Summer of Love, a Time Travel Read Online Free PDF Page A

until Susan hit the ground.
    *  
*   *
    “Starbright,”
Stan the Man says. “Got a place to stay?”
    If
she’s stupid, she may as well be really stupid. Does he guess she’s fourteen?
Who cares?
    “No,
Stan,” she says. “I’ve got nowhere to go.”
    “Come
with me, flower child.”
    He
takes her to a three-story Victorian with peeling paint where the Double Barrel
Boogie Band and their entourage camp out in the heart of the Haight-Ashbury. The
house must be about a thousand years old. A steep stairway angles up from the
street to the porch and front door. A crumbling fireplace and scuffed wood
floors lend some charm to a living room furnished with hand-me-down chairs and a
swayback sofa. The place smells of wood rot, burnt chocolate, and sandalwood
incense.
    Professor
Zoom cuts chunks from a brick of vegetable matter on the coffee table. Grease-lipped
beer mugs, rotten apple cores, a kazoo, a brass pipe, and a can of half-eaten
SpaghettiOs with the lid bent back decorate the table. The floor is thick with
more of the same.
    Susan
recalls her mother’s precise living room. The curving peach couch with its plastic
slipcover she only takes off for company. The white wall-to-wall carpet. Mom
would faint dead away at the sight of this pigsty.
    The
stereo blasts, and people mill around. So many!
    One
of the caterpillar-eyed girls who stood behind the stage approaches her. Sarah turns
out to be a sweet, fine-boned blond with freckles and bloodshot blue eyes
beneath her false eyelashes. Sarah leads Susan to the bedroom she shares with
Mickey and shows Susan her swirling psychedelic drawings. It’s sad. Sarah is
not a very good artist.
    Susan
can draw. She’s doodled hours away at Mr. G’s art supply store. She takes
Sarah’s scarlet chalk and sketches a bold eye with a star for the pupil. Her
mother always says her drawings are not proportional, but Susan has to wonder.
Her mother is not a very good artist, either.
    Sarah
says, “That’s beautiful, Starbright. What do you think of this? I want to do my
thing, too.” She shows Susan more crude drawings. “Mickey wants me to draw
posters for the band, but Stan says no,” she complains. Susan can see why.
    Looking
at Sarah and her drawings, Susan is reminded of “The Menagerie” on Star Trek .
The bleak landscape of Talos IV, and Vina, the human girl deformed and crippled
in a starship crash. The Talosians make her whole and beautiful, but her beauty
is an illusion. She falls in love with Captain Pike, who was deformed and crippled
in a crash, too, and now is strong and handsome—but only on Talos IV. Given a
choice to leave or stay in an alien world, Vina prefers her illusion.
    To
Susan’s luminous, numinous mind, this is another revelation: the saving grace
of illusion.
    “That’s
beautiful, Sarah,” Susan says of the drawings. She means it, too.
    *  
*   *
    Stan
the Man carries her purse and overnight bag in one hand, clasps her hand in the
other, and leads her up three stories of stairs.
    Paisley
blankets and old smoke layer his dark little penthouse pad. Susan’s perceptions
ripple and swell. She’s breathing hard from the long climb and aware of not
having bathed since yesterday morning. Of a tart sweat gathering in her armpits
and filming her skin.
    He
lights some candles, and they sit on a mattress on the floor. She’s never seen
anyone sleeping on a mattress on the floor—especially a grown man—but it looks
like fun. Like a pajama party. He eases off her jacket, slipping wool off her
shoulders. He pulls her mod ankle boots off her feet and kicks off his own boots.
    He
pulls her sweater up over her head, the lavender mohair Granma gave her for her
twelfth birthday, and tosses it on the floor. She follows the trajectory
unhappily. He seizes her chin, ravages her mouth. His kiss, so exciting in the
open meadow, is frightening in his lair.
    He
tears at her blouse, at the buttons she denied Bernie MacKenna and Allen
Weisberg. She fights