she read Billboard to the accompaniment of moving lips. When I walked in, she looked up in amazement, as if I were the first person she'd seen all year.
'Dr. Alex Delaware here to see Mr. Oberheim.'
'Oka-ay.' She put down the magazine, dragged herself upright, and walked a few weary steps to the office. Opening the door without knocking, she shouted in:
'Roily, some guy named Alex to see you.'
There was a mumbled reply, and she crooked her thumb toward the office and said, 'G'wan.'
The back room was small and dark and windowless, textured umber walls, an oak floor, the sole furniture half a dozen tie-dyed throw pillows. Oberheim squatted yoga-style on one of them, hands on his knees, smoking a conical clove cigarette. A single gold record hung on the wall over his head, creating a weird halo effect. The rest of the decor
was more psychedelic posters, a goatskin rug, and a large hookah that filled one corner. Bracket shelves held stacks of LPs and a state-of-the-art stereo system. A scarred Fender bass lay flat on the rug.
'Mr. Oberheim, I'm Alex Delaware.'
'Rolly O.' He motioned toward the floor. 'Rest.'
I squatted down across from him.
'Smoke?'
'No, thanks.'
He inhaled deeply on the cigarette and held the smoke in. What finally emerged was a thin, bitter stream that shimmered and made his face seem gelatinous before dissolving.
The face itself wasn't much to look at: coarse, jowly, and open-pored, with small, downturned eyes flanking a rosy bulb of a nose. His chin was mottled with scar tissue, the mouth above it concealed under a drooping brush of grey moustache. He was bald as an egg, except for a thin greying fringe that ran from temple to shouldertop. He wore a faded black Big Blue Nirvana T-shirt with a winged guitar logo and blue surgical scrub pants. The shirt was too tight and too small, exposing a hirsute tube of gut that ringed his waist. A small leather stash bag hung from the laces of the pants.
He looked me over, squinting through the smoke.
'Friend of Billy's huh?'
'More of an acquaintance. My fiancee builds his guitars.'
'Oh, yeah,' he rumbled, 'spaceships, Popsicles, and six-string dildos, right?'
'I haven't seen any dildos yet.' I grinned.
'You will, man. That's the way it's going. Away from substance, zoom into style. Strum a dildo, break platinum. Billy's a stone businessman, he knows where it's at.'
He nodded his head in self-agreement.
'Fact is, even the style today has no style. Two chords on a synthesiser and a lot of filthy words. Not that I mind filth -I played my share of raunchy gigs - but to be meaningful, filth's got to go somewhere, you know? Carry the story. It ain't good enough to shock grandma.'
He massaged his belly and took another hit of cloves.
'Anyway, no matter about all of that. Billy's all right; the boy can get down when he wants to.' He coughed. 'So your lady builds those toys, huh? Must be an interesting lady.'
'She is.'
'Maybe I should get me one of those things in a four-string model.'
He pantomimed holding a bass and moved his fingers down an imaginary fretboard.
'Boom da boom, chukka boom, chukka boom. Big old furry dildo with a heavy bottom sound. What do you think?'
'It's got possibilities.'
'Sure. Shoulda had one of those at the Cow Palace in 'sixty-eight.' He started humming in an incongruous falsetto. 'Boom boom da boom. Here I am, mama, signed, sealed, delivered, and ha-ard. Can't you just see the little girl boppers squirm?'
He finished the cigarette and put it out in a ceramic ashtray.
'Shrink, huh?'
'That's right.'
'Know Tim Leary?'
'I met him once at a convention. Years ago, when I was a student.'
'Whaddya think?'
'Interesting fellow.'
'Man's a genius. Fucking pioneer of the consciousness.'
He looked to me for confirmation. I smiled noncommittally. He recrossed his legs and folded his arms across his chest.
'So, Alexander the Grateful, what is it you want to know?'
'Billy said you knew everyone on the Haight.'
'An exaggeration' - he beamed - 'but not a humungous one. It was a tight scene, one big family, fluid boundaries. Roily got tapped as one of the daddies.'
'I'm trying to find out anything I can about two people
who lived on the Haight back in 'sixty-six. Peter Cadmus and Margaret Norton. She also went by the name of Margo Sunshine.'
I'd hoped the names would trigger a casual memory, but his smile died and his colour deepened.
'You're talking about dead people, man.'
'You knew them personally?'
'What's the connection, man?'
I explained my involvement with Jamey, leaving out the fact that I'd been fired.
'Yeah. I should have known. Read about the kid in the papers. Very ugly shit. What do you want? To find out if his parents dropped acid, so you can blame it on twisted chromosomes, right? More witch hunts and reefer madness. Yo, Joe McCarthy.'
'I'm not interested in that. All I want to find out is what they were like - as human beings - so I can understand him better.'
'What they were like? They were beautiful. Part of a beautiful time.'
He picked up a pack of clove cigarettes, stared at it, tossed it aside, and pulled a joint out of his stash bag. Lovingly and slowly he lit it, closed his eyes, sucked in a cloud of marijuana, and smiled.
'Dead people,' he said after a while. 'Hearing their name's pulling up heavy-duty associations. Beaming flashbacks on the old cerebrovideo.' He shook his head. 'Don't know if I want to get into that.'
'Were you close to them?'
He looked at me as if I were retarded.
'There was no close and far. Everyone was everyone. One big collective consciousness. A la Jung. Peaceful. Beautiful. No one ripped anyone off because it woulda been like tearing off a hunk of your own skin.'
During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college I'd got a job in San Francisco, playing guitars in a dance band at the Mark Hopkins. Flower power had been in its heyday, and I'd paid several visits to the pharmacologic bazaar the hippies had carved
out of the Haight-Ashbury ghetto. The streets of the Haight were a crazy quilt of social outcasts living on the edge: baby-faced bikers, whores, pimps, and other assorted jackals. A broth seasoned with unstable ingredients that boiled over frequently into violence, the talk of peace and love a dope-inspired illusion.
But I left Oberheim his memories unchallenged and asked him the name of the group Peter and Margo had lived with.
'They used to crash with a tribe called the Swine Club. Beautiful bunch of heads, lived in an old place right off Ashbury and ran free concerts in the park. They'd get veggies from dumpsters, cook up these big batches of rice, and give it away free, man. To anyone. Big parties. Be-ins. Nirvana gigged there all the time. So did Big Brother and Quicksilver and the Dead. Righteous all-day jams that made the place rock. The whole world was there. Even the Angels were cool. People would get up and rip off their clothes and dance. Little Margo was the wildest. She had a snake body, you know.'
