Utopia Avenue

by David Mitchell

  Anthony Hershey makes outraged popping, hissing noises, then: “I’m not taking marital advice from you!”

  “Yer bloody need it from someone. Acting is Tiff’s art. You took it from her. Give it back. She still likes yer, deep down. Even if yer do drop her like a dishrag the moment the phone goes.”

  The timbre of Hershey’s anger goes from hot to icy. “You’ll do film work in London or LA over my dead body.”

  “Oh, Tony, don’t tempt Death like that. Look, before one of us hangs up on the other, I’m curious: Were these glad tidings brought to yer by one Rod Dempsey? East End gangster-y kind o’ voice?”

  The director does not say, “Who?”; he hesitates, then says, “If you touch my wife again, I’ll crush you like a cockroach. If I see you again, I’ll give you the thrashing of your ruddy life. Am I clear?”

  “Does that mean Utopia Avenue isn’t going to be doing the soundtrack for—”

  The phone line from Los Angeles goes dead.

  If that’s Rod Dempsey’s revenge, Dean thinks, I can take it. “Sorry,” he tells the band. “There goes our shot at Hollywood glory.”

  “And I thought I was a dark horse,” says Elf.

  “On the bright side,” says Jasper, “we don’t have to worry about hacking ninety seconds off ‘Narrow Road’ any more.”

  “I can’t say I don’t wish you’d keep it in your trousers,” says Levon, “but Warners’ lawyers were a pain in the hole.”

  “Tiffany Seabrook?” Griff winces with admiration. “Back o’ the fookin’ net, Deano.” His stomach growls. “Is Jerry Garcia still expecting us for a bite to eat?”

  * * *

  —

  710 ASHBURY STREET is a tall, bay-and-gable, wood-fronted, black-and-white house on a hefty slope. Steep steps climb from the pavement to an arched porch on the second floor. Up on the porch sits a man in a rocking chair. A baseball bat leans against a pillar. To Dean’s eyes, he looks Red Indian. “My sisters and I had a doll’s house like this,” says Elf. “The front opened up like a book.”

  Jasper faces the afternoon sun. “Everything’s a few degrees more real after a day in the studio.”

  A small tour bus painted in psychedelic swirls pulls up. “This, folks,” declares the guide, “is the home of Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, and Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan—better known to the world as rock phenomenon the Grateful Dead.”

  “No mention of the fookin’ drummers,” says Griff. “Typical.”

  Tourists jostle to take a photograph. The possible Indian on the porch blesses the coach with a finger.

  “If this house could talk,” says the tour guide, “Ashbury Street would blush. Who dares to imagine what scenes of rock ’n’ roll abandon are going down behind those windows right now?”

  The bus pulls off. “Fingers crossed,” says Dean. They begin the ascent, gripping the handrail. A stumble could cost a broken neck. Up on the porch, the possible Indian has a moon-gray cat on his lap. “Hello,” says Dean. “We’re Utopia Avenue.”

  “You’re expected.” The possible Indian leans back to call through the half-open door. “Jerry, your guests are here.”

  The cat rubs against Elf’s legs. Elf picks the animal up. “Aren’t you adorable?” Its leaf-green eyes stay on Dean.

  “Utopians!” Jerry Garcia, beaming, bearded, flannel-shirted, and barefoot, appears. “I thought I heard friendly voices climbing up the stairway to Heaven. So, you found us okay.”

  “We told our taxi, ‘Follow that tourist bus,’ ” says Griff.

  Jerry Garcia’s smile turns to a grimace. “First they revile us, then they turn us into an attraction. Come in. Marty and Paul from Jefferson Airplane have dropped by. They’re cool. Obviously.”

  * * *

  —

  TIBETAN MANDALAS, AN American Stars and Stripes, and scrolls decorate the wall. Somewhere in 710, John Coltrane’s saxophone is playing. Dope smoke, incense, and the aroma of Chinese food mingle in the air. A few people drift in and out of the kitchen, including a girl wearing nothing but a sheet. Nobody seems too sure who lives here and who is visiting. Dean dunks a spring roll in the sweet chili sauce. “God, I bloody love these.”

  “Too bad you’re not staying longer,” says Pigpen, who, Dean can’t help thinking, looks like his name. “I’d take you to Chinatown. One dollar, you eat like an emperor.”

  Dean thinks of Allen Klein’s offer to meet and discuss a quarter of a million. “Next time.”

  At a corner of the table, Jerry Garcia and Jasper are swapping scales over a pair of guitars. “This one’s called the Mixolydian,” the Deadhead tells the Utopian, “and it uses a flattened seventh…” He plays it through. Marty Balin—short, round, and mushroom-colored—is flirting with Elf.

  Good luck with that, thinks Dean, as the eerily golden Paul Kantner asks him, “So did you ever run into Jimi in his London period?”

  “Only in passing,” says Dean. “We never hung out.”

  “Jimi played at the Fillmore the week after Monterey,” says Paul. “Started below us on the bill, but after a couple of days, he was headlining. What—a—cat.”

  Marty slurps noodles. “You and me, we play with hands and fingers, right? We taught ourselves, sitting down in rooms. Jimi’s a street guitarist. Plays with his whole body. Calves, waist, hips.”

  “Balls, ass, and cock,” adds Pigpen. “He’s the first black cat who white women, y’ know, frothed for. I’ve never seen anything like it. They kinda…dripped lust.”

  “Some white women,” Elf corrects Pigpen.

  “Sure, I hear ya. But lots. Guys too, that’s the thing. The first black leather pants I ever saw were Jimi’s.”

  “That scarf round the knee and scarf round the head thing he does?” adds Paul. “It spread through San Francisco faster than the clap during the Summer of Love.”

  “My Summer of Love was spent driving a van up and down the M1 with this lot.” Griff indicates the band. “Right time, wrong place.”

  “Sixty-six was the year.” Marty slurps egg-drop soup. “The summer before the Summer of Love. You agree, Jerry?”

  “Yup.” Jerry Garcia looks up from his fretboard. “The Summer of Granted Wishes. If you were a band, you had an audience. Bill Graham opened the Fillmore and put on four or five bands a night. You didn’t even need to be that good. A whole new scene sprang up, unlike anything in America. Or on Earth. Or in history.”

  “This is the Bill Graham?” asks Dean. “The same Bill Graham who manages Jefferson Airplane?”

  Marty makes a face and looks at Paul, who munches a rice cracker. “Uh-huh, though Bill’s only technically our manager.”

  “You’ll hear many views about Bill,” says Jerry. “Detractors say he’s only fed the psychedelic cow to milk it. But he works like crazy, he never denies wanting to get rich, he holds benefits for HALO—lawyers for busted kids—and for the Diggers, a radical community group who feed hungry people.”

  “Most revolutionary of all,” says Pigpen, “he actually pays bands what he promises to pay. There’s none of this ‘We didn’t make as much on the door as we hoped, so here’s a beer and a ball of dope, now piss off’ bullshit. Not ever. Not with Bill.”

  “Levon’s having breakfast with him tomorrow,” says Dean.

  “He’ll want you for the Fillmore,” states Pigpen. “Word’s getting round about your set at Knowland Park. That was some show.”

  Griff twists his fork into his chow mein. “How did Knowland Park festival compare to the Human Be-in?”

  “Chalk and cheese,” says Golden Paul. “Knowland Park was to make its organizers money, while pretending not to. The Be-in made nobody jack-shit, but it will make the history books.”

  “It was waaay bigger,” says Marty. “Thirty thousand of us at the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park. Haight-Ashbury hippies preaching peace and
love. Berkeley radicals preaching revolution. Comedians, poets, gurus. Big Brother with Janis, the Dead, Quicksilver, us. Tibetan chanters to greet the sun.”

  “And no violence,” says Pigpen. “No muggings. Owsley Stanley handing out LSD like there’s no tomorrow.”

  “Free LSD?” asks Dean. “What ’bout the cops?”

  “Acid wasn’t illegal yet,” says Paul. “City Hall hated it, but how could they withhold permission that nobody had asked for?”

  “The mayor of Chicago found a way,” said Elf.

  “San Francisco’s not Chicago,” says Pigpen.

  “And just for a while,” says Jerry, “maybe a few months, enough of us believed that a new way of living might be possible. Starting right here. The Diggers gave out free meals. There’s still a free clinic on Haight Street.”

  “What changed?” asks Elf.

  “Exposure,” says Pigpen. “Word got out. The media pumped the whole thing up. ‘Middle America! Your kids too could fall into Satan’s trap of free love, free dope, and free music!’ Which made damn sure those kids showed up, all wearing flowers in their hair.”

  “By the hundreds of thousands,” says Jerry. “Heading right here. Where, it turned out, Diggers didn’t dig up meals, not literally. They needed hard cash from the likes of Bill Graham. Demand was infinite. Supply was not.”

  “Drug dealers saw pay dirt,” says Paul. “Turf wars kicked off. A kid got stabbed to death thirty feet from this house. Then the first acid burnouts showed up. Owsley gave everyone the same dose. Beefy jocks and skinny chicks. People just ain’t built the same.”

  Dean thinks of the sorry state of Syd Barrett.

  “Anti-commercialism got commercialized,” says Jerry.

  “We saw all the head shops from the taxi,” says Jasper.

  “Exactly,” says Marty. “It’s T-shirts, I Ching sets, pentagrams. Racks of crap. It’s all gotten less ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’ and more ‘Roll up, cash in, sell out.’ ”

  “Here’s the difference between then and now.” Paul dabs sauce off his substantial chin. “A friend of mine was flying back to New Mexico in June of last year. He’s a classic hippie who doesn’t wear shoes. At San Francisco Airport, the clerk said the airline wouldn’t let him on board barefoot. So my friend looked around, saw a fellow freak arriving in San Francisco, and asked, ‘Hey, man, could I borrow your sandals? I’ll miss my flight if I don’t find some shoes right now.’ This total stranger said, ‘Sure,’ handed them over, and my friend flew home with no further trouble. Now, that exchange could only have happened in a narrow window of a few months between sixty-six and sixty-seven. Sixty-five would’ve been too early. The stranger would’ve said, ‘Are you nuts? Buy your own frickin’ sandals.’ Now, in 1968, it’s too late. The stranger would say, ‘Sure you can have them—five bucks, plus sales tax.’ ”

  Jerry Garcia fires off a closing blues riff.

  “Is anything left of that time?” asks Elf.

  The San Franciscans look at each other.

  “I’d say not a lot,” says Paul Kantner.

  “Only a few hollow slogans,” says Pigpen.

  Jerry strums his guitar. “Every third or fourth generation is a generation of radicals, of revolutionaries. We, my friends, are the bottle-smashers. We release the genies. We run riot, get shot, get infiltrated, get bought off. We die, go bust, sell out to the man. Sure as eggs is eggs. But the genies we let loose stay loose. In the ears of the young the genies whisper what was unsayable. ‘Hey, kids—there’s nothing wrong with being gay.’ Or ‘What if war isn’t a patriotism test, but really fucking dumb?’ Or ‘Why do so few own so goddamn much?’ In the short run, not a lot seems to change. Those kids are nowhere near the levers of power. Not yet. But in the long run? Those whispers are the blueprints of the future.”

  * * *

  —

  “WHO’S IN THE mood for acid?” asks Jerry.

  “Me and Paul have an early flight over to Denver,” says Marty Balin. “Bill’s got us on a treadmill.”

  “LSD and I do not get along,” says Elf. “I’ll bow out.”

  “Same story here, Elf.” Pigpen pours himself a tumbler of Southern Comfort. “My last trip—freakin’ nightmare.”

  “I’ll regret turning down an acid trip with Jerry Garcia,” says Griff, “for a date with two kickboxers, but the flesh is weak.”

  “Jasper?” asks Jerry. “You can’t tell me ‘Sound Mind’ and ‘Darkroom’ came from smoking Marlboros.”

  “If my mind was one of the three little pigs’ houses,” replies Jasper, “it would not be the house made of bricks.”

  “Man,” Pigpen turns to Elf. “Does this dude ever give a straight answer to a straight question?”

  Elf pats Jasper’s hand. “His answers are either alarmingly straight or cryptic crossword clues.”

  “Schizophrenia is an old friend of mine,” says Jasper. “It was trippy enough for a lifetime. My girlfriend’s going to a cabal of West Coast photographers, so I’ll join her.”

  Jerry looks at Dean. “You’re my only hope, Mr. Moss.”

  Tonight’s the night. “I’m in, Mr. Garcia.”

  “Ever tripped before?”

  “I have not,” admits Dean. “Not properly.”

  “Then, as a virgin, I’ll give you a light dose.”

  Elf, Jasper, and Griff stand up to go. “Look after our Dean,” Elf tells Jerry. “Good bassists are hard to find.”

  “If we venture out, I’ll summon up a guardian angel. Dean can crash on our sofa, so he won’t have to get back to your hotel.”

  “See yer all at the studio in the morning,” says Dean.

  “Session starts nine sharp,” says Griff. “There or square.”

  Jasper tells him, “Bring us back a souvenir.”

  * * *

  —

  “ACID IS A box of mystery chocolates.” Dean and his host sit on the floor of Jerry’s room, on cushions at a low table made of a slab of tree trunk. “Ten lines of coke from the same batch’ll give you the same bump. Ten reefers of the same weed will give you the same buzz. Ten trips with LSD of the same potency is ten different trips. A lot depends on where your head’s at, so only do this if you’ve got your shit together. This trip has no ejector seat.”

  Mandy Craddock? Her son? Rod Dempsey? My father? “My shit is as together as it can be, right now, right here.”

  “Then behind you is a big red book. Jules Verne.”

  Dean turns: “Journey to the Center of the Earth?”

  “Put it on the table.” Dean does as asked. Jerry turns to the rear cover and lifts a hidden flap in the thick board. Under the flap is a tiny brown envelope, one inch by three. Using tweezers, Jerry extracts a square of yellow paper the size of a postage stamp. “This is rice paper, impregnated with a dose of liquid acid. Lick your thumb.” Jerry puts the yellow paper on the damp patch, and follows suit. “Here we go.”

  They put the papers onto their tongues.

  Dean’s dissolves in seconds.

  “The magic carpet will arrive shortly. Pick out a record.” Jerry returns his stash and replaces Jules Verne while Dean pulls out the Band’s Music from Big Pink and puts on side two. Jerry and Dean bongo along until “Chest Fever” ignites with a fiery burst of organ.

  “Bloody incredible playing, this,” says Dean.

  “It’s a Lowrey. Garth’s the Band’s secret weapon. Sweetest guy you ever met, too. How’re you feeling now?”

  “Like I need a dump.”

  “That’s your body saying, ‘Something celestial’s on its way, I’ll attend to the earthier stuff now.’ Bathroom’s thataway.” Dean goes and Dean goes. He washes his hands. The water feels silky. Gravity is lessening. Back in Jerry’s room, Jerry asks, “Is it kicking in?”

  “I feel atoms of air bouncing in my lungs, l
ike popcorn.”

  “Let’s go out for a walk in the park.”

  * * *

  —

  THE POSSIBLE INDIAN’S name turns out to be Chayton. “One-half Navajo,” he tells Dean, as they descend to the street, “one-quarter Sioux, one-quarter who the hell knows?” He follows a step or two behind Dean and Jerry. Jerry talks about the neighborhood. Chayton walks with a panther’s gait, emanating a force field that the hustlers, beggars, and sightseers of Haight Street detect and do not test. Jerry’s wearing a vast-brimmed hat and mirror sunglasses, and nobody bothers him. His cigarette smells of sage. The sky is a no-man’s-land between afternoon and evening. Clouds are few, high, and puffy, like dragon smoke. Three jet trails make a triangle.

  The high windows of a bowling alley are propped open.

  Dean hears the trundle of balls and the clatter of pins.

  A girl walks by, leaving a trail of herself in her slipstream. Dean is entranced by the impossible sight. A tramp, too, leaves a dozen selves in his wake. Haight Street is filled with visual slipstreams.

  Dean swivels his arm and a fan of forearms opens up.

  “You ghosting?” Jerry is at the front of Comet Jerry.

  “Guess I am,” replies Dean. Ghosting. They cross Stanyan Street and pass under the wrought-iron gate of Golden Gate Park, where the colors are doubling, trebling, quadrupling in intensity. Green shrubs glow green, the blue sky sings blue, and a band of pink cloud oscillates through all the pinks there are and some there aren’t. “Does acid cure you of color blindness?” asks Dean.

  “No,” says Jerry, “but it makes you wonder if you’ve actually been living not in the real world but only a description of it.”

  “Can I have that line? I want to put it in a song.”

  “If you remember it, my friend, it is all yours.”