A Nation of Mystics

by Pamela Johnson

  “Hey, is everybody ready for the concert?” Richard called from his room.

  Marcie stepped from the bathroom and stood at his door. “We’re ready,” she said to his back.

  Richard, rooting through his shoebox for just the right smoke, turned absently and gave her a nod over his shoulder. In the next instant, his face whipped back for a second look. His eyes traveled her body, noting the round, reddish areola beneath the blouse.

  Just then, Alex burst down the hallway. “Richard, you ready to go?”

  His aggressive stride forced Marcie to step into the room. Perhaps it was her scent that first caught his attention, but as he passed, he looked with new interest. A slow smile began to form on his lips.

  “Did you get it?” Richard asked him quickly.

  “Oh … yeah. Here.” Alex passed him a plastic bag.

  “Thanks.” Richard walked over and took Marcie’s arm. “My lady, may I help you with your cloak? I have something special to show you tonight.”

  Richard was halfway down the hall before Alex called, “Hey, man, wait a minute.”

  “What is it?” Richard asked in a steady voice, his eyes directly on Alex’s face.

  “I thought you were working tonight.”

  “I am. Marcie’s working with me.” His voice held quiet power and authority.

  “I … I’ll get my jacket,” Marcie mumbled, quickly remembering her first impression of Richard: too sure of himself.

  “What just happened?” she asked the giggling girls in the front room.

  Still laughing, Honey put an arm around her and said in a voice only Marcie could hear, “Richard just told Alex to back off. Don’t worry. Richard’s a terrific guy. You can trust him.”

  Trust? She grabbed her jacket, her heart racing. Yes, I think I can.

  KATHY AND MARCIE

  FILLMORE AUDITORIUM, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  JUNE 1967

  Fillmore Auditorium was a large hall in the middle of San Francisco’s black district, the Fillmore. On this evening, it was almost impossible to find even a few inches of empty floor space. People sat hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder, or stood banked along walls, waiting for the first band to play. The hall was dark except for the multi-mirrored silver ball reflecting dots of light over the crowd and a slow-moving light that turned the waiting faces red, green, yellow, or blue. Soft conversation traveled through the theater, and outbursts of laughter broke through the murmurs. The heavy, scent-filled haze from hundreds of joints drifted and swirled in the colored lights.

  “Well, Marcie,” Kathy observed after picking up the tickets at the will call window, “I guess he’s for real. Want to go backstage? It might be fun.”

  “I think I’d rather stay with Richard,” she said, looking over to where he waited. Her tongue trailed across her upper lip in nervous anticipation.

  “Okay. I’ll meet you right here when the concert’s over.”

  The hall was jammed with people. Richard took Marcie’s hand and pushed his way to the center of the auditorium, gently pulling her behind him. “Here, brother, have a joint,” he offered, moving swiftly through the crowd, passing out rolled cigarettes. “Excuse us. Have a joint …” No one seemed to mind his intrusion, his careful pushing, as he slipped between people to find a spot that looked as if it might have room for two and sat down. From his pocket, he pulled out the plastic bag with the tabs Alex had given him. Marcie watched him choose one and eat it.

  “Here,” he said, turning to her, “this is what I wanted to show you. It’s acid.”

  So this is LSD, she thought, taking the small tablet and looking at it in the palm of her hand. It looks harmless enough. Let’s see what this is all about.

  Richard put an arm around her and gave her a squeeze as she swallowed, then turned to the man beside him. “Want some acid? White domed tabs.”

  “Can I have one for my old lady?”

  “Take as many as you want. One’s a trip; two’s an experience. Pass ’em down.”

  Men began to appear on the darkened stage, playing with the knobs of amplifiers, sending shrieks through the speakers. The excitement stirring the crowd picked up. People on stage scurried to positions. A spotlight hit the lead mike. Bill Graham, a thin man with dark hair, stepped into the light. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Fillmore Auditorium! Let’s give a big hand to welcome a sensational group … Electric Reason!”

  In seconds, the entire auditorium was on its feet, moving with the sound that slammed into the crowds. From different angles of the room, color burst on the stage, bathing the musicians in blends of colored lights, gliding over huge screens, vibrating to the music, pulsating with the beat. Strobes flashed. The sound was primitive, naked energy. The simple room was transformed into a living organism, breathing with life. Thousands who had sat alone minutes before were beginning to move together. This collective body had a beat, a pulse. Other handfuls of acid appeared, passed through the crowd, everyone going up together, mind patterns mirrored by the dancing patterns on the walls.

  About ten minutes after dropping, Marcie’s head began to clear from the pot haze. Her body had a new energy. She wanted to ask Richard what the feeling was, but he wouldn’t hear her over the sound. She looked at him, giggled, swayed in his arms, and saw him laugh with her. Electrical energy raised her body hair. A new tingle rushed through her, her legs unstable, trembling. Richard’s face was a maze of movement, color ebbing and flowing around him. He was pulsating with the music, with her heartbeat, moving in and out with his own breath. She laid her hand on his chest to feel the rhythm of his heart. When he laughed, the resonance quivered up her arm. The poet looked for words and could find none. Only feeling flowed through her body, and something new, an acute awareness of Richard, a connection, a deepening, as though she were falling into a warm sea where there were no boundaries. In the moment’s semiquiet that followed the end of the song, she said softly into his ear, “So this is what acid’s like.”

  The music began again, hitting the walls of the auditorium, reverberating through their bodies. She was distinctly aware of the receptor-like quality of her nervous system, knew dramatically that she was part of the electronic age. She moved with Richard and, together, they moved with the crowd, driven by the beat. The colorful organism changed, swirled over them. Richard began to touch her, to connect with her, becoming more suggestive, more intimate in his gestures. Her breasts were soft against his chest, her body a glow of tiny orgasms. Powerless to separate the multitude of feeling, she could only laugh and move to the soft, velvet energy pushing them, close with him in body and mind, single and separate ego gone.

  I’m sharing the same mind with him! There is a consciousness common to all men! I feel as if I’ve climbed a mountain and can finally see the whole, vast plain. If only I had paper and pencil to put it all down! But how? How to ever express this vision of eye and mind? How to ever express this feeling rushing through my body?

  All the while, she danced and laughed and cried, one thought falling into another, and overwhelmed, she held to the feeling of Richard flowing around her.

  Once backstage, Kathy followed Felix’s manager Tony down a hallway as crowded as the front of the auditorium and charged with the same explosive energy. Like Honey, some of the women wore long velvet dresses with lace at the sleeves and neckline; others wore bell-bottomed sailor’s jeans with soft, colorful blouses. A few of the men reminded Kathy of Alex—leather jacket, corduroy bell-bottoms, boots.

  “Hey, Tony,” a loud voice called.

  Kathy recognized David, the man who had held the pot under the table at the restaurant.

  “Felix show you that Gold?” he asked, his voice low, pitched so that only Tony and Kathy could hear.

  “Yeah, pick us up a kilo. How much?”

  “Two hundred.”

  Tony nodded. “Thanks. Let’s talk about it later. Right now, I have to get some things on stage.” Then, turning to Kathy, he said, “Felix is going to play pretty
soon. You can stand at the back of the stage, if you want. Come hang out after the show.”

  Even in the dim light, Kathy could see David’s eyes travel her body, and she laughed with abandon, high on the sexual energy that floated though the air. Suddenly, David’s attention shifted.

  “Kevin—hey, man, what’s happening?”

  “That hash should be in soon,” Kevin said, close to David’s ear.

  “That coming from Laguna? From Christian?”

  Kevin shrugged, keeping his business and his contacts to himself. “What’s going on with you?”

  “I’ve got a few keys left of that Gold if you want any. Why don’t I stop by after the concert with a sample? I’d like to see your new canvas.” David looked around, searching. “Where’s your old lady?” “

  “Debbie’s over there with Morning Star, waiting to touch Felix.”

  As if just remembering, David turned his attention back to Kathy. “Kevin, this is Kathy. She’s a friend of Felix’s.”

  “Yeah?” Kevin lit a cigarette. “Get him to drop by after the show.” He smiled and held out a cigarette pack. “Smoke?”

  She laughed, picking up on the energy, ready to fly.

  David stepped forward, brushing against her. “You want some coke, Kathy?”

  “Sure,” she giggled, thirsty. She’d been smoking for hours.

  But instead of passing her a can, David took out a small bottle and a tiny silver spoon.

  Oh, my God! I think he means cocaine!

  Affecting a nonchalant pose, she watched keenly as he dipped the tiny spoon into the bottle, held it to one of his nostrils, and sniffed.

  “Where’d you get the coke?” Kevin asked. “You don’t see much of it.”

  “Felix asked me to look around. Expensive, man.” David held the spoon to Kathy, standing near enough to touch her. “Here you go.”

  Kathy sniffed as she had watched him do, felt the tiny crystals hit the inside of her nostrils—first one side, then the other. The powder burned, made her eyes water, her nose run. Bitter mucous dripped into her throat. She sniffed again, easily. Her heart beat more rapidly, the muscles tightened in her chest and stomach; she became hot, nauseated, and anxious. “Is … is there a restroom somewhere?”

  Finding the toilet, she immediately emptied her bowels, trying to understand this new drug.

  It’s not like pot, she told herself, wondering where the light came from that filled the room. Her breathing was fast, her eyes widened, her vision cleared. She took several deep breaths trying to catch up with her heart.

  “Wow!” she cried aloud to no one. “Suddenly everything’s crystal clear. Bright!”

  Just as she reentered the hallway outside the dressing rooms, people began pushing back against the walls. The charged energy erupted just as lightning might break the thick air before a thunderstorm. “Here comes Felix!” Debbie cried. Felix wore a huge black hat with an enormous red plume, boots, striped pants, a red cummerbund, and a silver sequined vest. He and the other band members walked slowly to the stage, laughing and calling greetings along the way.

  “Well, hello, baby,” Felix said, close to Kathy’s ear. “You made it!”

  Kathy’s heart was still racing, her eyes large and dilated. Her body wanted to move, and he sensed it. “Come dance!” he told her. “Debbie! Morning Star! Come dance!”

  Kathy stood to one side of the stage waiting for the music. And when it came, it surrounded her—loud, driving, vibrating up from the floor through her legs, pounding against her body. Laughing and shaking, she turned to Debbie and Morning Star, and the women began to move together to the sound, beautiful nymphs, dancing a circle, making bonds in the easy friendships of youth.

  Kathy could only marvel that this was the same man she had known in the park. This Felix was all-powerful, controlling the dance hall and everyone in it with his sound. Electric sound. Filling the ears. Shifting perception. Hundreds of stoned people plugged into his output. He tantalized them, moving them to erotic feeling, stirring primitive memory. The offering he made to the crowd passed through them and was returned in something close to adoration.

  He’s boundless, she thought. Almost … almost a god.

  The music went on and on, and still Kathy danced, never stopping, dizzy, moving faster, stars flashing in front of her eyes, swimming in amoebas projected onto the stage. Her body was wet, her blouse clinging, framing her outline, holding hands with Debbie and Morning Star, circling with flying hair, locked inside herself with only the music in her head—then, the crowd’s roar and applause, the band pushing past her down the steps of the stage.

  “Come on, baby.” Felix put an arm around her waist. “Let’s go to my dressing room. We need something to smoke. Big Brother’s on next. We’ll come back for the performance.”

  “The tickets,” she said softly. “How can I thank you!”

  “Later, baby, later,” he touched her arm. “Let’s see the rest of the concert. The night’s only started.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen … Big Brother and the Holding Company!”

  In the center of the stage, Janis Joplin grabbed the microphone and began bouncing with the beat. In moments, the crowd was with her. Hundreds of joints pierced the darkness with points of red light, brighter on the toke. Standing in the stage light, Janis became a flaming candle bathed in changing colors of light. An electric drum flash, and she inhaled every breath in the room and sent it back, melodic, raspy, shrill, her lips pursed around the mike to howl both joy and pain.

  Marcie watched and listened, enraptured, breathless. Janis’s body was emotion, fingers spread wide, skin trembling, boots stomping, a finger pushed into the air to match the thrust of her voice. Sweat poured from her face and scattered as glistening drops in the stage lights, like tiny crystals. A feather became tangled in her wildly flying hair. Strands of beads swayed and bounced with her body. Marcie could not move, barely breathed, lest she destroy the poetry of the moment, all the while wondering whether she would ever be able to sing with such passion. Every note was a separate world, round and full, and she floated atop each note, higher, higher, jumping from bubble to bubble, always carried up. She leaned into Richard, entwined, just as the guitar mingled with Janis’s voice, through one song then the next. She and Richard moved against each other now, easy sexual excitement in every touch, without the burden of time.

  Then, suddenly, surprised, time did move, and Janis and the band members were gone. Low lights and quiet music filled the auditorium. The slow gush of cold air from opened doors brought her to a new place, and she watched, startled, as people moved toward the exits. Richard took her hand, and she found herself following, unsure, staying close to him. Once outside on the sidewalk, she looked into his face, grinning and self-conscious, cheeks hurting from her constant smile, her lips red, everything strange in the bright lights. Other stoned smiles passed them, walking rapidly in small groups to some safe harbor to finish the night.

  “What now?” she asked breathlessly.

  “We go home. In the car.”

  “You’re … you’re going to drive?” The idea seemed so incredible, that Marcie had trouble finding the words.

  “I’m used to it. I’ve done lots of acid. You learn to work with it.”

  By twos, their party grouped together. Greta and Merlin first, arms around each other, their hair frizzing in the damp, fog-shrouded night, grinning ear-to-ear. Alex next, his arm linked with Honey’s. The crowds thinned until only a few people straggled out of the theater.

  “Okay, I guess it’s just us,” Richard told the group.

  “What about Kathy?” Marcie asked, still searching the faces moving past her.

  “I’m sure she’s with Felix. She’ll find her way back tomorrow. Or whenever she makes it.”

  “You think she’s alright?”

  “Of course. She’s just doing her own thing. Come on. The car’s this way.”

  As Marcie walked, she couldn’t imagine how Richard could find his
way. The streets were all the same, a colorful blur without any distinguishing landmarks—concrete and asphalt, curbs and cars. How could he find the one car among all those cars that would take them where they wanted to go?

  But before long, Merlin was settling into the backseat with Greta close beside him, and Alex was pulling Honey onto his lap. Merlin started laughing, a loud, high-pitched giggle that set them all off. Acid caused a tremendous heat to come off bodies, and with every breath, the windows were soon thoroughly fogged.

  Richard, rifling wildly through the pockets of his jacket looking for the keys, murmured, “Everybody calm down. We’ll never get out of here if we don’t stop laughing and pull it together.”

  But the thought of calming down when everyone was up, sent a new roar of laughter through the car.

  “Marcie, roll down your window.” Then, more loudly, “I need something to wipe the windshield.”

  Greta passed a scarf forward, and attention began to focus on getting the car started. Sharing the same mind-energy was cool, but it meant that all their minds had to be directed to the same task.

  “What you need is a joint, man,” Merlin told him, lighting one and passing it up front.

  Richard toked, easing the muscles in his face, and Marcie followed, only to find that visions intensified, colors brightened, and patterns covered every surface.

  “Can … can you drive?” she asked.

  In answer, the car moved slowly away from the curb, lurching down the street, Richard working the clutch. The ride took them up Fillmore to Haight Street, then toward the park. For Marcie, there was no thought of time or destination. Only a sense of being in her body, comfortable, strong, mobile, a sense of clarity of mind, of being with Richard, feeling she could go anywhere with him, become anything.