Read Drop City for Free Online Page B

against the back wall and took it upon himself to make sure the jug kept circulating. All was peace. Silken voices murmuring, Marvin Gaye, Sly and the Family Stone, Hendrix, thump, thump, blat, and Pan was in the middle ofan elaborate story about a free concert in Central Park and the good and bad drugs he’d done that night and how somebody had vomited all over the windshield of his mother’s car, which he’d borrowed with every warning and proscription attached, when Sally, the skinny-legged fourteen-year-old runaway in the patched jeans and stretch top, cried out. Or she screamed, actually. “Get off me, you freak!” she let out in a piping wild adolescent vibrato that shot up the scale like feedback, and Ronnie glanced away from his story to see Lester simultaneously pinning her down and going at her breasts with both hands and the pink slab of his tongue, and Sky Dog— Sky Dog, Mr. Mellow Peace-and-Love himself—stripped to his tanned buttocks and working hard to peel her jeans down the flailing sticks of her legs.
    Ronnie was right in the middle of a story, his voice droning on through the standard interludes and rich with the twenty nasal catchphrases of the day, and he was so mellowed out he could barely keep his head up off the floor, but this—this scream, this scene going down in the corner—sent a shock wave through him. “Get off, get off!” the girl kept screaming, and now her legs were bare and Sky Dog’s buttocks were clenching and thrusting in a way that hurt to watch, a way that was wrong, dead wrong, and Ronnie tried to get up off the floor, tried to say, Hey, man, what do you think you’re doing, because this wasn’t right, it wasn’t—but by the time he got to his feet he realized everyone in the room was looking at him with eyes that had no brotherly or even human spark in them.

    In the morning, which came hurtling out of the sky like a Russian missile aimed straight at his brain, Pan opened his eyes on the stiff tall grass and the golden seedheads drooping over him as if he were already dead and decomposed. He seemed to be lying supine in the weeds beyond the back house, and this was a nasty little surprise, speaking of snakes, rattle or otherwise. His hair was stiff with dirt and bits of twig and chaff, and when he rubbed the back of his skull he feltan unevenness there, as if some essential fluid— blood, that is—had leaked out of him and coagulated in a bristling lump. He felt bad. Bad in every way. But most of all, he felt thirsty, and he saw himself rising up out of the sun-blasted weeds and staggering first to the hose on the back lawn and then to the pool, where the dried blood—and there seemed to be a rough granulated gash over his cheekbone too—would dissolve and boil up around him in a dull brown cloud of cellular material gone to waste.
    It must have been noon or maybe even later, because people were gathered round the lawn and the pool coping with metal plates of lunchtime mush in their hands, eyes shining, hair flowing, all the colors of their sarongs and T-shirts and burnished flesh aglow as if everybody was a lightbulb and they just kept shining and shining. A couple of people made comments—“Rough night, huh?”—and laughed and joshed him in a brotherly and sisterly way when he bent to the hose and let the silver liquid flow in and out of his mouth in a long glowing arc. He couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him, or what was most wrong—hangover, drug depletion or blood loss, and had he been in a fight, was that it? He tried to focus, tried to bring up the image of that girl on the floor in the back house, but the only thing that came into his mind was a phrase he’d used a thousand times, two truncated monosyllabic words that did nobody or no thing justice at all: Free Love.
    Reba’s kids were there, nice day, lunch outside, not enough seats in the meeting