” I knew I was confused and paranoid, but had I suffered any memory loss? I tried to remember something I might have forgotten. But if I remembered it, then it wouldn't be forgotten. The task was hopeless! It occurred to me that now I hadn't spoken or moved for a suspiciously long time. What was Rick thinking? I didn't have to wonder long because he stood up and announced, “We need music!”

“Yeah,
totally,”
I agreed, glad for something to say.

Rick began flipping through a stack of albums by a stereo in the corner. “The cat who lives here has all the best tunes: Argent… Emerson, Lake and Palmer… Loggins and Messina, Bread, Three Dog Night…” He turned back to face me. “What kind of music do you like, Little Lenny?”

I wanted to like something Rick liked, but had no idea what that was. “Those are good bands,” I all but squeaked. Was ‘bands' the right word? “I mean, groups…” Since when had inter-human communication become so difficult? “The ones you said.” I stared at my hands, which now looked alien and the wrong distance from my head. “I like all kinds of music,” I added, echoing the sentiments often expressed by my mother (of all people!) and hopefully handing the whole music dilemma back to Rick. Then I remembered that there was a new band I particularly liked. “Queen!” I shouted, my voice sounding too loud. It was my favorite band, but I had forgotten.

Rick scowled. “Don't see any Queen. How about Led Zep?”

“Sure.” Suddenly I felt compelled to stand. Standing took only a small fraction of the time it normally did and I became dizzy. I must have looked like something out of a silent movie, jerky and at the wrong speed.