“So the mighty Blue is in love, is he?” Tinker teased his mangled friend.
“Keep ’er down there, Tinker,” Blue warned, hushing him with hand gestures. “A rumour like that gets back to Karma and I’m done for. As it is, I’ll probably be washing dishes here at the Human Rainbow Commune until I look like my grandfather. What I need is a record contract. Cross your fingers, buddy, because that’s our ticket out of here.”
The bead curtain pushed aside and Kathy walked into the room.
“Am I interrupting anything?”
“You live here, I don’t,” Blue replied, getting up from the chair. “I was just telling Tinker here how much I like your paintings. You should give up writing and start giving drawing lessons. I bet there’s people right in this house who could use them.”
“Thank you, Blue. But you don’t have to leave just because I’m here.”
“Have to go anyway. The band’s having a rehearsal over at Peter?’s,” explained Blue who always seemed to have an explanation for leaving Tinker’s presence as soon as Kathy turned up.
“Are you playing at the party tonight?”
“Party?” Blue asked. “Who’s having a party?”
“The commune. There’s a notice on the bulletin board downstairs. Each member is allowed to invite three people. You could invite the band. It would be a chance to play for some new people.”
“Did you know about this?” Blue directed the question to Tinker who shrugged his ignorance of the commune’s social calendar. “I thought we were supposed to make these decisions together. If any of us have a suggestion everyone has to agree to it, right? But this idea belongs to his royal highness, I bet, so we don’t have to be consulted at all. Just insulted. What we need here is a coop-de-thaw. I’ve got a good mind to invite everybody I see between here and Peter?’s,” Blue added.
“Take my invitations over to Peter?’s with you,” Tinker said to Blue as his friend was leaving the room. “You know everybody I know over there.”
—
Blue Cacophony practised in the scrap of backyard at Peter?’s place, Blue singing the words of his songs while the rest of the band struggled to produce sounds to match the author’s vocal renderings. Blue was patient with their efforts.
“With practice you’ll get it down perfect,” he assured them. “It’s easier for me because I’m the guy who was inspired to write these songs. Gives me a head start.”
Gerry opened his mouth and dropped his bow. “Nathan, can two people, say you and I, get caught on the same acid trip?” he asked.
Nathan replied with a sudden squeeze of his arm, releasing a crazed alley cat into the neighbourhood.
“Squeezed your bag a little too tight there, did you, Nathan?” Blue asked, picking at his guitar. “Occupational hazard, the other fellow says. Look, guys, I know it’s not easy. That’s because you book-learned your music. Nothing wrong with that, but I have to teach you something different. Bach can’t help you here, but I can, and I’m going to make you guys a million bucks. Now, let’s try a few more tunes before we call it a day. We’ll want to be good at the party.”
The practice was interrupted by Peter?’s arrival, clapping for silence. When silence did fall upon the neighbourhood from the stilled instruments, even Barney wandered from under the sound-deadening step where he waited for Blue.
“We’ve got our first gig, men. I talked to the woman who runs the Warehouse Gallery, the place where Tulip is showing her work, and we can play during the opening. She read about Blue in Rolling Stone but never got a chance to hear him. She said a lot of people are curious and that gave me an idea.
“What do you think of this? We begin telling the press that we refuse to record. That creates the impression that we’ve already had offers. And if we do get any offers we say no.”
“Aw, Jesus, I don’t know about that, Peter?” Blue argued.
“Blue, we have the vehicle now. Blue Cacophony isn’t a band, it’s a revolution. It’s everything we ever dreamed about. We haven’t even played anywhere yet and we’re getting lots of press. Critics are debating Blue Cacophony’s merits. A legend is hatching as we speak. Carpe diem!”
“Yeah, well, I was an altar boy, too, and to tell you the truth in plain English, I don’t remember ever dreaming about a revolution. I just want to get a little gas money, and maybe a couple of million bucks besides, and records is where the money is.”
“Capitalist garbage. There’s no money in records, Blue. The record company gets ninety per cent and never pays taxes and you get ten per cent and it all goes in taxes. Then they tour you to death with nothing to do but take drugs and screw a different girl in a different hotel in a different city every night. Our legacy to the future will be a musical legend shrouded in silence, our absolute rejection of music as it has mutated over the ages.”
“That’s just fine, Peter?, but there’s something to be said for drugs and screwing, you know. Especially screwing. If I can just get the gas money, I’ll take the couple of million in trade.”
“How do you fellows feel about this?” Peter? asked.
“I agree! No recordings, for Christ’s sake,” Gerry said. “Some of us might have a future. I’d hate to see a record of Blue Cacophony turn up some time down the road just when I might be getting somewhere with my music – the way an old porno movie haunts some big movie stars.”
Nathan was gentler. “I think the legend idea is a good one, Blue. After all, we’re suppose to be a street band. I didn’t having touring in mind. And never in my wildest dreams did I plan on us recording. I’m curious as hell about what’s going on here, but we have to draw the line somewhere.”
“Do you guys hear what you’re saying. This is our chance. Records are pictures of voices, for Christ’s sake. I bet there was lots of great singers a hundred years ago that we don’t know anything about because we never heard them, so we never heard about them. But I bet everybody from now until Doomsday is going to know who Elvis is. I’d kind of like my chance.”
The vote was clear.
“Perhaps a rumour about not recording could get the record companies really interested, couldn’t it, Barney? Who knows, they might even start bidding on us. That would change a few minds around here,” Blue said as he and the dog walked back to the commune, following a different path than the one that brought them there. It was a brisk detour of four blocks that passed a small diner where the cook made his hamburger patties by hand instead of a meat-measuring cup, and the fried meat oozed with greasy juice. The cook, Blue and Barney were on a first name basis.
23
Blue Cacophony had played during the early stages of the commune’s house party, the performance taking most of those who had been invited by surprise. The living room where the band played stayed empty except for a curious few who visited, listened and left the domestic auditorium to join the swelling crowd in the kitchen. Blue Cacophony’s music, Peter? reminded the band members, wasn’t for everyone. Not yet, anyway. Only one fan was present throughout the group’s performance, sitting on a legless couch, his hands tapping their odd sense of timing on his thighs while Blue Cacophony cut across the tradition of music like a chainsaw across a stand of pulp.
“When I heard you guys at the café,” the fan told Blue as the group was packing up its instruments to join the party, “it didn’t make any sense. But I took a hit of acid tonight and wow, man, you were really great!”
The silence that had fallen upon the living room helped ease the congestion in the kitchen. Tinker and Blue formed a huddle in one corner of the room, watching the party unfold into clusters of meaningful chatter while the stereo screamed socially conscious lyrics in electric rhythms. San Francisco parties were nothing like those that had shaped their experience back home. Neither Tinker nor Blue knew how to find their way into them. It made them homesick.
Blue reached out and grabbed a long-ha
ired stranger who passed too close to their section of wall, mumbling indistinguishable lyrics to himself.
“I was just reminding Tinker here of the party they had for us the night before we left Cape Breton. It was up at Port Ban. You should see this place. A neat little cove that you have to climb down a hundred feet to get to, with a great waterfall to wash off a hangover in the morning. No cops can get within a mile of the place without being seen.
“Must’ve been a hundred people there that night, and a trainload of booze. I’m not kidding about the trainload, either. That’s how the liquor gets to our town, by train. It has to come that way. Only way to keep the town from sobering up, as the other fellow says....”
“I gotta go to the bathroom, man,” Blue’s audience apologized, backing away.
Blue turned to Tinker to continue his story when a commotion in the kitchen distracted them both. Moving casually to explore it, they saw people milling around someone in army fatigues, but someone not spit-polished and precise enough to be an enlisted man. It was army surplus all the way up to the black tam. In the middle of a welcoming embrace from Capricorn, the newcomer in camouflage caught sight of Blue.
“How’s my favourite redneck?”
“Hell, Cory, you can’t even see my neck anymore,” Blue said, grabbing a fistful of the hair that hung to his shoulders now. “Got a band, too. Blue Cacophony. Were you reading about us?”
“Got yourself a one-armed fiddler and a music philosopher for a manager. Why couldn’t you just burn your guitar like everybody else? When I heard you had a band I said that horse trader he told me about must have been his father. I’m coming around to hear you sometime. But the last time I saw you, you were driving down a Colorado mountain getting as far away from us as you could.”
“The Lord moves in mysterious ways, as the other fellow says,” Blue answered. “Cappi here told me you joined the Panthers,” he said, jerking his thumb in the direction of Capricorn. “What the hell happened up there, Cory?”
“The FBI came, busted us, took Tulip and me in. Kept us for a while and then let us go, but I came out of their office through a different door than I went in. I couldn’t hang on to all that peace and love shit, knowing what I know.” The last remark was directed at Capricorn, testing his attitude. Capricorn’s shrug was judgement free.
“What were you doing when the FBI came, Cory?” Blue asked.
“I was over by the horses.”
“What were you doing there?”
“I was just standing there scratching the mare’s forehead and staring at the mountains, thinking about nothing. That was the best part of being up there, thinking about nothing.”
“So how many cops were there?” Blue probed.
“Three cars and a van.”
“What’d you think when you saw them?”
“I’ll tell you this, you’re asking more questions than them.”
“Just trying to get the story, Cory. When I met you, we were standing with the horses, remember? Since then the commune’s been raided by the FBI and the cops, you and Tulip and the rest were arrested, the whole commune was burned down, they kept the two of you for a few days before they let you go, and now you’re a Black Panther and you’ll probably never see another horse again as long as you live. Sounds like a hell of a story. What were you thinking when you saw the cops? The story, man.”
“The first thing I did was walk the horses in the paddock so they could munch the grass, then started watching the raid. Then for a fraction of a second I actually thought it was a movie. Four brand-new police cars roaring into the commune on that rut of a road and our people running from one building to another like they were going to get away from it. Somebody even screamed. I thought about running to the woods. I was far enough away from the action to do it. Shit, I’ve been in the back seat of a police car more times than I can remember but I’ve never gone running scared through a forest. So I stuck with the devil I knew, scratching the mare’s forehead, waiting for it to end. I guess I knew way down that it had to end sometime, the commune that is. We’re just not allowed to get away from it, man. The Man just won’t let us!
“Then I got scared, really scared. There was a dozen cops in flacks, armed to fight a real enemy. Then it struck me that these cops really thought we were dangerous. It’s a joke down here in the city where there’s usually somebody watching the pigs, but it was no joke up there. They had us cornered and if they fired every bullet they owned into us, no one would have ever known. They really are at war with us, Blue,” Cory said, pausing a moment to re-imagine it. “That’s about it, I guess.”
“About it! Christ, Cory, the cops haven’t even captured you yet. How’d that happen?”
“When things began to get still around the cabins one of the cops looked my way and saw me and the horses. Then they came at me, five of them coming in a slow semi-circle, aiming their guns and walking like they were crossing a minefield, sighting me down the barrels. Strange thing was I stopped being scared. They made me lay in the grass and one of them searched me while the other four rested their barrels all over me, one on my head, one on my neck, one on my kidneys and one on my balls. They weren’t very happy that I didn’t have a gun. Then they pushed me over with the rest.
“They wanted Capricorn. Especially that creep, Wise. They had to settle for Tulip and me. Tulip because she’s his woman and me because I was black.”
Tulip let out a small chuckle that turned the kitchen’s attention to her.
“When Bud Wise was questioning all of us he kept asking us why we had a nigger up there. A couple of the cops said they’d probably know what Cory was doing up there if they took off his pants. Then Wise turned to Cory and asked him if he was a Black Panther.
“‘I am now,’ Cory told him, and that’s when they arrested all of us. Wrecked the place first, though, looking for evidence. Couldn’t find guns or drugs.”
“Couldn’t see the forest for the trees, you mean,” Cory reminded Tulip. “They sniffed every pot in the place looking for drugs, even held a conference over a bag of oregano. They never noticed the field I led the horses into, and the horses getting hungrier and hungrier. The more they ate, the hungrier they got. These guys are standing around us with guns, talking tough about drugs, and Tulip and I look at each other and get giddy. I could see her shoulders shaking and she was looking at the ground and I knew that if she looked up at me again we weren’t going to get out of there alive because the only way we’d have been able to stop laughing is if somebody shot us. Then everybody else caught on and started laughing.”
“The cops thought they had it figured out then. I heard one of them tell another that we were on drugs and had to be watched very carefully,” Tulip remembered. “When they didn’t find any, they took whatever they could, food they didn’t recognize, books to prove we were subversives, anything that looked suspicious to them.”
“Then they put us in different cars and took us to the station,” Cory added, “The feds were using the state police office down in the town. I didn’t laugh much after that.”
“So when did they burn the commune?” Blue asked.
“A couple of days afterwards, wasn’t it?” Cory said, turning to Capricorn for confirmation. “They made it impossible to go back.”
“Not impossible,” Capricorn corrected. “Just difficult.”
“So I don’t get it. You and Tulip spent time in jail because they wanted Cappi the Con here. Who’s this Wise character?”
“Some other time,” Capricorn said.
“But why did you join the Black Panthers?” Tinker asked.
“Those cops gave me a good education,” Cory explained. “In Colorado I was pretending colour didn’t matter. Even after they murdered King, I still tried to do it his way, follow his path of non-violence, but they straightened me out about that. And they let me know who they feared most of all because the
y kept asking me did I know Stokley, did I know Eldridge?”
“Who’re they?” Blue asked.
“Stokley Carmichael? Eldridge Cleaver?”
Blue reflected for a moment.
“Cleaver. Wasn’t he the guy on Leave it to Beaver?”
An uncomfortable quiet settled over the kitchen as Cory glared at Blue, his expression slowly changing to amusement.
“He means it,” Cory said to the rest, throwing his arm around Blue’s shoulder and laughing. “The dude really means it. Listen Blue, this place you come from ... what’s it called again?”
“Cape Breton.”
“Right. How did you get here from there? Spaceship?”
Cory’s story got lost after that. The party shifted to other centres of attention, but Cory and Blue hovered at the edge, leaning side by side on the kitchen counter, each nursing a beer, listening to the music from the network of speakers that Capricorn had installed and the murmur under it. Blue’s thoughts were mulling over a conversation Karma and Cory had had in their bedroom when Karma took Cory there to see the progress to date on her mural of lives. The three of them passed through the rattle of beads and the moment Cory looked at the wall he said, “Mayan. Were you Mayan?”
His question led to a long discussion between Cory and Karma about karma and cultures and the evolution of the soul. The figures in the first panel were just about finished, and while they talked Blue wondered who he would be living with in the next panel. He was still guessing at it back in the kitchen when Cory spoke.
“What did you mean before when you said I may never see another horse again?”
“We got this guy back home, eh, Farmer ... I told you about him. Well, he told me that he’s never seen anybody go back to horses. He’s been trading them all his life and he noticed that once people give up their horses they never go back. First, it’s a truck and then it’s a tractor and then the barn becomes a garage and pretty soon there’s not even any room in it for horses. Those horses the farmers didn’t want anymore Farmer began selling to the Americans. ‘From working horse to rocking horse,’ was what Farmer used to say. Horses that lost their job on the farm were becoming toys for Cape Breton’s summer people, see. But he’d never seen anyone, farmer or American, who went back to buying horses once they gave them up. I guess that’s what I was thinking about when I said that to you.
Tinker and Blue Page 13
