Polaroids from the Dead: And Other Short Stories Read online

  Emerson and Dale—friends of Ross—discuss the evening’s possible lineup of songs with a curatorial facility Daniel had considered to be held only by his mother’s wine-bore boyfriends. “No, no. They opened the second set of the first 1989 Spectrum show in Philadelphia with ‘China Cat Sunflower,’ not ‘One More Saturday Night.’”

  Stacey, thrilled to be moist, stands outside the tarpaulin and stares at the darkening sky and the rain along with a clique of other kids clad in Glad bags, fringed buckskin coats, Aztec ponchos, Cowichan sweaters and blond dreadlocks tucked within toques and rasta hair cozies. “I feel like one of those sixties photographs,” she says. “Are we going inside soon?”

  “Right now,” says Ross, “Dead ho! That means you, too, Daniel. Having fun?”

  Holly Kreuter

  Daniel, Ross, Tamara, Stacey, Emerson, Dale and others in their group enter the damp and snaking throng of line into the coliseum. How young the crowd looks, Daniel thinks. Why there’s almost nobody over twenty-two in the entire parking lot. This thought surprises him, because he had always believed the Dead were for clapped-out old hippies and bikers. He mentions this abundance of youth to Ross, who replies by saying, “Look at those two old coots there.”

  “Where?”

  “The fiftysomethings over by the pylons. Man, they must be doing pretty wild stuff over there. Look how into it they are. I’m curious—I’m gonna go check what they’re doing.”

  Ross scampers over to the two older, bearded men—1960s survivors indulging in a small, manually complicated ritual—and asks a question or two, then scampers back to his friends in line. Asks Tamara, “What were they doing?”

  Ross replies, disgusted, “Contact lenses.”

  Michael Zelner

  3

  YOU ARE EXHAUSTED BY RISK

  “HITLERBERRIES.”

  “Huh?”

  “Hitlerberries.” Caroline plucks a frilled strawberry hull from a ripe berry, depositing it into her backpack. She then eats the berry. “Ever notice how there aren’t any deformed strawberries these days? Remember how there used to be deformed—weak—berries hidden in the bottoms of the baskets? Now they’re all perfect. Boring. Flavorless.”

  Mario only half pays attention. He is hypnotized by a new bleeding tattoo of the sun on Caroline’s left calf. This is a tattoo garnered not thirty minutes previously in the parking lot in the rear of a gutted, Oregon-plated Chevy station wagon latex-painted with violet Jolly Roger skull and crossbones.

  Caroline and Mario are seated fourteen rows up, directly opposite the stage—choice seats—waiting for the show to begin and watching oval pink balloons the size of pigs being batted about by the audience. They inhale from the Coliseum’s syrupy microclimate. This is sweet druggy air, which only two months ago Caroline, a child of the Silicon Valley, might have feared was a breeding ground for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, but this is air which she now positively vacuums in with abandon, enthralled to catch a wave of patchouli oil or vegetarian sweat, the air humid from so much evaporating clothing.

  Caroline’s hair is woven into thin corn rows—the proto-dreadlock phase. Just prior to her tattoo she had breezily informed Mario that she had skipped a period. When they connected three months ago, he was the cooler member of the relationship.

  “And for that matter,” Caroline continues, back on her theme of strawberries and eugenics, “there aren’t deformed babies born anymore. Ever notice? All aborted, I guess. Imagine a world without midgets. Do you ever worry about biotechnology?”

  “Uh—” Mario stalls. He doesn’t understand half of what Caroline says these days. Somewhere, about two weeks back, Mario guesses, they crossed the point where it was mutually assumed he was smarter, or rather Caroline stopped pretending that he was. Maybe it was the exam hell or maybe it was the mescaline. Caroline’s current looseness is shocking compared to her previous uptight self, when she was like one of those ladies in cherry blazers who work behind the airline counters.

  “Life is so serious,” Caroline had told Mario when they first met at Katie’s garage sale. “One screwup and you’re doomed. I honestly think the world is a harsher place now than when my mother was a hippie back in the sixties. The stakes are so unimaginable now.” Her uptightness had made her seem vulnerable—attractive. Now, it is as though she is exhausted by the future, by options. Exhausted by risk. Yesterday she threw away all her makeup.

  “Do you—” starts Caroline, but Mario interrupts her. “Hey, I like your tattoo.”

  Caroline, seemingly already having forgotten her new marking, looks at her calf. “Oh, yeah. Skin. Sometimes I wish I was a skeleton. No skin. So I didn’t have to feel like an object.”

  Well. So much for chitchat, thinks Mario. They lean back and absorb the crowd scene and listen to drum noises. Mario caresses the limp crown of American Beauty roses woven around Caroline’s skull. He goes to the bathroom and scores four tabs of 100-microgram acid from a Santa Barbara skater dude, $3 apiece. On the blotter paper are images of open windows.

  Mario returns to his seat, and Caroline resumes her discussion about science.

  “Aw, Caroline,” pleads Mario, “the show’s gonna start in a second. Can we discuss stuff later?”

  “No, Mario, this is important. Don’t you ever wonder about the way the world is going? This weird global McNugget culture we live in? All our ideas and objects and activities being made of fake materials ground up and reshaped into precisely measurable units entered into some rich guy’s software spreadsheet program?”

  Mario stares blankly at Caroline.

  “I’m not going to shave my armpits anymore, Mario. Look at us. Long hair, but it’s squeaky clean. Bare feet, sure, but your dad’s Prelude is waiting for us outside. It’s so hypocritical.”

  “Your life, baby.”

  The band comes onstage and the crowd roars. Mario hands Caroline two tabs. “Cheer up, baby. Come on. Embrace the meltdown.” Then, pleased with himself for catching the drift of her lecture, he adds, “We’re the McDead.”

  “Yes,” says Caroline, placing the open windows inside her body, dreaming of another world where complex issues refuse to masquerade as oversimplicities, “we’re the McDead.”

  4

  T OR F: SELF-PERFECTION IS ATTAINABLE WITHIN YOUR LIFETIME

  FETUS AND THE PHOENICIAN PHOENECIAN ARE PURCHASING ORANGE DRINKS FROM A concession stand.

  “It’s not a universe,” shouts the Phoenician Phoenecian above the blare of tunage flowing in from the concert, “it’s a multiverse.”

  “Wow, man,” mumbles Fetus, cartoonishly, groggily, his white goatee dipping into his drink.

  The Phoenician Phoenician, a.k.a. Dennis, is a freelance data-entry worker from Mill Valley, born in Phoenix, Arizona, who was informed by a long-departed girlfriend, Rhianna, that he was once a healer in ancient Phoenecia.

  Fetus is Carl, so named for his tendency to regress while on drugs.

  The two friends have been following the Dead for two decades, and neither is edgy at the thought of missing a few minutes of show. Besides, Dennis wants to start his Yueh-Ling twirl dancing now, and Fetus, well, Fetus just wants to go get fetal with the waste cases in the seats out behind the stage.

  “Later, bro’,” says Fetus, backing away from Dennis, flashing a peace sign. Fetus then stumbles over a plump baby crawling after a blue Citibank balloon, causing Fetus to slop his orange drink. He regains his balance, smiles with relief, flashes a peace sign at the baby’s mother, then bumps backward into a Deadhead in a Eureka Loggers football T-shirt who is using a Pacific Bell booth, causing Fetus’s orange drink to fall splat onto the cement of the concourse.

  “Oh, wow—” he editorializes, “gravity really works,” and he is off into the arena.

  Dennis laughs at his friend. Fetus is so…human, Dennis thinks with a slight note of reprobation. He wishes Fetus would work on himself more. Dennis is ninety-nine percent there, he believes. He has the rest of his life to polish up the remainin
g one percent—toddle off to Big Sur…check out the sunrises in Solano County…learn to speak Dolphin.

  “Shoes off!” Dennis says to himself and hurls away the shackles of corporate domination. To the pulse of the music, and along with hundreds of other spinning dancers in the corridors, Dennis commences freedom dancing, his mouse-brown dreadlocks atwirl, red cotton drawstring pants and elfin red beard flowing with the guitars and drumspace of the Dead, all the while avoiding occasional blots of lentil-enhanced barf and foil sprinklings of pixie dust.

  During the next song break Dennis gulps his orange drink. A young Deadhead asks him if he can score a dose. “If you have to ask to buy it, then you won’t be able to deal with it,” Dennis replies, with what he hopes is gravity.

  “Cry into your dime bag, you hippie weed,” replies the youngster.

  Really. These kids. Shows weren’t always like this, Dennis thinks, vaguely angry and perplexed as he resumes his spinning-dance routine. Dead shows were the same as always until, kablooey, the MTV video happened and the kiddies began showing up, eager to party, not appreciating the true Dead spirit. Some of the new kiddies don’t even bother participating in the complex, rule-packed ritual of mailing away for concert tickets, showing up only for a groove in the parking lot.

  Well, at least Dennis has an audience. At least he can transmit the Yueh-Ling organic dance lore on to a new generation of twirlers and spinners—a master passing his craft to new generations. He can become…wait…over by the T-shirt booth…that tender young Deadling in the prairie dress. Is she, or is she not mimicking Dennis’s dance moves? Why, she could become Dennis’s new…disciple. Yes.

  Dave Weiland

  5

  TINKERING WITH OBLIVION CARRIES RISKS

  DOYLE, CLAD IN HAPHAZARD LAYERS OF LONG JOHNS, GYM PANTS, SECONDHAND sweaters, ribbed work socks and boots, lumbers through the fluorescent-lit spinning mob in the hallways. Fake Deadheads, he thinks. Fake Deadheads. He wishes they would all spontaneously combust.

  Head hunched under his brown felt fedora, Doyle scowls at the youngsters. His head jitters back and forth, continually on the alert for either Masonic imagery or a glimpse of Thomas Pynchon. He wonders if one of these kids would enjoy sifting through a leaflet promoting the denazification of Humboldt County.

  These foolish modern TV kids, asleep in a galaxy of pornographic beer commercials and anti-drug hysteria. They think their own personal choice of obliteration defines them as individuals: what brand of beer they piss, what species of toad they lick. But they are wrong. Obliteration will define them, and not the other way around. These kids wouldn’t know a bad trip if it shat on them: freight trains bleeding dead birds; Kodiak bears dipping live dolphins and their own paws into a McDonald’s deep fryer; celestial imagery feeding on itself; diarrhea like a steel pipe impaled in their rectums.

  Doyle tramps down the rampways, onto the floor, out to the standing worms of microphones being held aloft by the “tapers”: Dead fans taping the evening’s show. Fools, thinks Doyle, fools. Even his own peers don’t recognize the fragility of the Dead scene. Cops videotape the parking lots; skull stickers are probable cause for vehicle inspection in New Jersey; tour rats feed acid to puppies; Dead women squat to pee on park lawns.

  Doyle’s reverie is snapped when an Oakland Coliseum staff person tells him to either keep moving or stay within the white crowd control lines.

  Fascists, thinks Doyle, fascists…

  James Cachero/Sygma

  6

  YOU DON’T OWN YOUR BODY

  DIANA IS VISITING OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, FROM HAWAII WHERE SHE DEVELOPS REAL estate on the Big Island. Tonight’s concert intermission is nearly over, and Diana has returned to the arena’s floor after inspecting her two children down in the nursery—Jesse and Hope—and ensuring that their foam earplugs are fully taped in place and that the vibes are good. Cody, Diana’s husband, is up in the stands. He’s chatting with an old friend, Keith, about the DEA’s new heat-seeking radar copters being deployed to ferret out dope plantations in Siskiyou County. Keith’s okay—as long as he keeps on that lithium carbonate. All in all, the night is shaping up well.

  Diana feels sexy this evening. She’s wearing her black Neiman Marcus cocktail dress with emu-skin cowboy boots and around her neck a Zuni leather pouch stuffed with runes and quartz crystals. Diana feels older tonight, too, much older than the young children who vastly outnumber her here at the concert. She feels a wave of affection for these Junior Deadheads and yet sorry for them too. She feels that useful truths have been abandoned over the past years, that modern young people aren’t being taught the right words to ask the right questions.

  But Diana is happy that tonight the girls are going without makeup and bras. The world is about women being beautiful; the world is about people just being people. Diana likes the idea of her own fuzzy armpits above her strapless dress shocking some of the younger boys at the show—the suburban mall boys who don’t even know that women sprout hairs there. She likes the idea of her body being 100 percent owned by herself—like real estate. It worries Diana how naïvely people surrender ownership of their bodies to others—spouses, the state, the church, big science—all the while falsely thinking they have control over their own flesh: clitorectomy, bride burning, circumcision, veils, GI haircuts, all reproductive technologies…biology under siege. So many people willing—and eager—to tell you what to do with your body, what you should feel shameful about. Anorexia, bulimia, Nautilus, Barbie dolls and the application of Nair…the list seems endless to Diana.

  Even the ownership of minds is tenuous nowadays, Diana is beginning to think. Two days ago in Hawaii, young Jesse was simultaneously playing Tetris, watching Doogie Howser, humming along to Kriss Kross, all the while talking to Charlie next door over the headset unit that resembles those worn by CAA agents in Beverly Hills. Jesse became a living computer screen with multiple windows—information flowing and channeling effortlessly from window to window. The incident made Diana wonder if people are reverting back to the soundless communication state of animals, speaking a new language of pie charts, mouse clicks and bar codes. Not the world she has once envisioned.

  Cody returns just as the music starts and a tab of acid kicks in with a colorful, sparkling wash. “Hey, feeling good, honey?” he asks.

  “Like Las Vegas,” she replies with a wink.

  The lights dim; the crowd roars. Diana imagines a helicopter landing on her front yard in Hawaii, the blades blasting away the Fisher Price toys that litter the grass. She imagines Hawaiian state troopers stepping out from the helicopter and warning her of lava flowing down the slope toward her house from the lake of magma high up the mountain. And then she sees the lava river itself, not a baseball throw away, its blackened marshmallow-crust slime now encircling a plumeria tree, the tree’s sap spitting like hamburgers on a barbecue grill.

  Dave Weiland

  Diana watches fingers of the lava approach her house, nudging around the redwood siding, bending the aluminum laundry-room door, breaking the door down, the lava filling up the kitchen, making tins of pineapple and jars of preserved cherries burst and cook, making scalding hot water explode from the showers and boil in the toilets.

  Diana watches Cody’s satellite dish and her Caprice Classic carried down the slope. And she follows the lava stream down to the ocean—black crackling mayonnaise, its surface popping and crackling like…like…Polaroid flashbulbs, no, like Bic lighters popping at a concert.

  And then the lava hits the turquoise ocean water and crumbles in shock as it hardens, disintegrating, forming a new beach of warm black sand—a beach which Diana now owns and over which she now runs. This is a beach that lies in a place where no beach ought to be. Wave patterns will soon lick that black sand away. And this is a beach which, after being washed away in the night, will never be walked on again.

  The Image Bank

  7

  YOU FEAR INVOLUNTARY SEDATION

  SPECK WAS INITIALLY ATTRACTED TO THE STATE
OF FLORIDA BECAUSE THE STATE itself is shaped like a handgun. That was four years ago. After that he drifted. In Texas he worked as a diet cop for a TV talk-show host, spending endless sojourns in restaurants making sure that only salads were ordered, that only Sweet’n Low sweetened. In Arizona he learned how to fix air conditioners but thought he’d develop mental illness from the tedium. After that he drifted back up to his hometown of Dearborn, Michigan—“the Silicon Valley of 1947”—but winter cold reminded Speck of why he’d left in the first place.

  During a pit stop in Berkeley, Speck hooked up with a Northern California spinster he met, mundanely, in the produce section of Andronico’s, the gourmet grocery store that sells eighteen different hybrids of apple. Alice—fortysomething and the heiress to a Stockton rice dynasty—was of the same pinafore-wearing mold as Miss Jane Hathaway of The Beverly Hillbillies. Alice bought Speck a pair of barbells and a red telephone shaped like a Porsche; Speck sleeps in his own room downstairs and, once a week, in hers.

  Tonight Speck is at a Grateful Dead concert at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, having Jonesed himself a miracle ticket out in the parking lot. Alice thinks he is at his AA meeting, a group she obliquely refers to as “the Temperance League.” Alice herself is out tonight, too, at a university-sponsored literary do. Speck doesn’t really know what the do is about; he doesn’t pay too close attention to Alice’s day-to-day life; she’s so square and so easily fooled. Speck wishes Alice would surprise him a bit more. He tries, however, not to be gratuitously cruel with her; between them exists a pleasing silence. Sometimes Speck feels as though Alice has mailed him a letter and that she doesn’t want to waste words talking until the letter arrives and he has read it. So Speck is curious. And besides—Alice’s shingled Arts and Crafts house on Hearst Avenue is too comfortable. He has promised himself he will not steal the tiny Miró landscape in the living room.