Doctor Who_ Wonderland - Mark Chadbourn [5]
All the tables were full. Beards, long hair, tie-dye, camouflage, denim, beads, bangles, smoke, voices filled with passion, hope, politics, freedom. It was a blast, the Haight in essence, everything that I valued. The Magic Mouse hailed me quietly from the other side of the cafe, his face as doleful as ever, the familiar pile of unsold polemical magazines on the table in front of him. Idaho George sat with a bowl of rice, the fork moving back and forth from his mouth so slowly he must have been on geological time.
'I can't do this, man,' he muttered as I passed. 'I've been eating this for three days now and it never gets any less.'
Once we'd found a free table and Ben had got the coffee, I began to feel safe and relaxed among my own.
'Where are you living?' Polly asked, concerned.
'A squat, over on Oak. You can see the Panhandle from my window. It's easy to find a piece of floor to put your head. Round here, everybody helps everybody else.' I sipped the coffee, enjoying the warmth on my hands. The night had brought a chill to the air. 'That's why I got so worried about Denny. It's like he just disappeared.'
Polly asked for Denny's picture again and examined it closely. 'He looks lovely.'
'He is. We're soul-mates.'
'I don't know how to put this,' Ben began hesitantly, 'but you know how blokes are –'
My smile silenced him; it said more than words. 'Let me tell you about Denny. When my folks split up, I hit the road. The way I saw it, if you want to be a poet you have to get experience ... of people ... all the world has to offer. Besides, there wasn't anything for me back at home. Things hadn't been right for a while. It felt like my parents were dying a little every day.' I tried to sound detached, grown-up, but the memories were still raw. When you've had a happy childhood, idyllic even, and then everything falls apart, it's like nearly getting hit by a bus. You stand in the middle of the road, thinking what happened?, and spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder.
'I met Denny in a small town near Amarillo. A bunch of the local rednecks came out of a bar one night and set on this long-haired kid trying to bum small change outside. He hadn't done anything wrong; they just picked on him because he was different. And you could tell from the way the rednecks were acting, they wouldn't stop until he was all messed up. I was on the other side of the road, on my way to the bus station. I dropped my bag, ran over, and started trying to pull those drunks off. One turned and hit me in the face hard – I had a black eye for days. I thought they'd stop when they saw I was a girl. Only they didn't see a girl ... just another hippie.
'All I remember was feeling like someone had set off a bomb in my head. My nose and lip were bleeding ... And then Denny was there. He's a big guy, a football player. He took two of them straight out, and then managed to get me and the other guy away before the rednecks could come back at us.' I took the picture back from Polly and traced around the outline of his smiling face, trying to remember what it was like to touch his skin. 'Those guys were savages. Denny could have been killed. He knew that, but he didn't think twice about it.'
The beat poet finished his background drone and somebody I couldn't see started playing the bongos. It sounded like a heartbeat, growing faster.
'Denny and I got out of that place on the same bus. We talked right through the night ... about music, and books and politics and life. And about President Kennedy, and what his death meant to both of us ... what it meant to the country. But you're English ... you wouldn't know about that. What I'm trying to say is, Denny and I, we're the same. Two hearts ... forever. I know him inside out, and he knows me.' I couldn't stop my eyes filling with tears. 'It would have been easy for him to find somewhere for us here. And he would have contacted me the moment he did. And I haven't heard a thing.'
The bongo player became more frenetic.