Chapter Text
“Hey, Davy, wanna try this?” Micky asked, waving a vial with a dropper sitting loosely in the top.
Davy stopped in the middle of grabbing an apple from the kitchen table to stare at him. Micky was wearing his white lab coat and his hair and eyes were equally wild. Worst of all, he was holding the vial up and away; it was clear that if Davy accepted there would still be a list of disclaimers to follow, spoken fast as an auctioneer. When Micky played with his chemistry set, not even a sandwich could be accepted safely. “No, thanks,” he said immediately.
Micky frowned but bustled on to the living room, where two more targets lay unsuspecting: Mike was practicing a song and Peter was sitting in a chair reading the newspaper. “Hey, Mike, wanna try this!?” Deciding he could— perhaps—work on his salesmanship, he did a little dance and ended with a flourish, presenting the vial dramatically on the end-step.
Mike stopped playing. He cocked his head and thoughtfully swung his guitar to his hip. “What is it?”
“Knock-out drops!”
Mike swung his guitar back around to play once more, slipping right back into the tune as though he’d never left it. “No, thanks.”
Micky frowned. He deflated for a second but puffed himself full of air again. “Pete, baby!”
“I’m not sleepy,” Peter said diplomatically. He was nice enough to look sad about refusing.
“You go to bed easy, right?” Micky asked. He leaned over the arm of the chair and rocked onto the balls of his feet, pushing in close to Peter’s face. Peter leaned away from him and pulled his newspaper up as a shield, easily intimidated by his enthusiasm.
“That’s right,” he agreed.
“Well, so, if you were sleepy you wouldn’t need it!”
“I…What? Michael!”
“Lay off’a Peter,” Mike said without missing a note.
Micky glanced up. He immediately fell away. “Sorry,” he said, reluctant but sincere.
He trudged around the room like a kicked dog, eyes cast down, shoulders hunched into an ugly slouch. This wasn’t the sort of mood that would last long. Some people collected coins or stamps to the point it was a second job; Micky collected bits of pleasure the same way, fanatically picking it up throughout the day to create a stockpile of it. He’d amassed a fortune since childhood. Within minutes he’d be back to his usual obsessively joyful self.
Just the same it was pathetic enough that Mike decided to take pity on him. “Cheer up, Mick. You’ve made a lot ‘a progress with your experiments. You just gotta figure out what people will want to try, that’s all.”
Micky was still hunched in on himself, but his eyes were lighting up. “How do I do that?”
“You just gotta think, what would you use?”
Davy walked in just in time to see Micky’s face fall again. He took a bite of his apple and relegated himself to a corner, hopeful that no one would drag him into this mess so he’d be able to enjoy it.
“But I would use this,” Micky was saying, “It’s real hard for me to get to sleep sometimes— I get excited, and night’s the best time to do things ‘cause no one else is. You know that. I can’t take it now, though. I gotta record the results, everything! I can’t watch myself if I’m knocked out.”
Mike stopped playing a tune and instead focused on writing notes to himself in the sheet music, hoping to give Micky attention without having to give up productivity.“How many experiments you got cooking?”
“Like twenty.”
“So you got nineteen more chances one of us’ll dig it. Get back to work and come back with another.”
“I can’t do that, I’m finally focused,” Micky said, grief-stricken.
“It is the longest he’s stuck with one thing,” Peter agreed sympathetically.
Mike threw them both a world-weary glance that usually took another ten years and a couple of kids to master. Peter was good at infinite-patience and Micky good at infinite-enthusiasm, but Mike knew the value of limitations. He was just about to speak again when Micky’s fuse burned down to the firecracker and he lit up again with unbridled excitement.
He ran to Davy so quickly that Davy nearly choked on his bite of apple. Pulling out the dropper, Micky yelled “Davy, hold this!” and shoved the vial into his hand.
“What, what for?”
“Mike, watch me!” and with that he squirted the dropper into his mouth. He plunked it back into the vial before darting away from Davy again. “You guys gotta tell me what I do, if I fall asleep.” A pause. Addendum, “When I fall asleep, ‘cause, well…” He tugged at his jacket’s lapels with pride.
For two long seconds, three pairs of eyes stared at Micky dumbfounded all around the room.
It was Davy who wheeled on him first. “You’ve got to be out of your mind! You just swallow something full of— That could be toxic.”
“Pssh, toxic! I made it!” Micky reminded.
This apparently struck Davy harder than if Micky had just drunk something out from under the sink. He grabbed onto Micky’s arm and started leading him upstairs. “Man, you’ve got to go drink some water, throw up or something, I’m telling you.”
“Davy, wait a second,” Mike called. Davy swung around willingly, Micky by Davy’s force. Mike eyeballed Micky very critically before making an executive decision, “Mick, come on back and sit on the couch.”
“Now, guys, c’mon.” Micky laughed as he disentangled himself from Davy’s grasp. “I know they’re called ‘knock-outs’, but it doesn’t work just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
His eyes promptly rolled up into his skull as he fell flat on his face, unconscious.
All three of the remaining, waking members gathered Micky up; Micky, long as he was, still had a limited amount of space to grab onto, so Davy was left rather uselessly supporting his head until they dumped him on the couch.
“He could be really sick, you know,” Davy chimed in.
“Oh, he’s fine,” Mike said. He waited until Peter and Davy glanced at each other to surreptitiously check Micky’s pulse. It seemed perfectly normal to him, but he hadn’t exactly made it to medical school. Even high school had been a bit of a challenge. “Of course, if it’d make you guys feel better, we could call a doctor….” Mike turned to look at Peter, “Pete—”
Peter was already on the phone with Doctor Cordic.
The doctor came in a flash and gave an equally prompt diagnosis: “This boy’s unconscious.”
“Well, uh, that’s right, Doc,” Mike said. “But we were hopin’ you couldn’t tell us if it was somethin’ to worry about.”
“Certainly, if he told me how he was feeling,” said the doctor.
“But he’s unconscious,” said Peter.
“That’s right!” said the doctor.
The three waking Monkees shared a glance.
“If that’s all, that’ll be ten dollars,” said Doctor Cordic.
Mike sighed but passed the ten dollars over without question. The doctor took the time to look over their money—because they looked poor enough to need to skip out rather than dishonest enough to want to, Davy assumed. Then he was walking back through the house, and Davy found himself opening the door for him despite his frustration.
“Fellas, we need to go further in the Yellow Pages,” he said bitterly, shutting the door and collapsing back against it.
“I like Doctor Cordic,” Peter objected, feeling a deep and personal affront as the person who’d called him, “He always comes right away.”
“Sure he does,” Mike said, “’Cause no one else is callin’.”
+++
It was quiet with Micky out of commission. This wasn’t always unwelcome— whenever he had gone to visit his family, they all enjoyed themselves in the silence he left in his wake; Davy exuberantly, Mike quietly, and Peter guiltily. There was never any malice to this, and whether Micky was gone a day or a week, whenever he came back they reveled in the noise just as much as they did in the reprieve. Therein was the difference: when Micky was off visiting, they could all enjoy their time apart from each other knowing everyone was safe and sound.
Mike was the only one capable of ignoring the situation, given he could see that Micky was breathing fine and tossing and turning only as often as he ever had in his sleep. Doctor Cordic was worthless, but he was enough to dissuade any lingering fears Mike had, in that he assumed that even the worst doctor would be able to tell if someone was in serious trouble. So he was now able to get back to work on his music. Peter and Davy were another matter. While Mike assured them whenever they got to glancing too much at Micky’s prone figure that he was fine, the air of uncertainty still sat heavy in their chests.
Eventually Mike told them to take shifts watching Micky since they were staring at him so much anyway. Besides, he said, Micky had wanted to get reports on what he did, so it would help him out.
Meanwhile, Mike decided to focus on a project he didn’t want to let the guys in on until it was complete; he’d been trying to write a song lately, and he knew the second they heard about it there’d be no peace. Even if it was just a silly little tune about dogs, they’d fall on it just like they were falling over Micky now. They were all the most horribly supportive people Mike had ever had the pleasure of knowing.
Peter was on first watch, and it was largely uneventful.
He sat inches from the couch and stared at Micky straight in the face without rest. He opened his eyes wide and only after they began to burn would he give a quick little blink, like Micky would wake up in the fraction of a second he had missed out on watching him. For four long hours, every time Davy walked by he saw Peter silently breathing in Micky’s face.
Davy found Peter more interesting than Micky, and plunked himself down on the chair an hour before they changed shifts. He flipped through magazines and looked over at Peter, and did little else for a few minutes.
“Hey, Peter,” he called forty-five minutes from shift change. Peter turned to look. “Your shirt, man, really exceptional today. It matches your eyes.”
“Thanks!” After a beaming pause, Peter looked down at his button-up. He frowned and looked back to Davy. “But my shirt’s red.”
Davy fixed him with a smile. “Blink, Peter.”
“I can’t, I’ve got to watch Micky,” Peter said. With a gasp at having forgotten, he whipped around from to stare at Micky again.
Davy walked over and plunked down to sit next to Peter. “How ‘bout you wink?” He gave Peter several exaggerated winks while he spoke, “That way you’ve always got an eye on ‘im.”
Peter brightened up and started a continuous series of alternating winks.
Davy let him have at it for a full minute before stopping him with a hand on his shoulder and a laugh. “All right, hold it, hold it. You blink, and every time you do, I’ll keep my eyes open. Okay? He’s covered.”
“It’s not your turn yet.”
“It’s fine, believe me.”
Peter sneaked Davy a flash of a grin, and they spent the rest of his shift talking companionably.
By the time anything happened, Davy had been alone for several hours after ushering Peter out of the room. They were nearly up to switch again, as a matter of fact, and when Davy took a glance out of the window he could see only shadows in the dark. His feelings on keeping watch ran in a very large circle: He’d begun with an ache in his chest and a lump in his throat. An hour of waiting and he’d boiled down to a mild sort of worry that was placated by having Micky in the same room and had gone back to reading, buffing his nails, and doing general upkeep of the living room. This lasted for a while, but he was winding back up to legitimate fear as it neared Micky’s eighth hour of unconsciousness.
As was the case with these sorts of things, he was just about to get Mike to call the doctor again when Micky woke up, eyelids heavy.
Micky groaned. The room was bright and made his brain throb between his ears. He squinted one eye up into the lights and squeezed the other closed.
“Hey.” Davy squeezed Micky’s arm. “How’re you feeling?”
“My face hurts.”
“I’m not surprised. We don’t exactly have shag carpeting, you know.”
“Wha-? Huh?” Micky asked, distraught. Whether someone had to repeat a joke or he had missed out learning the meaning of life, he had exactly one level of high-pitched confusion. He turned his head to look at the floor, still squinting. “Oh, right, yeah.”
“Besides that, you’re feeling all right, then?”
Micky shrugged. He yawned in a way that was truly more dramatic than a yawn had any right or need to be. “Sure.”
This was all the assurance Davy needed to leap into criticism, “What you did was absolutely mad, you’ve got to realize that.”
“What was?”
“Drinking this stuff!” Davy whipped the vial from his pocket and waved it in Micky’s face. He only now realized he’d actually held onto it after having it thrust into his hand.
“Oh, right, yeah,” Micky repeated amiably. He flung an arm over his face to block out the light. “Well, I test all the stuff I make on myself when you guys won’t try it.” He smiled wryly and amended, “I test all the stuff I make on myself.”
“You must be joking!”
Micky lifted one shoulder in another half-of-a-shrug. He shrank down into himself and muttered, “Most the time nothin’ even happens.”
“That you know of.”
“Hey, that’s right!” Micky whipped his arm from his eyes to fix Davy with a full-faced grin.
Davy sighed. “Just take it easy.”
This Micky actually took under advisement. “Okay,” he said around another yawn. “You gotta tell me later if I did anything interesting.” He fell back to sleep within minutes.
+++
One glance at Davy’s sour face and Peter’s eyes brightened. “Micky’s awake!”
Davy glowered at Peter. He reminded Davy of a puppy he’d had as a child. Big moon eyes, wide-open grin. This was all charming enough, in its way, but it was the most annoying face in the world to look at when he had his mind set on being angry.
“He was,” Davy answered tightly. “’E’s back out, now.”
“But he’s lookin’ all right?” Mike piped in.
“’Cept for a bit of a headache,” Davy answered. He found himself grudgingly sympathetic, but was able to easily hammer this into a more productive sort of concern. He walked over to Mike and leaned against the wall in front of him to corner him, even though he suspected Mike could just swing one of those gangly Texan legs over his head to escape if he had the mind to. He spoke conspiratorially, “He really is certifiable, y’know. He’s drunk half the stuff he’s got in that chemistry set!”
“We all have our ways,” Mike said.
Davy frowned deeper. He’d expected this from Peter, who had made and ingested a good deal of questionable things himself. But Mike, Davy thought, was typically a rational human being who liked to avoid being poisoned. He’d forgotten that even Mike had a soft spot for the day-to-day antics that didn’t lead to them getting kidnapped.
After a moment’s thought, he removed his hand from the wall and paced the room a bit, just to get the guys’ eyes on him without having to call attention to himself. If there was one thing Davy knew how to do, it was how to get people to look at him. It worked like a charm. “No self-preservation, but I’d bet ya, we actually offered to try any of it and he’d be more careful.”
Mike looked at Davy for a very long, analyzing moment. Instead of pointing out that offering to drink Micky’s concoctions would make them the ones without a lick of sense, he said, “Yuh-huh,” in a tone that was clearly meant to get Davy to figure that out himself.
“’E’s nutty, but he cares about keeping us well,” Davy insisted.
Even Peter seemed to recognize this plan would just give Micky more victims. “He said he’d trade me to pirates for a sandwich yesterday.”
“Now, it wasn’t just any sandwich. It was a B.L.T.,” Mike corrected.
Peter broke into a broad, doofy grin as he remembered. Mike—who had expected something closer to reproach than boundless relief— shot Peter a strange look before accepting it.
Davy didn’t have the patience for meandering conversation. He cut in, “I’m gonna do it. Drink the stuff he’s got down there.”
“Okay,” Mike said. He looked Davy square in the eye. “Just don’t make yourself sick, all right?”
Davy waved him off. “I won’t, I won’t,” he said before darting off again.
+++
By the next morning the fog in Micky’s brain had cleared and he was suddenly wide awake.
The last place he’d remembered being was sprawled on the couch after a third hazy re-awakening at around ten o’clock, where Mike had shaken his shoulder and leaned in close to say something. After a moment’s hard thought, he remembered it was, “You gotta get up, it’s time for bed.” He thought of his mother saying the exact same thing once, way back when he was five or six and had fallen asleep watching Howdy Doody. He hadn’t gotten up years ago or last night, but both times woke in his own room, tucked into his own bed. He smiled trying to imagine the guys hauling him up the stairs like The Three Stooges lugging a hefty piece of furniture.
He was still thinking about this when he looked down and saw he’d even been changed into his lengthy nightshirt. Even if he were so protective of his nudity as to mind this, he would have found the mental picture of any of them trying to manage it funny enough that he would have forgiven them in a heartbeat. Since he wasn’t self-conscious in the least, he found it hysterical.
It was only in swinging his legs over the side of the bed that another clue fell into place: he could see he still had his shoes and pants on beneath the nightshirt. A quick peek down the front revealed a wrinkled, buttoned top.
Instantly, he knew there was only one person who would decide to ‘put some pajamas on him’ so naively and so literally.
“Peter,” he whispered to himself with a grin. He rolled his eyes, stood, and shucked the nightshirt. He headed downstairs without checking the time, briefly surprised as he passed by the other beds that everyone else was still asleep.
He was more surprised to look out the window and see the sun barely more awake than the guys were, toes stretching beneath the sheets, vibrant pinks seeping from under the cover of night. Glad he was already dressed, he ran outside to meet the sun as it rose. His shoes weren’t made for running in the sand; he pulled them free while stumbling across the beach and tossed them over his shoulder.
Micky plopped down at the edge of the water, tugging off his socks only as an afterthought when waves nudged at his toes. It was low tide and the water was weak and docile, comfortable at his feet. He looked first out across the ocean, took in the broken refraction of light across it, bits and pieces of the sun bobbing in front of him. Took in the smell, heavy on the wet air, that came from the lives and deaths of thousands of plants and animals beneath it, a constant flux of growths and decays, and from the humans already setting up their vending stations up along the beach waiting for the early-morning kids who came before school. It was human and it was nature all in one salty breath.
For a while he sat and breathed it in and watched as the sky flushed pink, burned deep before turning gold, but couldn’t help looking around in the middle of the sunrise to see all the people. There weren’t many this early on a weekday, but there were some. There were two sorts there: The romantics, who woke up an hour ago just to catch every color and the night owls, who saw it as he usually did, catching it right before going to sleep rather than right after getting up. It was easy to tell one from the other, because he knew the heavy-lidded expression of the night-owls well.
He turned back around and waited until the sky was a muted version of what it would be in the middle of the day. It was different being on the romantic end of things, he thought; rather than being some visual bedtime story it was stirring him awake from the inside out.
Micky gathered up his socks and shoes and headed back to the pad.
When he got back inside, the place was still filled with stale air. He bustled around the house before the other guys had so much as gotten dressed, flitting about and looking at everything he usually only saw with at least one more pair of eyes beside him. He explored every inch of the house the way he might have the day they moved in if he hadn’t tagged along with Mike, crawling up inside as much of it as he could. The experience made his eyes open up wide, every move of his arm and swing of a leg suddenly become larger, as though that would make him suddenly able to catch more of it.
It also made him bored very, very quickly.
Micky was made for engaging people, doing things. He wasn’t made for long hours of solitary reflection.
The first thing he did was stand beside each of the guys’ beds in turn and will them awake with as intense a stare as he could manage. Peter and Mike did absolutely nothing at all. Davy—because had less mass to disperse Micky’s concentrated will through, Micky assumed—did toss and turn a bit. But he’d also apparently built up a tolerance from thousands of girls staring heart-eyed at him, because a moment later he sighed softly and fell back into a still, calm sleep.
Micky frowned but left the room.
His next thought was to start playing the drums. It wasn’t just the noise that he thought would wake them up. Each of the guys could play a guitar; the entire reason he didn’t—besides the fact Peter and Mike could outplay him with two fingers tied behind their backs and no one would hire a group with four guitarists unless they wanted a mariachi band— was because nothing could compare to the sheer power of the drums. Unbridled energy. Barely-contained emotion. If the drums couldn’t wake someone up from both the volume and the emotion behind it, they might as well have been dead.
In the end he opted against it only because he decided to get some breakfast and lost his train of thought. Somewhere between heating up a leftover slice of pizza and pouring a glass of water, he decided two things. The first was that it probablywouldn’t be fair to wake the guys up. The second was more important; Mike was right: Now that he’d been knocked out for nearly a full day he had to admit he wasn’t keen on repeating the test right away, but he could still wrap up some of his other experiments until he got back around to the knock-out drops.
He gathered up his food and drink and headed to the spare room, where he’d set up his chemistry kit after it had been banned from their own bedroom. The whole process had been very democratic, with witnesses, expert testimonies, and Mike with a new, sturdier gavel. It was all so emotional that Micky had nearly felt compelled to slander himself. In the end he’d been granted the right to appeal in three months and besides which, there was more space without four beds in the way, so although he’d made a show of righteous indignation at the ruling, none of them had been left unhappy.
Davy woke up with a stretch.
Turning over, he saw two familiar lumps still curled up under their blankets. In the third bed, he saw unmade sheets and a discarded nightshirt. Getting up, he made his bed and was halfway through making Micky’s before he realized it wasn’t his responsibility and wandered downstairs instead.
“Hey.”
“Hm?” Micky swung away from his beakers. “Hey, Davy!”
Davy’s face was still sleep-puffy, with foggy eyes weighted by heavy eyelids and dark bags. One button had come undone from his pajama top, the right leg of his pants had rolled up in his sleep, and though he somehow still had his nightcap on, it was teetering precariously on the back of his head. He was the biggest mess Micky had ever seen.
The sunrise was nothing. Seeing Davy a morning wreck, Micky suddenly wanted to wake up early every day for the rest of his life.
“What’re you workin’ on?” Davy asked, words still balled up tight in sleep. His accent was a bit thicker before his voice warmed up.
“I dunno yet. I figure it out as I go along.”
“And that’s how scientists do it, yeah?”
Micky lifted his eyebrows and opened his eyes wide. He rubbed his hands together as he cackled, “The mad ones!”
Davy sensibly ignored him. “I’ll help, if you want.”
“Really? You were ridin’ me pretty hard yesterday.”
Davy shrugged. “I don’t want you to be drinking all’a this….” he waved at the chemistry set like a king dismissing a commoner. “But those knock out drops you made did what they were supposed to, so maybe you know what you’re on about. I thought I’d test some of ‘em so you wouldn’t have to.”
“That’s great!” Micky shouted, pulling Davy into a hug.
Davy laughed, clapping Micky on the back.
Micky leaped back and continued, “Oh, man, though! If you’re gonna help out, you gotta be dressed right, like me!” He stopped a moment to strike the pose of a man selling a suit. “I got another lab coat—and the goggles!— just hang on.”
Davy lifted his eyebrows as Micky dashed away. Within seconds he was back, shoving a lab coat and safety glasses into Davy’s hands, yelling at him excitedly to put it on.
Davy did so without complaint, and while he didn’t especially mind the way the jacket hung down to his calves, he did think that the arms dangled past his fingers more than they had a right to compared to someone only half a foot taller than he was. “You know why we’re The Monkees, don’t you?” he asked.
“Byrds got the sky and The Beatles cornered the bug market?”
“No, man, it’s all you! With your arms like these,” Davy flapped the too-long sleeves, “an’ a face like that! We didn’t have a choice!”
Micky’s amusement took him by surprise: he didn’t so much laugh as blow a raspberry of joy.
Davy kept on him as he rolled up the sleeves, “Peter plays the organ, y’know; we ever split up, you two could go and have a street act.”
“Split up! Babe, I could never leave a sweet talker like you!” He closed his eyes, puckered his lips, reached out wildly, and blindly went after Davy for a kiss and a warm embrace.
Davy darted out of the way with a yelp. Micky laughed and pulled back, standing up straight. Mere seconds after pulling apart, they joined again in the middle to giggle for no reason beyond the other one was. They continued to collect themselves only to set the other off with a sly grin or humor-widened eyes until it was an actual effort to draw a laugh out.
When they finally composed themselves Davy took Micky in very seriously. “How’s it I can say all that and you’re like this, but someone calls you skinny, you fall apart?”
Micky briefly made a disgusted face at the mere mention of the word ‘skinny’, but then smiled and shrugged with his arms out wide and bent at the elbow, cartoonish. He swung a hand to snatch Davy’s nightcap for no discernible reason other than to play with the pom-pom. “I could bulk up, gain weight or something, if I tried hard enough. But I’m stuck with my face, so what’s it matter what people got to say about it?”
“I like your face. It’s got character.” Davy was well aware that this was the kind of compliment that would make someone more critical, like Mike or even himself, look deeper, get caught up in what it meant. And given he was aware of this, he thought he, Mike, and all the other critical people were right, and it did mean something beyond the usual ‘beautiful’s or ‘handsome’s. Whatever he meant beyond that was good in his mind, however, so he was glad that Micky was the sort who thoughtlessly took things in the best possible light: he was beaming.“Any case, being skinny’s not so bad, y’know. I’m not the biggest guy around—” Micky opened his mouth. “—Watch it—” Micky shut his mouth. “But I got as many girls as I want. It’s confidence what does it, not how you look or any of that.”
“Uh-huh, sure.”
“Well, maybe looks have something to do with it,” Davy conceded, grinning a tad and ducking his head. “But the rest is how you carry yourself. I gotta act taller than I am, you gotta act bigger than you are! Don’t let anybody get you down.”
Micky grinned, then shook his head. “Man, when has anyone got me down?” He snatched up a few beakers and gave a much more maniacal smile from behind them. “So whaddya want to do?”
“Just test what you’ve got, man, so you don’t have to.” Davy took a test tube from the rack and brought it up towards his mouth. “Like this, or whatever you’ve got lying about.”
“Don’t drink that!” Micky yelped, just about tossing his beakers onto the table to free his hands.
Davy patiently waited for Micky to snatch the tube from him. “Why not?”
“It’s acidic,” Micky said, “You’re doin’ all right now, but you wear yourself down any more you’re gonna have trouble seeming bigger than anything.”
“Ah, come off it,” Davy said. He picked up another test tube and swirled it around. “You told me you drink everything outta here.”
“Everything I make.” Micky watched Davy warily. “’Cause I know what’s in there.” He raised his hands a bit, like he might reach for this tube, too, but just twitched his fingers in the air instead of making the final grab for it.
Making Micky nervous and careful had been the point of course, but Davy hadn’t expected to be this happy about enacting a bit of karma that Micky didn’t even understand. He put the tube back in its rack. Micky visibly relaxed, air whooshing from his lungs to the point it shrunk him down.
“That didn’t do you much good yesterday,” Davy said, picking up a beaker and peering down into it.
Micky’s laugh was strange, genuine but forced, like the main purpose was to stop Davy from being mad. “Yeah, man, I haven’t drunk something that knocked me out like that since Ken Thompson had us all down for a bonfire after graduation.”
Davy set the beaker down. He watched out of the corner of his eye as Micky relaxed again. He grabbed up a half-empty glass of clear liquid sitting next to an empty plate. “What’s this?”
Micky watched as Davy tipped his glass of water back and forth, inspecting it closely. “Well, that’s just—” He stopped himself. “Well, that you can drink, if you want. I had some, already. I dunno all the effects yet, but—”
“Oh, yeah?” Davy asked, turning his head to look at Micky.
“Why, sure, you could, but I gotta tell you—”
Davy drained the glass without waiting. He made a face. “Man, that tastes awful.”
Micky chuckled. “You should’a waited, babe,” he tsked.
“Yeah, why’s that?”
“Well it’s…” He rolled his story around in his head for just a second. “You know that lady who took our fortunes that one time, with the crystal ball, the one with all those big, groovy bracelets?”
“Yeah?”
“You know she had all those little bottles up behind her, these little potions? Like, the one for riches.”
“Yeah, we were too poor to get it.”
“Yeah, that’s right! But there was this other one, she said you put a spoonful into someone’s drink and they’d go nuts over you. Or, at least, the first person they see after they take it.”
“The love potion, yeah.”
“Yeah,” said Micky. “Well that’s what this is. Theoretically, I mean.”
Davy looked at the empty glass in his hand. He looked back to Micky. “Get outta here.”
Micky shrugged. “Sure! You take somethin’ that alters the chemicals in your brain, it changes how you’re feeling. Like iproniazid! That stuff inhibits monoamine oxidase so you stop bein’ depressed! And gives you hepatitis, but hey, you’ll be happy about it!” He smiled broadly and pointed at Davy like Davy would actually understand this joke. “So I figured, you change a couple chemicals around and it feels like you’re in love! Well, you’re feelin’ all in love, but who would you be in love with, you’re wondering? Then you see the person who gave it to you, and there’s this subconscious association and bam!” Micky slapped his hands together hard, then smiled pleasantly, “You walk off in the sunset together. And that’s about it.”
Davy shoved out his jaw and shook his head. “All right, then how come’d you take it, huh?”
“Well, it’s interesting and all, but I’m not gonna give it to someone without askin’ first, and I was up before all you guys so—”
Davy held up his hands to stop Micky. “Hold it, you were going to ask us?”
“Sure!— but you weren’t up. So I figured I’d see someone eventually, and then if I ever fell in love with them I’d know.”
Davy felt like his brain was about to fall out of his skull. “Even if you took it instead’a us, there’s nothing but guys here every minute of the day! What’d you expect?”
Micky shrugged. “Love’s love, babe. I’ve loved men before—a man before,” he corrected.
“You’re putting me on,” Davy decided, suddenly very sure. The idea of a love potion was one thing, but this was something else entirely. “I’ve known you for a while, and I know where you stick your nose— among other things. You’ve never dated a man.”
“Maybe we didn’t date. But if you ask nice I’ll show you what we did.” Micky fixed Davy with a Cheshire grin and a wink so exaggerated it took his entire upper body to pull off.
Davy took him in for a very long, slow, dragging second, then laughed. “You’re a trip. All right, well, don’t you have to write your results down or something?”
“Results, what, you’re in love with me already?”
“No, I wanna kill ya. That’s a result, isn’t it?” Davy gave Micky a sharp jab on the shoulder, more friendly than not.
Micky yelped, feigning agony, holding his arm and walking lamely away. “You can’t punch me, you’re my assistant! Insubordination!”
“Awright, awright,” Davy said, backing off.
Micky grabbed up his notebook, which did have a rather detailed account of every experiment he had done. It was also littered with little lists of nothing in particular and doodles of things he found interesting, which included girls, all of their instruments, Mike’s hat, and a rather bug-eyed looking portrait of Mr. Schneider. Davy found it professional, all things considered. “I’ll write it, but you’ll be changing your tune soon,” Micky said as he wrote, ‘Results, 2 minutes: subject feels contempt toward the lead scientist’ “You’ll be in love with me. Side effects include heart palpitations, shortness of breath, and sudden swooning.”
He felt the need to demonstrate the last one, and collapsed backwards with eyes closed tight and an arm thrown across his face.
Davy caught him obligingly. “Are you done?” He asked after holding Micky for several long seconds.
Micky peeked out of one eye. He rocked his head back and forth, debating. “Yeah, I think so,” he decided finally and swung up out of Davy’s arms.
“I’m being a good sport about all this,” Davy said, despite it occurring to him that he could’ve heard Micky out about it, “so tell me the truth, now: you were really with a guy?”
“You’re more hung up on him than I was.”
“So you were serious about it?”
“It’s gotta happen sometimes.”
“What was he like?”
“Well! His name was Bob—uh, Robert, he didn’t dig ‘Bob’, he was about this tall,” Micky held his hand out near the middle of his forehead, “Taller than me for about a month, ‘cause I got the last couple inches late; we went together about when I turned eighteen.” He wavered his hand around a few inches for his own height. “Anyway, he was blond, like Peter, but he wasn’t like Peter, real…he wasn’t tough but he was way tougher than Pete. Not biker-tough, but lawyer-tough,” he reenacted both as he spoke— first flexing his arms like a strongman, then giving a stern face—without missing a beat, “Great smile, though, man, it’d knock you out. Um…oh yeah, right! Real serious, but really smart. He was grown up. I thought that was incredible, he was so together. I wanted to be like that for…well, six months, then I got back into this,” he indicated himself with a sweeping gesture and a showman’s smile. “He was older, too, ‘bout…eight years? Eight or nine, yeah. So it wasn’t even a big thing, him bein’ more together than me, but I thought it was then.”
Davy recoiled. “Eight years? That’s a bit much.”
“Jerry Lee Lewis is about that much older than Myra.”
“Micky. Even if that was the same thing, it wouldn’t be a good example.”
Micky took the time to think, then dismissed his point entirely, “Well, we were gonna move in together, anyway, when I got done with school. But then we split.”
“You weren’t into him anymore?”
“No, I was,” Micky said.
“So he didn’t dig you anymore,” Davy said bluntly.
Micky laughed. “No, he dug me, but he didn’t wanna dig me, so he got to be a drag about it.” Davy fixed him with a silent stare, brows furrowed and mouth pinched, until he continued, “Y’know? He was into it but he’d still put out all these negative vibes ‘bout being together. Which was his deal, but I didn’t want it near me. It made me sick, like, bleh,” he mimed vomiting, balling up his hands near his mouth and opening them wide to spew forth his fingers while sticking out his tongue. “So I stopped hanging around.”
“I’d’a clocked him,” Davy said. He put up his dukes and jabbed a bit.
Although his voice was just as light as when he’d given Micky a smack in the arm, it struck Micky that Davy was suddenly serious. His eyes were grim, seeing something darker than the mere exhaustive back-and-forth relationship that Micky had felt. “It wasn’t like that,” he corrected quickly, “It wasn’t even a bum trip; if we’d’ve moved in, I wouldn’t’ve met you guys!”
This, Davy guessed, was probably actually true. From what he knew, Micky wasn’t even halfway to nineteen he’d met Mike for the first time in some dive. He hadn’t known either of them, or Peter either for that matter, for another solid month or so; he’d been fresh off the plane from England, then, and it had taken a while to lower his expectations of achieving fame for his grandfather enough to frequent the scene the other guys did.
“I still would’ve clocked him.”
Micky fluttered his eyelashes and looked at Davy with big, round eyes. “Always protecting my honor.”
Davy shrugged. He shook his head a little, sympathetic. “I would if you had any.”
+++
When they played at the Vincent Van Go-Go that night, Davy spent most of his time on stage thinking about the guy Micky said he was in love with.
The whole thing was obtuse at first, in that he didn’t realize he was thinking about the guy at all: he just started counting the guys who were as tall as Micky had said. He didn’t think much of height nowadays, but when he’d been a child he’d been fixated by it. He’d spent hours, days, weeks thinking about it for good reasons and for bad. Wanting to stay short to be a jockey. Wanting to be taller to avoid mockery. Measuring his height and recording his weight daily to see which way would win out and ending up with neither.
It was relatively easy to weed out everyone who was too short, more difficult when they were taller— when his general frame of reference even when he was hoping for a growth spurt was ‘way taller than I’ll ever be’ rather than narrowed by inches or centimeters. But he was good at estimating just the same, and had broken the crowd down within two songs.
Once he managed that, he tracked down the group that was tall enough all over again and broke them down by blonds. He went ahead and added bald men into this group, too, even though none were there, just because he figured the guy was probably losing his hair by now. Even this last thought wasn’t enough to connect it directly to Micky’s former whatever-he-was. It was harder the more specific he got, with all of the people in the room dancing, bobbing and weaving and ducking and twisting, which made it easy to seem like a game that meant nothing whatsoever. Just a strange version of ‘I Spy’.
It was when he narrowed it down a third time that he couldn’t deny what sort of person he was looking for anymore:
Age.
The guy would be far nearer thirty than twenty now, and breaking down the group was easy because of it. This was a young person’s scene. Most of their crowd were teenagers, and rarely over twenty-three. No one here that night was any older than that except for the manager.
This sent a violent wave of acidic disgust up from the pit of his stomach to burn his throat. It wasn’t that he was against going out with someone younger— he’d gone with girls still in school, himself. And it wasn’t that he’d even expected to see Micky’s whatever-he-was around the Vincent Van Go-Go; even taking an immediate dislike to the guy, that sounded either too coincidental or too strange for Davy to buy. But what was inside the club was the kind of range he found acceptable. The teenagers and the adults that were close enough, in age and otherwise, to dance together. To more-than-dance together. There wasn’t anyone nearing thirty dancing with the eighteen-year-olds because there shouldn’t have been.
He was shaking his maracas so hard that had Mike moved another inch duringMary, Mary, Davy felt he would’ve embedded his wool cap right into the back of his head. Instead Mike just turned to look at him with a look that was surprisingly concerned given the high level of annoyance in it.
Davy startled out of his reverie and looked to Mike, abashed.
Mike would never talk in the middle of a song, but he was already working on knowing what was up. He followed Davy’s gaze out into the crowd in the split second it had stayed before turning sheepishly onto him. There was no one he noticed that stood out, but he tried to pick out a few of the couples in that direction just the same. Knowing Davy, some guy was probably dancing with a girl he liked.
By the end of the song, Mike had picked out the most likely candidate: a cute redhead who he’d seen around the pad once, who Davy had hung around with for about a week or two. After debating this, he dismissed it; Davy hadn’t seemed any more hung up on her than he did any other girl, and he’d never been the sort to keep hangups quiet.
That meant he’d either have to let Davy sort it out for himself or go in blind and ask what his problem was directly.
Mike sighed as he stepped back to the microphone and prepared to sing.