Read Online Room Service by Frank Moorhouse - Free Book Online Page B

fulfilment therapy including heavy drinking.
    My first experience of Marin County fulfilment therapy was Tracy, a cocktail waitress at No Names Bar where I hang out when I’m in Marin. Tracy understands the restless soul. In Marin they have a style of talking that is very mellow and a vocabulary that has no edges to it.
    Tracy isn’t really a cocktail waitress: she’s a student seriously into deep-tissue massage therapy. She has been doing political science but moved across to physical therapy. In New York I found that the whores called themselves therapists; here in Marin the nice girls are into deep-tissue massage therapy (and all it can suggest).
    â€˜You are relating in a hands-on way to people and at least you see two years of tension roll away and people get up from the table smiling,’ she said.
    â€˜With political science it’s all verbalising and you never know whether you’re doing good or bad.’
    Later we tooled up to Bolinas in her Mustang to Smiley’s Bar, which is an old hippy hangout.
    When I walked into the bar I felt I’d walked back 10 years – more. It is the place where all the hippies and flower children came to die.
    Now they play Space Invaders and pool.
    The vegetarian cafe opposite Smiley’s showed an uncharacteristic sense of humour for a vegetarian cafe and named itself Scowleys.
    When I said to Tracy, ‘My God, this is it – this is the bar where all the hippies and flower children come to die,’ she became very upset.
    â€˜My step-father is an old hippy,’ she said, ‘and he’s a very mellow kind of guy.’
    â€˜Don’t get me wrong,’ I said, ‘I’m an old hippy myself. I wouldn’t mind coming here to Bolinas and Smiley’s bar to die.’
    I said that we old hippies didn’t seem to have left much of a mark on the world.
    â€˜I disagree strongly,’ Tracy said, ‘and it’s all going to come back (please no!) and this time it is really going to be a revolution ’cause all the old hippies are in power places and things like that and they’ll respond to new hippies.’
    Well, maybe.
    Tracy told me that Bolinas was where the ‘whale thing began’, where the Friends of the Earth headquarters were, and where Brautigan blew his brains out.
    The dogs all have a dreadful flea problem and scratch themselves against buildings and on gravelroads because the people of Bolinas don’t use flea wash or flea spray and rely instead on organic collars soaked in herbs. The dogs say it doesn’t work.
    There are no drug stores in Bolinas (in the accepted meaning of the word ‘drug’).
    Marin has two great beach villages – Bolinas and Stinson Beach. Stinson beach is more chic.
    â€˜Actually,’ Tracy said, ‘you should start your drinking at Stinson Beach – at the Sand Dollar bar – and finish the night at Smiley’s – you have your first ten cocktails at the Sand Dollar and your second ten at Smiley’s.
    â€˜You know what a cocktail dress is?’ Tracy asked. ‘Well, I’ll tell you – it’s a dress you need five cocktails before you are mellow enough to wear it.’
    In the Sand Dollar we saw this really unhappy chic lady with her arm in a sling and both eyes black – really black – she seemed to have been in a bar brawl.
    The cocktail waitress at the Sand Dollar told us the story.
    This lady’s husband had gone away for a week on business and for the first time in her life the lady decided to go to Bolinas and pick up a guy for the night. She had her ten cocktails at the Sand Dollar and tooled up to Smiley’s in her BMW where she picked up an ex-hippy flower-power boy and took him home for the night. At home he bashed her up, set fire to the luxury beachside house, stole her BMW car and crashed it into the sea, where it still was.
    The chic lady with her arm in the sling clutching her Tequila