crowd.
The sidewalks were jammed with the usual eclectic sampling of life's rich
pageant that clung to the belly of any major university. Students, would-be
students, used-to-be students, hawkers, hustlers, hangers-on, punkers, and a
whole new generation of bums all flowed and eddied about, forming a meandering
stream of partially washed plurality.
I shouldered my way through the melee and headed downhill toward the
Cucumber Castle. In its present manifestation, it was a combination head shop,
clothing store, and CD exchange. Arnie Robbins had a knack for keeping up with
the times.
Thirty years ago, in the back row of the balcony of the Varsity Theatre,
Arnie'd slipped me my first joint. We'd found Charlton Heston's antics in The
Ten Commandments so inexplicably funny that we'd eventually been escorted out.
While for most of us the tribal fantasy of the sixties had been merely a
brief respite along life's highway, a welcome excuse to avoid the imagined
terrors of responsibility for just one more endless summer, for Arnie it had
become a permanent way of life.
Arnie was on his usual stool behind the counter. A tie-dyed Dorian Gray,
seemingly impervious to the ravages of time, he looked exactly like he had back
in the early seventies. His frizzy red hair and walrus mustache showed no signs
of gray. Unlike the rest of us, he seemed to lose a few pounds every year. As
one by one we'd trudged off toward serious jobs and serious responsibilities,
I'd initially been saddened by what I'd perceived to be Arnie's arrested
development. The last few times I'd seen him, however, I'd experienced
something a great deal more akin to envy.
The store was full. He glanced up briefly as I walked in, handed the blue
ceramic bong he'd been holding over to a leather-clad kid with an orange
Mohawk, and walked down to the display of vintage horror comics at the far end
of the counter. I followed.
We engaged in the old hippie thumbs-only handshake and checked one another
out.
"Looking good, Leo," he said with a smile.
"You too, Arnie. I mean, Jesus Christ, you look great."
"Clean living," he said gravely. " went full fruitarian five
years ago, changed my whole life, Leo. You wouldn't believe - "
Mercifully, two clean-cut coeds had decided on a pair of wild tie-dyed
T-shirts. Arnie hustled down to take their money. I looked around the shop.
Tie-dye was back with a vengeance. I was still shaking my head at the
vagaries of devolution when Arnie came back.
"It's the Age of Aquarius all over again, Leo." God forbid, I
thought.
"Listen, Arnie, have you still got that collection of semi=running
beaters out back of your house?"
"I'm preserving the earth's resources, Leo. Do you have any idea what
our addiction to the automobile is costing this planet? Do you - "
"Any of them big and still in running condition?"
"Well" - stroking his mustache - "there's that Buick station
wagon we used to tool around in. a real gas hog though."
"It still runs?"
"You bet." He headed off to wait on a customer. He was back.
"You'd have to take the battery out of the red Chevy with the camper on
it. Other than that I think it's just fine. Ran okay the last time I fired it
up. Burns a little oil. You want to borrow it?"
I said I did. "Tags current?" I asked.
"Not since sixty-three," he laughed. "Take the plates off the
Opel station wagon; they're good for another couple of months."
The crowd was thinning out. Mostly just wasting time. I jumped on the lull
to pick up a little information.
"Arnie, tell me what you know about an environmental group called Save
the Earth." The question pulled him up short.
"Bad news, brother, bad news," he intoned gravely. "Making
all the legitimate movements look bad. People like that make me wish I was a
CPA, man." I somehow doubted it. He elaborated. "They don't
understand that violence begets violence. They're a bunch of vigilantes. Bought
this big old armored cargo ship. Been tearing up fishing nets. Rammed what
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