My style’s a kind of resourcefulness, too. My hippie clothes—getting more raggedy, since home gets stranger, and my parents have forgotten about shopping, and do I really want things that speak of their world anyway, like underwear? I love the colors of the weird and beautiful outfits the Hog Farmers wear, citizens of a New Mexican commune who’ve come to town on their magic bus, and parked the painted extravaganza in the middle of the Yippie Free Festival, where Dino and I have danced all afternoon, each of us high on a package of Romilar, an over-the-counter antihistamine that makes you fly, if you take enough of it. Today the music carries me up and up, and when the crowd applauds the clapping enters my forehead like a thousand shining little needles. I’m so high I don’t notice when somebody steals my new shoes, handmade leather moccasins that don’t have soles but sort of wrap around your feet so you can feel the earth. They cinch at the top with a loop of leather that threads through two brass circles, but now I’ll never loop them again. Oh, well—somebody needed those shoes more than I did.

My friend Anna’s at every free festival, immensely pregnant, radiant; her boyfriend’s an acid dealer I know, a dark-skinned Hispanic boy with plum-colored lips and long eyelashes. Anna knows her baby’s going to be beautiful. The boyfriend picks up whole suitcases full of LSD at the airport; he has to wear gloves to count it because the stuff’s so strong he’ll get high just from the residue penetrating the skin of his fingers. I know it’s true because I bought some from him once, an envelope of white powder, and after I licked my finger walked into a Baskin-Robbins: not thirty-one flavors but thirty-one hundred heavens of color, a tantric paradise glowing like the keyboard chords in the Donovan song, in those saturated hues: Havana Lake, Rose Carmethine. Anna’s a little worried because she’s tripped once while she was pregnant, but in her heart she feels the baby’s okay.

And he is; next time I see her there’s Alexander Moonbow, right against her breast, his little fingers reaching for my patchy new beard, his own luscious black hair curling. “We live out in the desert now,” Anna says. “In a trailer. Just me and little Moonshine. It’s lonely, but you ought to see the stars.”