Life At Death Cabin

By Parker T. Pettus

Life at Death Cabin: a deadly comedy.
It is 1977, and 60's pop idol, Loretta Traveler, rents her estate in a small, conservative town to a group of ex-hippies. Her tenants are exactly the type of people the townsfolk wish to avoid, and before long they became mired in accusations of littering, overcrowding, and murder.
Do the former hippies succeed in maintaining their idealism in the new age of the Me Generation?
Does Loretta think the inevitable conflicts between her hard-partying tenants and Zoning Commissioner Dachausen will create the opportunity she hopes for? Maybe that's why, whenever Loretta comes to visit the estate, she always pauses on the walkway for a minute, gazing through the trees towards Dachausen's house, smiling.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543968057

Book preview

Copyright © 1987 by Parker T. Pettus

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN: 978-1-54-396805-7

To Nobody

Table of Contents

RETRO-SPECTERS

LORETTA

THE PERFECT WAVE, THE PERFECT RIDER

PLAYERS FOR A HOUSE OF CARDS

STUMBLING INTO A VOID

A HOMECOMING AT POOLSIDE

A PARTY AND A NEW LOVE

DANCING AT THE CROSSROADS

AN EVENING AT HOME

LORETTA DROPS IN

MISOGYNY WITH ROGER AND JERRY

KELLY DAVIS

A VISIT BY KATE’S PARENTS

CARNAL KNOWLEDGE

ANOTHER HEAD TRIP

FROM THE PAGES OF THE WEST ROTON WEEKLY

A LONG EVENING

SUSPECT NOMINEES

A LITTLE ARCHAEOLOGY

A POOLSIDE ENCOUNTER

HEAVY DINNER CONVERSATION

ANNIE’S MORNING AFTER

TORTURING CURLY

A NEIGHBORLY VISIT, MANA FROM THE STRATOSPHERE

A DISAPPEARANCE AND A STRANGE CONFESSION

FROM THE FRONT PAGE OF THE WEST ROTON WEEKLY

A DISCUSSION ON CURRENT EVENTS

A LETTER TO LORETTA TRAVELER FROM DEATH CABIN

DEFENDING THE ZONE

A LETTER FROM LORETTA

THE EQUINOX PARTY

THE BODY IN THE POOL

THE CONFERENCE IN THE COTTAGE

BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE

FROM THE SPECIAL ISSUE OF THE WEST ROTON WEEKLY

ACCIDENTS, SUCH AS DEATH AND TAXES

VISITING PETER

PARTYING FOR THE DEFENSE

THE OVERDUE DARKNESS

A LETTER FROM LORETTA’S ATTORNEY

THE NEW AGE DAWNS ON ROGER

A RELUCTANT PHOENIX

RETRO-SPECTERS

The dream came into my sleep again last night: the recurring dream, the REM redux, the déjà video. The dream has been in and out of my mind for many years now: changeless, unfaded.

Somehow, I have washed up on a rocky beach and lie soaked, battered, nearly lifeless, in the sand at the edge of the surf. I gaze at the turbulent, mottled ocean as it assaults the beach in waves that bash themselves into spray and foam against the rocks. The swash laps gently on my body and washes through the tatters of my clothing.

The ocean in the dream is a sea of faces. They are American faces: from, every culture, every style, every era there has been for us. The mulligan of mugs is a restless sea of souls stretching far to the horizon, mixed and churned by the winds and the tides.

A wave begins to define itself in the great mixing pot, scraping together a regiment of hippie faces: a skirmish line of long hair and headbands, face paint and beards, wreathed with strings of love beads. A whispering of acid rock grows into a reverberating roar of feedback and distortion as the wave builds and races towards the beach. I watch as the wave crests, foams, and crashes headlong into the unyielding shore. The music stops. In a hiss of white noise, the hippie faces disperse, slithering in disarray, back into the sea of all faces.

Another wave forms. The chant, Workers of the World, Unite!, sets the cadence as a picket line of American Socialists rears up, surges towards shore, and finds brotherhood on the rocks.

Another wave. I hear drums, a tambourine, and see a long line of temperance marchers begin the trek to prominence and back to oblivion. I lie on the beach, exhausted, watching the waves.

Presently a figure appears on the horizon: standing, balancing, gliding from crest to trough, a champion surfer on the tides of change. With each wave, he draws nearer and with each wave the surfer’s clothes, hair, total image changes to match the current movement. I am a flotsam island run aground, waiting.

The surfer draws near, poised on a crest of Black Revolutionaries. The wave teeters for a moment over the rocks. The surfer, with the casual alacrity of somebody who knows exactly where the shoreline of the immutable lies, kicks out on his board and alights gently on the sand, as the wave pounds itself into evaporating spray all around us. I raise my head and squint at the figure standing against the sun. I recognize the face of Roger Debris. He is in a Cardin suit. His hair is in place. His shoes aren’t even wet.

I know why that particular dream comes to me so often. Although I was not surprised that Roger managed to benefit from the Death Cabin experience, watching it become the best thing that ever happened to him was a soul-searing epiphany.

Roger and I were left-wing insurgent delinquents in high school: neophyte political party-goers, eager to participate in the uncivil disobedience that was becoming rampant in the mid-sixties. In a decade when assassination, illegal warfare and secret government were still novelties, we joined our generation behind a banner of moral indignation and demanded Peace, Love and Dope.

No use at all dreaming about Mark, who hung out with us back then. He was sincere and thoughtful, lending the group just the proper touch of legitimacy but no more than the rest of us were willing to tolerate. He survived high school and the painful infatuations with his home-room Dulcineas. He survived the youth revolution and the anti-war movement. He didn’t last long enough at Death Cabin to finish unpacking.

I did dream about our friend, Peter, but only once in all the years since our Death Cabin days when I last saw him: wounded, palsied, and in jail. I dreamed that we traveled in time together, far back to one summer’s midnight just after high school graduation, when we sat on the sea-wall by a calm, moonlit ocean, drinking.

We stood behind our teenage selves, watching as we talked about brotherhood and the truths and the lies that brought our country to war in Vietnam. We imagined our own futures, and the peace that would come in the new age our generation was forging. To my surprise in the dream, we mentioned a song Loretta had on the charts back then, when she was Jackie: Days of Freedom Past.

Peter and I eavesdropped on Peter and me for a time, then Peter walked up behind himself. He whispered in his younger ear for a minute and then stepped back again. I – my other self – didn’t seem to notice.

Young Peter sat in silence. Prior I noticed his suddenly pensive demeanor and asked what he was thinking about. Peter the previous stood, looking out to sea. Then, saying nothing, he walked straight into the water and disappeared under the ripples.

LORETTA

Mecca lies at 21.4° N latitude, 39.9° E longitude, on the Arabian Peninsula. The azimuth to Mecca has changed for nobody in the Middle East for scores of generations.

Americans have always had a cultural Mecca lurking somewhere beyond the horizon, but its azimuth spins around the compass like a glittering Wheel of Fortune locked into overdrive. This is a very convenient attribute for a direction, as it gives even the most Brownian wanderer a sense of purpose and a destination to call his own.

The baby boomers had more than their share of Meccas: Disneyland, the surfing beaches of California, Greenwich Village, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock, Studio 54, and always some never-ever land on TV.

No Mecca is complete without its Muhammad, and we’ve had no shortage of sages, prophets, geeks, and charlatans to follow around: Malcolm X, Timothy Leary, Dick Gregory, Jerry Rubin, the Maharishi, Jim Jones…

Loretta Traveler: the needle on the Wheel of Fortune. A peripatetic prophet, Loretta was dedicated to almost everything at one time or another, and her peek-a-boo politics enabled her to avoid the bullets, drug overdoses, media overkill, and digressions from core competency that did in many of her messianic contemporaries. Our jet-set Joan of Arc was a lady not for burning; she knew when it was time to pull up stakes and move on.

Loretta dropped out of Radcliffe during her senior year in 1960 and made her pilgrimage to Greenwich Village. She arrived in time to usher out the final vestiges of the Beatnik era and midwife the birth of the urban folk-protest movement. Loretta was perfect for the Kennedy years: educated, articulate, and committed to social change and equality as only a young person of privilege can be.

She happened to meet two aging Beatniks who had adjusted to the age of social relevance by putting on denim overalls and playing old Woodie Guthrie tunes on their guitars. They called themselves Mutt and Jeff and managed to eke out a living playing in the coffee houses and subway stations of lower Manhattan. Mutt was impressed by the girl from New England who had ironed her long, blonde hair and gave her an audition. The newly-minted trio christened themselves Peabody, Pax, and Jackie.

Loretta-as-Jackie became a figurehead of social consciousness, riding a string of folk-rock protest hits with Peabody and Pax. Her concert and TV performances did much to galvanize a generation who had adopted a role model in James Dean’s Rebel Without A Cause, but who wanted the advantage of having an excuse.

In 1964, Loretta abruptly left the music scene to devote her time and fortune to civil rights activism. Peabody and Pax struggled on for a time, gradually disappearing from the pages of grocery store tabloids. Loretta also faded from view. After a string of ever-less-publicized appearances at marches, demonstrations, and arraignments, she had slipped into obscurity.

During San Francisco’s Summer of Love, Loretta resurfaced as Joyce James: the leading lady of an acid-rock band called Uncle Sam and The Withholding Company. Her formerly ironed hair now bloomed in a spectacular blonde afro, and her demure, sincere attitude had become raucous and exuberant. Somehow, she had learned to sing the blues as if she had been born the illegitimate daughter of a sharecropper rather than the illegitimate daughter of a corporate lawyer.

Loretta invested much effort in the anti-war movement, somehow managing to make a trip to Hanoi. The evening news reports of her laughing with the North Vietnamese soldiers and inspecting their bomb shelters created a firestorm of controversy. Loretta returned to America as one of the most influential people on the political left, and the one most hated by the political right.

Shortly after the counter-insurgency operations at Kent State and Jackson State, Loretta became a truly radical chick, openly sympathizing with urban guerilla revolutionaries and anti-nuke, ecology radicals. Loretta’s revolutionary period did not last long; the Symbionese Liberation Army’s baptism of fire left her with a third-degree case of burn-out.

Loretta’s long, strange trip left her yearning for peace and solitude (and a sound real estate investment), and so she settled in a small community about a two-hour drive from New York City, east of the Hudson River. West Roton had been a quiet farming village for two hundred years, but in the 1970s had seen an influx of executives, professionals and one controversial celebrity.

The newcomers eagerly bought up a number of the larger farms and renovated or replaced the old houses, creating more than a little resentment among the traditional, working-class inhabitants. Loretta purchased two adjacent parcels, totaling about 20 acres of second-growth trees. She restored and modernized the 1760s farmhouse and turned the barn into a lovely, separate cottage. On the property’s high point, just behind the house, she installed a heated, in-ground swimming pool.

Strange that Loretta should find herself in a community that was politically to the right of The Newlywed Game, but there it is. Her conservative neighbors, possibly recalling her trip to Hanoi and radical activities with some bitterness, never found their separate peace with Loretta, and she was treated with a baleful hostility throughout her time there.

Her special nemesis was her neighbor: Zoning Commissioner Dachausen. He balked at granting the zoning variance Loretta needed to build an access road for construction at the pool site and even accused her of Flag Desecration when she displayed an American Ecology banner on Memorial Day.

The anonymous telephone harassment and acts of petty vandalism Loretta endured climaxed one morning, when she found her poodle tied to a cement block, lying at the bottom of the heated, in-ground pool. More than that, Zoning Commissioner Dachausen actually filed a complaint with the local chapter of the ASPCA, charging Loretta with negligence in the matter.

The murder of her poodle and the subsequent finger-pointing by Dachausen was the last straw. Loretta moved back to New York - the Upper East Side - and organized her own media company, to release an aerobics video under her real name: Loretta Traveler. It was the first time Loretta had come face-to-face with the destiny she had long denied. She was in desperate need of capital.

The Zoning Board, with Dachausen at the helm, frustrated Loretta’s attempts to subdivide and sell off her property for condominium development. After a costly and time-consuming series of legal battles, Loretta changed strategies. In the opening move of a gambit that would have made a Russian chess master weep with envy, she put the estate up for rent.

And Roger began waxing his board.

It wasn’t inevitable that her path and ours should cross, but it was altogether fitting. Roger, Peter and the rest of us had emulated Loretta’s lifestyles and attitudes throughout our teens and early twenties. When she invited us into the estate that was to become known as Death Cabin, it was a kind of karmic homecoming, so steeped in festering counter-cultures and overripe idealism that even the murder seemed like a breath of fresh air.

THE PERFECT WAVE, THE PERFECT RIDER

It was 1977 and Thermidor in the youth revolution. Neither the best nor the worst: it was a time between times. As was the case in the French Revolution, terror had gone out of style, and the dawn of a nouveau, bourgeois dementality was beginning to color the cultural landscape.

Call it a moonscape. Watergate Conspirator Colson and Black Revolutionary Cleaver had joined forces with Billy Graham, on crusade as born-again Christian soldiers. The MBA held sway on campus, where portfolios had displaced psychedelics. Rock had gone soft, and punk – a genre that would not mature until it began to rot – was only a rumor.

The ever-lost war in Vietnam was unmentionable, rather like a recently divorced spouse, with the veterans left orphaned in the settlement.

The presidency of the United States had slipped through the clutches of a felonious gang of burglars and was now occupied by a peanut farmer with lust in his heart.

Roger had moved in with Peter and Willie Max. They were living in a small, dilapidated house next to the railroad tracks in Bridgeport. Roger and Peter, following high school graduation, had gone their separate-in-all-but-spirit ways until some years later, when Roger returned to the home town, rather like a salmon, to spawn and die, I guess.

Peter, who enjoyed working at cross purposes and had an abiding appreciation for irony, found a perverse satisfaction in being given the choice of accepting jail time for his marijuana bust at an anti-war demonstration or joining the military. Never one to do things halfway, he enlisted in the Marines and got his hip blown to pieces during a night ambush near Khe Sanh, trying to pull a wounded buddy out of the kill zone.

Peter had been renting a house near the railroad tracks for several years after his long stay in a rehab hospital, living on his disability benefits and royalties from the stories and articles he occasionally wrote for a bewildering variety of publications: The Enquirer, Ladies’ Home Journal, Reader’s Digest, Popular Mechanics, and so on. Peter also was the proprietor of a small, retail drug dealership, but due to his self-destructive habits of consumption and boundless generosity, his income from this source could barely be measured in grams.

Peter’s other house-mate was a young, eager-minded pioneer of neo-atavism only two years out of high school: Willie Max. He was a big, bearded, heavy metal rocker who looked older than he was and fit in well with the other mechanics at the garage where he worked. Willie Max could fix anything, ruin anything, and consume everything – and he was non-stop about it. Nothing exceeds like excess, he loved to say to people who questioned his indulgent lifestyle. They described Willie Max as an indiscriminate gourmand, but I saw him as a sort of reborn Dadaist.

Although the house was run down, it was cozy enough: it even had a casually elegant tilt to the floor in the living room. The trains going by would regularly drown out conversation and rattle the collection of Jack Daniels bottles on the mantle, but all in all, there was the kind of comfortable squalor a guy can build a home in. It was the go-to venue for parties since minor damage fit in with the general decor. Friends would frequently drop by to play poker, watch the game, indulge, hang out, pass out.

After high school, Roger attended several colleges and eventually won his socially-relevant, liberal arts degree from a small, drug-addled institution of higher learning in rural Vermont. Following graduation, Roger traveled around the country working various subsistence jobs, but eventually tired of the old hippie lifestyle. Only six months before the move to Death Cabin, Roger returned to Bridgeport and landed his first career position as a management trainee at a real estate brokerage and development firm. He had acquired a new sense of purpose common to those destined to become the New Age Yuppies: he was going to Get Rich.

The change in Roger was hard to believe. Formerly the hippest of the hippies, the hairiest of the hairy, Roger now looked more than a little out of place among his friends. Standing in the living room in his three-piece suit, he looked like an insurance salesman who had become hopelessly lost and wound up trying to sell term life in an opium den.

Roger always knew how to find the advantages in any situation, and he put his shiny, new career image to good use right away. A little networking brought him into contact with