Freeze Frames Read online

  When Nick comes whistling in, counting a wad of cash, John is finishing up for the day, writing test results in a stained spiral-back red notebook. He frowns a little, marking columns of numbers in his tiny handwriting. Shoulder-length hair curls round his neck and frames his face.

  “Would you shut up?”

  Nick stops whistling, waits until John shuts the notebook and slips it into a drawer.

  “Having a good day?” Nick says. “Happy, are we?”

  “Ah shut up. This is all okay, and it’s sure better than the university, but I dunno.” John pulls up a stool and perches on it. “There’s still something missing.”

  “You need a little excitement, man. There are all these cool chicks all over the Haight, and what do you do? Close yourself up in here in this damned lab. Live little, man. They’re right out there, and they all got The Pill.”

  “Better living through chemistry.”

  They look at each other and laugh.

  o~O~o

  The Wizards started life as a jug band by another name, and their name will doubtless change again when their style does, but at the moment they play rock and roll very well but prosaically. Four or five guys—the number varies from night to night—straggle into the ballroom and set up speakers and drums, unpack electric guitars and a Fender bass. At that magical invocation, “The band’s here,” young women appear, trooping downstairs to sit on the floor and watch, passing joints back and forth while they wonder if maybe the band will make it someday and if so, should they start sleeping with it now before the line forms. The core of the band, Jimmy G and Hog and Billy, the good-looking one, concentrate on their music at these rehearsals, but afterwards is another matter.

  Dr. Lucky and Nick sit as far as possible from the speakers. Even though his eardrums are young again, John finds the blare of electric music painful. Not far from them, a good distance from the other women, sits a chubby girl in tight jeans and a dirty red turtleneck. Her brown hair, too wavy, really, to be as long as it is, hangs in tendrils round her face. No one knows her name, but she lives in the house and cleans the upstairs kitchen and bathrooms for want of rent. In a brotherly way Hog looks out for her. Every night, round midnight, she takes the five dollars Hog gives her and goes out barefooted to buy doughnuts up on Stanyan Street and bring them back for the band. Once some guy tried to call her Sow, but the enormous Hog picked him up by the shirt and banged his head repeatedly against the wall until Jimmy G made him stop. The name did not stick.

  Tonight Nameless Girl has dropped a hit from John’s latest batch, to try it out at his request. She sits very silently now, smiling a little, watching many things that no one else can see. Every now and then, while the band plays “Turn on Your Love Light” over and over, trying to get the break just right, John turns to watch Nameless Girl and make sure that her breathing stays regular and her color, good. He prides himself on making clean drugs, not bummers that will send his clients off to the nearest all-night psychiatric intake. At one point the music stops to let the band squabble with the new rhythm guitarist they’re trying out. Nameless Girl turns her head and focuses her stare upon Nick.

  “Far out,” she says. “You don’t have an aura, man.”

  “Huh?” Nick says.

  “You don’t have an aura. Everyone else has auras. This is good stuff, Dr. Lucky. I can see everyone’s aura as clear as anything, ’cept for Nick. He doesn’t have one. Can’t be the acid. He just plain must not have one.”

  John laughs.

  “Well, shit,” Nick snarls. “Then don’t go looking at me, if I bug you so much.”

  “You don’t bug me, man. You just don’t have an aura.”

  When Nick growls like a dog, Nameless Girl stands up and moves back, but she continues to consider Nick with a remarkably focused stare. John notices Hog walking toward them. Somewhere inside his tangle of bushy black beard he seems to be frowning.

  “Cool it, Nick,” John whispers.

  “A poodle?” Nameless Girl says, then shrugs. “Weird.”

  She wanders off toward Hog, who smiles and escorts her to a seat among the other women. The band picks up their instruments again, the drummer settles in, the music starts. Nick sits stiffly, his face pale with rage.

  “What’s bugging you, man?” John has to shout over the music.

  “Nothing. Oh shut up!”

  John shrugs and gets up, stretching.

  “I’m going upstairs,” he bellows. “Too loud for me.”

  Nick says nothing, merely slouches against the wall and growls to himself.

  Weaving through the lounging girls, waving smoke away from his face, John gains the staircase and hurries up. The stairs debouch into the wide entrance hall; he pushes open the double doors and steps outside into twilight for fresh air. Although the shadows are gathering along the street, the sky above still shines pale blue. The unkempt trees in the garden rustle in the evening wind. From behind him he can hear the band, but mellowed by distance and a ceiling.

  Out on the sidewalk a girl strolls past. Tall, slender, with golden-blonde hair parted in the middle and falling straight to her waist, she wears jeans and a flowing shirt made of tie-dyed velvet, crushed, glimmering, all purple and blue and red in the streetlights, a barrage and flash of color as she strides by, silver highlights swirling round her sleeves.

  “Hey, baby,” John calls out. “Don’t be in such a hurry.”

  She slows down, glances his way with a grin, then walks on, crossing the street between parked cars. All at once Nick appears in a waft of smoke, the scent of marijuana drifting on the evening air. The porch creaks under his sudden weight.

  “Who’s that girl?” John says. “You know?”

  “The blonde? I’ve seen her, yeah. She’s got a friend who lives upstairs, one of those college girls.”

  “That’s the one I want. The blonde I mean.”

  “Maggie? You’re nuts, man. She is one tough chick. A dropout from State, and she’s studying karate now or something.”

  “I don’t give a shit about her educational career. She’s gorgeous.”

  “But she’s into Zen, man.”

  “Who cares?”

  Across the street Maggie has disappeared, but in his mind John can still see her smile. For a moment he finds it hard to breathe.

  “You got it bad,” Nick says. “Look, there’s all those girls downstairs who would love to spread their little legs for you.”

  “Don’t want them. Nick, you get that girl for me or the deal’s off.”

  Nick squalls, catlike this time.

  “I mean it,” John goes on. “And I want her now.”

  “Tough shit. I can’t work miracles. Out of my department.”

  “Oh yeah? Then—”

  “Give me a week.” Nick rolls his eyes upward and waves his hands in a hopeless little motion. “I’ll see what I can do, but it ain’t gonna be overnight.”

  o~O~o

  “They make my tits hurt, and I’m not going to take them. They’re just not natural.”

  “Maggie!”

  “I’m using a diaphragm.”

  “A diaphragm. Oh wow, far out—like hell. They’re not safe.”

  Maggie merely scowls for an answer. She and her best friend Rosie, a small and delicate woman with an amazing frizz of jet-black hair, are sitting on the mattress in Rosie’s room, once the embassy parlor, with its big bay window, a high ceiling decorated with stucco fruit round the central boss of the light fixture, and wood panelling, cracked vertically from years of dry air and neglect. Books—Rosie is a classics major at San Francisco State—lie spread like seawrack across the floor. On one wall pushpins hold up two Fillmore posters, an enlargement of a sepia photograph of Oscar Wilde as a young man, and a big print of a Renaissance engraving, where a pilgrim, his back to a rural landscape, sticks his head through a starry sky and sees the machinery, all gears and wheels, of the universe. The herbal scent of rope incense hangs in musty air.

  “Ah well,”
Maggie says at last. “I’m not sleeping with anyone right now anyway. So it doesn’t matter.”

  “Oh? How long is that gonna last?”

  “Maybe forever. I’m sick of men.”

  “Oh yeah sure.”

  “Well, I’m sick of crummy guys, anyway.”

  “Progress!” Rosie lays a dramatic hand on her chest. “Can my heart take this?”

  “Oh shut up. If I get involved with a guy again, he better have some class. That reminds me. I was walking by here last night, you know? And there was this guy standing out on the porch. Kind of tall, with a lot of curly brown hair, and pretty good looking, and he was wearing this cool shirt of some kind of Guatemalan hand-weaving. You know him?”

  “Dr. Lucky himself.” Rosie pauses for a groan. “Class, she says! The biggest dealer in the Haight, that’s what he is. Well, that’s not fair. He’s the chemist. It’s that Nick dude who does the dealing.”

  “What’s he like? Lucky, I mean, not Nick. I’ve met him, and he creeps me out.”

  “He never blinks, yeah. But Lucky was asking me about you, actually. Just this morning.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. He’s a nice enough guy, I guess, for a druggie. But he’s setting himself up, they both are, for a big bust, with the chances they take. I can’t believe they haven’t been busted already, they’re so damn open about it.”

  “But are they righteous dealers?”

  “Real righteous.” Rosie sounds as if she hates admitting it. “Fair prices and they give away stuff on the street, too, like at the park concerts. But that’s what I mean. The pigs aren’t blind.”

  “How come you still live here, then?”

  “Inertia, what else? But I’m thinking of moving. Some of the hookers upstairs are shooting smack, and I don’t want to come home one night and find my stereo gone.” Rosie cocks one eyebrow. “Maybe we could get a place together?”

  “That sounds cool, yeah. I’m getting kind of sick of where I’m living.”

  o~O~o

  Where Maggie lives is one narrow room in a railroad flat over on Waller Street. She owns one mattress, neatly made up with blankets and a huge American flag for a bedspread, one orange-crate of books, mostly about Japanese religion, one duffel bag with four changes of clothing, a pair of sandals and a pair of boots, two towels, and a plastic bucket holding soap, shampoo, a washcloth, and other such things. The bag and the bucket go into the closet, the orange crate stands at the head of the bed. The walls are bare.

  “Not a lot of trippy hippie clutter, is there?” Nick remarks. “Cool. Some of these chicks are so messy it makes me sick.”

  “Yeah, well.” John stands in the doorway and looks round. His heart is pounding so hard, just from seeing her room, that he decides he’d better sit on the floor. “Jeez, I never felt like this before. Not with my wife, that’s for sure.”

  Nick makes a sour face and opens the closet door with one hand. In the other he’s carrying a wooden cigar box.

  “Well,” he says doubtfully. “I guess I’ll just stick it in here. Things aren’t exactly the way they used to be, huh?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing. You sure you don’t want to leave a note?”

  “Nah, let her guess. Where’d you get that necklace, anyway?”

  “Around.” Nick lays the cigar box on the floor next to the bucket. “Well, that’ll have to do, huh? Come on, Lothario. If you want her to guess, you better be gone when she gets back.”

  o~O~o

  Maggie finds the box late that night when she puts her boots away. As she picks it up, she’s thinking that one of her crummy roommates has left his stash in her closet for safekeeping and without having the decency to ask her, either. Idly she flips it open and stares for a long moment at a silver necklace, Navajo Indian work, a length of silver beads alternated with tiny silver squash blossoms. In the middle hangs a silver crescent set with an enormous chunk of turquoise. Maggie whistles under her breath, drops the box, and holds the necklace up to catch the dim light from an overhead bulb.

  “That is really cool,” she says aloud.

  On a whim she takes it down the hall to the communal bathroom and puts it on in front of the cracked mirror over the sink. It’s a heavy piece, but it feels snug and right, lying over her collarbone, the crescent hanging just between her breasts. She turns this way and that way, smiling at her reflection, suddenly so grand with silver to set off her dappled blue and green T-shirt. She wears the necklace back to her room, then returns it to the box. It must have come from Dr. Lucky, she decides, since he’s the only man she knows with the kind of money to buy this kind of gift for a girl.

  The question is, should she keep it?

  o~O~o

  “I can’t believe it,” Nick howls. “I fucking cannot believe it, man! She gave the damn thing to the Zen Center.”

  “She what?” John swivels round on his lab chair. “The necklace, you mean?”

  “Yeah, the fucking necklace, man! She gave it to Suzuki Roshi down at the Zen Center. Sell it for the poor, she says. And of course the old man took it, the sanctimonious little bastard.”

  “Can’t blame him, I guess.”

  “I can too!” Nick begins pacing back and forth. “This whole thing is getting weird.”

  “It’s going to get weirder, man, if you can’t deliver. You’ve got four days left.”

  Yet later that afternoon John himself finds Maggie, as he’s walking down Page on his way to the Panhandle, that narrow strip of park, mostly battered grass and trees, that runs between Oak and Fell streets. The Jefferson Airplane are giving a free concert on a stage improvised from old lumber and a pickup truck, driven up next to a swing set and a slide. The crowd mills round and spills down the grassy strip as the band struggles to get their equipment running on the truck’s generator. Every now and then a guitar squeals; the crowd cheers; the power dies again to a long groan from the would-be audience.

  Way off to one side, Maggie is standing on a big cube of concrete installed by the city to replace vulnerable park benches. With her hands in her back pockets she watches the band work, smiles a little. Over a calico patchwork shirt she wears a torn and peeling black leather jacket. When she shakes her head, her hair ripples round her hips. With the money I’ve got now, I could dress her like a queen. As he walks over he feels himself turn first shivery cold, then so hot he’s sure he must be blushing scarlet. She hears him coming, turns round and smiles down at him.

  “Hi,” she says. “Dr. Lucky, I presume.”

  “Hi yourself. Get any presents lately?”

  “So it was you, huh? Who gave me the necklace, I mean.”

  “Yeah. Nick told me you gave it away. Why?”

  “It pays to travel light, that’s all.”

  John can think of absolutely nothing to say to that. Laughing, she jumps downs with a shake and ripple of her hair.

  “You like to dance?” she says.

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Oh come on, man. Anyone can dance. It’s not like the foxtrot anymore, you know.”

  Although John doesn’t know, he soon finds out, when the band gets the music under way. First he learns to dance, then discovers he likes to dance, especially here in the open air in the cool of a foggy day, in the middle of a crowd of people who are too busy dancing to care what he looks like. The music pounds on and on, the dancing ebbs and flows, the crowd changes like a wave as some drop out to catch their breath and others sway into their places.

  Maggie never agrees to sit one out; she pauses briefly between songs, panting for breath, running both hands through her sweaty hair, then swirling into dance the moment the music begins again. Every now and then John is forced to rest, forced to watch her dancing with some other man, someone she doesn’t even know, just a man the music brings her. Partners change mindlessly; many people dance alone. As the fog grows thicker, colder, the light turns silver and leaches the shadows away until he feels as if they are d
ancing in a movie, an old movie, in black and white.

  Sirens cut through the music, which stops. The police arrive in squad cars and on motorcycles, parking their vehicles randomly out in the street and sprinting for the stage with batons at the ready. The crowd freezes, parts only reluctantly when the officers insist, moves back only when ordered. Bad cop: the neighbors have complained, the band has no permit. Good cop: but there’s no problem, no one’s gonna get arrested, if only the band stops now, if only the crowd disperses. Things hover on the edge of ugliness. John grabs Maggie’s hand and pulls her back, eases her away to the fringe of the crowd and relative safety. The band confers, surrenders.

  “The show’s over, folks. Maybe another day.”

  Good cop grins. Bad cop scowls. The crowd breaks up, muttering, streaming away in all directions, shaking its collective head in disbelief, that someone would complain about free music. John and Maggie start walking across the Panhandle, heading west and uphill to Haight. She allows her hand to remain in his.

  “Want some coffee?” John says. “Or we could get something to eat.”

  She considers, drops his hand, stops walking to consider him from a few steps’ distance. His mouth turns as dry as chalk as he waits.

  “Sorry, but can I have a raincheck?” Maggie turns to him with a smile that clutches his heart. “I’ve got to get to the dojo by five. What about tomorrow?”

  “Sure. Let’s go out to dinner and a flick.”

  o~O~o

  These days, when Romance (in the older meaning of that term) has turned into something called a “sex scene,” what is there to say? Maggie and John take the N streetcar all the way out Judah to the beach and the Surf Theater, where they watch an Alain Resnais movie. They walk for a few minutes beside an ocean far too foggy and cold to be picturesque, then take the streetcar back to her apartment house. When she invites him into her room to talk, they sit down on the edge of the bed. He kisses her, she responds, much later they fall asleep.