DOOM CHRONICLES/Article 1

Homage to Dr. Thompson...


Well, here I am facing the empty page. Inspired by the Doctor, I'm at it again. The drugs are in another county and the police are breathing down my neck and those of all the brethren. It is a bad time for freaks, even grey-haired women with too many felonies in her past for decent people to comprehend.

Santana's new album is playing. He's obviously bent the children. Serious acid in the Perrier at the studio? I had bad flashbacks when the first cut, Yaleo, played. The paisley walls of the Fillmore (they weren't?) blinded me for a long minute until I hit the snare drum hard and got control. And where's Michael Shrieve? The little gnome who used to play drums for him. He had Kevin Bacon's nose and was shy then. I knew him before Santana was a legend. They played in small dirty clubs in the Bay Area that smelled of patchouli sweat and weed. We'd go to see the band, but spent more time in the can eating speed and sucking whiskey from silver flasks we carried in our "trip" bags, which held everything we needed if we had to leave town in a hurry. Books, drugs, weapons and birth control pills. Traveling was easy and cheap. We were girls. We always got picked up hitchhiking. And if some pervert waved his dick in the air, we laughed and got out at the next signal. Sometimes, if he was cute enough, we stuck around. We were free, wild, stoned and horny, and we took no shit from anybody. We were armed, discreetly, just in case.

Whenever we got our hands on a car, I was the designated driver. Not like today's who stay straight. Hell, nobody stayed straight then. I just maintained best. But even I could not have foreseen the total weirdness that tranpired that night in San Carlos. I was wearing prescription shades, stoned to the tits, driving a 1942 Hudson that ran out of gas in a middle-class neighborhood when the cops happened by.

Cops were the enemy. The idea was to avoid the "Pigs", especially an eyeball to eyeball confrontation when you are seeing tracers and even road-kill cracks you up. But we needed a ride home, or we were going to have to walk too many miles, and I only had these dark shades and was blind in the dark. Oncoming headlights had kept on the right side of the road until the goddamn car gave out. We didn't have much money, and we'd had to make a hard choice. Dope or gas.

The cops were about to leave after deciding we weren't murderous desperados illegally lurking in the neighborhoods of our betters, but I talked them into giving us a ride home. The others thought I was nuts and would have resisted but didn't want to make a scene. Even I had a momentary rush of blind panic when they closed the back door and there was no handle inside. But I wasn't going to walk. A little whiskey, acid and weed should not get you arrested unless you are a hopeless amateur. For us, maintaining was an art-form. We were professionals. And back then, without evidence to the contrary, clueless cops thought giggling girls were fresh from a harmless beer bash. Back then that wasn't a felony and they'd cut you a break.

The house was on the lake. Emerald Lake. It's like being in La Honda, but just a couple of miles from El Camino Real, a street of ugliness and greed. It's a long gash of six lanes with cheesy restaurants, pizza chains, closed theaters, bus depots, thrift shops, tattoo parlors and used car lots that extends from San Francisco to L.A. The sainted Father Junipero Serra is responsible and if he wasn't already dead, I'd say lynch him for it. Murdering indians wasn't enough for the fat bastard, he had to leave this hell steet of bad traffic and formica architecture growing like a leech on the spine of California. There's not a patch that's redeemable. It's trailor park white trash for 400 miles; even in the black neighborhoods. Some smells stick beyond anybody's ability to deodorize them.

As I said, we lived in the boonies on the lake. It was dark and quiet, and the cops were driving like they didn't know where they were. We had to keep pointing and shouting directions. Who were these guys? I started to wonder if we'd been played...we never asked for IDs...we trusted. Had it been some horrible mistake? I couldn't remember who had the Bowie knife. I knew I couldn't shoot through the screen if things got crazy. It was metal and a ricochet bullet would kill one of us in the back seat as dead as that skunk on the road that had cracked us all up earlier but didn't seem so funny now.

The poor bugger had been hit and landed with his white stripe lined up with the white line on the road. It began the inevitable speculation abut whether the lane lines were paint or flattened skunks bred for the purpose and murdered by skunk killers at the DOT and shipped to the states in top-secret containers with heavily bonded drivers delivering the loads at midnight to Cal-Trans. It had gotten weirder as we worked it over. There were mentions of the Mob, Chinese gangs, and a Tijuana Connection that made sense if you've ever been there.

At some point the flashes and tracers lessened enough for me to notice that the cops weren't following any of our directions, and they were acting what we called "mellow" back then. This tripped my Strangness alarm and I elbowed Phaedra hard in the ribs. She cleared sufficiently to focus on Caroline in the front seat, flirting like she was on a heavy date with the two cops. They were smiling and chatting back. With the crackling radio, the wind through the slightly open windows and the metal grill between us, I could not catch enough of the conversation to understand exactly what was going on. I only knew with absolute conviction that we had made a fatal mistake letting Caroline in the front seat with two men. Cops notwithstanding. She couldn't help herself. And we knew this. We were to blame. Whatever happened now, it was our ticket, and we were going to have to take the ride.

I don't have anything against any body's choice of sex partners. But I don't think it's wise to chat up two cops who've got your four best friends locked in the back seat of their car, in 1967, while you are tripping on acid. I admit to being a serious risk-taker. But there are some even I try to avoid if I can. Caroline never did grasp much beyond the men-drugs-sex-fun thing. She was not a model of discretion. Even among her best and closest friends, she was kept on a permanent "need to know" basis. She was our friend, but let it never be said that she was too smart for her own good. The lawmen had been smiling and talking and Caroline had been smiling and talking, and only God himself had any idea what she'd said. I felt my wrists stiffen in anticipation of handcuffs as she jabbered away and flapped her eyelids at these two cops like she was picking up some pot-head at the Poppycock for a good trip and a one-night-stand.

Phaedra, it turned out, had the knife. We quickly realized it was useless in this particular situation. So was the gun. All they were good for now was increasing jail time. Concealed weapons are frowned on in California. It seemed to Phaedra and me during frantic whispered conversation that echoed like the Grand Canyon in our acid dipped ears, that we were heading toward an unpleasant resolution to this dilemma when the car suddenly stopped.

We were at a small clearing surrounded by dense trees. At least that's what it looked like through my black shades and the police grill in the directional glare of the headlights. We could have been in North Dakota for all I knew. But Phaedra whispered that we were about 3 miles due west of the house. Shit! All that driving and I was still going to have to walk 3 miles...if I manged to stay out of police custody by some miracle. We were, after all, still locked in the back seat of a patrol car. And who knew how much Caroline had told these guys.

Suddenly the doors blew open and the lights went out. Country darkness, and me in shades made for high-noon in the Mojave. Nevertheless, I bolted out of that car willy-nilly like a condemned man freed by the peasants at the Bastille. Before I could get oriented and find Phaedra and the others, a flash that penetrated my shades like a searchlight came from my right. One of the cops had opened the truck looking for something. Handcuffs and shackles spiked through my mind, but I figured if they wanted us, they wouldn't have let us out of the car. Just as I started to breathe again, I saw him pull out a six-pack.

Caroline had told them all about the frat party we had attended at Stanford that night...and that since we weren't used to drinking, a couple of beers had made us all a little tipsy. Reality check: We had all dropped acid at the house, smoked a couple of joints, filled the flasks with cheap whiskey from Phaedra's dad's stash and jumped into to car heading to a club on University Avenue in Palo Alto, to listen to an unknown band that probably became a headliner at the Avalon Ballroom within six months.

The detail, the beauty, the simplicity and the totality of Caroline's lie was breathtaking. We felt humbled that we had missed these hidden depths—until we found out later that her acid trip had included a hallucinaton of a frat party—but that's a story for another time. At that moment, we felt only awe and hastened to corroborate her exquisite lie.

We knew we were safe. There would be no long prison sentences that awaited women of technically legal age who are found with dangerous drugs and concealed weapons. Just then, the taller of the two cops grabbed me by the shoulders and planted the weirdest kiss I ever experienced directly on my mouth. I felt like had fallen into a frozen river. I couldn't move for a moment; I was in shock. What the fuck was going on?

The oily bastard started sweet-talking and offering me beer. He kept talking and the drift was as clear as good vodka: fool around with us and we won't tell your daddies that you went to a frat party and drank beer. The guy was from the stone age. And it was perfect.

I felt the smile steal over my face. I managed to get near Phaedra and explain the plan. She smiled too, the evil smile that even scares me. She talked to JoAnne and Catherine. We didn't tell Caroline. Habit is hard to break.

When we left the cops handcuffed together around a small tree, they were not happy.

But I only wanted the cop car for the gas. When we got back to our car, we siphoned enough to get us home. Phaedra, who knew the area best, drove the Hudson back to the clearing. I followed in the patrol car. I parked it, locked it, and put the keys into the pocket of the one who'd kissed me. I put the handcuff keys where they could reach them with a little effort and teamwork. I promised we wouldn't say anything about this unfortunate espisode if they didn't. They agreed it was probably best. We tumbled into the Hudson and split.

We made a point of staying out of San Carlos after that.

The Gunslinger