Nathan sat beside Tinker. “Is everyone Scottish where you come from?” he asked.
“You must have heard the one about Saint Peter giving the new souls the tour of Heaven,” Tinker said. “He takes them to a place where everybody is just sitting in the sky, meditating. ‘This is Nirvana where the Buddhists stay,’ he says. Then he takes them to an oasis where there are old men and eternal virgins and Saint Peter tells them that this is where the Moslems spend eternity. Then he takes them to another place where people are just sitting by the River Jordan singing hymns. ‘This is where we keep the Baptists,’ he says. Then they come to this big high stone wall and Saint Peter puts his finger to his lips and they all tiptoe past. When they get past, one of the new souls asks what’s behind the stone wall. Saint Peter whispers, ‘That’s where we keep the Catholics. They think they’re the only ones here.’
“Well, it’s kind of like that with the Scots in Cape Breton, Nathan. They think they’re there all alone. But there’s plenty of other kinds of people too. Me, I’m Irish.
“Look, I don’t play this thing very well but I’ll trade you a song for the tune you played.” Keeping the theme constant he began the words to “Will You Go, Lassie, Go.” A short way into the song soft notes from Gerry’s violin joined him, and Nathan produced a chanter and added that to the growing orchestration.
“Great voice,” Nathan complimented when Tinker had finished, and Gerry added that he liked to come by and listen to Tinker when he wasn’t playing himself.
“You should drop into the Aquarius Café sometime,” Nathan advised him. “It’s not far from here and anybody can play. They just have a mic and an amp. You go in, you sing or play, you pass the hat. It’s a great place to hear some good sounds. Lots of people got their break there.”
“Where’s this place?” Blue chimed in, listening intently to the instructions.
The street party carried on into the early evening as music, information and stories criss-crossed like girders of a bridge spanning a chasm. Food mysteriously appeared and the beer disappeared, cigarette and marijuana smoke stained the air, temporary bands composed of bagpipes and violins and guitars and tambourines formed and dissolved, songs of the day and songs centuries old sharing the same sidewalk.
“Nathan, old buddy,” Blue said, giving the piper a slap on the back during a lull in the singing, “I can’t thank you enough for what you did for old Tinker here. He’s as homesick as he is lovesick. He thinks I don’t know that,” Blue continued, convinced that he was whispering. “About being lovesick, I mean, but that’s another story, to quote the other fellow. Anyway, the way you play those pipes is enough to make a grown man cry. Not that there’s anything wrong with a crying jag, mind you. Hank Williams makes me think about crying all the time. But you know what I mean? You must miss Seattle enough to make you want to cry sometimes.”
“I can’t honestly say I ever broke down and wept for Seattle,” Nathan said with a smile.
“No? Well, look at her this way, buddy. You guys have been waiting for the promised land for as long as there’s been a Bible, right? Well, we Cape Bretoners got ours, and let me tell you, Nathan, my man, it’s worth the wait. I can’t wait to go home myself.”
“Where is this place, anyway?” Nathan asked, and Gerry and a few others murmured their wondering as well.
“They don’t teach you Americans any geography at all, do they?” Blue scoffed. “I haven’t met anybody on this side of the border yet who knows where Cape Breton is. Well, Cape Breton is this island just off the coast of Nova Scotia which is in Canada and Canada, are you listening, students, Canada is in ... North America, just like the United States, and we got more pipers there than a horse has kicks. And fiddlers, too, Gerry. The best in the world.
“You should come back with us when we go. All of you,” Blue added with an invitational sweep of his hand. “What would be great, eh, is if we got a bus and filled her up with gas and all of us and headed for home. You’d like that, I bet. There’s tons of hippies there already so you’d be right at home. And so would we, huh, Tinker? How about it, buddy? What do you say? We trade in the Plymouth for an old school bus and head east like three times three times three wise men?”
“I’ll never get that drunk,” Tinker said, picking Blue’s hat from the top of his friend’s head and shaking it to demonstrate how empty it was. “You get the bus and I’ll drive the Plymouth ‘and I’ll be in Cape Breton afore ye!’” Tinker sang, teasing his intoxicated friend.
16
“Kind of reminds you of the inside of a coal shed, doesn’t it?” Blue said, scanning the interior of the Aquarius Café.
The café, complete with low ceiling and exposed pipes, was located in the basement of the address to which they had been directed. The walls were painted black and most of the inadequate lighting came from clusters of candles flickering slow shadows across fluorescent stop-the-war posters while layers of cigarette, marijuana and hashish smoke made lazy swirls in the wake of anyone passing by. Tinker and Blue sat on tin folding chairs at one of a dozen small, round tables, drinking syrupy coffee and waiting for Tinker’s turn on the stage.
The stage was a tiny, six-inch elevation in one corner of the café, equipped with a stool and a microphone that was unnecessary in the close basement quarters. They listened to singers singing anti-war songs, poets reading anti-war poems, political activists chanting anti-war slogans and dropped change into the cup every time it came around.
“If you don’t get up there soon and get us our money back we’re going to wind up on the losing end of this deal, Tinker,” Blue cautioned as another donation left his hand. “It’s cheaper to go to church.”
“I don’t know about this, Blue. Everybody that’s gone up there has been singing their own songs and they’re all against the war. I can sing a few that I picked up on the street, but they’re not my own.”
“Make you a deal, Tink. You go up there tonight and get our money back and I’ll write you some anti-war songs of your own for the next time.”
“You sure you can do that?”
“Christ, Tinker, how hard can it be? Do you know how many words rhyme with war? Sore, more, door, floor, gore, nor, snore, chore, bore. It’ll be a breeze, buddy. Just be glad they’re not singing anti-orange songs.”
A girl with a sweet, angry voice sang of napalmed children and when she finished Blue opened his guitar case and followed Tinker to the stage. Tinker sat on the stool and nervously began “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream.” Blue, playing behind him, remembered the really important thing about this particular anti-war song, the reason Tinker had decided to learn it.
“Fellow from back home wrote that. Ed McCurdy,” he shouted between verses. “Halifax, actually.”
Tinker moved through his small selection of popular protest songs, his rendering of them casting a spell across the café. Recognizing that this was the ideal time to profit from the war, Blue lowered his guitar and left Tinker to finish unaccompanied while he walked among the tables with his hat extended. When he came to their own table it was occupied by Nathan Goldstein and a friend, along with Tinker who had finished his gig. Blue pulled up a chair.
“Not bad,” Blue told Tinker, whose performance was being complimented from all corners of the café. Blue’s review was for the collection.
Nathan shook Tinker’s hand, said hello to Blue and introduced them to his friend who wore pigtails and Benjamin Franklin glasses with a cracked lens.
“What’s the name again?” Blue asked.
“Peter?” Nathan’s friend replied.
“Don’t ask me. I’m asking you,” Blue said. “Peter, you said?”
“No. Peter?”
“Acid, right?” Blue said, turning to Nathan for confirmation.
“No,” Nathan answered. “It’s Peter? Explain it, Peter?”
“Well,” Peter? began slowly, collectin
g his thoughts. “Descartes was correct in proving his own existence. I think, therefore I am! Brilliant. I couldn’t have said it better myself. But proving your own existence is only the first step. You can say ‘I am,’ and still know nothing except that. So the question that truly brings us to the centre of being, of existence, of the Universe is ‘Who am I?’ I am still questioning myself. Peter, my parents’ choice for a name, really says nothing about me. Peter?, the question you see, keeps my quest eternally before me. Descartes laid the foundation, but someone must build a tower of truth upon it. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Like putting da cartes before da horse, you mean?” Blue said, kicking Tinker under the table.
“Precisely!” Peter? said, his eyes glowing with excitement. “The cart before the horse! Very colloquial but very insightful. We’re kindred spirits, I believe, fellow philosophers,” extending his hand to Blue.
Blue fired a panicky glance at Tinker who was already on his feet and heading for the washroom, shoulders shaking.
“You’ve got more than that in common, Blue. Peter? is a writer, as well,” Nathan said as Blue rose from the table.
“Great,” Blue answered. “Excuse me, guys, but I got to see a man about a horse, as the other fellow says.”
“That other fellow’s name wouldn’t be Descartes by any chance?” Peter? asked, winking at his own witticism.
—
“Tinker, will you shut up and listen to me!” Blue said, standing at the urinal. Tinker was sitting in the washroom’s only cubicle, barely able to breathe, laughter rolling out of him. “Know what I think, Tink? When we go to leave this goddamned city we aren’t going to be able to get out because there’s going to be a big cement wall all around it and written on that wall in letters big as Giant MacAskill are the words ‘San Francisco Asylum.’ If people aren’t shitting on the floor of the hotel they think they’re God. Did you hear the guy? I am who am! That’s right out of the Bible, boy. And Moses playing the bagpipes. Jesus, Tinker, we gotta get home.”
They returned to the table where Nathan and Peter? were listening to another voice rising melodically against the war in Vietnam. Peter? ordered a round of coffee while explaining that freelancing articles to various magazines paid the bills while he worked on his philosophical dissertation. He inquired about Blue’s writing.
“I’m a songwriter myself,” Blue told him, tapping the guitar case that leaned against the table.
“Spoken like a true wordsmith,” Peter? replied.
“The poet?” Blue asked.
Peter? looked at him oddly, then smiled.
“Oh, Wordsworth! That’s another pun, right? A wordsmith, I said. You must have heard that used before to describe a writer. A wordsmith, someone who works with words the way someone who works with hot iron is a blacksmith.”
“Oh, I get it,” Blue said. “A wordsmith. There’s a sense of real work in it, isn’t there? I helped Iron Angus, this blacksmith back home, shoe a few horses in my time. Blacksmith, wordsmith. I like that. Tinker, don’t let me forget it.”
“But the important thing,” Peter? observed, “is that you described yourself as a songwriter, not a musician. A musician is primarily concerned with music; words are a secondary consideration, but when a man says to me that he is a songwriter, emphasis on ‘writer,’ then I know that this man is interested in articulating thought rather than feelings. Feelings are fine, of course, and music may soothe the savage beast, but it cannot make the beast argue intelligently for itself or its species. Without words there is no philosophy, and without philosophy there is no hope of understanding Man’s essential nature. But what about a sample of your own words, Blue? The stage is free, I see,” Peter? said.
“Yes,” Nathan encouraged. “If you don’t go, I’ll be up there with my pipes emptying this place. The acoustics here are not what you would call Hebridean.”
Blue, smiling, pulled off his blue hat and threw it into Tinker’s lap. “Watch me fill that thing for you, buddy,” he said. “I’m working on a piece that you might be interested in,” he said to Peter?, taking his guitar from the case and turning toward the stage.
For the first time since retiring his talent on the sidewalks of San Francisco, Blue let the lyrics to his masterpiece-in-progress pour out of him in public. The words to “The Red Lobster,” including its latest addition, verse fifty-four;
You reach out and grab me
Like the long arm of the law
Squeezing me hard
With your lobster claw
You wanna hear “I love you”
Squeak outta me
But all I gotta say
is “Show some merceee”
Red Lobster, red lobster
Don’t you dare sob, sir
’Cause love is you, and love is her
You’re the meat. She’s the but-tur
The patrons of the Aquarius Café were unfamiliar with the musical forms employed by Blue, both in his lyrical construction and in his rendering of lyrics. Some listened politely and some not at all and some departed, but Blue didn’t notice because his song was directed at the table where Tinker, Nathan and Peter? were seated.
It was their request that caused him to be up there on the stage instead of hovering in the background, engineering Tinker’s career. Tinker, of course, had heard it all before. Nathan had obviously heard nothing quite like it before. Peter? pulled a notebook from his pocket and scribbled while listening to Blue’s forty-minute memory feat. In spite of Blue’s coaxing, no one dared join him in the chorus. He carried the whole event off by himself.
“That’s as far as I’ve gotten with it,” he explained as he returned to his seat in the near empty café. “There’s forty-six more verses left to write.”
Anything that Tinker or Nathan might have felt obliged to say was drowned in the tidal enthusiasm welling out of Peter?.
“It’s epic, Blue, courageously epic. I was jotting notes just to keep track of the thoughts inspired by your music. You’re not insulted that I call it music, I hope.”
“Not at all,” Blue answered. “You know what the other fellow says about music, don’t you?”
“Remind me.”
“The other fellow says music’s nothing but organized noise. Well, some people organize it one way, I organize it another.”
“Wow!” replied Peter?. “But music is as close as I can come to describing what I have just heard while at the same time I realize that music is exactly what it wasn’t. Oh, man, it’s so far out there on its own it could originate on another planet. You’ve read Plato, of course? The Republic?”
“Ahhhhh, yeah, I think so,” Blue lied. “The condensed version. Reader’s Digest. Pretty good story.”
“You’re pulling my leg, right?” Peter? asked him. “Reader’s Digest? Condensed version? Never happened, did it? I would have heard. I’m sure I would have heard. Then, of course, I never heard The Republic called a story before but I suppose you’re right. Plato was just making it up in his own head, wasn’t he? But do you remember what he said about music?”
“That he liked it?” Blue replied tentatively.
“No, that in the perfect society music needs to be controlled. Plato said that society must have control over the development of its music because, listen to me now, because Plato saw that the winds of change and protest will always appear in music long before people become consciously aware of it. So the Republic must protect itself from the influence of music by allowing only a shadow of it to exist.
“And he was right! Plato, I mean. Because do you remember the first time you heard the Beatles? They were singing ‘Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! I wanna hold your hand.’ Cute stuff, but not poetry. Still, it mattered. Why? Because of the music. Even when we didn’t know why, the Beatles’ music still mattered,” Peter? pointed out. “It spoke to our restless souls, man. We wanted to find out
things for ourselves, about ourselves, things Second World War movies couldn’t tell us. And look at us now! The Beatles and so many other songwriters have caught up to the music, putting in words the ideas that make our parents puke. We’re out here making it happen, and the music is leading the dancers.
“But, for all their brilliance, the fact remains that the Beatles are still experimenting within established forms of melody, finding new ways to use established harmonic relationships. Your material, though, Blue, assaults the concept of harmony itself. It threatens to produce anarchy in the spheres. It’s wonderful, man. Don’t you agree?”
“Well, I won’t say that you’re not right, but as the other fellow says, I’ll have to give it some thought before I sign anything.”
Peter? invited them back to his place where a party was already in its fourth day, according to him, and apologized because they would have to walk several blocks to get there. “My van broke down,” he explained.
“A VW?” Tinker inquired and, finding out that it was, assured Peter? that there was nothing to worry about. He was an experienced Volkswagen mechanic.
“Whaddya think, Tink?” Blue asked as he emptied the contents of his hat, put the thirty-two cents in his pockets and picked up his guitar. “Follow any of that philosophy business?”
“Lost me just about the time he started to talk,” Tinker replied.
17
Hendrix was pulsing out of speakers wired into every room in the apartment, but that was the only visible energy as far as Blue could see. The bodies themselves were slouched on a collection of makeshift pillow furniture which was strewn around the rooms. People made listless, glassy-eyed waves of acknowledgement to the four newcomers. Bead curtains separated the rooms but the rooms were pretty much all the same, beads, posters and incense. In the stereo room a black light searched out a phosphorescent Universe for the entertainment of those afloat on the good ship LSD. Blue wondered what would happen if he threw a fake grenade in there.
Tinker and Blue Page 9
