Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [39]
From the way his face looked, I thought he was going ballistic on me. But when he finally spoke, his voice was melancholic. “We’re the fucking freaks now. We’re the surviving core, that’s what you’ll be looking at tonight.” He slackened his grip, and I eased my body closer to the passenger-side door. “We created the Age, and we created the Scene. We created all of it, flower power, acid, free speech, rock, protest … Leary and Kesey and Brautigan, they got it from us.”
I got the gist. All of them should have died thirty years before. They had friends who had, others who’d changed their lives and moved into the Establishment. Like Jess, like Ham, like Fred. Even old Bio-Mommy.
“We’re just like the Nam vets.” Ham sighed. “A lot of casualties, even more fucked-up survivors. And quite a few traitors.” He brightened. “We came closer to destroying this nation than any group at any time in history. And we end up the Rodney Dangerfield generation.”
He pulled into a parking lot and prepaid the attendant. We walked into Vito’s in that odd, ambivalent mood.
Inside the club the lights were kept so low that it took me a few minutes to make out faces. He slow-guided me around crowded tables. People caught his eye and shouted his name. We stopped and chatted. “Aren’t you going to introduce her, Ham?” some of them kidded. “At your own risk,” Ham kidded back. “My friend Devi.”
Vito’s had a small dance floor packed with serious dancers, mostly Cuban. Ham was big on salsa music. My SUNY marketing degree didn’t come in handy for telling mambo from bolero from tango from samba from salsa, and doing the macarena didn’t count with Ham.
Given my guide, everyone assumed I belonged. They also assumed I’d come to California from somewhere more fascinating. All of a sudden Brazilians led off speaking to me in Portuguese, Zydecos in Creole, Mexicans in Spanish. The whole world had gone into my making, wasn’t that Fred’s complaint? The whole world was mine to claim. I shut my eyes for a moment as I floated through the club on Ham’s arm. If I squeezed my eyelids harder, kept squeezing, I was sure I’d start speaking the language I’d shared with Sister Madeleine.
“You okay?” Ham whispered. “We won’t stay long.”
His lonely-man entourage swelled as we made our way to the booth that Jess DuPree was holding. She waved, all biceps, no flab. Her friends waved. Fred Pointer looked up, didn’t wave. Of course he’d know Jess; everyone was in the loop except me. Fred acted as though we were meeting for the first time, a good PI trick. The game seemed harmless, so I played along. We spilled into adjoining booths, took over and joined tables. Ham reigned, king of lounge lizards.
Ham’s groupies were mostly single-again thirtysome-things. Only two of his women friends—Jess and a bony hat-wearer with two nose rings—were the right age to interest me. The Hat-Wearer shot me bitter, brooding looks, but didn’t speak to me. She wasn’t speaking to anyone. The only communicating she did was to press up real close to Ham and tap his arm whenever she wanted another drink.
I answered the routine questions. Ham worked the booth. “How do you like our Bay Area?” “Do you kids still come to the Haight?” “Has someone taken you wine tasting through Napa?” I kept my deflectors up. “Gee, I don’t know!” “Oh, wine goes to my head!”
Jess busted the routine with her “Devi, where are you from?”
“Upstate New York.”
“I mean, where are you really from?”
I knew, but played dumb. “From Schenectady. Up near Albany.”
“You know what I really mean, Devi. Come on, where are you from?”
“Some toxic dump. I’m a radioactive geek, can’t you tell.”
Ham stopped our sparring. “That’s how I’d describe Schenectady too. Anyone aching to salsa?”
“Vámonos!” Jess laughed. She plucked the Hat-Wearer’s hand off Ham’s arm, and led him away.
I caught Fred’s wince as Jess and Ham hit the dance floor.
Until I watched Jess move on that tiny floor, I hadn’t figured salsa for a courtship dance. Retreat and pursuit. Promise and withhold. All longing and heartache. Ecstasy without messy consummation.