"Greetings the house!" he called through a curtain of phlegm. "This is Bible Bill, ol' Bible Bill, come in the name of the Main Redeemer, praise Him. Anybody home?"
I didn't have to give it a second thought. "No," I said.
"Dev? Brother Deboree? Greetings, brother, greetings!" He held forth the Good Book and the bad wine. "Compliments of Bible Bill, these -"
"No," I repeated, pushing right on past the offerings. I put one hand on his chest and held the door open with the other, pushing. Behind him, I could make out an entourage of shivering teenagers, unhappy in the December wind. Bill wasn't pleased with the prospect of getting shoved back out in it, either.
"Dev, don't be like this, dammit all! I promised these kids -"
"No." I pushed.
"Give it up, dude," one of the teenagers said to him. "Can't you see you're bugging the man?"
"But kinfolks -"
"But my butt," another kid joined in. "Let's go."
With me pushing and them pulling we moved him back to the Toyota they'd come in, him hollering, "But cousins! Brothers! Comrades!" and me hollering back, "But no! No! No!"
The second visitation was a little more complex. For one thing, he was likable. He showed up the next morning while I was out in the field with Dobbs, fixing the fence where the cows had broken through during the night. Whenever it's real cold Ebenezer likes to lead her herd in an assault on the barnyard, hoping to break into the hay sheds (for cussedness and comfort more than food), and it was real cold. The ruts and tracks raised by their midnight raid were still hard as iron. Dobbs and I were long-johned and overalled and leather-gloved and still too cold to be able to effectively hammer in staples. After a half-hour's work we would have to head to the house for a gin and tonic to warm us up. After the third try, we haywired a hasty patch and came in for good.
I saw him standing by our stove, bent to the open door, moving his hooked hands in and out of the heat the way a man does when they're numbed so stone hard he's afraid to thaw them back to feeling. I left him alone. I peeled out of my overalls and boots and mixed Dobbs and me a drink. The guy never moved. When Betsy came downstairs she told me she had let him in because he was obviously about to freeze to death and didn't seem the slightest bit worried about the prospect.
"He says he's got something for you."
"I'll bet he does," I said and went over to talk to him. His hand was as hard as it looked, a calloused claw, beginning to turn red with the heat. In fact he was turning red all over, beginning to glow and grin.
He was about thirty-five or forty, like Bible Bill, with a lot of hard mileage in his eyes and scraggly hair on his face. But this hair was the color of berries on a holly bough, the eyes sharp and green as the leaves, merry. He said he was called - no lie! - John the Groupie, and that we had met once fifteen years ago at the Trips Festival, where I had given him something.
"I got good and turned on," he confided with a big limber-shouldered shrug, "and I guess I never been able to get turned off."
I asked him what in the dickens was he doing this far north at Christmastime with nothing on but ventilated sneaks and kneeless jeans and a Sunset Strip pink pearl-button shirt? He grinned and shrugged his carefree shrug again and told me he'd caught a ride with a hippie kid outta LA over the Grapevine, and the kid said he was headed all the way to Eugene, Oregon, so John the Groupie says, well, what the hell... never been to Oregon. Ain't that where Old Man Deboree hangs his hat? Maybe I'll go check him out. Met him once, you know, over a tab or two, ho ho.
"Besides," he added, trying to get that big red claw down a hip pocket, "I got something here I knew you'd want."
This made me back off two steps, I didn't care how carefree his shrug or merry his eye. If there was one thing I had learned in Egypt, it was Don't take nothing free, especially from ingratiating types who come on "My friend please be accept this wonderful geeft, my nation to yours, no charge" - pressing into your palm a ratty little scarab carved out of a goat pellet or something, a little hook by which the hustler can attach himself to you. And the less you want the goddamned thing he forces on you the more attached he becomes.
"I got right here," John the Groupie announced proudly, holding out a wad of white paper, "Chet Helms's phone number."
I told him I had no need for Chet Helms's phone number, that I had never needed Chet Helms's phone number, even during Chet Helms's San Fran Family Dog promoter days, hadn't even seen Chet Helms in ten years!
John stepped close, becoming intimate.
"But I mean this isn't Chet Helms's answering service, man," he made me to realize, delicately holding forth the little chit like it might have been a spindle of the purest Peruvian. "This is Chet Helms's home phone number."
"No," I said, holding both hands high and away from the offered morsel, which I wanted about as much as I wanted a goat turd or a hit off Bible Bill's bottle. "No."
John the Groupie shrugged and put it down on the coffee table.
"In case you get eyes for it later," he said.
"No." I picked it up and put it back in his hand and folded the freckled fingers over it. "No, no, no. And I'll tell you now what I have to offer: I'll give you something to eat and I'll let you sleep in my cabin, out of sight. Tomorrow I'll give you a coat and a hat and put you back on I-5, on the southbound side, with your thumb out." I fixed him with my sternest scowl. "My God, what a thing to do - just showing up at a man's place, no invitation, no sleeping bag, not even any damned socks. It's not courteous! I know it's inhospitable to turn a wayfarer out like this, but goddammit, it's discourteous to be tripping around unprepared this way."
He had to agree, smiling. "Like I said, I never been able to get turned off the trip. I guess I do get turned out a lot, though, ho ho hee."
"I don't want to hear about it," I kept on. "All I want you to know is I'm offering warmth and sustenance and a way back to Venice Beach if I don't have to listen to you run any numbers on me, savvy?"
He put the paper back in his pocket. "I savvy like a motherfucker, man. Just point me to this outasight abode."
Like I say - likable. Just your basic stringy, carrot-topped, still-down-and-it-still-looks-up-to-me acidhead flower child gone to seed. Probably no dope he hasn't tried and, what's more, none he wouldn't try again. Still grooving, still tripping, he didn't give a shit if he was barefoot in a blizzard. I left him rolled up in two cowhides, thumbing through the latest Wonder Warthog while the pine flame roared and rattled in the rusty little cabin woodstove like a caged Parsi firedemon.
When he wandered back up to the house it was dark. We had finished supper and were on the other side of the room watching Monday Night Football. I didn't turn but I could see Betsy in the mirror setting him a place. Quiston and Caleb had been duck hunting the day before, and we'd had two mallards and a widgeon for supper, stuffed with rice and filberts. A whole mallard and two half-eaten carcasses were left. John ate the mallard and picked all three carcasses so clean that red ants wouldn't have bothered over the leavings. Plus a whole loaf of bread, a pot of rice big enough for a family of Cambodian refugees, and most of a pound of butter. He ate slowly and with bemused determination, not like a glutton eats but like a coyote who never knows how long it might be before the next feast so he better get down all he can hold down. I kept my eyes on the game, not wanting to embarrass him by letting on I was watching.
It was the Dolphins against the Patriots, the fourth quarter. It was an important game to both teams, as they fought for a playoff berth, and a tense series of downs. Suddenly Howard Cosell interrupted his colorful commentary and said a funny thing, apropos of nothing discernible on the screen. He said, "Yet, however egregious a loss might seem to either side at this point in time, we must never lose sight of the fact... that this is only a football game." A very un-Howard-Cosell-like thing to say, I thought, and turned up the sound. After a few moments of silence Howard announced over the play-action fake unfolding on the field that John Lennon had been shot and killed ou
tside his apartment in New York.
I turned to see if John the Groupie had heard the news. He had. He was twisted toward me in his seat, his mouth open, the last duck carcass stopped midway between tooth and table. We looked into each other's eyes across the room, and our roles fell away. No more the scowling landowner and the ingratiating tramp, simply old allies, united in sudden hurt by the news of a mutual hero's death.
We could have held each other and wept.
The weather broke that night. It rained awhile, then cleared. The sun sneaked through the overcast after breakfast, looking a little embarrassed for the short hours it had been getting away with during this solstice time. Betsy bundled John up and gave him a knit cap, and I drove him to the freeway. I let him off near the Creswell ramp. We shook hands and I wished him luck. He said not to worry, he'd get a ride easy. Today. I saw somebody stop for him before I had gotten back across the overpass. On the way home I heard a report on Switchboard, our local community-access program, that there was no need to call in to try to scam rides today, that everybody was picking everybody up, today.
When I got home the phone was ringing. It was a Unitarian Minister from San Francisco who was trying to put together some kind of Lennon memorial in Golden Gate Park, needed some help. I thought he was calling to ask me to come speak or something - deliver a eulogy. I started saying that, sorry, much as I'd like to I just couldn't make it, I had fence to fix and kids' Christmas programs to attend and so forth... but he said, oh no, he wasn't wanting that kind of help.
"What is it you need, then?" I asked.
"I need some organizational help," he said. "I've never done anything like this before. I need to find out about permits and the like. So I was wondering if you might know how I could get in touch with Chet Helms? The guy who did all those big be-ins? You happen to have Chet Helms's phone number anywhere?"
Many such memorable scenes from the last decade and a half of our onreeling epic have been underscored by Beatles music: "With a Little Help from My Friends" was playing when Frank Dobbs and Houlihan and Buddy helped hold my acified atoms together one awful night. During my six-month sojourn in the outer reaches of the California penal system, I used a Beatles record as my mantra, a litany to lead me safely through the Bardo of Being Busted. The record was "All You Need Is Love." I listened to it so many times that I came to count the number of times the word "love" is used in the mix. It was 128 times, as I recall.
Now, as I run my eyes over these three ragged runes of Christmastime in the Eighties, looking at them for whatever message or augury they might offer, I cannot help but view them to the accompaniment of Guru Lennon's musical teachings.
The lesson learned from Bible Bill and his ilk is simple. I already had it pat: Don't encourage a bum. Attention is like coke to these bottomless wraiths - the more they get the more they want.
The epiphany taught by the visitation of John the Groupie is simple enough on the surface: Don't forget the Magical Summer of Love in the Chilly Season of Reagan. I think even John the Limey would have agreed with this interpretation.
What complicates the lesson is that in its wake washes up the third apparition.
This final visitor is still a mystery to me. I knew how to deal with Bible Bill. I know now how I should have dealt with John the Groupie. But I still don't know what to do about my third phantasm, the Ghost, I fear, of Christmases to Come: Patrick the Punk.
He was on the road alongside my pasture, shuffling along in army fatigues and jacket and carrying a khaki duffel over his shoulder. I was headed to town to pick up some wiring and exchange a video tape. When I saw him I knew there was no place he could be headed but mine. I stopped the Merc and rolled down the window.
"Mr. Deboree?" he said.
"Get in," I said.
He tossed the duffel in the back and climbed in beside me, heaving an unhappy sigh.
"Fuckin Christ, it's cold. I didn't think I'd make it. My name is Patrick."
"Hi, Pat. How far have you come?"
"All the way from New York State on a fuckin Trailways bus. Took every nickel I had. But fuck, you know? I mean I had to split. That East Coast-shit, all they want to do is fuck you over or suck you dry. I'm dry, Mr. Deboree. I'm broke and I'm hungry and I haven't been able to sleep in three days from this fuckin poison oak."
He was only a few years past voting age, with a soft unblinking stare and a gray mold of first whiskers on his chin. The whole right half of his face was covered with white lotion.
"How'd you get poison oak?"
"Running through the woods from this murderous old bitch in Utah or Idaho or someplace." He dug a Camel out of a new pack and stuck it in his swollen mouth. "She thought I was trying to rip off her fuckin' pickup."
"Were you?"
He didn't even shrug. "Hey, I was terminally drug with that fuckin' bus. Who can sleep with all that starting and stopping? Bums and winos, maybe, but not me."
I still hadn't resumed driving. I realized I didn't know what to do with him. I didn't like having him in the car with me - he stank of medicine and nicotine and sour unvented adrenaline, of rage - and I didn't want to let him stroll onto my place.
"I came to see you, Mr. Deboree," he said without looking at me. He seemed in a kind of shock. The Camel just hung there.
"What the hell for? You don't know me."
"I've heard you help people. I'm fucked and sucked dry by those vampires, Mr. Deboree. You've got to help me."
I started to drive, away from the farm.
"I never read Sometimes a Cuckoo Nest, but I seen the flick. I did read what you said in the Whole Earth Catalogue about believing in Christian mercy. Myself, I'm an antagnostic, but I believe everybody has a right to believe in mercy. And I need some, Mr. Deboree, you can fuckin believe that! I'm no wino bum. I'm intelligent. I've got talent. I had my own little C & W group and was doing real good for a while, but then, them fuckin vampires - I mean, man, you know what they -?"
"Never mind. I don't want to hear. It'll just depress me. If you'll promise to spare me your tale of woe I'll buy you lunch in town."
"Lunch isn't what I had in mind, Mr. Deboree."
"What exactly did you have in mind?"
"I'm an artist, not a mooch. An experienced singer/songwriter. I need a job with a good little country-and-western group."
O, dear God, I thought, as if I knew a country-and-western group, or as if any group would want to take on this whey-faced zombie. But I kept quiet and let him ramble on in general about the shitty state of everything, about all the fuckin psychedelic sellouts and nut-cutting feminist harpies and brain-crippling shrinks and mother-raping bulls who run this black fuckin world.
It was a week or so after the Lennon killing, a day yet before the winter solstice, so I tried to listen to him without comment. I knew he came as a kind of barometer, a revelation of the nation's darkening spiritual climate. Still, I also knew that, as black as it might be, the Victory of the Young Light could always be expected after the darkest time, that things would get better again, and I told him so. He didn't look at me, but I saw the side of his mouth move to make a smile, or a sneer. The expression was unpleasant, like an oyster lifting a corner of a slimy lip from a cold cigarette, but it was the first that had crossed his puffy puss and I thought maybe it was a hopeful sign. I was wrong.
"Get better? With seventy percent of the nation voting for a second-rate senile actor who thinks everybody on welfare should be castrated? Hell, I been on welfare! Food stamps too. It's the only way a legitimate artist can survive without selling out to the fuckin vampires. Fuck Jesus, if you knew the rotten shit I been through, with that bastard bus driver and that trigger-happy bitch in Idaho and now this fuckin poison oak -"
"Listen to me, punk," I said, gently. For I figured that anybody who doesn't have anything better to do than travel 4,000 miles to try to get a fat old bald retired writer who he hasn't even read to get him a job as a singer in a country-and-western band that doesn't even exist is
in dark straits indeed; so I decided to give him the benefit of some of my stock wisdom. "Don't you know you got to change your mind? That the way you're thinking, tomorrow is gonna be worse than today? And next week worse than this and next year worse than last? And your next life - if you get another one - worse than this one... until you're going to simply, finally, go out?"
He leaned back and looked out the window at the passing Oregon puddles. "Mister, I don't give a fuck," he said.
So I gave him three bucks and let him off at a Dairy Queen, told him to get something to eat while I did my shopping. For the first time his eyes met mine. They were pewter gray, curiously large, with lots of white showing all the way around the pupil. To certain oriental herbalists, the white of the eye showing beneath the pupil means you are what they call sanpaku, "a body out of balance and bound for doom." I concluded that Patrick's curious eyes must indicate a kind of ultra-sanpaku, something beyond just being doomed.
"You're coming back to get me, aren't you?"
Something both doomed and dangerous.
"I don't know," I confessed. "I'll have to think about it."
And handed him his duffel. As I pushed it out the door at him, I felt something hard and ominous outlined through the canvas. It gave me pause.
"Uh, you think you'll need more than three bucks?" I felt compelled to ask. He had turned and was already walking away.
It had felt about the size and shape of an army.45. But, Christ, I couldn't tell. I didn't get much wiring purchased, either. I couldn't decide whether to leave him at the Dairy Queen, or call the cops, or what. I kissed off the electrical shop and went on to the video rental to trade in "Beatles at Shea Stadium" for a new tape, then I circled back by the Dairy Queen. He was already out on the curb, sitting on his duffel, a white paper bag cradled under his chin as though to match the chalky swatch on his cheek.
"Get in," I said.
On the way back to the farm he started coming on again about the hard-hearted Easterners, how nobody back there would help him whereas he had always helped others.
"Name one," I challenged.