Freaky Deaky

Skip Gibbs smiled, a thirty-eight-year-old kid: dull blond streaked hair tied back with a rubber band in a short ponytail, bread crumbs in the beard that grew up into his cheeks; Skip the Wolfman wearing a black satiny athletic jacket that bore the word Speedball across the back in a racy red script: the title of a film he'd worked on handling special effects, blowing black-powder charges and squib bing gunshots.

He said to Robin, "You still look like you can hit and run"-crinkling his light-blue eyes at her.

"Man, there's something about a thin girl with big tits." Staring at her beige cotton sweater, three wooden buttons undone at the neck.

"I notice they're still in the right place."

"You put on Jane Fonda 's Workout, " Robin said, "all you have to do is sit and watch it, you stay in shape."

Skip said, "I knew you'd be into something. Just don't tell me you've become a women's lib vegetarian lesbian, okay? I have beautiful memories of us in bed-and on floors and in sleeping bags, in back seats …"

Now Robin Abbott was smiling, sort of, agreeable without admitting anything: calm brown eyes gazing through the tinted glasses set against a pale fox face, her brown hair sleeked back into a single braid she would sometimes finger and stroke, a rope of hair, holding it against her breast in the cotton sweater.

"Your hair's different," Skip said, "otherwise…" He squinted at her and said, "The first time I ever saw you, Lincoln Park in Chicago, man, that was a long time ago. We were only-what, nineteen years old?"

"You were. I was still eighteen," Robin said.

"It was the Saturday before the start of the Democratic National Convention, August twenty-fourth, 1968." She was nodding, seeing it again.

"Lincoln Park…"

"Thousands of people," Skip said, "and I picked you out right away:

Why, there's a little Wolverine from the University of Michigan. Though I hadn't seen you at school before. You had on a tank top and you were holding up a poster that said, real big, FUCK THE DRAFT, waving it at the cops. I kept looking at you, your little nips showing in that thin material, your hair real long down your back. I said to myself, I think I'll score me some of that."

"Your hair was longer too," Robin said.

"Cops kept grabbing it, trying to hold you. We got away and I tied it up in a ponytail."

Skip said, "You think I don't remember that?" Touching his hair.

"I don't ordinarily wear it like this, but I did this evening."

Robin said, "I'd know you anywhere. Remember the first night? In the guy's car?"

"The cops pounding on it"-Skip grinned-"whole bunch of them wearing those baby-blue riot helmets. I look up and see these pig faces staring at me. Cop bangs on the window.

"What're you doing in there?" I go, "What's it look like I'm doing?

I'm getting laid, man." That's when they started beating on the car.

The guy comes along that owned the car, remember? He couldn't believe it.

"Hey, what're you doing to my fucking car?" He tears into the cops and they club the shit out of him and throw him in the wagon. Oh, man."

Skip rubbed his eyes with a knuckle.

"I

get tears thinking about it."

Robin said, "You remember the last time we were here?"

The waiter appeared with Skip's drink and the bottle of wine, opened it and poured a taste into Skip's glass.

Robin watched Skip hold the wine in his mouth and wink at her, and for a moment she thought he was going to spit it out and do a scene with the waiter. Skip loved scenes. But this time he swallowed and gave her a sly grin.

"I wasn't gonna do nothing. Guy's a real waiter, wears a tux, probably been here all his life."

Robin tried again, patient.

"You remember the last time we had dinner here?"

Skip had to stop and think. She watched him look around, maybe for something that might remind him.

"We got picked up in 'seventy-eight… It wasn't after they brought us back."

"Before that. Before we went underground."

"Man, that was a long time ago."

"We came here December fifteenth, 1971," Robin said, "about a week after we got back from New York." She waited again as Skip frowned, thinking hard.

"We went to New York for that stop-the-war benefit."

He came alive.

"Yeah, in that big cathedral."

"St. John the Divine," Robin said.

"You sold tickets at the door and walked off with something like nine hundred dollars."

"I think it was more."

"You told me nine hundred."

"The People's Coalition for something or other."

"Peace and Justice."

"Yeah, they had a bunch of celebrities giving talks. It was so goddamn boring, that's why I ripped 'em off. I figured they weren't gonna cut it, so fuck 'em."

"But when we came here for dinner, you were broke."

"I'd bought a ton of acid and a few pounds of weed by then."

"You said, "It looks like we're going to have to eat and run, fast," and I said, "Why don't you take up a collection?"

Remember?"

He was looking around again.

"Yeah, shit, I remember."