Freaky Deaky Read Free Page A

beard.”
    “I’ve had it off and on. I first grew it when I was over in Spain. That’s where I went soon as I got my release. Started as an extra in the picture business and worked my way into special effects and stunt work. This guy Sidney Aaronson was doing a big epic called The Sack of Rome . But what it was, it was a sack of shit. You know how many times I got killed in that fucking picture?”
    Robin watched him reach out to stop their waiter going by with a tray of dinners. Skip ordered another drink and a bottle of Valpolicella. The little fifty-year-old waiter said with an accent, “Just a minute, just a minute, please,” and hurried on.
    Skip winked at her. “Time him. He gets one minute.”
    “You haven’t changed at all,” Robin said.
    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 squibbing 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 cottonsweater, 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’tseen 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