The Butterfly Kid: The Greenwich Village Trilogy Book One

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1

The trouble with most warlocks is that they talk too much. That’s how I happened to notice the kid in Washington Square: he wasn’t saying anything. He just sat there, quietly making tropical butterflies, while the teenyboppers rippled past, unnoticing.

Okay, I thought, I’ll play your silly game. I parked myself on the bench across the walk from his and elaborately ignored him, which wasn’t all that easy.

He was a pretty ordinary-type kid, by Greenwich Village standards: yellow hair, darker eyebrows, longish face not quite finished yet, blue unbelieving eyes—a sufficiently good-looking kid, but most Village kids are good-looking. The eyebrows gave him a touch of distinction, but there were already three or five other kids making the two-tone scene that summer, so he was going to have to find himself some other trademark. Those butterflies, I thought, would probably do it for him. They were vulgar butterflies, too big and too flashy, but good taste doesn’t matter much in miracles, and anyhow, he’d learn.

I still couldn’t see how he was doing it. He’d clench his fist, then open it, and off’d go another butterfly. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it very smoothly.

The kid looked to be about two weeks late for a haircut, and his clothes were nearly clean. Check. But he was so fair I couldn’t tell whether or not he was growing a . . . Yep, he was growing a beard. When he turned to watch a particularly garish butterfly veer off toward Fifth Avenue, the new sun hit his face at just the right angle to show he’d recently quit shaving.

He was obviously new to the Village then, but he didn’t look around to catch reactions to his butterfly routine, which was unusual. I was mildly fascinated.

Finally he reached into his shirt pocket, found nothing, and didn’t bother to explore his other pockets. His face looked immaturely rueful. Right. I lit a cigarette as ostentatiously as possible and did not smile.

Do you have another one of those? in a light tenor drawl. He was being casual so hard it almost glittered.

Huh? The object was to keep him on the offensive, let him write the script. I was very curious about those butterflies.

He said it again, more expressively, and conjured up a small, gray moth.

I said yes and held out my pack, he crossed the path and parked himself beside me, and the crowd remained the crowd. He tore the filter off the cigarette I gave him, but I forgave him for the sake of those lepidoptera.

The kid had a problem. Every time he tried to strike a match, a red and yellow butterfly got in the way. After three butterflies I shrugged my shoulders and gave him a light.

Thanks, man.

We sat there for a while. The butterflies got better, more imaginatively colored, and I nodded quiet approval at some of them. Just before he was ready to throw the cigarette butt away, I said, Pretty good butterflies.

Yeah. He smiled a few watts and generated a large butterfly that had Pretty Good Butterflies, gold on brown, printed across its wings. If the trick was still so new to him that he could openly admire it, I figured, he must’ve learned it in the Village, which would be interesting. Of course, he might’ve picked it up at the Bicentennial Exposition, but that could be interesting, too.

How do You do it? I stressed the you a bit, ever so gently, so he wouldn’t think I was trying to steal his secret. Forestalling someone else’s paranoia is a basic Village survival technique.

I dunno, he said, smiling mysteriously. I just . . . Well, I . . . He closed his left hand and opened it to emit an iridescent green beauty with a pattern of crossed question marks in gold across its back. Pretty good, for an amateur.

"It just, like, kinda happened. You know? he went on. I mean, he gestured colorfully, I was at this Party." He boosted his smile by a few more candlepower and leaned back. He wasn’t exactly smug about it, but he liked it.

Pretty good butterflies, I repeated. Then we were both silent for a while. A female teenybopper, blonde or so, in white pants just too tight enough, enjoyed our unanimous total attention for as long as it took her to strut down the path and out of sight, whereupon the kid produced a huge chromatic butterfly of pornographic implications.

Would you believe, I invited, "that the term teenybopper was invented sometime prior to 1962 by Lee Lamb?" which I thought might interest him.

I was being inordinately cool, not rushing the kid or frightening him, but generating just as hard as I could the feeling that it’d be lots of fun for him to tell Uncle Chester all about it. After a while, a short one, I could see that I was beginning to get to him. He filled the air with color for a few minutes and then said, You know, it’s kinda funny . . .

Good morning! quacked Michael the Theodore Bear in his favorite comic voice. The kid twitched.

Oh, good Lord! I tried to sound genial, but it wasn’t easy. This is Mike Kurland, I explained. He’s my Roommate. I didn’t know quite how, but I was sure Mike was going to scare the kid away. He’s sometimes hard to take if you’re not used to him. Of course, so am I, but . . .

Mike stuck out a hand for shaking, being a professionally genial sort. The kid’d had his hand closed, so naturally a butterfly popped out when he made to accept Mike’s paw.

Howdy. My name’s . . . Shawn. S-e-a-n. You know, like . . .

It didn’t work. The butterfly was blue on one side and green on the other, and Michael, face frozen at the start of whatever he’d been about to say, watched after it until it had blended into the new summer foliage and a little longer, all the while shaking hands reflexively. He looked more comical than he’d ever looked on purpose, but I was too bugged to enjoy the show.

Quack? he said plaintively. Quack?

Mike turned back to us and, completely deadpan, sat down. He used to be something of a spy—our side, of course, during the Second Cambodian Crisis—and took just pride in his utter unflappability. That was a butterfly. He said it like a line of print, which showed that he was pretty shaken by it all.

Yeah, the kid explained. I’ve got these Butterflies. He demonstrated.

Hmm. So I see. Yass. He sounded like W. C. Fields, a very bad omen.

What’s happenin’, Mike? I burbled in alarm. That’s an ancient Village greeting, full of implicit hipness and signifying nothing. Mike was in the habit of satirizing this with a blatantly absurd program of events, and I was willing to endure anything to prevent a battle of cools between him and the kid. Cooler-than-thou contests are never informative, and I was starving for information. But it didn’t work. I began to think nothing was going to work.

"Butterflies, you say?" Mike had now said four complete sentences, using a different voice for each, and the kid was growing nervous, very carefully keeping both hands open and fingers widely separated.

Hey, I blurted, that’s right! I haven’t even introduced myself yet. It was a clumsy non sequitur, but it just might turn the tone back toward casual and comfortable conversation, I hoped. My name’s Chester, I drove on. You, an enormous concession, can call me Chet. We shook hands formally. Where are you from?

The butterfly that fluttered where our hands had met was extravagantly baroque, and Mike, his cool now wholly blown, overtly goggled.

Howdy, Mister Dillon, the kid drawled. Every Chester in America hates that line. Usually when I hear it, I deliver a short prepared speech on the evils of TV and memorized wit, but I had other fish to fry at the moment, so I let it pass.

Yeah, I sighed. "Where did you say you’re from?"

The ornate handshake butterfly was perversely circling Mike’s head, he swiveling pompously about to keep it in view, and I hoped it’d go away and he’d follow it. From the look on his face, if it did he would.

I’m from Fort Worth, said the kid, forgetting about Mike. I just got here Saturday, last Saturday. I’m a lead guitar player.

Fine. A bull teenybopper with butterflies. Just what the Village always needed. Great.

How do you like the Village? I asked politely. Mike was still occupied with that butterfly, and his antics (twirling about like a dignified top to keep it safely in front of him) were attracting some attention. A small herd of tourists was developing about us. I tried to keep the kid from noticing.

It’s funny, he said. I mean, well, the people are kinda funny. You know, strange. The herd was increasing, but the kid went on. I mean, well, I went to this Party last night and, well . . . He made a sweeping gesture and the air was thick with butterflies.

That’s when it hit him. He gaped at the butterflies and the crowd, dropped his jaw, then turned back toward me with panic in his eyes: precisely what I’d been trying to avoid.

People don’t make butterflies! It was a truth so basic it had never needed stating, and now Sean’s universe was crumbling in lepidoptera.

And what else can you do? breathed Mike at this worst of all possible moments.

And all the stunned while, the sentence Sean had been working on, impelled by its own momentum, dribbled out one word at a time. I went to this Party and they gave me this Pill . . .

Phuip! Where he’d been was just a kid-shaped heap of butterflies.

There was scattered light applause. Somebody threw us a copper quarter. Then the butterflies and tourists drifted off. A mixed bag of teenyboppers wafted past us unawares. In the distance a Good Humor man plaintively cried his wares.

Hmm. Mike stared at me with his very best hurt look. A plaid butterfly landed on his knee and he slapped at it petulantly. I hate to see grown men petulantly slapping innocent plaid butterflies.

Coffee? I suggested. No response. I stood up, rescued the debased quarter from an approaching wino, and started toward MacDougal Street. Michael came along, still looking hurt. Whenever a butterfly approached, he ducked. He seemed to be dancing Swan Lake.

At last, You gave me your Solemn Word, he said earnestly, that you weren’t going to doctor my orange juice anymore. In fact, you Promised.

So that’s what was bothering him. No, Mike, I swore. That was all real. Honest.

That kid? And all those . . .

The whole bit, baby. My public image at the time involved a cultivated smattering of hip jargon, which I undertook to speak with a distinctly Liverpudlian accent. The tourists expected it.

Mike brooded a little. Then, No LSD? he asked.

Just once I’d spiked his orange juice, just once.

Not a bit.

You really saw it, too?

Everybody saw it. Honestly, Mike, it really happened.

But he wasn’t convinced until he overheard two nuns talking about the strange butterflies and one ancient chess player named David explaining how freak air currents sometimes blew migratory butterflies off course, and even then he had reservations. I’d played a regrettable series of complicated jokes on Mike a few years back, and he wouldn’t put it past me to be in collusion with a brace of nuns and old David.

However, as we strolled down MacDougal toward West Third, Mike’s expression moved slowly back to the bland malevolence that passed for normal with him. By the time we reached the Garden of Eden, the coffeehouse our people frequented that year, he was chattering animatedly about an elaborate joint deception we were working on.

We peered past the awful paintings in the foggy plate glass window to see who was there. Everybody does this—even the Law—even though he’ll be inside in a few seconds.

Moving toward the door, Mike said, in total explanation, Contact high?

Right.

Obviously.

It had been that kind of summer.

2

Contact high!

We heard those words at least ten times before Bonnie-Sue, the day girl, brought our coffee. Ever since last May, when an anonymous philanthropist had distributed magic mushrooms free to everyone in the Village who’d accept them, imposing on Lower Manhattan a whole week of psychedelic fun and chaos . . . ever since then, contact high had been the standard explanation for all impossibilities, and the impossible had lately grown common in the Village.

Not that this explained very much. A contact high was only the subjective response to someone else’s real high, and we had no proof that there actually was such a thing. No matter. We were able to make do with precious little explanation in those days.

". . . and then man (dig it) this cat starts whistlin’ Bach, man! Like, I’m thinkin’, ’da Di—pa-ba Diddilly . . .’ you dig? An’ this cat’s inside my Head, man. An’ he’s got this like Orchestra! Oh WoW!" Little Micky was on the customary verge of hysteria.

Contact high, M. T. Bear and I chanted in jagged unison, and Little Micky donned his shades and said Oh WoW again and split. We’d met him at the door.

The Garden of Eden was a long, dark, ostentatiously air-conditioned cave with black walls, and our group’s table was the big round one halfway to the rear. We greeted Joe at the cash register (Hey, you know what? Guess who had one of them contact highs last night. Me! Yeah, me. Honest to God! I musta been outta my skull: givin’ everybody free coffee onna house! Nin’y t’ree dollars ’n’ change, Christ!) and journeyed tableward from greeting to greeting, eavesdropped here and there en route (I had the nicest contact high last night and I don’t even know who it was!), moving with all the cozy pomp of celebrities in a gathering of celebrities. The Garden of Eden, as a Gestalt, treated everyone like a celebrity that year, which might as well explain its popularity. The trip from door to table was wearying but wondrously flattering, a potent drug on which we’d neither of us admit to being hooked.

I’m getting tired of this place, Michael muttered as we sat down.

Yeah, I agreed. Same old faces, same old talk. We were lying.

We were the first members of our circle there that morning, so Mike pulled a paperback mystery out of his right hip pocket, I took a spiral-bound notebook out of my briefcase, and we settled down to kill a little time. Neither of us mentioned butterflies.

All around us The Garden of Eden hummed like any garden. Since the place had no entertainment and was located in the throbbing left ventricle of the Village’s entertainment district, most of the patrons were entertainers and such—rock ’n’ rollies, superannuated folkniks, assorted groupies, plus a smattering of teenyboppers (teenage rock fanatics) who managed to sneak in past Joe’s cerebean glower. This made for liveliness, in a superhip and nervous sort of way. Geetar cases littered the aisle like a herd of leatherette dinosaurs, and the raucous Kallikak box was OD’d on all kinds of electrified gitfiddle music. Almost every regular Gardener had at least one record on the box, but the unwritten rule against playing one’s own records kept The Garden relatively bearable.

Hello there.

Ah. That oddly bassoon-like sound came from Andrew Blake, one of our group’s more shining lights, who would normally spend the whole afternoon explaining that he could only stay a few minutes because he had a deadline coming up (professional writer of paperback dirties) and besides he just couldn’t take Saturday in the Village anymore. So Mike said Hi and I said Howdy and Andy sat down.

I’m beginning to think, he claimed, that the whole damned world is just somebody else’s contact high.

In the beginning, I intoned, God created the heavens and the earth.

In July? Mike said, referring mainly to Andy’s habitual black suit and gold brocade vest.

To Mike: It matches my beard. To me: Sure, and the earth was without form, and void. Oh wow! Then back to Mike: "And why not? The whole world’s air-conditioned now.

Summer, winter, shrug, I never used to catch colds. I was more the humiliating-accident type. You know, whenever all the snow decided to slide off some roof, I was always the kid it was waiting to land on. I was sixteen before I learned that zippers aren’t supposed to gape open when girls are watching. It was like living in a comic strip, sort of, but at least I never caught colds, Now look!

Mike: So what else is new?

Ninety-five outside and sixty-five in here. If I don’t wear a suit, bubie, I’m dead. He sounded like a melancholy woodwind.

Meanwhile, a small Black-Haired Chick I’d been noticing around lately was sitting by herself across the aisle and staring at us. With her unfashionably healthy face and lorn waif eyes, she looked like a kid outside a toyshop. A collector of sorts, I decided, checking to make sure I had all my sorts about me.

Just now she was watching us with what looked to be pure reverence, perhaps. Most likely she’d just found out who we were—you know, real live authors she’d almost read books by, and I a long-haired minor rock ’n’ roll celebrity as well.

I wasn’t alone in noticing the chick, but then, I never am.

Mike said, That makes sense. Though he was ostensibly talking to Andy, he was using his invitation-to-overhear tone for the chick’s benefit. You hang out here to beat the heat, so you have to wear a suit to keep from freezing. Sure. Tell me more.

What can I tell you? Blake performed his famous Yiddish shrug. So I’m without form, and void. His open-letter voice was now in operation. The Black-Haired Chick was getting the full treatment.

I refused to participate in this foolish charade. I was a working entertainer, among other things, onstage every night. I’d be damned, so to speak, if I was going to stage a private showing for his hero-worshipping adolescent matriarch, this antique teenybopper who was clearly all of seventeen. Nay, sir, not I.

Not quite, I