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T. C. Boyle

Drop City

For the sisters Kathy, Linda, Janice and Christine

Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the _solid__ earth! the _actual__ world! the _common sense! Contact! Contact! Who__ are we? _where__ are we?

— Henry David Thoreau, “Ktaadn”

Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of god,

Wandering, wandering in hopeless night.

Out here in the perimeter there are no stars,

Out here we is stoned Immaculate.

— Jim Morrison, “The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank Chuck Fadel, Jorma Kaukonen, Russell Timothy Miller, Alan Arkawy and Jim Perry for their help and advice.

PART ONE. DROP CITY SOUTH

C'mon people now

Smile on your brother

Everybody get together

Try to love one another right now.

— Chet Powers, “Get Together”

1

The morning was a fish in a net, glistening and wriggling at the dead black border of her consciousness, but she'd never caught a fish in a net or on a hook either, so she couldn't really say if or how or why. The morning was a fish in a net. That was what she told herself over and over, making a little chant of it-a mantra-as she decapitated weeds with the guillotine of her hoe, milked the slit-eyed goats and sat down to somebody's idea of porridge in the big drafty meeting room, where sixty shimmering communicants sucked at spoons and worked their jaws.

Outside was the California sun, making a statement in the dust and saying something like ten o'clock or ten-thirty to the outbuildings and the trees. There were voices all around her, laughter, morning pleasantries and animadversions, but she was floating still and just opened up a million-kilowatt smile and took her ceramic bowl with the nuts and seeds and raisins and the dollop of pasty oatmeal afloat in goat's milk and drifted through the door and out into the yard to perch on a stump and feel the hot dust invade the spaces between her toes. Eating wasn't a private act-nothing was private at Drop City-but there were no dorm mothers here, no social directors or parents or bosses, and for once she felt like doing her own thing. Grooving, right? Wasn't that what this was all about? The California sun on your face, no games, no plastic society-just freedom and like minds, brothers and sisters all?

Star-Paulette Regina Starr, her name and being shrunk down to four essential letters now-had been at Drop City for something like three weeks.

_Something like. __ In truth, she couldn't have said exactly how long she'd been sleeping on a particular mattress in a particular room with a careless warm slew of non-particular people, nor would she have cared to. She wasn't counting days or weeks or months-or even years. Or eons either. _Big Bang. Who created the universe? God created the universe. The morning is a fish in a net. __ Wasn't it a Tuesday when they got here? Tuesday was music night, and today-today was Friday. She knew that much from the buzz around the stewpot in the kitchen-the weekend hippies were on their way, and the gawkers and gapers too-but time wasn't really one of her hangups, as she'd demonstrated for all and sundry by giving her Tissot watch with the gold-link wristband to an Indian kid in Taos, and he wasn't even staring at her or looking for a handout, just standing there at the bus stop with his hand clenched in his mother's. “Here,” she said, “here,” twisting it off her wrist, “you want this?” She'd never been west before, never seen anything like it, and there he was, black bangs shielding his black eyes, a little deep-dwelling Indian kid, and she had to give him something. The hills screamed with cactus. The fumes of the bus rode up her nose and made her eyes water.