After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  Meg sat down next to Dot and Marie, and explained that Vito had arranged for them all to dance at the Hullabaloo as performers, because of a complicated licensing regulation. “They’re wiping out the dancing, so everybody’s getting zonked out, right?” she said. “As soon as everybody’s on one thing, they make it illegal. Some of those kids they arrest on the Strip, you know, they call up the parents and say, ‘We’ve got your kid on suspicion of narcotics.’ ‘Suspicion of narcotics.’ They just don’t like the kids and the dancing. They could arrest you on suspicion of being a Martian. They could arrest you for using the wrong deodorant.”

  “People don’t think,” Dot said. “It was dead on the Strip without the kids there.”

  “They’re going to be locked in their own houses sooner or later without us, and they don’t even know it,” Meg said. “But a whole lot of people are strange. I’m not even sure they’re well—are you ready for that? Everybody should dance, and love, and go about their business, right? But those poor cops, those poor screwed-up cops, they don’t have the words to yell, so they just scream, you know—they just came down the Strip screaming. They’re frightened, right?”

  “Nobody had guns,” Marie said, referring to the night of November 12th.

  “They didn’t have guns,” Meg said. “They were afraid they’d use them, they were that screwed up.”

  “They were afraid if they brought guns, the guns would get broken,” Marie said. “We would have broken them.”

  “Man, if you have this hostility, you learn to take it out in loving ways,” Meg said. “If you love somebody, you really groove with them, right? I’m writing things down in a book for myself, because my parents—well, they’re very beautiful for their own thing, but they just don’t know.”

  “My parents just can’t stand it,” Marie said. “They can’t stand my bare feet. They can’t stand to see me sleep all day. They say, ‘You ought to find a job. You ought to be self-supporting.’ I say, ‘Why? All I do is sleep here once in a while. Why can’t I have a free life?’ My mother worries about the people I hang out with. I can’t explain—people aren’t what they look like or what they wear . . . .”

  “You’re judged by the people you run with, right?” Meg said. “I’m adopted, and my parents really love me. And that’s too bad, because my real mother was probably some unwed mother that I could have grooved with.” She picked up the pussy willow and waved it thoughtfully. “Sometimes I’m so messed up you don’t even know,” she said. “I’m not even sure if I’m really here.”

  “I worry about that, too,” Marie said. “Sometimes I think I’m dead and I’m hallucinating the whole thing.”

  Three girls, all dressed in dark-blue skirts and jackets, with dark-blue hats, and with lace handkerchiefs in their jacket pockets, came up the staircase, looked around, and silently went down the stairs again.

  Meg, whose slacks were splitting slightly at the seams, took them off, went to get a needle and some thread, and sat down to sew.

  “Have you ever had the idea you might be in somebody else’s dream?” Dot asked.

  “Well, if you’re hallucinating the whole thing, you can change it, right?” Meg said, biting off the thread. “It’s like when you’re having a bad trip—you see what’s real, or what you think is real, and you get upset. You’ve got to say to yourself, ‘You’re on a drug, it’s only a drug.’ Sometimes it takes awhile to change it. But can you imagine how creative your mind must be if you’re dreaming the whole thing?”

  The conversation stayed on metaphysics for another hour, during which the girls in the dark suits appeared twice more and the boy with bare feet never uttered a word. At one point, Dot and Meg began to reminisce about how they had become acquainted—in a juvenile home, where Meg had been sent as a “habitual runaway,” and Dot for the vaguer offense of what she described as being “in danger of leading an idle and desolate life.” They spoke of a ghost story the Mexican inmates used to tell—about “La Harona,” a woman who, crazed by syphilis, killed her children.

  “They said if you shouted ‘La Harona!’ five times, she would come to you,” Meg said, “and a lot of kids in my unit wanted to test it.”

  “I was so terrified I cried all night,” Dot said. “They said she comes through mirrors.” Both girls still seemed terrified at this thought.

  “Wouldn’t it be funny if you could look at yourself without looking in a mirror?” Meg said. Then she began talking about a boy friend who had first brought her to Vito’s. “I was completely freaked out at the time,” she said. “Pete just brought me here, and I grooved on the place. He used to wear two belts and wild flowers. Now he plays in a jazz group and wears a suit, but I still love him. The chick he married loves me, too, but I think two’s company.”

  One of the three girls in blue suits now appeared at the top of the stairs again, wearing gold-rimmed glasses and carrying a piece of the red clay. She began to dance by herself.

  Dot and Meg spoke of their last day at the juvenile home. They had sculpted a large eye together in an art class, and they had asked for permission to take it with them when they left.

  “But the teacher at juvey said, ‘You have to finish it,”’ Meg said. “And, of course, we told her it was finished. But she said, ‘No, that isn’t finished, you have to paint it.”’ “So we didn’t get to take it,” Dot said.

  By this time, Vito and Sue were getting up from their nap, and a crowd gradually assembled at the top of the stairs. A fourth girl in dark blue now joined the three others. An Oriental boy in a paisley shirt and suede pants appeared, and then a girl in a scarlet pants suit, and one in a purple pants suit (both wore matching derbies and ties), and a man in what looked like a matador outfit, a man with chaps and a ten-gallon hat, a girl in a piece of silk bordered and tufted with fur, a girl in a fringed deerslayer jacket and orange bell-bottom trousers, a bearded man in a kind of bishop’s mantle, and several others in puff hats or floppy hats or with red bows tied all over their hair. The entire group departed in four carloads for Sunset Boulevard, to dance onstage in the After Hours at the Hullabaloo.

  At 2 A.M. on Saturday, January 14th, the Hullabaloo, which holds about two thousand people, and which lies directly across the boulevard from the Hollywood Palladium (where, earlier that evening, Lawrence Welk had played for the National Smooth Dancer’s Association Ball), was so full that the longhairs waiting outside occupied the entire block, not in any sort of line but extending radially over the area. A parking lot beside the Hullabaloo was full of cars, nearly all with their radios on, so a kind of concert of Donovan, the Beach Boys, Sonny and Cher, and Buffalo Springfield (“Fly trans-love airways / Getcha there on time . . . . Gotta keep those a’lovin’ vibrations a’happenin’ with her . . . . The beat goes on . . . . Paranoia strikes deep / Into your life it will creep”) was rising from the asphalt. Vito led his group in among the cars and around to the back of the building, where, after being questioned only briefly at the entrance, he smuggled them as “performers” up a ramp, and onto the back of the stage. Since the hours before morning had been Friday the thirteenth, thirteen groups were scheduled to play: the Sound Machine, the Mandala, the Peanut Butter Conspiracy, the Smokestack Lightning, the Factory, the Electric Prune, the Yellow Payges, the Sons of Adam, the Coloring Book, the Wild Ones, Iron Butterfly, the Seeds, and Love. The stage floor was a rotating platform divided in two by a backdrop curtain, so that while one group was playing the next could be warming up. (This arrangement created a sound backstage not unlike the one intentionally produced by some of the groups in the course of their normal engagements. Love, for example, often plays with someone else’s record of another song as background music.) The area backstage was full of people in costumes of one sort or another—denims, satins, burlaps, suedes, and one tutu. A lonely troubadour wearing knickers and a ruffled shirt walked around throughout the performances strumming a guitar. No one seemed to know him, and he was not a member of any group.

  When the Sound Ma
chine started to play, with a beat so deeply resonant that many members of the audience began to cough, Vito sent some of his group onstage. These included Meg, Dot, the barefoot boy, Vito’s pregnant wife, and six others, and from the reaction of the audience—a polite but unsurprised attentiveness—it was obvious that they had seen the group before. Meg raised her arms and began to run quite gracefully about the stage, Dot began to bend at the waist and straighten up with regularity, as though she were keening, Sue began to wave her arms about in the air, pivot, and droop from side to side, and the barefoot boy began to sway quietly in place. The others frugged or improvised. The members of Vito’s troupe who had remained backstage soon grew restless, and Vito kept promising them that they could go on at any moment. But the girl in the tutu could bear it no longer; she ran out onstage. A few seconds later, Meg’s pants began to split again, and some of the audience started to laugh—though not unkindly—and applaud. Meg, looking rather frantic about the eyes, arrived backstage.

  “Fix your pants, baby,” Vito said quite calmly, producing what he called a “fraternity button,” designed by him. “Just relax.” Meg took the button, pinned her pants, and returned onstage.

  By 5 A.M., six groups had played, and the Monkees, the Miracles, and the Mamas and the Papas had joined the audience. Vito’s group had been taken offstage earlier when it was announced that all further dancing would be done by two union dancers, in red spangles, on the balconies of the dance hall. Within moments, however, the two union dancers had been supplemented by a dancer in a silver costume and silver boots, who materialized onstage, and since no one seemed to know whether she was union or not, Vito took this as a cue to send his group back onstage, where they remained. The size of the audience had not diminished in the slightest, nor had the volume of the radio concert in the parking lot. At five, there was a pause, and both the audience and Vito’s group seemed tense; everyone was quite sure that it was Love’s turn to play. By five-twenty, when there was still no sign of Love, the management was trying to divert the crowd with jukebox music. The audience, however, appeared quite accustomed to delays of this sort; the pause seemed to bear out their expectation that Love would be the next group to go on.

  It was. A record was cut off abruptly, the front curtain rose, a group of four whites and three blacks was revealed, and the lead singer, dressed in a black stocking cap and brown pants and vest, leaned slightly sideways, yawned briefly, and began to sing. The group, with what seemed a kind of driving, electronic desperation, played a song called “My Flash on You.” When the song was over, the audience cheered a kind of desperation cheer, as one might cheer an acquittal verdict for a defendant against whom the case looked bad. The group played two more numbers, and then, in the middle of a song called “She Comes in Colors,” the lead singer walked off. He did not return for several minutes, but the group played on. Then, when he did return, he ignored the microphone and sat down abruptly on a crate amid the electronic equipment. Several times, as the group still played, he seemed on the point of rising but sat down again. Finally, he rose, walked carefully forward, and, grasping the microphone, leaned forward a few moments, with teeth bared, and began to sing. He sang a long time, then stopped and let the group play several minutes more. Suddenly, in a calm speaking voice, he wished the audience a Merry Christmas and reminded them that Halloween might soon return. The front curtain dropped. The audience cheered again.

  There was another extended pause, and then the Seeds appeared. They were greeted with an affection almost as obvious and ardent as the reception given Love. Shortly after the Seeds had finished, the Peanut Butter Conspiracy began to play. And shortly after that (since the Hullabaloo is permitted to stay open only until 6 A.M.) the police, by unplugging the Conspiracy’s electronic equipment and rounding up Vito’s obviously exhausted but still enthusiastic dancers, induced the audience to leave. Only eight groups out of the scheduled thirteen had played, but the After Hours at the Hullabaloo was over.

  In the early hours of the morning, posters had appeared at the Fifth Estate and the Kazoo and outside the Hullabaloo and Pandora’s Box announcing “A Gathering of All Tribes, a Human Be-In,” for noon on Saturday, in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park—in sympathy with a similar event, with Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and Dick Gregory, to be held at the same hour in San Francisco. By 1:30 P.M. on Saturday, the park, which is in the canyons above Sunset Boulevard, had the air of a small-town picnic ground, with, instead of friendly interlocking groups from the Lions, Kiwanis, and Rotary, friendly interlocking groups from the drug, New Left, and teen-rock establishments. The Sound Machine was playing once again. Someone was distributing olive branches. Someone else was selling Oracle. Someone else was selling colored paper flowers. A fourth person was giving paper flowers away. Several people had brought their children, their dogs, and, in paper bags, their lunch. One young man was lying barefoot on the grass (it was a sunny day) with an Army helmet, painted gold, over his face; he kept running his fingers softly across the top of a lunchbox at his side. A St. Bernard with a paper flower in its collar was licking the young man’s toes. Several transistor radios were playing softly. Vito and Meg were there, and so were Marie and Dot, the bearded clerk from the Kazoo and the girl he had consoled, and the boy who had not written to his eleven-year-old sister in New Jersey. A photographer for a fashion-trade publication was unobtrusively taking pictures. There were no police around at all.

  The New Yorker

  February 25, 1967

  LETTER FROM THE SIX-DAY WAR

  IN THE years since 1948, when Israel fought its war of independence against Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, the Israeli government had to prepare for, among other undesirable contingencies, what the defense establishment referred to as Mikre Hakol (the Eventuality of Everybody)—a concerted attack upon Israel by all the Arab countries along its uneven, militarily and geographically unsound frontier. Until two weeks ago, the possibility of Mikre Hakol seemed quite remote. Then, by an incredible series of overlapping miscalculations by almost everyone involved in the Middle East, Israel was brought to the brink of annihilation, the United Nations—which, in a sense, had been born as a peacekeeping force in Palestine in 1949—was about to dissolve as even a useful forum over the same question in 1967, and the Soviet Union and United States narrowly missed a nuclear confrontation. The rapidity with which Israel won the war (for such a small country there could be, in fact, no such thing as winning slowly) seems to have bailed out the great powers and the UN (although a statement by French Foreign Minister Couve de Murville, on June 7th, to the effect that France had foreseen the satisfactory outcome of events was greeted with hoots in the French Assembly, and British Foreign Minister George Brown found it necessary to remark, on the same day, in Parliament, “I deplore this tendency to giggle whenever the United Nations’ authority is mentioned”).

  The war for Israel was a costly one, brought on in part by the refusal of the Western nations, in a kind of displaced intellectual racism, to take any statements—including racist threats—made by the Arab nations seriously. Israel won, at great risk and with great sacrifice, alone. This time, it would not, for the sake of the good will of its friends (whose good faith had been tested and found wanting in events at the Gulf of Aqaba), subject itself to the same risks and sacrifices again. The victory would, with tact and statesmanship, lead to that cooperative revival of the Middle East which had always been one of the dreams of Zionism. Israel has much to offer the Arab states; and for Israel itself peace would mean an end to the strain of maintaining a constant posture of defense, of being forced to trade at a distance of thousands of miles instead of with its immediate and natural neighbors, and of being economically dependent on help from Jews in the Diaspora. But it is impossible to negotiate with someone who does not know where his own self-interest lies, and the radical regimes of Cairo and Damascus would have to negotiate reasonably, recognizing at last the existence of the Israeli state, or go.

  It is also im
possible to inhabit a geographical absurdity. The Gaza Strip, which leads like a boarding ramp into Israel along the southwest coast; the wedge of Jordan that protrudes into Israel from Jenin to the Dead Sea (and that made possible the shelling of Tel Aviv on Israel’s west coast from a point well beyond its eastern border); the division of Jerusalem, which leaves its civilian population virtually indefensible; and the Syrian positions above Galilee, which made impossible any accommodation over water rights (and which made the shelling of Israeli settlements, farmers, and fishermen such a common occurrence that for nineteen years northern Israelis have referred to mortar fire as “Syrian rainfall”)—in all these cases the boundaries would have to be redrawn. The Israelis would have to contribute to, and the Arab nations cooperate in, a resettlement of Arab refugees. But a simple (and, as recent events have proved, meaningless) guarantee by the United Nations would not do this time. All parties would have to work out the conditions under which they could live together and return from a twenty-year siege to their domestic concerns.

  To this end, Israel did not settle for a simple military victory, as it had in the campaigns of 1948 and 1956. It persisted to the point of virtual annihilation of the Arab professional armies. The victory could bring—by force or by reason—stability in the Middle East. It could even, by preempting the news and capturing the popular imagination for a while, take some of the pressure off conflicts in other areas, notably Vietnam. The West, without risking a soldier—without even, in fact, honoring one of its firmest commitments—had shared in a resounding victory over a Russian-supported totalitarian regime. The balance of power, or even the idea of the balance of power, and the relationship of the great powers to the small had been altered in ways that have yet to be fully explored; the United States might have some new room, and Russia some new incentives, to negotiate. (The fact that the Russians should have been supporting the Arab countries at all was one of the historical ironies of the situation. The Arabs had originally opposed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine not out of anti-Jewish fanaticism but out of the Arab chieftains’ reasoned fear of what effect the sight of prospering Socialist cooperatives might have on their feudal sheikhdoms and caliphates. Russia, expecting an ally, had been one of the first nations to recognize the State of Israel. Now the prospering immigrants found themselves viewed as colonialists, and the Arab regimes were using the arms of Moscow and some of the rhetoric of revolution.)