Good Vibrations Read Online Free Page B

work here?’ I asked the next agent in the book, but was handed a similar fistful of mould.
    â€˜If you’re a diplomat or a student or are in the Armed Forces you can have insurance. Otherwise you have to get a local licence.’
    â€˜How do we do that?’
    â€˜That’s easy. You just present your out-of-state licence to the Department of Highways and they’ll give you one for a few bucks.’
    â€˜How does it work?’
    â€˜You take a four-hour course on drug and alcohol abuse, then you get asked questions about road safety. If you come out clean, you’re issued with a temporary driving permit. Three weeks later you can take a driving test. Pass it, and you’re entitled to a Maryland driving licence.’
    I was delighted with the idea of the drug and alcohol abuse course. Perhaps we’d pick up a few useful tips, but further digging revealed the sad fact that as aliens we couldn’t hold a Maryland driving licence anyway. You couldn’t insure until you had a licence, but you couldn’t have a licence whether you were insured or not. I’d been hearing for years that the United States had become a haven for bureaucratic idiocy, but as a passer-by had never experienced it. Now here it was. Red in tooth and claw, and it had us by the throat.
    I sat on the sofa in growing despair, cursing deeply and roundly. Already, I was scheming about selling the bikes to Clark for $1 and letting him insure them, but I had a feeling it wouldn’t be that simple. Roz ignored me and proposed a trip to town to rattle a few cages in person, to let these nameless faces hiding behind their telephones see with their own eyes that we weren’t road-rage inspired serial killers. We could also grab a spot of lunch.
    Down near waterfront Annapolis we discovered the Moon, ‘a global cafe’ where the sixties lived on without a hint of self-consciousness. I left Roz reading something inscribed in flowing script on the wall and strolled over to the gents. The men’s room was decorated with planets, stars and optimistic visions of a distant future like images from Neil Young’s ‘After the Gold Rush’. I parked myself on the throne to wonder how, so soon after the hippy movement had promised sweet reason to all, mankind had arrived at such a bankrupt pass. Before I had an answer, an anxious fellow-sufferer started battering the door down, so I let him in and returned to the late 1990s. Roz had claimed a window table, where she was contemplating a menu of vegetarian marvels. Behind her, above the glass, was a quote from Oscar Wilde. It slotted in well with the images in the ‘john’.
    â€˜Yes, I am a dreamer, for a dreamer is one who can find his way by moonlight, and see the dawn before the rest of the world.’
    Our waitress skipped up wearing brief shorts of blue denim and a weenie bodice of the same material. I guessed she would be brown all over, but she wasn’t born when I was picked up hitching on the Massachusetts Turnpike in 1967 by a girl who looked a lot like her. Marian had been all thick, dark hair, cheekbones and wandering brown eyes. The difference in my case was thirty years and a thickening around the waist; in hers, no flowers in her hair, no coloured beads cascading down her front, and of course, it wasn’t really her.
    The waitress started her ritual of reciting the day’s specials, and my mind drifted away, past the insoluble problems of insurance, back through hazy decades to the sunshine summer when Marian had squealed to a halt in her full-sized convertible Buick. She had a couple of pals with her, but we all jammed into the inviting front bench and blasted off towards Cape Cod at 7-litre speed with the oversize radio speakers spilling out Country Joe and the Fish.
    Now if you’re tired and a bit run down,
Can’t seem to get your feet on the ground,
Maybe you ought to try a little bit of LSD.
Only if you want