The Butterfly Kid

21

“MICHAEL,” I said, taking care not to let the others hear me, “Michael, I’m worried.”

“Swell.” He was riding the controls like a cowpoke on a bronco, strenuously, almost fighting them. The two steering levers moved like willful live things trying to escape him. Mike struggled with them grimly. Sweat, a rare sight, stood in beads on his upper lip and brow, ready to pour down his face at any moment.

Groovy, said my worrying machine. Mike’s having trouble keeping the bus under control. We’re in trouble. Hell, we’re doomed.

“What are you worried about?” He didn’t look at me when he spoke — a bad sign.

“What’s wrong with the bus?” I asked, neatly putting first things first.

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Running like a… like a Bus. What makes you think there’s something wrong with the bus?” He didn’t sound concerned, but I was not deceived.

“Why do you have to fight so hard to keep it under control? What’s wrong with it? C’mon, tell Uncle Chester.”

“Fight?” Now he looked at me: one of his prime puzzled looks. Then, “Oh. I’m not fighting. Look.”

He relaxed. The steering levers stopped having a life of their own. The bus continued to ride as smoothly as before. Oh yeah?

“Explain?” I said unpleasantly,

“I was just playing astronaut.” He had the grace to grin sheepishly. “You know, landing the capsule and all that”

“Playing astronaut.”

“I didn’t realize it’d bother you. Sorry.”

“Great.”

“That what had you worried?”

“In part. Look…” I itemized our fighting crew’s deficiencies in some poetic detail, devoting lots of extra fine rhetoric to the untrustworthiness of Gary the Frog. He listened to it all as politely as he could — intent sufficing for the deed — but devoted most of his attention to driving. We were in the midst of the usual traffic jam at 36th Street, and the bus was trying to mount the car ahead of us. This would’ve been impolitic. It was another police car. Our bus had amazingly strong preferences.

When I was finished, Michael said, “Are you finished?” and I said I was.

“Swell. Now stop worrying.” I started to object, but he went on. “Believe me,” he said with galling patience, “I understand what you’re worried about. I know why you’re worried. But there’s nothing to worry about, honestly. I’ve got it all figured out, really I do, and it doesn’t much matter whether they can fight or not. As soon as we get out of this damn traffic I’ll explain it to you, okay?”

I was dubious and said so.

“Why don’t you go back and play your harpsichord?” he shrugged me off. “And don’t worry about it.”

There’s not much can be done with Michael when he acts like that, so, trying hard not to worry, I shuffled to the back of the bus and sat down at my little solid state harpsichord.

En route, I collected another worry. We had nothing to fight with. No weapons. The closest thing to a weapon that we had, in fact, was my briefcase, which might be good to swing in a crowd but wasn’t likely to make much of an impression on a hard-shelled blue lobster. But Mike had probably taken the lack of weapons into account, too. I carefully worried as little as I could and tried to play The Carman’s Whistle.

(The trouble with letting Michael manage things is that three times out of five he takes everything into account, and two times out of five he doesn’t, and there’s no way to tell which he’s done this time until things start to hit the fan. When his managing works, it works very very well, but when it doesn’t, you notice. Boy, do you notice!)

The Carman’s Whistle attracted Stu, Pat, and Kevin. They filtered back to the practice area, grabbed their axes, and wailed. We segued instantly into “Songwind”, an incomprehensibly poetic, hyperromantic, hard-driving modal rock tune we were hoping to hit the charts with.

I played bass with my left hand and raga riffs with my right, Stu beat out something like a demented 16-stroke tala, Pat played poignant lead lines based on the Kyrie cum Jubilo, Kevin’s 12-string provided architectural solidity, I forgot to worry, and Sativa came back to sing.

We were deliberately being influenced by the I Ching and Subud, a combination we thought singularly hip at the time.

By the end of the first verse, between 38th and 39th Streets, everyone but Mike was sitting cross-legged in a large semicircle around the band. Little Micky was muttering, “Oh wow! Dig it, baby! Wow! Oh, dig that, man!” under his breath as he usually did. Sean was watching Pat’s left hand like a rabbit watching a snake. Lots of people were smiling and nodding in time, and Gary the Frog was lighting up a joint.

I thought next to nothing of this at the time. It didn’t seem at all odd or out of place. People are always lighting joints at band rehearsals. I remember being a bit surprised that Gary the Frog had his own grass for a change, but I didn’t think twice about the grass itself, and when the joint came by me, I took a good hearty toke before swinging into the second verse.

Mike had somehow managed to get us to Broadway and 42nd, Times very own Square. It was early evening, clear, warm, and summer, so the Square was packed past endurance with all manner of machines and funny-looking people, and traffic was moving by appointment only and as seldom as the laws of chance allowed. And there we were, motionless and grooving, stuck in the very middle of it all.

We attracted a crowd instantly. Even when it’s empty, the Tripsmobile gets a lot of staring at and gawking. With the band on board and playing, we were a free show, a very swinging free show, and everyone who could hear us — almost everyone — had suddenly nothing on his mind but getting close enough to see us, too.

And so the crowd gathered. I didn’t mind. I like crowds — especially when I’m playing. I’ve often said that playing without an audience is just a form of aural masturbation. So I smiled at the people outside and they smiled back at me, they waved at me and I nodded at them, and I felt in general absolutely great.

Then somebody passed me the joint.

Once again my poor mind boggled under the strain. (Mind boggling was becoming a habit with me.) There in my right hand was an incredibly illegal marijuana cigarette. There, just a few feet away, were tens of thousands of strangers and countless cops — witnesses! — who had watched that criminal cigarette pass from hand to hand around the bus, to end up in my very own newly moist and lightly trembling paw. This was clearly not a healthy situation.

I knew better than to stop playing, or do anything else that might call outside attention to the seven-year sentence I had in my hand. Instead, I palmed the joint — burning my palm in the process — and staggered into the least sincere third verse I’ve ever played.

We were still there. All those people were still there. The smoldering joint was still in my right hand. There didn’t seem to be any way to get rid of the damned thing. If I dropped it, people would notice. If I just put it down on the top of my harpsichord, oh so very casually, it would be aggressively visible for miles around. I didn’t have any pockets loose enough to get into in the scant free time “Songwind” allowed my right hand. So I took the standard, traditional out — something I’d never had occasion to do before — and, with a gesture faster than snake tongues, I popped the joint into my mouth.

It was still burning. So was I, but I didn’t dare show it. I extinguished the joint with saliva and undertook to swallow it, while the first verse reprise rolled past without my hearing it.

It seems that cigarettes aren’t all that easy to swallow, not even little skinny marijuana cigarettes. It wouldn’t go down whole, wouldn’t dream of it, so I soaked it and chewed at it and broke it up fine. But a mouthful of loose pot isn’t a snap to swallow, either. The stuff has — or this stuff had — the texture of rough sand, gritty and hard, with tiny sharp edges. No amount of saliva soaking seemed to soften it perceptibly, and my throat was reluctant to have anything to do with it, but by the time we’d finished “Songwind,” I’d managed to get the stuff down and was able, aside from a convulsive racking cough, to breathe freely once again.

And then I saw Gary the incredible Frog getting ready to light yet another joint! He picked the damnedest times to be affluent.

“Gary,” I said gently, “please put that away.”

“Had enough?”

He was ready to say more, but I didn’t let him. “I never have enough,” I said, still gently, “but put that thing away just the same.”

He stared at me as though I’d lost my entire mind, and made no move to put away the joint. By then he was the only person there who hadn’t noticed what was happening. The silence of horror had frozen every tongue but his.

“If you don’t want no more, that’s cool,” he gibbered, affronted, “but I want some more, if you don’t mind.”

I remained gentle. “Look around,” I invited. He did, reluctantly. He looked around twice, in fact. At last it began, slowly, to dawn on him. His jaw dropped with an audible click.

“Now then,” still very gently, “put that goddamn thing away before I shove my boot down your stupid throat. Understand?”

He panicked, of course, but he put the joint away. I didn’t think his panic hurt us much. Gary the Frog’s the kind of creep whose panics go unnoticed.

Then everybody started breathing. “Wow!” they all said, and went on talking. It sounded like lunchtime at your local junior high. I scurried to the front of the bus to relate the gory incident to Mike.

I needn’t have bothered. He was having gory incidents of his own.