The Book of Skulls

“It’s warm in Florida, too.”

“No cactus,” I said.

chapter seven Timothy

It took me an hour to find the right girl and arrange things. Her name was Bess; she was a busty kid from Oregon; she and four other Barnard juniors shared an immense apartment on Riverside Drive. Three of the four girls had gone home for the holiday; the fourth was sitting in the corner, letting a sideburned twenty-fivish advertising- man type make his pitch. Perfect. I explained that I and my three roommates were passing through the city tonight en route to Arizona and hoped to crash someplace groovy. “We should be able to manage it,” she said. Perfect. Now I just had to get it together. Oliver was talking in a bored way with a skinny, too-bright-eyed chick in a black jumpsuit, maybe a speedhead; I pried him loose, spelled out the scene, and turned him on to Bess’s roommate Judy. A Nebraska lass, no less; quickly the Mad Ave delegate was in the can and Judy and Oliver were discussing the price of hogfeed, or whatever. Next I rounded up Ned. The freaky little fucker had picked up a girl, of all strange objects; he does shticks like that occasionally, I suppose for the sake of thumbing his nose at the straights. This one was a downer — giant nostrils, giant tits, a mound of meat “We’re splitting,” I told him. “Bring her along, if you like.” Then I found Eli. This must have been National Heterosexuality Week; even Eli was scoring. Thin, dark sort, no flesh on her, a quick nervous smile. She was flabbergasted to discover that her Eli was rooming with a galumphing shegitz like me. “There’s room at the inn,” I said to him. “Come on.” He almost kissed my boots.

The eight of us piled into my car — nine, counting Ned’s catch as the double she was. I drove. Introductions went on forever. Judy, Mickey, Mary, Bess; Eli, Timothy, Oliver, Ned; Judy, Timothy; Mickey, Ned; Mary, Oliver; Bess,

Hi; Mickey, Judy; Mary, Bess; Oliver, Judy; Eli, Mary — oh, Jesus. It began to rain, a cold drizzle just above the freezing point As we entered Central Park, a decrepit car about a hundred yards ahead of us went into a skid, did a wild sideways slalom off the road, and smashed into a colossal tree; the car split open and at least a dozen people flew out, rocketing off in all directions. I braked in a hurry, for some of the victims were practically in my path. Heads were cracked, necks were broken, people were moaning in Spanish. I stopped the car and said to Oliver, “We better get out and see if there’s anything we can do.” Oliver looked stunned. He has this thing about death: it guts him just to run over a squirrel. Coping with a carload of damaged Puerto Ricans was enough to send our sterling pre-med into a state of shock. As he began to mumble something, Judy From Nebraska peered around his shoulder and said with real frenzy, “No! Keep going, Tim!”

“People are hurt,” I said.

“There’ll be cops here any minute. They see eight kids in a car, they’ll search us before they bother with them. And I’m holding, Tim, I’m holding! We’ll all get busted!”

She was on the edge of panic. What the crap, we couldn’t afford to waste half our vacation being arraigned because one dumb cunt felt she had to carry her stash around with her, so I nudged the pedal and steered my way carefully through the dead and dying. Would the fuzzies really have paused to hunt for dope while the ground was strewn with bodies? I couldn’t believe that, but maybe it’s because I’m conditioned to think that the police are on my side; Judy might just have been right. Paranoia is contagious these days. Anyway, I drove on, and it wasn’t until we emerged onto Central Park West that Oliver opined it had been wrong to leave the scene of the accident. Morality after the fact, said Eli from the rear, is worse than no morality at all. And Ned cried bravo. What a routine, those two.

Bess and Judy lived up around 100th Street, in a huge, decaying apartment house that must have been a palace in 1920. Their apartment was an endless flat, room after room after room, high ceilings, gingerbread moldings, cracked lumpy plaster that had been patched and patched down through the centuries. Fifteenth floor or so: a magnificent view of New Jersey’s squalor. Bess put on a stack of records — Segovia, Stones, Sergeant Pepper, Beethoven, you name it — and fetched a jug of Ripple. Judy produced the dope that had panicked her in the park: a lump of hash as big as my nose. “You keep it on you for a good luck charm?” I asked, but it turned out she’d had it laid on her at The Plastic Cave. The pipe passed. Oliver, as usual, let it go by; I think he thinks drugs of any sort will pollute his precious bodily fluids. Ned’s Irish washerwoman also abstained — that much with-it she wasn’t prepared to be. “Come on,” I heard Ned telling her, “it’ll help you lose weight.” She looked terrified. Expecting Jesus to stride through the window any moment and rip the immortal soul out of her throbbing sinful body. The rest of us got pleasantly stoned and drifted off to various bedrooms.

In the middle of the night I felt a certain pressure of the bladder and went searching for a john in that maze of hallways and doorways. I opened a few wrong doors. Heaps of humanity everywhere. Out of one room, sounds of passion, the regular, rhythmic bouncing of bedsprings. No need to peek: that had to be Oliver the Bull, giving his Judy her sixth or seventh ride of the night. She’d walk bowlegged for a week by the time he got through with her. Out of another room, snores and whistles: begorrah, kinky Ned’s sweet sow at her slumbers. Ned was sleeping in the hall. Enough was enough, I guess. At last I found a john, only it was occupied by Eli and Mickey, taking a shower together. I didn’t mean to intrude, but what the crap. Mickey struck a delicate Grecian pose, right hand over the black bush, left arm flung across the very minimal jugs. I would have believed she was fourteen or younger. “Excuse me,” I said, backing out. Eli, dripping, naked, came out after me. I said, “Don’t make a hassle, I didn’t intend to intrude on your privacy,” but that wasn’t what was on his mind at all. He asked me if we could swing a fifth passenger for the rest of the trip. “Her?” He nodded. Love at first sight; they had clicked, they had found real happiness in each other. Now he wanted to bring her along. “Christ,” I said, coming close to waking everybody up, “have you told her about—”

“No. Just that we’re going to Arizona.”

“And what happens when we get there? Do you bring her to the skullhouse with us?”

He hadn’t thought it through that far. Dazzled by her modest charms, he could see only as far as his next fuck, our brilliant Eli. Of course it was impossible. If this had been planned as an erotica trip, I’d have brought Margo and Oliver would have brought LuAnn. We were stagging it, though, excepting only such stuff as we foraged along the way, and Eli would have to abide by that. At his insistence we were a closed foursome, hermetically sealed. Now Eli wouldn’t abide. “I can drop her off in a Phoenix motel while we’re in the desert,” he argued. “She doesn’t have to know what we’re going there for.”

“No.”

“And anyway, does it have to be such a fucking secret, Timothy?”

“Are you out of your tree? Aren’t you the very one who practically made us take a blood oath never to reveal a single syllable of the Book of Skulls to—”

“You’re shouting. They’ll hear everything.”

“Right on. Let them hear. You don’t want that, do you? To have these chicks here find out about your Fu Manchu project. And yet you’re ready to let her in on the whole thing. You aren’t thinking, Eli.”

“Maybe I’ll forget about Arizona, then,” he said. I wanted to take him and shake him. Forget about Arizona? He organized it. He lured the necessary three other males into it. He went on for hours and hours to us about the importance of opening your soul to the inexplicable and implausible and the fantastic. He goaded us to set aside mere pragmaticism and empiricism and perform an act of faith, et cetera, et cetera. Now a winsome daughter of Israel spreads her legs for him and he’s willing in a flash to give the whole thing up, just to be able to spend Easter holding hands with her at the Cloisters and the Guggenheim and other metropolitan cultural shrines. Well, crap on that. He got us into this, and, entirely leaving out of the picture the question of how much faith we really had in his weirdo immortality cult, he wasn’t going to shuck us that simply. The Book of Skulls says that candidates have to present themselves in fours. I told him that we wouldn’t let him drop out. He was silent a long while. Much gulping of the Adam’s apple: sign of Great Internal Conflict. True love versus eternal life. “You can look her up when we come back east,” I reminded him. “Assuming that you’re one of those who comes back.” He was pronged on one of