LITMIR.BIZ

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which some viewed as a disgraceful ghetto, and others viewed as an oasis of forwarding-thinking lifestyles in conservative Columbia.

      “Third floor,” Dave said, admiring her butt as they made their way up the narrow stairs to his stuffy room. Dave slid a window up. She showed him two tiny white tablets in the palm of her hand. Although Dave did not do drugs any stronger than pot, he took one and swallowed it with a slug of beer from his refrigerator. “Same trip as window pane acid, but not as many hours,” she told Dave. “I like it better. More color and less movement.”

      “I’m Allison Gates,” she said. They shook hands.

      “Dave Gardner.”

      Talking with her was easy. Dave was taken with her big laugh, big tits, and hips a little too wide. He tried to look cool and avoid staring at her as she rolled around on the mattress pulling one book after another out of his pile of paperbacks. Her breasts were bouncing around beautifully under her cotton blouse embroidered with the tree of life, its roots spelling Katmandu.

      He lit a stick of incense and sat down beside her on the mattress. The sounds of traffic and people drifted in the open window on the Indian summer breeze.

      “Let me guess,” Dave said. “You’re from New Mexico.”

      She laughed, clapped her hands, and then kissed him unexpectedly. “No, but I’d like to be. When I was in junior high school, back in Moberly, I used to tell my friends my parents had been living in a commune out West when I was born.”

      “Moberly.” Dave did not add the dismissive remark he would have added talking with Carol. “Like to tell stories do you? Make up your life as you go along?”

      “I like to live life as I go along,” she said. She sat down on his mattress, perfectly at ease, and looking very sexy in her earth-mother way. “Yeah, a farm on Route K east of Moberly.”

      “What’s your major?” he asked.

      “I’m not enrolled,” she said. “I just sit in on classes that seem interesting. I sat in on an Anthropology class today.”

      The colors in the old wallpaper were beginning to shift as the acid started to affect his senses. “You feel it?”

      “Yeah,” Allison said. “It’s neat.”

      Dave grinned. “Neat?”

      She leaned over and hugged him. “Don’t make fun.”

      Dave held her for a moment, intoxicated by her warmth, the scent of her hair, and the warm brown of her eyes. “You are beautiful.” And so different from Carol, he thought. He knew his logic could never persuade her of anything.

      She pulled back. “Don’t give me that. I’ve got a big butt, a chipped tooth, my hair is uncontrollable…”

      “You’re beautiful,” he repeated slowly as the drug took him along, pulling him into her vortex.

      Allison sat in zazen, eyes closed, hands on her thighs palms up—a beautiful Buddha, her curly brown hair a halo. “I was thinking about sunrises,” Allison said slowly. She opened her eyes and moved to sit across from Dave at the window, one arm on the sill. She picked up a book from his stack. “I read this book, Journey to the East. There’s this guy Leo, who’s been their guide on this journey. He asks if they’ve become friends and Leo says he doesn’t know people at all. He says knowing a dog is better. Easier.” She laughed, then stopped. “Sorry.”

      Then she burst out laughing again, snorted, and they both laughed until tears were running down their cheeks.

      After they caught their breath Dave said, “Nothing to be sorry about, you didn’t write the book, Hermann Hesse did.” They both started laughing again and couldn’t stop for a long time.

      Allison pulled Monday Night Class from Dave’s bookshelf. “I went to hear this guy Stephen, the guy who wrote this. He travels around the country teaching people stuff.” She paused, seeing something only she could see.

      A wave of color washed over Dave unexpectedly. “Colors,” he said. “Shades of lavender and purple and chartreuse. Beautiful.” The angular light on the faded wallpaper revealed a rose pattern he had not known was there. He studied the faded roses, the bare wood floor, the old Indian blanket on the mattress. The afternoon light was fading. Moving with infinite slowness he picked up a candle, set it in the plate that served as a candleholder, found some matches, and got it lit.

      Allison was talking, “… stuff like loving each other…I mean really loving each other. And other stuff, like consciousness, and aura…all kinds of stuff.”

      “Stephen?”

      “Yeah.” A smile came slowly to her face like a sunrise. “It would be really neat to go and listen to him again.”

      Dave was transfixed by the dark wainscot. There was a dent in the top of it near the door, where someone had once dropped something on it. It had been repainted several times. A collage of the people who might have lived in this room in the past flowed across his imagination.

      From the open window he could hear the distant sound of a child’s voice, the closing of a car door, a crow far away. Columbia went about its business on this ordinary September evening. There is only this moment, he thought. That’s what Zen teaches us—Zen which sounds so simple, yet is so difficult to attain. He ran his finger along the dusty top of the wainscot, painted brown by some unknown hand. He saw the wood as it had looked when it was new—straight, clean and aromatic.

      A branch of the oak tree touched the wall outside the room, scratching softly. “”What’s that?” Allison asked.

      “My spiritual guide. The tree,” Dave said. He saw the spirit of the tree, preoccupied with the things only trees know.

      Allison got out a lid of pot she found behind the stack of books and started rolling a joint.

      “Hey, wait a minute,” Dave said. “I’m high already. That isn’t drug use—it’s drug abuse.”

      She licked the joint closed sensually and held it up, perfectly rolled. “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.” She lit it from the candle and took a long hit.

      “In the candlelight your smile looks like sunrise,” Dave said.

      “I smile a lot, sorry,” Allison said tightly through a lungful of smoke. “It just happens. Like the sun coming up.”

      After a while they took off their clothes and made love. When Dave woke, his head hurt and Allison was gone.

      Chapter 4

      Jeff laid a silver ankh and chain on the wooden counter and pulled out a five dollar bill. The guy behind the counter put the money in a box and handed him back a worn one-dollar bill. “I thought the price was three fifty,” Jeff said mildly.

      “Tax,” the guy said with a snotty grin. His girlfriend tilted her purple granny glasses down and snickered. “For the revolution, man.” The guy adjusted his headband and eyed Jeff’s slacks and corduroy sports jacket with contempt.

      “You’re not a revolution, man,” Jeff said, already regretting his sarcasm. “You’re just sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”

      The other two laughed. “That is the revolution, man. Where have you been?”

      Jeff shook his head. He was waiting for the guy to offer to put the ankh and chain in a box for him. “You’ve been listening to TV reporters quoting every half-assed ‘spokesman’ and rock star.”

      “Bullshit!” the girl said. She put her sandaled feet up on the counter. “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Do some righteous acid, man, get in touch with your head, get real.”

      “Any more clichés you need to quote?” The guy unknotted his headband and shook his hair out of his eyes in a gesture Jeff disliked instantly. I sound like my parents,

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