The Butterfly Kid

2

CONTACT HIGH!

We heard those words at least ten times before Bonnie-Sue, the day girl, brought our coffee. Ever since last May, when an anonymous philanthropist had distributed magic mushrooms free to everyone in the Village who’d accept them, imposing on Lower Manhattan a whole week of psychedelic fun and chaos… ever since then, contact high had been the standard explanation for all impossibilities, and the impossible had lately grown quite common in the Village.

Not that this explained very much. A contact high was only the subjective response to someone else’s real high, and we had no proof that there actually was such a thing. No matter. We were able to make do with precious little explanation in those days.

“…and then man (dig it) this cat starts whistlin’ Bach, man! Like, I’m thinkin’, ‘da Di — pa-ba Diddilly…’ you dig? An’ this cat’s inside my Head, man! An’ he’s got this like Orchestra! Oh WoW!” Little Micky was on the customary verge of hysteria.

“Contact high,” M. T. Bear and I chanted in jagged unison, and Little Micky donned his shades and said Oh WoW again and split. We’d met him at the door.

The Garden of Eden was a long, dark, ostentatiously air-conditioned cave with black walls, and our group’s table was the big round one halfway to the rear. We greeted Joe at the cash register (“Hey, you know what? Guess who had one of them contact highs last night. Me! Yeah, me. Honest to God! I musta been outta my skull: givin’ everybody free coffee onna house! Nin’y t’ree dollars ’n’ change, Christ!”) and journeyed tableward from greeting to greeting, eavesdropping here and there en route (“I had the nicest contact high last night and I don’t even know who it was!”), moving with all the cozy pomp of celebrities in a gathering of celebrities. The Garden of Eden, as a Gestalt, treated everyone like a celebrity that year, which might as well explain its popularity. The trip from door to table was wearying but wondrously flattering, a potent drug on which, we’d neither of us admit to being hooked.

“I’m getting tired of this place,” Michael muttered as we sat down.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Same old faces, same old talk.” We were lying.

We were the first members of our circle there that morning, so Mike pulled a paperback mystery out of his right hip pocket, I took a spiral-bound notebook out of my briefcase, and we settled down to kill a little time. Neither of us mentioned butterflies.

All around us The Garden of Eden hummed like any garden. Since the place had no entertainment and was located in the throbbing left ventricle of the Village’s entertainment district, most of the patrons were entertainers and such — rock-n-rollies, superannuated folkniks, assorted groupies, plus a smattering of teenyboppers (teen-age rock fanatics) who managed to sneak in past Joe’s cerebean glower. This made for liveliness, in a superhip and nervous sort of way. Geetar cases littered the aisle like a herd of leatherette dinosaurs, and the raucous Kallikak box was OD’d on all kinds of electrified git-fiddle music. Almost every regular Gardener had at least one record on the box, but the unwritten rule against playing one’s own records kept The Garden relatively bearable.

“Hello there.”

Ah. That oddly bassoon-like sound came from Andrew Blake, one of our group’s more shining lights, who would normally spend the whole afternoon explaining that he could only stay a few minutes because he had a deadline coming up (professional writer of paperback dirties) and besides he just couldn’t take Saturday in the Village anymore. So Mike said Hi and I said Howdy and Andy sat down.

“I’m beginning to think,” he claimed, “that the whole damned world is just somebody else’s contact high.”

“In the beginning,” I intoned, “God created the heavens and the earth.”

“In July?” Mike said, referring mainly to Andy’s habitual black suit and gold brocade vest.

To Mike: “It matches my beard.” To me: “Sure, and the earth was without form, and void. Oh wow!” Then back to Mike: “And why not? The whole world’s air-conditioned now.”

“Summer, winter,” shrug, “I never used to catch colds. I was more the humiliating-accident type. You know, whenever all the snow decided to slide off some roof, I was always the kid it was waiting to land on. I was sixteen before I learned that zippers aren’t supposed to gape open when girls are watching. It was like living in a comic strip, sort of, but at least I never caught colds. Now look!”

Mike: “So what else is new?”

“Ninety-five outside and sixty-five in here. If I don’t wear a suit, bubie, I’m dead.” He sounded like a melancholy woodwind.

Meanwhile, a small Black-Haired Chick I’d been noticing around lately was sitting by herself across the aisle and staring at us. With her unfashionably healthy face and lorn waif eyes, she looked like a kid outside a toyshop. A collector of sorts, I decided, checking to make sure I had all my sorts about me.

Just now she was watching us with what looked to be pure reverence, perhaps. Most likely she’d just found out who we were — you know, real live authors she’d almost read books by, and I a long-haired minor rock-n-roll celebrity as well.

I wasn’t alone in noticing the chick, but then, I never am.

Mike said, “That makes sense.” Though he was ostensibly talking to Andy, he was using his invitation-to-overhear tone for the chick’s benefit. “You hang out here to beat the heat, so you have to wear a suit to keep from freezing. Sure. Tell me more.”

“What can I tell you?” Blake performed his famous Yiddish shrug. “So I’m without form, and void.” His open-letter voice was now in operation. The Black-Haired Chick was getting the full treatment.

I refused to participate in this foolish charade. I was a working entertainer, among other things, onstage every night. I’d be damned, so to speak, if I was going to stage a private showing for his hero-worshiping adolescent matriarch, this antique teenybopper who was clearly all of seventeen. Nay, sir, not I.

“Not quite,” I stated firmly and sonorously. “What it is, Andy, is that Contact High routine again.” Blake groaned and the chick leaned eagerly toward us. “And darkness,” I explained, “was upon the face of the waters.” I sat back, smiling proudly.

While Andy’s face was arranging its well-known That’s-It! grin, Mike chuckled in quick appreciation of the joke, and the chick looked vaguely puzzled. Frankly, I agreed with the chick. I didn’t know what was funny about it either, only that Mike would surely laugh and Andy would certainly explain, giving the chick a clear choice among Mike the Clever, Andrew the Understanding, and Chester the Profound Humorist. It’s nice to have friends.

“That’s it!” Grinning, Blake clenched his right fist in front of its shoulder and stuck the index finger out at shirt-pocket level to emphasize the point — a gesture I felt to be unfairly phallic and subliminal. “Of course. This is all somebody else’s hallucination and,” he paused to let the understanding index finger take effect, “I keep stumbling in the darkness.”

I was disappointed — he generally does much better by me — but the chick seemed satisfied, and yes, that outthrust finger business was decidedly unfair.

Ranting on, Andy said, “I just wish to God whoever’s running this show would move on to the next verse.”

Whereupon all three of us declaimed in loud, clear unison, “And God said, ‘Let there be light!’ ”

By now, of course, everyone was staring at us. That’s what they were supposed to do, and they always did it. Once you’ve been famous in the Village, no other fame can wholly satisfy you. The chick looked sinfully idolatrous. A few trained cynics near the door applauded. Then everyone said OH!, for Behold, there was light!

The Garden of Eden was a sudden deep pit of silence, and Andrew Blake, renowned author of Love Pusher, Virgin for Eight Hours (“…enthralling reexamination of progressive education…” Appaloosa Post-Chronicle), and Sex, Incorporated, good old Andy, sat across the table from me swathed head to sole in what could only be called a halo.

It was baby blue and it pulsed.

It was appalled. I remember thinking that somebody had pulled a monumentally unfair trick, and even wondering to whom it was unfair, during that long, frozen stillness; but then there was an unusually sincere scream and Little Micky, who’d come back, left the coffeehouse again, this time through the front window, and ran noisily off toward the East Side. It was a lovely exit, and I was irrationally glad he’d had the opportunity to make it.

Blake looked undecided, as though he and I were maybe thinking the same thing. Saint Andrew the Pornographer? Mike looked heavily put upon. I’ve no idea how I looked, and wouldn’t care to know, but the Black-Haired Chick was smiling like Christmas all year long.

“Pardon me,” Saint Andrew bleated with grave courtesy as he rose slowly to his feet. “I feel, ah, unwell. I think I will go Home now. Thank you. Yes?”

What was there to say? Mike nodded, I gawked, and Good Saint Andy walked slowly toward the door, his path made perfectly visible by halo shine. He looked like a dignified, contemplative, thickly bearded will-o’-the-wisp (but he cast fuzzy violet shadows, alas), and everyone he passed shrank from contact with the pale blue-white light he shed. Joe even let him leave without paying his check, an event almost as unprecedented as the halo itself.

Other than Andy, nobody moved but the Black-Haired Chick. She followed him at three yards’ careful distance through The Garden of Eden and out to the street.

For a long time after they were gone, the unnatural silence did not break.

As soon as I could, I asked Mike, “Contact High?”

“I… ah, I… I think the butterflies were prettier.”