The Children of Hamelin by Norman Spinrad Read Free Book Online Page A

There the very shit and sewage of civilization would feed pure feral life; we were all part of the pattern of nature, down to our lowliest turd. We couldn’t be anything but nature’s own creatures on a planet that cherished our very foulness and loved the very ass-end of our dead residues back into life.
     
    “Thank you,” I said, not knowing if it was God or Robin or the universe I was thanking, seeing them all as one with myself in the rolling vastnesses of our mind.
    “I told you, didn’t I?” Robin said, ever young, ever old, preternaturally wise. “Acid is love.”
    Could she be right? Could acid be the universe’s aqua regia, the Universal Solvent of souls in whose deeps all merged into One? Had I been given the Gift for which all life yearned?
    Robin stood up, pulled me up with her. “Yes, this is a groovy place to go up in,” she said. “But now it’s time for another magic carpet ride.”
     
    “Here?” I said when Robin told the cabbie to stop on the corner of MacDougal and Houston. Clown Alley? The MacDougal Street freakshow? Honkie-tonk mockery of the best year of my life?
    “Here,” she said definitively. “You haven’t seen what you think you’ve seen till you see it with kaleidoscope eyes.”
    A squeeze of her hand said trust me, how could I argue with that? My Magical Mystery Tour Guide hadn’t made a wrong move yet. So I paid the cabbie $1.40 and there we were on fabled MacDougal Street, a block below Bleecker, where it was just a quiet brown little Italian Village street sleeping in the soft shadows south of where the Freakshow begins.
    “Look, I don’t mean to be an old man,” I said, “but MacDougal Street has worn some bumpy ruts in my mind.”
    And just thinking about it caused dopplering waves of memory to whistle hollowly down the narrow brownstone canyon from the flash and color of the MacDougal main drag I could dimly see a block away.
    That long golden summer when I had kissed Flatbush and college goodbye and hadn’t yet kissed Anne and smack hello, first and last time of total freedom in my life, my Golden Age, when I knew every face on The Street and Saturday afternoon was a walk down MacDougal from the Park to Ted’s old loft on West Broadway and then a choice of the best party of the night—
    The ruins of the Golden Age: funky little coffee-houses turned into rock joints, Art Kaiser’s Jewelry Shop now a poster-and-button store like the old Folklore Center and a dozen other remembered shops, the ethnic little Italian sausage-and-pizza stands chromed and aluminized, the double line of parked cars that clogged the street and made the sidewalks cozy now banished for efficiency’s sake, making the street seem twice as wide and half as warm, and all my friends gone and the ruins overrun by teenybopper barbarians from the northern wastelands—
    And in between these bookends of time, the Age of Decline, when MacDougal meant trying to scrounge together $3 in small change with Anne and whatever other junkies were freaking out in front of the Night Owl and frantic phone calls from the booths in the Village Drug Store to connections who never were there and the dirty old shakes at 3 in the am walking blearily down MacDougal to Bleecker and Snooky’s, the junkie’s terminal graveyard—
    “MacDougal Street wears ruts in everyone’s head,” Robin said. “Dig it on acid and get a free roadmap.”
    “I don’t know... some pretty heavy things....”
    “Fear is the mind-killer,” she said, and, recognizing the line from a book I didn’t believe we could’ve shared, I felt suddenly closer to her as she said: “Trust me, baby.”
    And she took my hand again and led me up MacDougal toward Bleecker past the solemn quiet tenements with their empty stoops, upstream against the waves of memory that seemed to fade into mist as I remembered what I had told myself when I dropped the acid a geological age ago: if you want to walk through the fire, you’ve got to step into the