Read The Trail to Buddha's Mirror for Free Online Page B

short, I am in, and therefore in the money. Buy me another espresso.” His long fingers whipped a card from his pocket.
    “C’mon, Crowe! Business cards?”
    “You know a lot of corporate types, don’t you?”
    “I guess the Sixties are really over.”
    Crowe raised an eyebrow at the waitress, who quickly came over with two espressos. Crowe leaned over his cup and looked sadly at Neal. He dropped the artsy pose and said, “My three-piece-suit clients are always asking me to get them acid. Acid! I haven’t done acid since the first Monterey Festival.”
    “So you’re off the bus?”
    “And on the gravy train. The Sixties are over, the Seventies are on the downslide, and the Eighties are almost upon us. You want to be carrying some money into the Eighties. Remember that, young Neal. It’s about making money now.”
    Neal took the card. “My clients don’t usually come to me looking for art, but …”
    “Networking, you know? Networking gets the right people together with the right people.”
    “The ‘right people,’ Crowe? You joining the country club next? You were a communist, for crying out loud!”
    “I turned in my card. I’m thirty-eight years old, young Neal. I can’t work for rice and beans and dope anymore. One day I looked in the mirror and saw my happy hippie face differently. It looked pathetic. I was a tourist attraction, local color for the tourists who hadn’t figured out the hippie thing was already dead.
    “So I quit doing art for art’s sake and started doing it for A. Brian Crowe’s sake. I learned some interesting things, like the fact that a corporation won’t even look at a piece that costs a thousand bucks, but will fight over the same piece when it costs ten thousand bucks. I just started adding zeros to my price tags. I got myself an agent and started going to parties and sipping white wine with the right people. You can call it selling out…. I call it selling.”
    Neal avoided his gaze. Crowe looked older. The fire in his eyes had become embers.
    “It’s okay with me, Crowe.”
    The artist snapped back into his role. He stood up, whirled his cape around his shoulders, and said, “Crowe’s address and phone number are on the card. Give Crowe a call. We’ll do dinner.”
    Neal watched him stride out the door. A. Brian Crowe, flamboyant artist, counterculture hero, Gold Card member.
    That’s all right, Neal thought. Every one of us is at least two people.

3
    Neal got back to the Hopkins, found Blue Line Transportation in the Yellow Pages, dialed the number, and found out that the old Number four plied a route from downtown San Francisco to Mill Valley, where it dropped its passengers at “the Terminal Bookstore.” Neal wondered if the Terminal Bookstore specialized in texts for morticians, but was generally willing to ride any bus that ended its journey at a bookstore. He had an hour and a half to catch the two-twenty from Montgomery Street in the Financial District.
    He went down to the gift shop in the hotel basement and picked up a guidebook to the Bay Area. The index told him that he could read about Mill Valley on page sixty-four, where he learned that Mill Valley was a charming little village in Marin County, nestled on the southern base of Mount Tamalpais, just a few minutes’ drive from the Golden Gate Bridge.
    Neal bought a copy of the book and a bright blue vinyl tube bag that proclaimed “I Left My ♥ in San Francisco,” and headed back to his room.
    He ordered a cheeseburger from room service and started to pack the tube bag. The last bus back from Mill Valley left at 9:00 P.M. and seeing as he didn’t have any idea what he was going to do, he didn’t know if he’d be done doing it by then, so he packed for an overnight: a black sweater, black jeans, black tennis shoes, gloves, burglary kit, and two thousand dollars in cash. He took a quick shower, changed into a fresh shirt, and put his khaki slacks and all-purpose blue blazer, rep tie, and loafers