Free Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Farina Page A

“Oh hey, you don’t have a greenhouse, Calvin? I’ve got something to plant.”
    “David Grün has one, I think. Some kind of cactus?”
    “Just Mexican grass. How’s old David doing, anyway?”
    “Coming out with more disturbing music than you’ll remember. But potent and red-faced.”
    “He was always a pretty lyrical cat.” Pamela calling me that. Not altogether correct.
    “More atonal now.” Pouring the tea over the cinnamon sticks. “You’ll have to hear for yourself. He had his fortieth birthday last week, you know; a sixth daughter born when you were looking for Motherball.”
    “Sixth?”
    “Robin, they call her. A bird’s name like the other five.”
    And me a spiritual virgin. How many unborn children flushed in rubber balloons. Name them after insects, even if I had them: how do you do, like you to meet the twins, Locust and Centipede.
    Jesus, that eye in the hand. Wink at it. No don’t, it might wink back.
    They drove into the country, along frozen Harpy Creek. A faint gurgling under metallic ice. The painter’s black Saab, its two-cycle engine puttering with a hypnotic whine, Pappadopoulis slouched down in the seat, his eyes on the padded lining of the roof, remembering his quest in Taos, looking for the Connection who might tie all the loose ends of vicarious experience into a woven sign or pattern, some familiar rebus. A triangle, perhaps. A fish. The symbol for infinity.
    But now he sat with Blacknesse, whose slender dye-stained fingers were closed gently around the wheel. Their vision was focused arbitrarily on the rippling white hyphens that danced back under the car whenever they passed a melting stretch of road; both of them taking pleasure in this sensation of shifting surface, having to deal with different mediums, different textures in the same plane.
    “You were starting to tell me something. In the studio.”
    Gnossos collecting various thoughts, his attention having drifted to the sound of the tires. “New Mexico, man, I finally found him, right where every hophead in the country figured he’d be. But no sun god or anything, just tacos and shakes. It’s enough to bring you down.”
    “We figured.”
    “We?”
    “Beth and myself.”
    A lazy sigh, a sound of marrow-bone weariness, hoarded, stored for precisely this moment. “If I’d been into the Middle Ages, man, you
know
I would’ve gone looking for the grail or whatever it was got them hung up. And so would you, so don’t come on cocky. Everybody’s got his little search and yours happens to be internal, but I’m just not cut out for meditation, right? Don’t have the time, for one thing; this is a nervous little decade we’re playing with.”
    “Exactly.”
    “Exactly nothing. And come to think of it, you were among the first people to mention the cat, apart from Aquavitus.”
    “My error, and I apologize. I’d heard he was a mushroom-warlock from Mexico, not part of some narcotics syndicate. You were looking for visionary enlightenment, if I recall, not just a chance to get high.”
    “Well, you take what comes along. Maybe next time I’ll cross the border and avoid hangups. Let me tell you, man, you can’t move in this country without catching your heel in a hangup. Mousetails in your root beer, grubs in your Hershey bar, always some kind of worm in the image, munching away.” Shifting his glance to a drop of water that had worked its way through the sealed glass and begun breaking apart from the vibration of the frame. “Even the desert. Maybe I’m naïve or something, but I
did
expect a little dune here and there,
some
thing besides the Arapaho Motor Inn, ninety-two units, all Polar Bear Cool. And the lights! Pink, chartreuse, Congo ruby, magenta, baby blue, you’ve got to pack a mule to get away from the glare, man, believe me. Even the sand is full of hump-trash. The only thing you get to know about is hot wind and dry, see, you really get involved with dry.” The broken drops on the windshield