Hippie Drum

HIPPIE DRUM

A novel by Jnana Hodson

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published by Jnana Hodson at Smashwords

copyright 2013 Jnana Hodson

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Contents

Chapter One: Striking Out in a Summer of Love

Chapter Two: Virgin Territory

Chapter Three: Millie, Without the Microscope

Chapter Four: Be It Ever So Humble

Chapter Five: Violetta, Verily

Chapter Six: Gigue & Reel in Ives’ Symphony of the Universe

Chapter Seven: Cockadoodle Doo

Chapter Eight: Sarabande

Chapter Nine: Naughty Noreen

Chapter Ten: Mountain Lights

Chapter Eleven: The Whole Scene Now

Chapter Twelve: Raquel, From the Queens

Chapter Thirteen: Phat!

Chapter Fourteen: Tara, Come Autumn

Chapter Fifteen: Movin’ On

Chapter Sixteen: Afterimage

About the Author

~*~

This book is for anyone who was there

or wanted to be.

Chapter One: Striking Out in a Summer of Love

They embark with a letter. Typically Dear John or Dear Jane or To Whom It May Concern. What the words try to say is forget me, forget us. The page, however, reads remember the good times we shared. What the looping handwriting avoids confessing is my feelings for you aren’t what I’d whispered. Even so, DL reads script that implores him, Keep in touch. I’ll always love you. Followed by good-bye. And then silence.

If they could only make it clean. Thanks for everything, have a good life. If it could only so easy, by a mutual agreement to end the play, on both parts – rather than leaving one actor alone on the stage as the audience walks out. The advice is given to relinquish the past, to whatever extent you may, and shift to the present, as much as you’re able. For those who have faith, the future takes care of itself. The body knows otherwise. Just what was she singing, anyway? What were the words? How did the melody flow? His ears still wanted her. His eyes still searched for her. His hands continually reached out to touch everything but what they had sought, her hair and skin.

DL, the freshly emancipated photographer from Iowa and then Indiana, hitched on eastward. However aimless his plan, he wound up dropping in, seemingly out of the blue, on a former colleague who’d at one time been both the Magician’s lover and Diz’s roommate. Anita was woven into his matrix far more than he realized, and far more of a guardian angel than an agnostic deserves. Through her, he also settled in with a throng of heathens on an almost communal homestead just shy of a hazy green summit. In this nest, his bruised soul might recover. From everything he could determine, this was the Yankee back porch of fabled New England; not the barnacle seaports of whaling renown or rotting piers stacked with lobster pots, but rather the forests and meadows over the ridge from outlying villages and decaying mill towns – the side with the mountains and steeples.

When he strolled into the newsroom and saw Nita at the desk, he had no way of knowing anything would follow. He thought he was simply dropping in to say hello before the next leg of wandering. She looked up, grinned, and then jumped up to hug him. What took you so long? And then, Where have you been?

So long? As if she were expecting him? DL wasn’t even sure where he’d been, other than out on the road wherever the rides would take him.

Didn’t you get my messages, that we have a photographer opening? Wouldn’t you know I thought you’d be a great candidate? But you’re not expecting to make lots of money right out of school, now, are you? Are you ready to build up a solid portfolio of real-life experience? Have you met my boss yet?

But I don’t have any samples with me. My resume's back in Daffodil.

And you think I don’t have tear-sheets of our work together? What do you take me for?

It wasn’t supposed to be this easy, landing a job right after college.

Then there was the matter of getting a set of wheels and somewhere to live. He arrived basically broke. How could he make a down payment or a security deposit? He looked in the classified ads. How can anybody afford to live here? he asked in shock.

Nita smiled diffidently. Don’t you think we have ways of surviving? Would you be interested in joining us at the farm, where we split the rent? How about cheap wheels? And she lifted the phone and dialed a number. Bob? It’s Nita, remember? Could you do me a favor? Do you have anything in the way of inexpensive, reliable transportation for a colleague we’ve just hired? Something we can arrange payment on? Should I send him on down?

As well as Have you seen my straw hat? before heading out of the office together.

And so he found himself unpacking much more than he'd anticipated, for a much longer stay in an unfamiliar landscape than he would have planned.

For starters, he also had a number of other details that needed to be addressed, including some from his past, pronto.

He could write: Dear Ned, Please ship my gear. I won’t be returning come fall. Landed a job with Nita. Remember her, from the paper? Will repay you promptly, first paycheck. Have a nice life and keep smiling. Your ace, DL.

Or he could dash back to the Midwest for the goods himself.

Either way, he’d have to phone his mother, collect, keeping any arguments short. He promised to write with particulars, someday. His first job out of college was where the rest of the family wasn’t. They refused to understand. Why try explaining?

Either way, Ned wrote frequently into autumn, keeping DL abreast of their mutual cronies from the dorm, the ones who converged at the dining hall table and late-night card games as well as in underage drinking and, for some, around the sacred hookah once a few had off-campus apartments. But DL was mistaken to believe he really knew any of them as much more than acquaintances or that they had shared such profound encounters or were so intent on pursuing mutual life objectives that their friendship, much less their correspondence, would continue over the years. Still, in many circles, one individual possesses an underlying concern for all the others and an ability to act as the group’s switchboard; in the dorm’s case, that was Ned. In one postscript, he mentioned that nobody had observed their sidekick Dickie in ages. Last seen wearing a Castro fatigue cap to keep hair out of his mouth when he brushed his teeth, Dickie had subsequently vanished. Ultimately, Ned heard something about hepatitis.

From the needle?

Naw, I don’t think he did that kind of garbage. Bad water, I guess. According to Ned, there was no cure without long rest.

Dickie tried to continue school but soon dropped out for a semester. Everything was just too much to handle.

Oh, well, you think it will keep him out of the armed forces? Nita wisecracked.

For that matter, what would DL do without her, the lanky redhead from Daffodil? So what if she graduated a year before him? They had worked together intensely on the school’s daily newspaper and survived all the upheavals. Covered protests, had a hand in the forced resignation of the university president, and brought a pervert to justice, despite the ramifications. Now she had not only secured DL his job at the local newspaper but a used Volkswagen and a room at the rundown, whimsically dubbed Ranchos Huevos as well.

And it was Nita who counseled him: When you’re away from your job, do you think you can put the cameras aside? Just for a while? Let yourself live for a change? Experience life, directly? What if you have enough shooting to do at work? Can you let that suffice? Perhaps she perceived that his art had become an addiction. Or maybe a shield or a mask he could hide behind, although she didn’t come right out and say it. Instead, she chose to let him discover that reality on his own, with a few gentle nudges, as needed. DL trusted her, even when she moved into realms he couldn’t fathom. Respected her professional work, especially. All along, she had been expected to start out at the New York Times or Des Moines Register or Louisville Courier-Journal, but that was before the big round of bloodletting and layoffs. Even so, there was a lot of muttering in the school newsroom when she took the job in a place no one had heard of. She could explain all she wanted that it really wasn’t that far from the Big City, or that in a small operation, one person could make a big difference and gain managerial experience quickly; what she couldn’t explain was how much, after all the frenetic events on campus, she needed a period of relative tranquility, of freedom from bureaucratic intrigues or even from her own intensely competitive nature. Time, especially, for investigating some deeply personal and spiritual matters. Maybe, like Dickie, they both needed long rest and recovery. What she asked of DL, in other words, was something she also pursued.

There were fresh introductions here – an entire college campus, for starters, plus the circus that kept popping up at the Ranch. All kinds of interesting people passed through town, too - artists, poets, musicians, gurus. And there were the stray locals who preserved bits of ancient wisdom and practices in the face of change. Each had something to offer, if you took time to watch and listen. Still, both Nita and DL were in flight from something. They were not yet in any pilgrimage they could see.

DL was too busy at the time to realize he was unintentionally shedding his comrades from the last four years. He had no way of knowing how important sharing a common space is to maintaining friendship, even if that space exists only during an annual reunion. The same would be true for his new domicile, despite its own color, as well as his next community. Moving on, they were all headed into different, sometimes mutually exclusive, circles. Not even Ned could override that.

At the moment, back in the Midwest, even flat out on his back, Dickie rarely expressed much, which kept both the FBI and CIA guessing. You had good reason to watch what you said on the telephone. Innocence was no defense. Your mail, too, was suspect. Maybe Dickie would keep the Feds from making a hop northeast, although Nita held little hope for that. They’re everywhere, she grumbled. She’d already been around too long as a reporter and had covered too many busts of one sort or another. If your hair was long or your blue jeans were blanched and patched, the Demopublicans knew your politics. Too many agendas conflicted. Everyone was, in some way, trying to avoid the obvious.

When Dickie recovered and was nearly broke, he enlisted in the Indiana State Police. He’d be as fine a trooper as any, or so Ned insisted. Their compatriot, the fiend, thus kept himself out of U.S. Army and its tour of ’Nam. With weirdness spilling over hills and prairie, Ned figured if anybody was going to be on their trail, it might as well be the likes of Dickie. Who could say?

Do you think the police were that desperate? Nita quipped in reply. Could you send us a photo of our officer in uniform?

Across the miles, DL tried to envision Ned, swirling another sip of tap water from his oversized brandy snifter and getting along comfortably – more so, actually, than DL, who was at heart an ascetic.

Instead of Dickie’s photo, however, Ned mailed newspaper clippings that divulged how another old matie had been busted. Given the alternative of prison or enlisting, he picked the U.S. Navy. Stoned out of his mind, his head between two full-blast loudspeakers, Del had yelled out Come in! when narcotics agents tapped at his door. Some people have all the luck. He was just downstairs from DL’s previous address. So much for the past. DL had come a long way from Iowa in such short time. What if he hadn’t gone away to college - gone east, in fact, to Indiana? He might have gone a lot further. As to Indochina.

In their farewell to Del, as the report went, Ned kept insisting Trooper Dickie had nothing to do with the drug bust.

Nita, however, wasn’t so certain. A job was, after all, a job.

Reading these letters, DL sensed he could have been any of the others, or all, if Fate had so fallen. Maybe if he’d had a different lover, especially.

~*~

DL was fortunate. He hadn’t come down with a debilitating illness or been busted or shipped overseas. He even had a job where he could finish his daily assignments and move on, leaving the work behind him at the end of his shift. Yet he was suffering, and getting free of that was his real task for now. That meant having to face up to the debris from his Diz disaster. To free himself from his swollen laceration and his continuing entanglement would require more than time. How could such a cherub have betrayed him? He, who had expected their upcoming marriage to jump to happily ever after, now saw only a dull blank horizon as the future. Forget her, his new circle advised – counsel that would prove nearly impossible, even to someone isolated on alien turf. Rather than forgetting, he needed to observe firsthand his own role in the deception. He needed as well to acknowledge his human yearning for physical touch, and the ways he kept confusing that with intimacy. If only he found purely social connections as fulfilling as Ned did, he would have fared much better, yet DL had to acknowledge he had always felt a hollowness even when he was at the center of such activity; for him, a beloved was essential for his own wholeness. For the present, to begin trusting again, he needed to plunge into some secluded lakes and chance overtures. He needed to circulate and then some. It was time for him to become a little birdie chipping its way out of its shell.

Chapter Two: Virgin Territory

As the new shooter on the staff, DL often faced a work schedule that was beastly. Some mornings, he opened the darkroom at 5 to mix fresh chemical solutions and then process rolls of film left from the night before or arriving by bus from outlying correspondents – all before he was sent out to cover traffic accidents, bad weather, breakfast speakers, and early school programs. Saturdays, on the other hand, he typically worked nights, especially once ballgames kicked in. And Fridays could swing either way.

And so it was not uncommon for DL to return from the office just about the time his band of new housemates began venturing out into the light. This time they shouted, Come on! We’re going to the lake!

He quickly changed out of his necktie and dress shoes. But when he pressed the crew for details, his questions were parried. He sensed this was no trip to the park, but something more clandestine. Someplace private, in fact, as in trespassing. But how could he say no? They’d been there and back, and he hadn’t. As he would see, this was nothing like anything he’d previously encountered. While he had been able to backpack and camp on his route to becoming an Eagle Scout in the Midwest, he’d not seen lakes of such clear black water rather than muddy. And none placed in such a rolling, lush setting.

As they pulled up in their pack of battered vehicles, Gooseberry Pond reflected the late afternoon sun, which was hanging just over the ridge behind their farmhouse two miles away. A dozen mossy vacation huts surrounded a cove in the far shore, a half-mile from their pocket beach. Even when nobody else was present, the Ranchers knew to steer clear of that section, having already seen their owners, a suspicious and broad-shouldered lot. On the near shoreline, though, sat a Bible camp. Somehow, an understanding had emerged that as long as the Ranchers weren’t destructive and didn’t interfere with camp programs, DL’s circle was free to swim. Maybe these fundamentalists were praying for the intruders’ salvation. What a trophy a whole hippie farm would be! They could, no doubt, anticipate heavenly rejoicing. What he found in their water was a baptism of another sort, and DL was soon performing a daily ritual of swimming before or after work and getting ever closer to nature’s rhythms. Maybe he was a pantheist at heart. Or maybe, in daring himself to swim across the lake and back, something of a Spartan. The spring-fed water was benumbing, for certain.

One sweltering afternoon when the Ranchers showed up, their places were already taken. A Sunday school picnic was in full swing. The men’s crewcuts suggested a stretch of civic duty venturing far from their farms and machine shops across the state line, and marching off with their Scriptures until honorable discharges had sent them home to their honeys, who now sunbathed and chattered in a swirl of yipping children. This was, after all, a picnic, complete with paper plates and watermelon rinds. Spit another seed, Sergeant Emerson!

Cautiously surveying the scene from a distance, the Ranchers deduced there was room enough for both groups. Should they? Three downcast missies, who had planned on swimming in their customary panties and T-shirts or bras, declared they’d be satisfied just to wade, and that pretty much settled the outcome. The tribe skirted the church assembly and, one by one, wafted into the shimmering water. Once he was in to his waist, DL dove and swam underwater out past the ropes, heading toward the floating raft. Most of the rest of his clan stayed with the dogs, close to the cars.

DL swirled up beside a colossal inner tube, hardly anticipating a bronzed seraph to emerge, flickering, above its glistening rim. Face to face with her inquisitive blue eyes and guileless smile, he gulped. They regarded each other in slow motion. Giggling, she dove away, resurfaced, slithered atop her black doughnut, and straddled its rounded rubber. Notwithstanding her sheltered background, she was clearly enjoying this flirtation. DL rolled over to float on his back. The sun, nearing its annual apogee, poured glorious light and warmth on his skin and hers. In this slightly guarded, anonymous setting, neither DL nor Wink, now treading nearby, appeared to be the lurid sinners she’d been warned against in long sermons. Indeed, the ambiguity she sensed between the Woodstock they embodied and her upright nurture felt confusing: which would she choose, when the time came? Maybe she would run off and become a hippie herself. Maybe she was nearly engaged, planning on a large family. Maybe she was inhabited by more demons than DL could imagine behind that golden façade. At the moment, she clearly appeared to enjoy the sensation of flying, as if she, too, were one of the fair weather cumulus clouds puffing and dissolving overhead - an appreciation she had in common with DL, who took freedom in the exercise of flying to the far shore and back. For now, suspended in the middle of everything, he was enthralled by her natural beauty, so seemingly pure and yet so seductive. He could wonder if he could capture this look if he photographed her or how she would appear at the moment of sexual climax. Instead, he was simply buoyant and speechless while she was angelic. Who knows how they would view one another fully clothed on the street. Whether she would come off as mousy and uptight, with large glasses and severe hair, or he would strike her as too skinny and ragged. Even so, she still had reason to dread the small-town prattle of her fellow believers who would keep her in line or, admitting failure, ostracize bitterly. Little did she know the ambiguities both DL and Wink were feeling. In fact, Wink’s mosquito of a wife, Irma, kept an uneasy watch from her perch on shore. DL, on the other hand, balanced the theological debate of an ethical agnostic and the prurient desires of unrequited passion - inflamed, in large extent, by his involuntary celibacy and romantic solitude since Diz’s split back in Indiana. Just who was the more naive or innocent one here, anyway?

Before a word could be exchanged, though, the stranger was called back to the fold. DL watched her swim the entire way back