“Oh wow!” Fritz Wildermood froze in his tracks. He couldn’t believe his eyes. A misty oracular nimbus seemed to form in the hushed air above the “new arrivals” case at Babs’s Bookstore.
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The fact that he was attending junior college and working part-time as his uncle’s gofer at the Teamsters local and part-time pumping gas on the weekends didn’t faze his new friends a bit. His old friends were busy being drafted or taking rides to college. He began to think of himself as the Righteous Outsider, and cultivated a Kirk Douglas Viking look, sans eye patch, to go with it. In a crowd of revolutionary greasers, Fritz was the thinker. In a crowd of college kids, he was the yodeling yobbo. It didn’t bother him a bit. He was a party dude of the first magnitude, with a head full of poetry and reefer. The first time he heard the Fugs, he fell out of his hammock.
Fritz made the scene, all right. In between trips back to his apartment farther north, he practically camped out at the foot of Lincoln Avenue, eyeing loose pavement stones and inhaling solidarity. It was hard to miss Abbie Hoffman in his American-flag shirt, with “FUCK” written on his forehead as a tease for news cameramen. And wasn’t that Jean Genet, French playwright, chatting up a pair of hippie boys by the park lagoon? Every headline hound, every photog, mythmaker flack, and self-aggrandizer, every bearded bum and out-of-school hell-raiser, every poet, sage, and professional muff diver seemed to be in Chicago that week. Certainly every roller in the city was there as well, munching Italian-beef-and-hippie-headband sandwiches while practicing their nightstick swings. Batting practice, it turned out. In one of his first true failures of adult nerve, Fritz decided to stay inside when the shit storm hit. On the day when demonstrators tried to march all the way to Hubert Humphrey’s coronation as Prince of Pigs in the stockyards, Fritz was laying up at Polish Ted’s crib with his girlfriend Marilyn, using Demerol to recover from a rousing night at the Kinetic Playground. Who needed to get their heads busted? Leave that to the glory seekers. My goal’s beyond, man.
The nuttiest story in the book, the one everybody rhapsodized over, was “The Blood of a Wig,” in which a thrill-seeking hack journalist gets himself injected with stolen blood from the veins of an institutionalized schizophrenic symbolist poet, then goes to work writing a magazine story about the untold true events of the day JFK was assassinated. The payoff image is of LBJ, crouched over the presidential casket in the cargo hold of the plane for Washington, fucking the neck wound. When read in the right way with the proper emphasis, this passage could make Annie, God bless her, come with a banshee scream. But Fritz’s own favorite Southern exposure was a piece in the National Lampoon that featured rabid veep Spiro Agnew, attired in a bodysuit made entirely of the stitched-together sphincters of Viet Cong, being whipped by little boys while dancing around his White House office chanting “I’m a Greek gook asshole rimmer!” Fritz and Annie thought Terry Southern was the coolest thing since Liquid Prell. As Rod Stewart said, “Look how wrong you can be.”
Smitten by reverie, Fritz scooped up the four paperbacks, mentally balanced his Mastercard account, and sauntered up to Babs’s cashier. Behind the counter, the heavy-lidded young woman with bright orange (Bozo!) hair floated a smirk in his direction. “Catching up on your psychedelic reading?” Fritz Wildermood, former working-class freak and fan of the recreational aspects of revolution, summoned his best silver-plated, armor-piercing, semi-precious-stone-brooch-unfastening, heart-melting, undergarments-evaporating smile and said: “Yeah. I was stoned the entire decade and wanted to see what I’d missed.” She smiled back. “Lucky you.”
