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

lurched together, formed a single stream, and ran back up into a shivering ball. “Old Pluto’s got his dirty claws in the landscape, all right. Try to groove behind the daytime cosmos and you get a faceful of whipped cream and Betty Crocker pastry. They
could
hit you with a lightning bolt but that wouldn’t be comic enough. I mean, somebody’d have to send the little pile of ash and hair back to your mother and who’d get the joke?” He crossed his fingers to guard against any possible hex.
    “I was ready to throw in the towel when I tried taos, let me tell you. It just didn’t seem the likely place to find him, little town full of getups, serapes, silver talismans, jade rings, all like that. But sure enough, this Indian comes out of the shadows, wrapped up in a flannel blanket, everything hidden, even his face, nothing showing but the eyes. And stitched across the back of the blanket, Calvin, one word. One word, right?”
    “Motherball.”
    “What else? That’s how he reaches people. Sends out his boys with these blankets, you follow one and there you are. If you’re fuzz they probably nail you, they all look like assassins out of
Four Feathers
, thuggees with piano wire; but they’ve got some way of knowing how to pick out the junkie types. He took me to a bar with a rainspout over the door, kind of adobe place, in an alley. I remember the spout because there was never any rain. And Louie Motherball, sure enough, waiting inside, just like that.” Gnossos drawing an
M
on the moisture of the windshield. “Just standing there behind the bar, wiping glasses. Sydney Greenstreet. Fat, hairless, fuchsia suspenders, no shirt, sweat lines all over his belly—like a hogshead, no fooling—and chewing sen-sen. Some starving Pueblo chic sitting next to him, his wife I think, wearing a maroon dress, drinking out of a gallon bowl through a surgical tube. You should have seen them, man, the whole thing was very gross. You know what he said? I wasn’t in the door a full minute and he said, ‘You’re of course familiar with the works of Edward Arlington Robinson.’ Talk about the Mushroom Man, baby, I really thought I’d found him. Lord Buckley out doing the Gauguin or something, ready to straighten my head once and for all, right? But what he was doing the whole time was mixing up this juice he calls Summer Snow. White Bacardi from Cuba, shredded coconut, crushed ice, milk, orange sherbet, the whole thing whipped up in a Waring blender. Then he serves it in chilled bowls, and wipes the rims with cactus heart. He chops peyote buds into the froth with chocolate jimmies.” Gnossos erased the
M
. “So I stuck it out, you know what I mean, two, maybe three weeks, just lying around digging these recitations he gives, talking to lightbulbs, and like that. Man, he had it all down, line after line of that Mickey Mouse verse, coming on like the March of Time, and all the time his old lady so wiped out of her skull she couldn’t hobble as far as the head without getting hung up by the candles on the way and forgetting what she wanted. And no food, either. Just Summer Snow and Motherball’s voice day and night, whenever he wasn’t busy whipping up new juice. ‘Bout every four hours or so, these shifts of Indians fell by in flannel blankets and lushed it around a little. It really got euphoric, man. A couple of them would start out by giggling when the session was halfway through and finally the whole place would go to pieces, everybody rolling into weak-fits. Edward Arlington Robinson, man, you’d have to hear it to believe it. And every year he picks someone else. Year before, it was John Greenleaf Whittier or James Whitcomb Riley. His plan, the way he laid it out, was to do a cyclical rendering, starting around the Wife of Bath and ending up at Pooh Corner. What I didn’t know until the end, of course, washow he was taking the Indians. Lock, stock and barrel, man, life savings, government checks, silver mines, jade