4. Donkey Island.
In the morning, Hippie made egg sandwiches with Taylor ham and cheese, and there was coffee. He made frozen concentrated orange juice and cut up bananas and strawberries. He had a yellow gingham cotton tablecloth and the juice glasses had oranges painted on them. Hippie was very domestic. Still, it was far too hot for November, smoggy and oppressive; earthquake weather. The morning was a perfect storm of pretty and horrible. It was unsettling.
There was a half-sheet of blotter stamps and Hippie unhinged three of them. He ate his. Farmgirl licked the back of hers. I hesitated and put my head in my hands. “Headache,” I said. Hadley picked up the little orange stamp, handed it to me and said, “This will make you feel better.”
Hippie had a brand-new Datsun 510. It was green. It had that new car smell, mixed with pot. I sat in the back, in the middle, and hung my head over the front seat. I didn’t know where we were going. We stopped at the Hollywood Ranch Market. There was a map from The Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out on the back seat of the car. When you bought the record, you sent in a dollar and they mailed you a map of L.A.’s “Freak Out Hot Spots.” In it were all the cool places in L.A., Bido-Lito’s and Ben Frank’s and The Troubadour. A lot of the places were closed now, like Pandora’s Box and The Trip. The map was wrinkled and dog-eared and Hippie had marked it up with the places he’d been. I said, “This is your map?”
Farmgirl took it and read, “‘Hollywood Ranch Market; a good place to see some real freaks.’ I want to go there,” she said. Hippie said we could, but that freaks don’t get up at 10:00 in the morning. We got some Mexican sodas and Hadley took pictures, then we headed out the Interstate to Ojai. The Datsun had air conditioning and it was cool and Hippie played Let It Bleed on the 8-track.
I started peaking with “Monkey Man” and was really tripping with “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Hippie was singing, “If you try sometimes,” he sang, and he thumped on the steering wheel. We were out of the smog and into the clear skies amidst the orange groves and the lemons, and then we passed the colonnaded boulevard, like a cloister with cars and restaurants. The moon was out and hanging there in the deep endless blue. We turned into a trailer park filled with palm trees and Airstreams. Hippie said the hills were the Topatopa mountains and I couldn’t stop saying it. Topatopa; it kept resounding in my head.
The trailer was his grandparents’ and his grandmother, whose hair was lavender, as was her sweater, was standing out in front, waving. She wore a paisley blouse beneath her seater; periwinkle, I’d call it. Her pants were the color of eggplant and her sandals were plum. His grandfather wore a golf shirt and a lemon-yellow sweater like Andy Williams. His hair was silver and full in a wavy pompadour. The Airstream too was silver, and it sat amongst the date palms and the coconut palms and the yucca. His grandmother brought out lemonade and we sat at a picnic table. Her name was Ceil and she told incomprehensible stories. Hippie would laugh or say, “I remember.”
Ceil had a big tin of buttons, thousands of them, and she was sorting through each, putting them on the table, making piles of red or piles of white, but one pile was simply colors that looked nice together. All the while I could say nothing, as if I were mute. Then his grandmother brought out a tray of sandwiches with the same keen eye as Hippie. “These are delicious,” I burst out. “Delicious.”
Hippie gave us each another tab of STP, my reluctance quelled by the necessity to swallow it before his grandmother returned, having stepped back into the trailer for more ice; his grandfather never sitting down, watering flowers, kicking stones into place.
I grew up watching PBS on channel 28. It didn’t come in well, but it was all good shows: Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and The Friendly Giant and Sesame Street. The reception would pucker in and out and go all horizontal, and the sound would catch and stop. Tuning into the STP was just like that, as if I needed to adjust the horizontal and the vertical, to mess with the bunny ears.
All I said was “Delicious,” but when we left, Hippie’s grandmother said, “It was a pleasure to talk with you,” and she put out her hand. Her hand was soft and fragile and cold to the touch. To Hadley she said, “And you’re just as cute as a button,” and then she laughed. Grandfather Hippie shook my hand, grasping it tightly, and we piled, I would imagine comically, into the Datsun.
We rode back down the boulevard through the colonnade and as we passed the Spanish belfry, there appeared up ahead a carnival. There was a merry-go-round and a Ferris wheel. It was the late afternoon and the lights were coming on. There was a funhouse with those crazy stairs and a big neon sign that said, “Lost City.” There was laughter, frightening laughter and there was music from a calliope.
We went on a ride. It was nothing but dark and frightening, and a thousand degrees. It was like Dante’s Inferno. There was Limbo and lust and anger. There was heresy and violence and fraud. We had hot dogs and sodas, so there was gluttony as well. We walked by the Lost City and a creature popped up as Hippie passed. He jumped and then he laughed, but his laugh was more of a bray. And when I looked over there was some odd transformation manifesting itself across his face and his long hair twitched and, suddenly, two long furry ears appeared, standing up straight. I looked over at Farmgirl and there was the same kind of wicked revelation. Between her pigtails there were the ears of a donkey and she brayed and her teeth were bucked and looked nothing like Hadley’s but for the space between them. I stopped and as she passed I noticed that she had sprouted a tail. It grew and it wagged and it swatted a fly. There was a wavy mirror and I caught a glance at myself. The three of us were donkeys, braying at one another like in Pinocchio, still dressed in jeans and t-shirts.
5. The Blue Fairy
After that, it wasn’t the same.
Without a lot of exaggeration, our adventures had us outfoxed, murderers attempted to hang us from a tree (I’ll spare you the details); there was that incident when the puppeteer tried to use us for firewood; and, of course, the occurrence at Donkey Island led to our being swallowed by a whale. The talking cricket, who I may have neglected to mention earlier, was well aware that naughty boys and girls remain who they are.
But he’s dead now.
I’m being pedantic, of course, but on our way home a tire blew out. The Datsun careened off Highway 101 through a barbed-wire fence and we hit a cow, an unfortunate bovine who didn’t budge while the Datsun 510 crumpled around it. Okay, it was a cow and not a whale, but you can grasp the allusion. Hippie broke his nose on the steering wheel. Farmgirl was fine, and so was I, until I got out of the car and sidled up against the barbed wire.
Then we met the Blue Fairy. I banged on the door of a cottage up the road and she came to the window. “No one,” she said, “lives in this house. Everyone is dead.”
“Won’t you at least open the door?”
“I am also dead.”
“Dead? What are you doing at the window then?”
“I am waiting for the coffin to take me away.”
That’s what I remember, at least. We stayed that night at a Holiday Inn.
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