He undertook what he considered fieldwork, observing the effects of psychedelics on humans by plunging into the Bay Area subculture at the maximum bubble of its fermentation. One of the first potential subjects his searching turned up was none other than Kimberly Anne herself, now calling herself Sunflower and lovelier than ever.
He had become infatuated, both with Sunflower and the Movement with which she had so seamlessly blended. He himself couldn’t quite connect with either. But both seemed to him inexpressibly beautiful, worth any lengths to attain.
He had finally nerved himself to take the logical experimental step of dropping acid himself when the fateful news of the Kent State killings hit. Wandering by the university waiting for the drug to kick in, he had stumbled upon a confrontation in People’s Park that was rapidly going critical. That tripped the drug and flipped him right out of his skull; he stumbled backwards into an alley and wasn’t seen by a living soul for twenty-four hours.
But out of that alley at the crucial moment stepped the Radical. The National Guard was sent packing and Hardhat humbled. Radical was embraced as a brother by Tom Marion Douglas, the Lizard King, reigning rock ’n’ roll ace and master of a somber, driving musical style that was at once cerebral and visceral – Apollonian and Dionysian, as Douglas liked to say.
The Radical led a wild victory celebration, consuming vast quantities of beer and pot and truly epic sex with a violet-eyed lady who called herself Sunflower. Then, at dawn of the day following his triumph, he waved goodbye to his baggy-eyed but still stoned and jubilant admirers and walked into an alley. He was never seen again.
Mark was, though. He staggered out of the alley a short time later with his Coke-bottle glasses gone and his pants all crumpled and a headful of images he would never quite get sorted into coherent memories. His just-friend Sunflower had grabbed him by the arm and wondered loudly how he could possibly have missed what might have been the most glorious moment of the Movement. She had seen a Hero, and her eyes glowed like stars.
Mark’s faculty advisers, alarmed at the turn his private life was taking, steered him away from his study of psychoactives. He allowed himself to be maneuvered into genetic research, at least in the classroom. Outside the UCB lab, though, he grew his hair long and increasingly gave himself over to a glowing Summer of Love vision of life – an ideal that had never been, and was little more than a gauzy memory in that blood-in-the-streets spring of 1970.
His work in psychedelics continued on an extracurricular basis. He was convinced, somehow, that he had been the Radical. Some combination of drug and existing brain chemistry had activated his ace, and for one moment he had been strong and loved and valid. He would recapture that, somehow, anyhow. And Sunflower’s eyes would shine for him.
He got his doctorate in biochemistry and performed what would prove pioneering work in the field of recombinant DNA. But his heart wasn’t in it. The Radical eluded him; and that was the only goal he truly felt.
One summer dawn in 1974 Sunflower had turned up at the door of his apartment in the burnt-out huckstered-out husk of the Haight. Only, her glossy black hair had been cut to a bristly paramilitary brush, and she was calling herself Marshal Pasionara of the Symbionese Liberation Army. A dental emergency had pulled her out of the SLA’s hideout in Watts just in time to miss the fiery shootout in which Field Marshal Cinque and the others lost their lives.
The SLA’s harsh discipline had brought her off recreational chemicals of all sorts, but after four months on the Revolution’s far nut fringe she was as weird as if she’d been tweaking on crystal meth the whole time. The live news coverage of flames shooting out of the house she was supposed to be in – and the dark hints in the cell that she was showing signs of dangerous deviation and bourgeois weakness when she left to seek attention for her toothache – had slammed her to reality’s cold, hard ground.
To her parents she was dead, to her old Movement buddies she was either a dangerous zany, a deserter from the real revolution, or a possible government agente provocateuse – there was anything but consensus about the Symbionese crew – and to the United States government she was a wanted fugitive, though not under her real name or a reliable description. In all the world she knew of only one person who wouldn’t judge her, one way or another.
Mark was scraping by on sheer if sporadic brilliance, helping lesser lights deliver on their research grants. Most of his money went for his chemical dream quest and enough marijuana to take the edge off his continual disappointment. But he took her in, and felt only joy. The first two weeks she was like a fresh-trapped wild animal, all nerve ends. He let her be, even cutting his tiny apartment in two by hanging a Madras print to give her some privacy. Eventually the adrenaline buzz began to recede.
On August 8, 1974, the sixties officially came to an end with the resignation of a Whittier College alum even more notorious than Kimberly Anne and Nancy Ling Perry. Mark and Kimberly killed a bottle of wine – not Gallo – and wound up fumbling together on the rump-sprung mattress on the floor on his side of the partition. The divider came down the next day.
The next seven months or so were the happiest time Mark could remember. At dawn on the vernal equinox of 1975 Mark and Kimberly – again calling herself Sunflower – were married at Golden Gate State Park.
After that, nothing seemed to go quite right. Sunflower drifted from cause to cause, cult to cult, at once restless and listless. She began to drink and take pills. Mark retreated further into pot smoke and his search for the Radical. His odd research jobs got odder, not to mention less frequent.
Sprout was born in the spring of 1977. It was another case where partners in a failing marriage shared an unspoken belief that having a child would somehow cement their relationship. As a remedy it was akin to trying to save a crumbling bridge by running more semis over it. By the time Sprout’s developmental problem, or whatever euphemism they were using, was diagnosed in 1978, Mark and Sunflower were communicating solely in screams and silences.
The divorce was finalized in 1981. A nasty custody fight was aborted when Sunflower broke down completely at a hearing. She was declared incompetent and institutionalized in Camarillo. Mark was given sole custody of their daughter.
He took her and fled east. As a countercultural pole star, the Village had shone almost as brightly as San Francisco and Berkeley and didn’t harbor the landmarks and memories that reproached Mark for his many failures. His father, now four-star General Marcus Meadows, lent him the money to go into business for himself. He opened the Cosmic Pumpkin head shop and deli on Fitz-James O’Brien Street on the southern fringe of Greenwich Village.
He was not, to say the least, a natural businessman. His father established a trust fund to discreetly funnel money into the store. Mark and Sprout got by.
Then, in early 1983, his long quest for the Radical bore fruit. But like Cristoforo Colombo setting forth in 1492 to find a quick way around the world and fall on Jerusalem from behind to liberate it from the paynim, where he wound up wasn’t exactly where he intended to go…
Curled up on the fold-down bed, Mark stirs, moans softly. He has the compartment all to himself. He drools a little on the pillow. Outside, the Italian night rattles by.