My brother had an in with the Hippiest street on the West Side, where all the coolest West Side cats lived, and if they were old enough, worked alongside us in the sewage and the bus-tubs, so were kind of part of the family, working in the restaurants and doing odd jobs or selling “scrap iron” to the shifty antique store owners. They wanted to put on a Giodenes Street Festival, and guess which bands were going to play? The Waxy Ensemble and a trio of super cute blondes who blew some really mean, smart West Side type jazz. My brother Fantasted was at his best, which is to say his worst, getting really picky about the snap of the many fiendishly clever tempo changes he and the kid drummer Bentansche worked out.

It came to pass that I finally was able to whine, bitch, complain and mumble about it enough that my brother got JamCracks, our “band,” a chance to open the Festival, by virtue of switching the PA on a half hour earlier.

Doc got nearly as crazed as Fantasted, but more about the sudden fame he imagined us all getting immediately.

“But wait a humping minute there Doc,” I said, “Now you know, and Ricodebool know, and everybody know, that what we need to do before we can even agree to this gig, is that we need to get us a Gio-odorous drummer or something because Rico can’t pucker up on that beat without one.”

“Slash, now, I love you like a brother,” Doc says back, with a wisecracking carney-con smirk, in full celebrity mode, like he’d been doing a lot lately. “But we have a few things to do first. We got to come up with a pucker-humping name for the band, JamCracks is too 1977, see what I’m mean? We got to address all our gorgeous lipsticked girlfriends as groupies and tell them that they are all groupies now, and then ask them, real quiet, if they know what groupies do? Do they know that? And then ask them if we can see? What them groupies actually do?”

“Shut up, Doc,” Ricodebool said, as the voice of reason tearing teen hormones a new waste hole, “What we got to do first, is cruise over to the West Side to buy some beer and sell a flower or two of chib to one my Hippies up on over there Now.”

So we piled into somebody’s car, maybe two, and when we got back we had to wake Doc up and drag him back up to the attic to party with us.

“Meet Malkamal, our new latin percussion player,” I told him, as we came into the room where there were excited girls smoking chib, and Ricodebool fluttering his fingers over his bass like a skittering critter, making very little sound since he wasn’t plugged in.

Malkamal was a Horghem mother-pucker, very hippie, very northern, you know the kind, the best, the pumping best at banging skins, shuffling, playing, and popping out heart-stopping crisp-shot tempos like a damn machine.

In Bum Shit City we were all the lowest of the low, nobody knew us as anything but northern, though we’d been living in Bum Shit City since the days of slaves and that waste and that terror. But put us next to a Horghem hippie and we all looked like West Side rich pups posing as hippie. So we were into this fortuitous discovery.

Malkamal was a little cracked from the first Now, I’ll admit that. I found him jamming with his bent silhouette against the midnight moon out there on the side of the MackArdo Bridge, and I stopped and brought him back over to the Play Pen, so I hate to admit it—but history proves it all out—so anyway, Malkamal was strange.

He liked to caterwaul during the jams, which could have been cool, if he hadn’t been so crazy. The worst of it was he used all these old slave words when he did it, and none of us were comfortable about that. It was weird, him being way more hippie than any of us, but he still liked rubbing that slave waste in our faces, and we knew that the West Side would like it even less. So we tried to talk him out of it, and he’d say he wouldn’t no more, but then he’d start doing it anyway, every damn time, slave words and everything, like he hadn’t just said he wasn’t going to, right before the song when we had asked him not to.

He never really stopped, so when we got up on the stage we didn’t give him a mic, we just mic’d his congas, but that didn’t stop him one bit. Hippie looked so damn slavish, blonde hair dangling, leaning over, bent near in two, bellowing his bullshit into the conga mic, saying really crude slave shit while the West Side crowd gasped in horror.

We kept playing, though, and Doc did his little theatrical show where we all started jamming some waste up and down, first Makamal, then Ricodebool, then me, and while we was jamming, Doc brings out this big scroll like a high school diploma, because Doc has this thing about not having one because his mom threw his worthless behind out of the house for not having a job when he was seventeen, and never getting his.

He was wearing this old military band jacket, pink and blue with white and gold piping, long tails in the back, fancy and fabulous, and a graduation hat up on his long haired hippie head. He had Fantasted’s old beat up solid body Guitbox, and he started nailing the “diploma” up on his drawing board where he sketched out his Now Filter ideas into the mad genius night, and I was sawing away grinning and wishing Doc knew how to drive a damn nail while I’m waiting and waiting, and everybody’s there in the crowd, including Dobbelker’s little sister Beeniebee, who was screaming and being a good little groupie like all our girlfriends told all they girlfriends to do.

Finally he gets it up and the power chords rip out the pinhead simplicity of “Coda to the Code (of Admirable Puff)” and we start playing and even Makamal’s keeping it simple. We got into a long guitbox intro to the next song and I’m starting to think Makamal’s gone be all right and not yell out any more slave shamers, you know, and we played another song too, and then we started ramping up to our anthem “Party Right Now!” but Makamal can’t restrain himself any more. That disco beat started to shaking everyone’s bones and it was just about as damn hippie as it could ever be on some street on the West Side, and he couldn’t stand it any more and bent almost down to the ground, where the mic on the bottoms of his drums was, his lanky locks dragging in the dirt and the cords and the spilled beer, and started caterwauling and moaning and groaning like the crazy man he was.

Doc hated that slave stuff and he cut that one kind of short after he started to hear the slave “Yowza!” between groans, and we made the biggest mistake of them all, that nobody had foreseen because foreseeing wasn’t what we was any good at doing, in any realistic way, that is.

We started playing what a hippie like me, with no regard for the offended feelings of the West Side slave-masters who had owned my great grand pappy and all that, would think was our funniest and most pointed song, “Throm-Boys Chugging Beer (On the East Side)” about all the West Side rich kids coming over and partying with us tough hippie trash over in Bum Shit City. It exposed, in a way that celebrated the essential otherness of hippie pride, the iniquities yet inherent in the mindless chugging of the corporate overlords contrasted with the voluntary, even eager self abasement of the hippie underclass smiling under they master’s heel.

We were screeching out “Throm-boys!” really loud on the chorus for the pumpity-umpteenth time when somebody with half a brain cut the pucker-pumping juice to the PA, with the hippie half of the audience still singing on, off key but intelligibly, and the West End half either worried to death or just plain disgusted.

It was like Civil Rights was still a sick racist joke as JamCracks retreated sullenly from the silent stage, with only a few half hearted confused yays here and there from the deflated groupies in the crowd. That was our big debut. Some pumper-mother cut us off, and we pretended it was a triumph, drinking ourselves drunk enough to fall, slipping on beer slick floors, passed out the rest of the chaotic impoverished night.

(Note: Set in my alternate world of Orora, during a time equivalent to the 1970s on Earth. The northern populations of this world were poor and enslaved by the rich southern people throughout history. I have chosen the word "hippie" to stand in for the degrading term used by the southern colonizers to label anyone northern, low-class or poor. Chib is a smoked drug, Throm is the ancient capital of the ruling south, Gio is their God, Bum Shit City is the nickname of their side of the river, a notorious slum, and the West Side a nickname for the expensive old town where they work for pennies.)

“Do you love me?” he asked for the hundredth time, as she twisted away, hips switching back and forth in black tights, hands white dangles from outstretched forearms. Doing what looked like a dance from some 60s Italian movie, while fixing him with a hard, glassy stare from under her jet black bangs.

“Of course I love you darling,” she said, quiet and docile. “I’m only going to marry you.”

“I would marry you,” he whispered back, as petals shook and fell from the spring trees of their courtyard garden. “If only I could.”

“You will,” she smiled back, “If only you want.”

The writer was exhilarated by the integrity of the police interrogation process.

One would expect that being led into a metal cell with a small desk, a man in suit, lit by a single shaded light bulb, and having questions barked at you would be considered an unpleasant and fearsome experience for most people, but not our brave and righteous aspiring author. She was glad of the opportunity for a truly productive collaboration with experts in their fields.

She had never felt so wonderfully doted on before; the exhaustive details wrung forth by the interrogator, the official surroundings, the recordings, the beautifully-formatted pages of manuscript that she spent hours red-lining and correcting before she signed.

She felt like someone was finally getting her story right.

And, the judicial system really knew how to make a writer feel important.

They cared just as much about word choices as she did, and their goal was both completion and precision, and in the end, everything was a matter of life or death.

It’s a 1984 lunch, and thin sunlight is shining through the clear and purple stained glass of Duff’s. Buddy is feeling sexy and impulsive. His new girlfriend, Lynn, is the sweetest thing he has ever seen. Much nicer looking than Val, his last serious girlfriend. He just knew they were going to have a really great relationship. Which meant really great sex, of course.

“So I says to JoAnn I says—” Buddy breaks off as Lynn butts in.

“Buddy, remember Harry?”

Lynn just has to ask.

Buddy immediately pretends to have never met the fellow.

“What Harry?”

“The waiter that used to work here? The little skinny guy?”

Lynn knew he knew it, so she wasn’t about to let the whole point be lost on either of them. Buddy admits he might have once “known” the man.

“Looked like a monkey. Little mustache, half bald? A little too Nellie to make it through the 90s?”

Buddy got an uplifted eyebrow of approbation from Lynn with each seemingly rhetorical query that he chose to diagnose as affirmative.

“He died last week. AIDS.” Lynn dropped the bomb with straightforward grace.

“Oh my God.”

“Isn’t it terrible? He was like my favorite waiter.”

“Oh shit.”

Lynn thought this sounded a little harsh, almost involved.

“Buddy, what is it?”

“What? Nothing. It’s just a goddamn shame, that’s all.”

“I didn’t think you’d react this way.”

“What? How am I reacting? I’m not reacting any way. I mean—”

“No, it’s good. I thought you were—I never thought you—”

“I’m not saying anything.”

“I thought you were going to say something about his being a fag or something, that’s all.”

Buddy stops a second and looks at her with real sincerity written on every inch of his epidermal kernel. Back when everyone knew him as Chef Joey back at Balaban’s nobody ever called him a fag basher. Not back when fags ruled the whole goddamned world. Back when he knew Harry.

“What’s to say? He was gay, right? He got AIDS, right? I just hate it when—you know. Plus this drug stuff, and the AIDS. I’ve seen the numbers you know.”

Nobody could say nay to the numbers. A chill grew like a methodical, industrious crystal, notwithstanding the weak glint of oblique sunlight.

Lynn thought of all the tragedy this AIDS stuff had brought her and would someday bring again. She broke the sudden silence.

“I’m really, really scared of AIDS.”

“Yeah, so’m I, I mean, uh—”

“Have you been tested?”

“I don’t need to get tested.”

A little too quick.

“You should get tested.”

Lynn had huge brown eyes. They widened slightly in emphasis.

“I’m gonna get tested,” Buddy announced it without certainty, with a scratch at the side of the nose. He was a little flustered, but set his jaw and fixed his gaze.

“When?” Lynn asked with the utmost gravity. Buddy looked around the room, not even sure that he knew her anymore.

“Soon.” Buddy turned his head away and wrapped one hand around the base of his neck.

They sat there a moment. Buddy pretended to not feel the tension and looked around with a quiet smile at the pleasant surroundings, bathed in sun. Lynn quietly watched him.

“I’ve been tested.”

She said it with the innocence and solemnity of a small child.

“I know you’ve been.”

Buddy gave his answer the sing-song cadence of a little brat back at her, with a little sarcastic smile to signal his amusement at the obviousness of it all.

“And I’m clean as a whistle. Wouldn’t you like to say you were too?”

Buddy knew that to actually be tested would be to admit that he felt less than clean; and he could never do that, after all the many nights of unprotected sex that would be transformed from clean, healthy fun to murder.

He cleared his throat and asked, in a cheerful voice, “So, Harry’s dead, huh?”

Buddy drove back to the office parking lot. He reflected that it was a strange thing that every office had to have it’s parking lot. The office park he worked in was punctuated by ample parking on blacktop lots.

He could tell how fascist each company was by examining the pattern of their yellow lines, deciphering the hoops the bosses drove you through, wondering which car would get the coveted spot in the only shade for miles around.

Buddy had reached a point of no return with the parking lot, and opted out of the frenzied competition for the shady spot. He parked down at the end of the sun-scorched blacktop, down by the driveway where nobody else ever parked.

He pulled up in the farthest possible spot, turned off the car, and sat looking at the dead dashboard one blank second in the silence. Then he looked up at the building. A cute girl got out of her car not too far away. He gave her a look, realized she was young and very good looking, tore his eyes away from her a second with a physical wrench, and then looked back at her again because he simply couldn’t stop himself.

After she was far enough away that he didn’t feel like a stalker he followed her into work, but when he reached the lobby she was gone forever. He looked around hopefully, but she was gone.

The next day Buddy found her in the copy room, the den of a huge old copier, stinking of toner and oxygen-starved heat. She was slouching next to it, lower lip dangling in youthful disdain. She was watching the machine churn out multiple double-sided collated copies. It looked like a big job.

“Can I get in here?”

“I don’t think so. They’re waiting up there for these reports.”

“In the conference room?”

“Yeah. Like they should have been ready an hour ago or something.”

“I’m only talking about two copies both sides. Like 30 seconds.”

She stuck her lip out even further in an adorable pout and shook her peroxide locks.

No.

Buddy bit his lip and squinted from the pain of this spectacle of youthful beauty. He wasn’t thinking of sex. But his whole body was suddenly flooded with hormones. In the flush of bodily maturity there was no need or call for extravagant fantasy, no need for the full-fledged scenario of this girl naked, having sex with him, nothing as brutal and plain as an object on a windowsill. It was simply meat heat, internal shudders of quickly squirting juices, hidden deep in glandular recesses.

She was pointedly ignoring him, but he still wondered if she felt it.

JoAnn paged Buddy from the cubicles. “Call for you, Bud!”

He rushed back to his desk. Buddy liked to walk quickly through the cubicles. It gave him an air of urgency and efficiency that offset the actual lack of real work to do at his office.

He leaned over his desk and grabbed the phone.

“Yeah? Hi! Great. Lunch? Great! Yeah. Yeah! What? Where? Oh yeah. Sure I know—yeah, c’mon. I know. Yeah, I’ve been there a million—yeah, great! Look if I’m ten minutes late can you—No! No way, I’m just saying just in case I happen. To. Be. No! Wait a minute, Val, you know, no no noo! Look, I’m a little tied up with the copy machine—I could go up to the fourth floor to do it—or else I swear to God there’s this copy center right down the street, on the way to the place, right! So there’s no way I’ll be any more than two seconds at the outside—Yeah! Right! Don’t worry! Bye.”

Buddy watched JoAnn adjust her skirt and opened the morning paper to a Sex Quiz.

Over his shoulder, you could read the large headline: “How many sexual fantasies do you have a day?” as he snorted contemptuously.

At lunch Buddy left the office, and got into his car. He watched, eyebrows aloft, leaning under the askew sun visor, as the copy girl mounted a motorcycle with some pissed-off looking boy. A good looking boy. A tough boy.

He pulled up to a cafe with a few tables outside. He sat down, tried not to stare at a good-looking woman across the street walking her dog. He was craning his neck over his shoulder when Sheila and her friend Bert entered the patio and started towards him. He was a little embarrassed, but everyone said hi and didn’t mention it.

Sheila said, “What are you doing over here all by yourself?”

“I’m not alone, you guys are here, and besides, you know, I’m like waiting for a certain young lady—”

Bert, her new husband this year, saw an opportunity to crack one of his famous sarcastic remarks.

“Yeah, right. Mr. Big Dick Stud out on the prowl. Oh, brother.”

Sheila asserted her new matrimonial authority. “Shut up, Bert.”

Turning to Buddy, “You look nice! What, did you just come from work?”

“Yeah, this is how they make us dress, yeah.”

“Not like when you used to bus tables at Duff’s huh?” Sheila cracked. Bert gives her a bemused look as he appends his own crack right after hers, as if her sarcasm were implicit permission to allow him another dumb crack. “A fellow wage slave. So what are you drinking, wage slave?”

“I’ve got a beer coming. There, here it comes. You guys?”

“I’m going inside. I’m not sitting out in this heat.” Sheila hates even the slightest bit of heat. San Francisco girl.

They went inside, as Buddy gazed after them with a half-amazed, half-contemptuous look. He jiggled, tapped his foot, and felt a light smack on the back of his head. It was his lunch date, Val.

“Stop ogling the broads, Casanova.”

Laughs, hugs, kisses.

“I was not looking, Val, I swear to Christ God Almighty!”

“Like hell you weren’t. You know what you are, Bud? Huh? A pig. A big pig, that’s what.”

“I try, or at least I used to.”

“What? The death of an Era?”

“I mean it’s hard to be a stud with like three triple strength condoms on.”

“Why worry about it? Oh, I guess you heard about Harry!”

“Harry? Who’s Harry? I mean, which—”

“Cut the crap, Buddy. Some of us still remember the drug-crazed days of our youth, you know. I remember when you quit Balaban’s and ended up washing dishes at Duff’s. You would have stayed down in that stinky basement washing those dishes forever if Ginger and Harry hadn’t thought you were cute enough to bus tables instead. And some of us still recall a certain intimacy between—”

“For crying out loud, Val. I was 17 years old, for Christ’s sake.”

“With a dick as hard as a steel bar and balls as blue as the Mediterranean sea.”

“Give me a break, Val.”

“The Mediterranean sea off the isles of Greece! The Straits of Rhodes, pal! Anyway, you’ve heard he’s dead, right? AIDS, right?”

“Hell, I haven’t seen him in like years. Not since he moved down to Soulard when the whole gay scene kind of went back underground when the big disco craze was about over with.”

“About the time they took Quaaludes off the market.”

“Now that was a black day.”

“Honey, you wouldn’t begin to know about it. You were always a honky at heart, Buddy my son.”

“Me? The biggest maggot brain in town? I owned two copies of every Funkadelic album ever made, including that one with “My Automobile” on it, remember?”

He starts to sing “My Automobile”.

“After your brief little indiscretion with Harry—”

“Listen, Val, I deny everything!”

“Sure you do. You were seen at breakfast with him one time. Some people think you spent the night at his place once or twice. The evidence is purely circumstantial at best.”

“I don’t even remember any of this. I mean, we’re talking fifteen years ago or something.”

“Save your convenient memory lapses for Lynn, Bud. Did it ever occur to you that you might just as well accept it? What’s the big deal?”

“No big deal. If I was gay, I’d be proud of it. Even more so back then. I was in the process of reinventing myself as a New-Wave Punk. If I could have passed as a fag I would have flaunted it all over the place, but no! I was desperately, completely, uh unre- irredeemably straight. And I never cared how uncool they tried to make me feel for being that way.”

“Like that time Miss Vera Vogue chased you all around the back kitchen of Herbie’s discotech trying to show you his ‘operation’.”

“That swishy little asshole! He kept grabbing my hand and trying to get me to stick it down his pants and feel it. And the other waiter Steven who always looked at me so pityingly as he tried to make me understand that everybody was really gay deep in the hearts, and I’m sure he really believed it, too.”

“Hell, yes, he believed it. Ask anyone down at the Baths.”

“You know to this day I never knew where these famous Baths are?”

“Ask anybody.”

“I never asked.”

title: Not Me!, genre: literary fiction, age range: 17 to 72, author name: Tony Patti, why your project is a good fit: It's an instant best seller, a snarky book showing white male presumption rampant in the days before cancel culture, the hook: white male denies his fears about AIDS and his sexual past and stumbles on his own tangle of justifications and privilege, synopsis: Buddy finds dating increasingly problematic as he becomes convinced he might have AIDS, and is soon tricked by his ex into actually being tested, with the aftermath of the results changing everyting about how he sees sex as recreation, target audience: woke young things and those who remember the AIDS crisis.

He turned on the camera, pushed it back and forth a little on the tripod until he could see himself in the center of the frame on the viewfinder, which he had flipped and facing him.

He took a drag off his cigarette and swished the ice cubes in his hefty drink. He looked down at the drink, not moving his face at all, so his eyes rolled way down and back up to the viewer. He swished the cubes, tinkly-chink, and said, “Now, I know the kind of image you expect from a Lawyer.”

He pointed to a TV behind him, where you could see two respectable specimens posing on the steps of a 1930s courthouse. “These guys aren’t what you need. I know what you need.”

“The wildly violent vengeance of the just. The sweet ire that can only be quenched by the gushing fountains of the blood of your bitterest enemies.”

We see extra bold type fill the screen over his face, saying “BOSSMAN BOB!”

“Own your enemies,” he said, in a voiceover. “Destroy them utterly, and sow their fields with salt and ashes, so that even their children’s children will know only want and desperation.”

The 800 number flashed bleakly over a screen of flames and explosions.

• Science throned and instantly throttled by the lynch mobs of the righteous seeking fresh outrage.

• The slop of brute assumption fogging the clarity of truth.

• The tragic motivations of self.

• The instinctive switch to action in place of thought.

• The narrow frame of possession preferred over mutual accord.

• The concordance of disambiguated recollections stripped of complexity.

• Bumpkins refusing bemusement for fear of being bamboozled and pettifogged by rhetoric.

• The reflexive need to critique a criticism received.

They were the producers of crap.

They’d give you anything. They’d give you anything you want. All you had to do was ask, put your hand out, smile bravely, hold your head high, and demand that which was due you. You might have to jump through a few hoops, fill out a couple forms, sign this, stamp that, here’s your copy, the contract copy, the redemption copy for the point of sale, file it all way, dust your hands of it. Done for the day.

Problem was he was too old to want any of it. So he never ever ever asked for nothing. Why bother, he asked himself, moping around the house in his ratty wool socks, looking in the fridge for something to eat, not seeing nothing comestible.

What would they give to the world at large out there, the ones to come, in their own frenzied magnificence? Now it’s less than nothing, it’s more like an extraction, exactly like a take. They ain’t giving nothing to no world nohow.

When it comes to the world, they only take. The world isn't accorded the high status of a customer.

You, they’ll give to. Mostly you buy it, true, but that’s all part of the asking. The world gets nothing. The world can’t even buy nothing, not even itself. Because, let’s face it, the world is very lousy at asking for stuff. It’s so busy giving.

Someday, something will have to jerk this arrangement around. The world will start to get a little ragged if it never gets nothing, and nobody wants that. The world has got to get some back without having to ask for it.

When I think about what I want, this is something I kind of wish I could ask for, instead of a new TV show or something. I would ask for the world to get some if somebody’d just let me.

The world deserves anything we give it. The world has earned our gratitude and our fealty. I’m getting all worked up thinking of how much the world really needs, and how little we give it.

It’s embarrassing.

He was one good looking ghetto boy, from some rural zone, far from the hopeless depths of Hicksville; never had him no college, never paid him no bills his Daily Wage couldn’t provide, one of them, you know the kind, one of them kind.

Hippie got up and walked out on stage, poked his headset, and started up this fake pitchman strut, across to stage right.

He looked more futuristic than the past had ever dreamed, with his gleaming skintight projections, the most expensive and tailored kind, all over his self.

The soundtrack was a deafening blend of symphonic bombast and abstract synth sound waves. He snapped a 180 and strut right back down stage left, making a silent “OWWW!” face at the audience, rock-star style.

The clapping, hooting, and stamping of feet was positively sports-worthy.

He leaned over, butt comically out, and picked up the end of a wheel of ribbon printed with the word TIME, over and over, and he strut back center stage to a sideways golden hoop with the word “NOW” beaming brightly above it.

The tape rolled out as he pulled the ribbon through the “NOW!” hoop. He leaned back on one leg, trunk and legs pivoting on the axis of his waist, and extended the other leg out, far beyond the “NOW!” hoop stand. It was like a crazy backwards curtsy.

Hippie swooped back up forward, levering his extended foot and bringing up the back one, and fell into that infuriating strut again, and then he bent down, butt out again, and wound the TIME ribbon on the wheel opposite.

It was a burlesque in every gesture; lips stuck out, grimacing winks, the near-constant rock- star “OWWW!” face, the high-kneed strut, and all the bending over and sticking out the butt poses, most of all.

He bounced back up, presenting himself splayed out, facing the audience, and held out his hands.

Slide 1:

“Does time exist prior to the present moment, in the future? We don’t know if time begins in the future, and ends in the past; or if it started in the past, and ends in the future.”

Hippie began his pitch:

“You can spend your life reading about the various theories of time, and see the same linguistic errors. Loose definitions.” He made a face of disapproval, lips out, head shaking dismissively.

“The big problem is our definition of time is based on the ridiculous assumption that time begins in the past, and continues into the future, like an arrow that we can measure, by comparing durations between things like the rotation of the earth, the hands of a clock, or the decay of radioactive isotopes,” he said, finger pointed heavenward, looking authoritative and scholarly.

Slide 2:

“Time exists in the past. We only see the near past when we experience the present.”

Illustrated by a brain, connected to an eye, with dotted lines showing the field of vision, and a flower, with 0 at the flower, the duration needed for light to enter the eye under the field of vision, the fraction of a second the brain needs to flip the image and carry it to the brain under the eye, and the fraction of a second the brain takes to recognize the flower under the brain.

“We see what just happened, and by the time we see it, it’s in the past,” he said, moving a pointer from the flower, to the field of vision, to the eye, to the brain.

He paused, looked up at the audience, and fell to his knees, hands clasped, and beseeched the audience piteously:

“Don’t tell me there is no past.”

Hippie gets up to his feet, looking suspiciously at the audience, as if fearing contradiction, and says, slowly and quietly, “The past exists, in physical space, in time and in gravity. The past is indestructibly real, immutable and reliable.”

He stomps a foot.

“We exist in the past, because the past is all we can see.”

Slide 3:

“Which way does time go? From the past into the future, or from the future and into the past?”

Hippie goes over to the opposite wheel and starts it spinning.

“Time is going from one side of this NOW hoop to the other, according to traditional theory.”

He stops the tape, and goes over to the hoop and grabs the TIME tape on each side.

“Which side is past, and which side is future?”

Slide 4:

Diagram of the arrow of time: “>Past>Present>Future>, <Past<Present<Future<”

The crowd goes nuts.

People start screaming “That one’s Past!” “No, that one’s Future!”

People jump up and down, arms bent, swinging them in a frenzy, elbows and knees, disheveled and crazed, mouths agape with thwarted fury.

“Don’t matter,” he says, shaking his head, repeating it a few times until they all calm back down.

“It don’t matter which way it goes because we can’t figure out the Flow of Time,” he says, perfectly reasonable, like he’s talking to a beloved child who ought to know all this.

He pulls the tape to the left, then pulls it to the right.

He does it with the silliest open-mouthed smirk, tongue out one way, then back the other.

“Now which way is the Past if TIME goes this way through the Now?” and he pulled the tape toward the farther wheel again, his left.

He looked sadly down at his right hand, lips pouted out.

Slide 5:

“You can take a photo from the past and see it in the present, but you can’t take a photo from the future and see it in the present.”

There is a camera snapping a a photo of a flower, an arrow going to a photo of the flower as it was with the same flower, young and fresh, and an arrow going to the photo with the flower wilted and drooping down one side of the dry vase.

Hippie points up at the camera taking the photo. “Past.”

Then at the photo with the flower it captured in the past next to it. “Present.”

Then at the last photo, of the same flower wilted, and the photo. “Future.”

“So time starts in the Past, and goes into the Future, right?”

He points up at the wilted flower, and points at each image backwards.

“Is this the Future on this side, headed toward the Now, and going through it into the past? Is that the kind of thing that makes sense to you, future into past? Of course not. This is the Past, headed toward the Now, going into the future, right?”

“Or maybe not,” he says, confused. “The past is in the past, the Now is where we are, and the future is yet to be.”

Hippie hung four numbers on the Past side of the Time line, 1, 2, 3, 4.

“If time moves from the Past into the Future, we get this,” he cranked on the wheel marked FUTURE, and the ribbon of time moved from the past wheel onto the FUTURE wheel, through the NOW hoop.

“Say it with me as each number goes through the Now hoop from the future into the past!”

“Four,” he says, and hardly anybody pipes up, “Three,” he says, and a couple of the more excitable in the audience help a little, “Two,” and a few more draw out the number with him.

“Looks like time moves from the past into the future this way,” he said, grinning widely and leaning back a few inches farther than necessary, his fists on his hips.

He turns the wheel, muttering, “Four, three, two, one, no, that’s backwards.”

“That ain’t right,” he said, sticking out his lower lip and frowning darkly at the ribbon of time.

“Can’t be right. If that were so, things that just happened would happen again in the future, and we never know exactly what will happen in the future. We know what will probably happen, but we can’t never ever really know exactly what will happen. Stuff that already happened never happens again backwards. Never.”

“Ok, but something is moving, isn’t it?” he asked, after a short pause.

“Maybe the future is moving into the past.”

Hippie rolls time from the future into the past, and everyone chants, “One! Two! Three! Four!”

Slide 6:

“Time begins in the future and becomes the past.”

With a drawing of a man from thirty years before, another man from sixty years ago, and another from ninety years ago, cunningly styled to relate to the laughable fashion cliches of their time.

Hippie cranked the TIME ribbon back through the Now and toward the past.

“This feels more like time to me, I don’t know about you all,” he said, cranking slowly away.

“This way, the unknown future moves into the Now, where we see it, and then past us, where we are certain it goes, because we see traces of it going back to the origins of the universe, the Big Bang, all that.”

The crowd is very happy with this confirmation of known properties of time, yells, hollers, whoops, yeses, fists in the air, and some rhythmic hooting.

“My daddy is back up in there,” he yells over the crowd, pointing at the past, which is getting more and more full, increasing the screams of the crowd, adding to the excitement.

“My grandaddy is back up in there before him. And his daddy, and his granddaddy, and all y’alls grandaddies is laying up in there somewhere where we can’t see them, except for the fossils or photographs they left behind them that persist.”

The crowd gets wound up at the thought of all their ancient daddies up in there.

Hippie holds up his hands for quiet and waits until it dies down enough to be heard.

“Why is it now,” he says, and the crowd keeps going while he repeats it once or twice, until they finally compose themselves, “Why is it that we can’t directly see our great-great-great grandaddies going about their business populating the world with their future progeny?”

He looks around, belligerent eyes popping, eyebrows cocked.

“We know they was there,” he said, and he pulls out a printed photo of the oldest guy on the slide. “We’ve seen the pictures, but we can’t see nothing directly. We can’t see nothing that isn’t right here with us in the NOW hoop.”

Hippie passes the photo through the NOW hoop, it catches fire, and the ashes all fall to the ground on the past side.

“Here’s where all this linear TIME ribbon-type thinking falls apart,” he said, toeing the ashes and pointing at the flying flakes.

“It’s all about observation, isn’t it now? It’s all about what we actually see, and what we record, and what we recorded that persists in the past, in the now, and hopefully into the future.”

He pulls out another photo and pushes it through the NOW hoop into the future.

“That’s what we all want,” he says, with fatuous satisfaction, his chin sunk into his neck, “That’s what we are all working for every damn day. We do nothing, if not try to drag ourselves and everything we love from the past, where we learned to love it, to take care of it, earn money for it, feed it and cure all it’s ills, take all of that and push it into the future. So now which way is time going?”

Hippie looks around, challenging all the bold and thoughtless shouters to yell something stupid, but the crowd is now quiet.

Hippie, you high, I say. Hippie was sitting back, left knee hunched up, squinting one eye, tongue stuck out, and just going “Squee-hee-hee” in a weird little Hippie laugh.

We were at that Hippie place I liked, down off South Dreadway, standing around outside talking while our favorite local band was inside playing too loud to talk over. It was nice to be able to relax back into old-timey hippie-dippie ways among other nappy-headed dusty-assed bong-brained buffoons with mealtime chortle-hounds abounding.

I was trying to explain something to that Hippie humper-upper, but what I was trying to do was being messed with, by all that Hippie irreverence and Hippie-don’t-care kind of tone. I was trying to explain, (and getting nothing but derision,) Doc’s theory that a body don’t need contact for a contact high. Spooky action at a distance, y’all. Which is hard enough to explain when your Hippie ain’t even high yet, but Hippie totally was.

So I go, body needs no contact at that point, you know what I’m saying? Needs no contact at all. Matter of fact, the less contact, since it really needs no contact at all, the better. That’s not what the body needs.

I resorted to hand gestures.

I put one hand here and the other over here. See that? Way over here. Like that? Way over yonder?

Of course it was all in good clean fun. At least none of them Hippies seemed to mind if you know what I’m miming here. To the casual observer, the meaning of these hand gestures was regrettably obscured, and seemed more like hand dances, probably in need of a fan.

A Hippie came out of the club and lit up a smoke. Then it looked like Hippie was coming on over. Uh oh. The miming stops, everyone gets decent again. Hippie come up, saddened by the sudden change, looks around, beseechingly, as if to beg for one faint taint of the long-vanished past, as it recedes ever farther into the metaphysical distance. We got to laugh right at that Hippie at that. I’m telling you. Shouldn’t even be funny at all, but it was.

Hippie says, man, if and I and I only was to, now listen, now, if and I was to, you know what I’m saying, right? We listened to him at first, but since he kept going on and on mumbling this endless stream of frictionless existences, we started to zone out and chill. Doc said, let’s ditch.

Out on the sidewalk at the Hippie ride we stood there and measured our drunkenness by the steadiness of the blue steel streetlights. Across the wide diagonal span of South Dreadway you could see all the way down to where rusting chemical sheds leaked unknowable toxins into the river. There were no cars nowhere at night in Bum Shit City, and Hippie knew that fact.

Doc said he knew why there were never no cars nowhere at night in Bum Shit City. Hippie say why that? So Doc says because you know they like you being out, like we is now, on the street like this, nothing but streetlight under a veil of fog, cause it mess with your head, and they can see you easier, without no other cars to compete for unwanted attentions.

Hippie needs to know who they is, that wants that.

Doc tell him Hippie, please! The police, Hippie, now do I got to say it? Did I really have to say that shit out loud and all. Damn.

Hippies got up in the ride and argued over the radio jams. Hippies get a little prickly about their hat-snackled horse-gobbler jams. I popped the stick into gear and we took off for the bridge. Hippies never found a jam they liked, either. The mood was getting desperate, Hippie chill in serious decline.

My girlfriend Lisatta saw we were almost at the bridge, and said something about, getting her up on the roof, to free fly over the bridge, and then she opened her door. The red light never changed as she slammed that door and splayed her skinny Hippie body over the car roof top. I took off when the light changed, under that crazy young body on my roof.

From a distance, you can still see it in context: red light stuck out over the empty dark street, streetlights going distant until obscured by fog, Hippie car idling there behind the near invisible ghost of a pedestrian stripe. I took off and Hippie hair blew out wondrously under the harsh insectile light.

Bum Shit City police lurk in dim corners and under dark cover, lurid eyes of policeman hate gleaming madly in the unbearable boredom of night. They sit and they shake with the ceaseless rage of them that’s unjustly condemned to be judge, jury and executioner of any random citizen that should happen to come along.

They saw my Hippie car all right. They had to let it slide on by until Hippie got on up on top of it. But by then, Hippies was almost to the bridge that marked the line to freedom from the tyranny of the current estate.

One cop says, man, we oughta. Look at that. Almost gone, though.

Other says, they still here now. They gots to stop. Then he hits the lights, and other cop crank the motor, and I got a cop car light show extravaganza on my butt. Now I’m asking you. Who wouldn’t jump a bit at all that, especially Hippie like me. You know what that means. So I’m just saying.

I’m speeding toward that bridge, and it isn’t far, just up the road a ways past the EAT RYTE Diner that’s open all night, the exit from culpability and entrance to protection from foreign rule and law. But Hippie up on top, right? Hippie still up there, hanging on that roof by Hippie fingers, little delicate ones that shouldn’t be clinging to a whole dang Hippie life, about ready to fall maybe.

What it was, was that we definitely hit that first curve a little hard, which was easy because that first curve up there on that bridge, you know the one I’m saying, is damn sharp, two wheeling it for sure if you gone a mile over forty, so then the fear became truly real as I tried to brake enough to hit it but without reverse throwing a Hippie hood ornament back into a cop car collision course.

Hippie held on great, crisis averted, Bum Shit City police stymied and infuriated, fuming in their blazing, screeching cop car at the imaginary dotted line that kept their laws from our Hippie ways. Right after we crossed over, and Bum Shit City cops stop and fume madly, I gently rolled to a stop, and got us a damn Hippie off the roof of that Hippie car. Lisa had her a ride, she did.

We got back to the crib, you know, and had the beer, and Hippies was awful glad to see us up there, you know. Soon as we lit we grabbed the axes and started to jam.

Ricodeebool was like whamming it, like he did, wailing and slamming it all over everywhere, shaking the walls and fingering the frets on his massive bass guitar. The Doctor was shaking his head and wincing every five seconds playing his dinky little chords on his nylon stringed acoustic guitar that nobody but him could even really hear. Deebool wasn’t following or listening or anything, you know, like he always did, and was lost in his Hippie Captain Harhearty slash Jakeco Pastorfastor fantasies of utter jazz funk freedom from any possibility of an expectation of rational thought in music or in form.

Let’s jam, pumper-puckers, I said, in my most cartoon scratchy cat voice, and popped me open one of them beers and guzzled down about half of it at once, rolling my eyes up at that ceiling of Hippie crash pad delight.

On a broad old street where cars used to whiz all along the way before all them straight assed noses all hauled it on out of our urban zones to raise their flaxen-haired offspring in the secure comforts of toxin-spewing pressed wood ranch housing, the red brick remnants of ancient capitalist concerns still loom, windows dark, patched here and there with plywood, girdled by wire fencing rusting in charming diamond patterns and crowned with twisted festoons of barbed-wire practicalities that distant landlords love to reassure themselves with as they drift off to sleep at night on their silken suburban pillows. The yards of these buildings are oft crammed with a kaleidoscopic variety of abandoned machines, parts packed in half-empty dirt-caked crates, truly prodigious blooms of ghetto weeds, concrete blocks in fallen stacks, thousands of broken and rotting pinewood shipping pallets, useless piles of cardboard blooming with rot, metal trash cans stacked three or four high—empty rusty dented and dinged—stuff like that and more. Anything nobody needs, anything too unsightly to take up valuable space in the green and spacious avenues far from Hippie heaven. In this lovely urban panorama we languished between dishwashing jobs and other suchlike minimum wage slaveries, in one of the smaller buildings, which had a bathtub shoehorned into one of the old workmen’s johns, making it legally habitable by the lax standards of Bum Shit City East. Nobody could hear us jam, it was perfect. The tattoo parlor was within easy walking distance, where fading displays of the old school mom hearts and anchors you could have poked into your skin were posted near the door behind cracked and dusty glass. The bar next door had a bowling alley in it that supposedly didn’t work, but they sold package liquor, six packs straight out of the cooler so cold they’d frost up into weak beer slush if you opened them too fast. Past that was a gas station, ghetto clean, with all the cigarettes and all the stale packaged junk foods you ever wanted, just outside the cloudy plastic bullet proof plexiglass turntable where you put your crumpled money up and got back the right to leave with your stuff without getting shot in your own dang back.

I got this place because the neighbors were complaining about us at the last place Hippies had, called the Playpen. Now how these neighbors of ours got to be complaining about us, when they themselves were the worst of all the damn Hippies ever caught squatting in malodorous slums and impregnating their own kids and all, how they got the right to mess with our thing, when they own things was so messed up, you know, was all way back of beyond anywhere any of us could ever figure to find. But Townaman, the landlord back there and also here, was cool, he liked the rents being paid the way we did, and he had this place, the new Playpen we called it until we called it the Launchpad, just sitting out here middle of nowhere probably not even zoned for occupancy for all we know. He even dragged off enough trash in the concrete yard that we could park our damn hoopties up behind the chain link fence that we hung a broken padlock on in the name of security, decency and the Hippie Dippie way.

Horse Badortiz came shambling up to grab him some beers in the big room where we kept all our amps. Horse had an actual job roofing that paid decent money, unlike the rest of us, so he always kicked in on the beer runs and made dang sure he got his fair share. Horse was the ugliest damn Hippie you’d ever see anywhere, but he was clean. He always scrubbed that acne-scarred mug of his on up until it was raw red fresh, and his scraggly fair hair hung limp but flew away in wisps, dry and wire-stripped grease free.

The Doctor put his guitar down carefully and came over to grab a beer. He looked tired and withdrawn and all that; hardly Hippie at all. Doc picked up one of his notebooks he always carried around and started flipping through it. We all had notebooks, composition notebooks bound with twine and mottled black and white covers, filled with poetry, beauty and songs. The Doctor was the most fervent writer among us; he had entire notebooks filled with wonderful nonsense that said nothing at all with great style.

Hey Deebool, you should’ve seen Lisatta riding the roof over the Mack-Arnold bridge with a cop car tearing after our asses, I said, cackling glee, trying to bring Doc up with us, ready to party, you know, ready to funk it on up. Doc managed a weak smile, but had no Hippie heart in it, and it soured my buzz mightily, and it saddened my Hippie soul. Deebool stopped shaking the walls long enough to grab him a beer, and his girl, Stonea, got herself one too, and it was a damn party, like I like.

Horse was a lot older than us, had been a warrior in the far southern jungle was back in the sixties, and often gave us the benefit of his sage experience when he thought of it. You guys is lucky that you didn’t get her ass killed man, you know that right? We all laughed at that, and Horse did too, of course, but he still shook his big Hippie head, gold brown locks waving, and said, seriously, fellas, I’m tellin’ ya.

Doc laughed too, of course, he might have been dolorous, but he was no nose, you know what I’m saying, so he was still with us. He wasn’t gone all punk rock quite yet, but he was starting to kind of feel it.

We had been a band for years now already, and were known far and wide as the craziest Hippie whatever anyone had ever seen, which wasn’t really anything to brag about, but we did.

I ain’t never doing that no more again, you know what I’m saying?

Doc throws back a nice slug of ice cold beer with satisfied sigh wheezing out higher’n’shit.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Nobody answers Doc, they know too well by now. That don’t stop him, hell no. Hippie loves to hear his self talk.

Once a cause occurs, if it has an effect, after the effect has occurred, both events inhabit the same moment, the moment when now ends and the future begins. Causes and effects, once both have occurred, are coeval. Before either have occurred, neither is cause or effect.

Co-evil, a Hippie giggles. Doc sputters out something about being the same ages, and that leads to some cackles and cracks about his sixteen year old girlfriend Maggle.

Doc you are whipping me high, I said, and my Hippie starts in saying that it all started when I was a little boy and I had to get on an All-State Bus, and suddenly this ambulance comes out of nowhere (yeooooommm) and causes a terrible accident and I ended up in a wheelchair trying to catch an All-State Bus, when this ambulance comes out of nowhere (yeeeeuuuuuummmm) and causes a terrible accident and I ended up in a wheelchair.

So Doc starts humming yeeeuuuuuummm and Maggle starts humming zeeeooooommmm and all the hippies are zipping through the atmosphere and banging into All-State Busses. And I ended up in a wheelchair!

Does the universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before then? Doc asks us, then answers himself.

The universe begins before the moment when the future becomes the past.

Deebool snorts and asks when’s that?

Now, babe, now, Doc says, in a loud whisper, glasses shining. He goes on.

Where did the universe come from and where is it going? I go over to put on a record, start flipping through my music. Doc is fun for a while, but you got to plan to stop him gently before he gets too damn deep.

Where did the universe come from? Doc asks.

The universe exists both within the flow of time and is observable in a limited way within the flow of time, but is only completely observable outside the flow of time. We can’t see the entirety of the universe from our viewpoint within the flow of time, but we can easily see that it is expanding, and as the universe expands, it inhabits and defines space.

What makes you think the universe is expanding man? Stonea asks, lounging back on the filthy couch, shading her eyes with one hand from the harsh light of the security floodlights coming through the lead-paint slathered western window.

Even I know the universe is expanding, I say. And I can dig that if every second that passes means there’s another second on top of all the other seconds there ever was, you gots to admit that the past is expanding. So how could the universe not be expanding along with it, if space and time are twin concepts, as we are taught they must be?

Who taught you that? Maggle laughs, and I point my middle finger at Doc, with a tight, triumphant smirk, and swing it up at him a few times to milk the cruel guffaws from my worthless Hippie-assed friends.

Just let me say in my own defense, y’all, that all this is just plain old high school physics like you could read in any dumbed-down physics book at the library, Doc says, and then he starts up again with the pronouncements.

To say that the universe is infinite is equal to saying that wherever there is space, there is the universe, and wherever there is time, there is the most recent moment of the past, which we observe instantly after it happens, as it joins the rest of the past.

Doc is right as usual, I say, cranking up the music and shouting over it to try to close this fruitless bullshit up. The universe is as big as we can see, and time is as long as we can measure it, using the distance between stars and the speed of light to figure it out. Happy, Doc? Hippie, please!

Pip came right on up to Doc and said, man, you know you full of shit. You lying like another pucker. And one thing every father’s son has got to know, has GOT to know, is that number one, you can never bullshit another bullshitter. Ain’t nobody fuller of shit than me. Now you know that Doc.

Number two, you should never even try to bullshit someone who you know is a far better bullshitter than you. I can see your bullshit Doc. It’s just sad, that weak bullshit you’re giving me now. Come on!

And number three, really shouldn’t, because it’s a bit pathetic. Sad, really. Showing how little you know about bullshitting another pucker by mucking it all up right in my damn face.

The sadness lies in that, bullshit, as it is currently expressed in the general culture, is widely recognized, by any people of sufficient intelligence, like all y’all, as kind of stupid-assed nonsense, and is, of course, morally bankrupt. So giving that bullshit to another bullshitter is just an increase by infection, as the bullshit spreads among the populace, running amuck.

No, it’s all true, man, I shit you not! Doc sputters in outrage and angst. My theory of time will allow faster than light travel by shifting where particles come into existence in the universe from any set of coordinates to another. Because if time begins, as I insist, in the present moment, then all you have to do is figure out the precise location of one place and swap it with another, by changing the timing and frequencies of the particles making up your body and surroundings to another place elsewhere in the universe.

That’s exactly the kind of bullshit I mean. Pip sputtered, and took a long drink from his can of cheap beer. I guess you think you’re just going to come into existence elsewhere in the universe.

Yeah, because that’s how time is created. Doc said, the dark circles under his teenaged eyes conveying more than what mere words might say. Once we control the frequencies of creation calculating outward from the present moment rather than any other past-centric temporal conception, we’ll be able to change anything and everything that exists in the physical universe.

It’ll be the end of money! Pip screeched, really upset about it, because his dad was some kind of rich lawyer. Every need possible, instantly supplied. The end of want, of ownership even, since anything could be copied infinitely.

What’s wrong with that? Doc cried, genuinely upset. Why shouldn’t everybody just get anything they want, once they learn how to make it, he asked, tears streaming from his huge dark brown eyes. His rimless glasses got a little steamy.

On that note, I picked up my axe and started to bow a sweet little gypsy melody. Doc looked over at me at once, of course, and we connected, as usual, through music. He shuffled over to his beat up old catgut strung guitar and started to strum his favorite chord. It was his bag, a chord that just hung there, perfect for anything, ready to take it anywhere, even to the stage.

Doc really seemed like he knew what he was saying. He was obsessed with all this time stuff, even when he wasn’t speeding, tripping, drunk, and stoned. But what can a high school drop-out sandwich-cooking minimum wage-making upper thumper do about any of his ingenious little insights?

Ain’t nobody gone listen to his sorry Hippie ass.

The innocence of a child of loveless parents is heart-rending. This child doesn't understand how deficient his life is, he only knows the yearning to be loved, instead of beaten, berated and neglected. A child blames himself for his punishments and never misses the love he has never known.

Through my impoverished and violent childhood, I found the yearning I had for love in books. In books parents were sometimes loving, sometimes not, and gave me hope.

Right before I was thrown out of my mother's house and dropped out of high school, I discoved Salinger's short stories, and Zooey enraptured me. Love is a constant theme in most literature, but Zooey opened up, like the emerging universe, the idea that love has far more expansive possibilities and divers modes; like medieval mysticism, like a goddam bowl of soup refused over and over but still offered, like the fat lady listening.

There are more recent stories that move me, but Zooey was the first light bulb in the thought balloon of my life.

When I was still in school, they called me gifted, allowed me to attend special schools, punished me for stealing into the bookroom to read the stories in textbooks of grades ahead of mine. Friends of my socioeconomic level yelled at me for bringing books along wherever I went.

I had a friend who always carried a Composition Notebook with him, like Harriet the Spy in my favorite childhood book, and wouldn't show anyone what he was writing. I started to do this too, though I never stopped anyone from reading mine. He also read Proust, in the hope that someday a beautiful girl would sit down next to him on the bus and say, "I see you're reading Proust."

It took me ten years to read Remembrance of Things Past, as it was called back then. I read the first three books over and over, until I could find a copy of the next volume. I remember reading it laying on the thin foam rubber mat wrapped in dirty curtain fabric that I slept on when I lived under Ead's bridge.

Reading assures us, even in times of desperation, that there has always been the hope of love.