by Lewis Shiner
“If you had one, how do you know you’d be able to play it? How do you know you won’t get tired of it in two weeks and go on to something else?”
“I’ve played Alex’s guitar. I can learn. It was like, like I already knew how and was just remembering it.”
Steve let the silence unwind for a while before he said, “How much does it cost?”
“We went looking after school this week. We found just what I want at a pawn shop on Harry Hines. For everything—the guitar, a practice amp, a case, a 12-foot cord, a strap, an extra set of strings, and a half-dozen picks—it’s…” He took a deep breath. “… a hundred and twenty-five dollars.”
“Amp?”
“Yeah, a practice amplifier, it’s about this big.” He pantomimed a shape a bit larger than a shoebox.
“You’re talking about an electric guitar?”
The kid was losing his temper, as he always did, though he tried to hide it. “Of course. To play in a group.”
Steve shook his head. “Now, one of those Spanish guitars, I could maybe see that. But electric?”
The kid went quiet and Steve took another look. He had his jaw set and was wearing an expression of defiance that Steve had never seen before.
At that instant, Steve knew he was standing on the edge of a cliff. In the next thirty seconds he could lose his son, maybe for good. The thought made him so furious that he was tempted to press on, not only refuse the guitar, but ground him for picking one out before he had permission, for announcing that he was going to be in a combo with the Mexican kid like it was already decided. Lock him in his room if he had to. If Steve had tried to blackmail his own father this way, even at age 15, he would have gotten a beating, probably with a razor strop. And if he’d fought back, his father would have gone after him with his fists and beaten hell out of him. He’d sworn he wouldn’t be that kind of father. He’d also assumed his son would be like Steve was at that age, quiet, hard-working, obedient.
His window of opportunity to preserve his family was closing. He tried to clear the rage from his throat, found he couldn’t, cleared it again. Looking straight at the road in front of him, he said, “Give me a minute to think about it.”
They drove the rest of the way in silence. Steve parked and said, “Coming in?” and got only a surly shake of the head in reply.
He took his time. He picked up a fifth of Bacardi white rum for Betty and a fifth of Canadian Club for himself, then lingered for a while looking at the imported beers. This will pass, he told himself, like the kid’s obsession with cowboy shows and toy six-shooters. And then he saw the way to turn this to his own advantage, and it was all he could do to keep from whistling as he walked out.
He drove back to Northwest Highway and said, “Okay, here’s the deal. If you want this, it’s going to cost you. I’ll front you the money for the guitar, but you have to pay it back.”
“Of course.”
“Wait till I’m finished. You have to pay it back from what you’ll earn in your summer job next year, working in the oil fields in Tyler.”
“All summer?”
“Two months.”
“Okay.”
Steve was stunned. He’d underestimated how far the kid was willing to go.
“I’ll draw up a contract, which you’ll have to sign, so there’s no misunderstanding. There are two other conditions. The first is, you have to keep up a B average at school. If that slips, you lose the guitar.”
“Okay.”
“The second one is this. You can play in this combo with your Mexican friend, but this is not going to be your career. I am not going to provide you with the tools to throw away your education and wind up using dope and living with Negroes and getting syphilis and dying at age thirty in some rathole. This is a hobby, and nothing more than that. Is that understood?”
It occurred to Steve that he might have pushed too far. So be it. He’d lived through the Depression and seen the despair in men’s eyes who only wanted work, any kind of work, and couldn’t find it. He’d been stationed in Europe for the last year of the war and seen how they lived over there, the bombed-out cities, people eating their own wallpaper. He, and every man he’d served with, had been determined to build a world where that would never happen to them, and they’d done it. Now that there was prosperity, maybe it was all too easy.
He didn’t want to admit it, but it hurt him. Here is this gift, he’d said to his son. Here is the world I made for you. A world where you can be assured of a good job and a good living, your own home, your own car, enough money to raise a family. I worked all my life to make you this world.
And his son said no, I don’t want that. It’s worth nothing to me. What I want is an electric guitar.
They pulled up at a light and Steve turned to face him. “Well?”
“How long do I have? Since we’re laying all this out. Do I have until I finish college to play in bands? And that has to include playing in public, because there’s no point otherwise.”
“Assuming you keep up your grades, I suppose so.”
The kid licked his lips. “Okay, then.”
“Not good enough. I need to hear you say, ‘I agree.’”
“I agree,” the kid said.
Steve bit back the words his own father had used so many times, about how it was for his own good. Take your bitter victory, he told himself, and show a little class.
“Good,” Steve said. “Now where is this pawn shop?”
*
Dave had tagged along to San Francisco with Jake and the Spoonful, and what he’d found there was a city shedding its skin. The old city was North Beach, the tawdry burlesque joints and the Beat bookstores and coffeehouses, where the band was currently wrapping up a two-week residency at the hungry i, a folk and comedy club that was not remotely prepared to deal with their volume or the quantity of their recently converted fans.
The new thing was Haight-Ashbury, a Victorian neighborhood recently saved from the wrecking ball, now home to a cultural ferment so new that it didn’t have a name. Their unofficial ambassador was one Luria Castell, a dark-haired entrepreneur in thrift-store couture and glasses, a founding member of something called The Family Dog, which had been involved in a rock dance scene that summer at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City. Luria had discovered the Spoonful at The Trip in LA, and during their previous San Francisco residency, at a club called Mother’s, she had brought the Haight-Ashbury royalty to see them: her partner Chet Helms, a comedy ensemble called The Committee, and another theater group called the Mime Troupe, along with their loud and headstrong manager, a New Yorker named Bill Graham.
Now Luria had booked the Spoonful for a dance at the Longshoremen’s Hall on the Sunday after the hungry i gig, touted as the sequel to a dance the previous Saturday, called “A Tribute to Dr. Strange,” that the cognoscenti were still talking about. Those same scene-makers and dozens of hip, artsy, extroverted kids from the Haight had been showing up every night to shake hands and share a joint or two with the guys in the band. Because the guys already knew their way around—from Carol Doda’s famous artillery-shell, silicone-injected breasts, on exhibit every night at the Condor, to the Roaring Twenties and its infamous Girl on the Swing routine—they dove headlong into the decadence. Everything they had worked so hard for was now theirs, not by the spoonful but by the truckload: adulation, sex, and at least the promise of wealth, though no actual money had yet arrived from the record label. What with the brazen availability of the girls in the audience, the seediness of the neighborhood, the excitement of the hit record, and the width of the continent between them and home, the boys were swept into a carnal frenzy that Dave was embarrassed to behold. Jake was no help. He’d loved the city since he’d attended a Jamboree there as a Boy Scout, and was out sightseeing all day in a rented car.
Dave had taken to roaming the streets of North Beach at night, browsing at City Lights or lingering over an espresso at Caffe Trieste. The hustle, the flashing neon, the loneliness of t
he commodified sex, all left him alienated and blue. Then, on the final Friday, he saw Hugh Romney’s name on a flyer outside the Committee’s theater on Broadway, a few doors down from the hungry i.
Dave had spoken to Romney a few times in the Village, fascinated by the dizzying wordplay that brought on intellectual and moral aftershocks. Lenny Bruce, who was managing Romney at the time, had carried him off to LA in 1962 and made him the first of a wave of defectors that eventually included Jim McGuinn and David Crosby.
Though the evening show was over, the doors of the theater were unlocked. The place had steeply raked seats and a big, open stage. A strange-looking guy with a long narrow face and an enormous nose asked him his business.
“My name is Dave Fisher. I was hoping to see Hugh.”
“Wait here.”
A minute later, Hugh appeared in dungarees and a sweater. Dave barely recognized him without his trademark finery. “Hey, I know you,” Hugh said. “Dave, is it?”
“Yeah. I used to come see you at the Gaslight.”
“Right! How you doing?”
Dave never felt awkward around Hugh, who radiated a fearless comfort with his own existence, and after a little small talk, Hugh consented to a cup of coffee.
“I’m just up from LA for a couple of days,” Hugh said as they settled in at the counter of an all-night diner. “I’m trying to pick up a buck or two. I used to be a member of this outfit, so I guess I’m re-membering. I’ve got a day job teaching improv to actors at Columbia Pictures back home, but I’m part of this commune-type thing now and we go through a lot of money.”
“A commune? For real?”
“Yeah, a bunch of the Pranksters got stranded in LA—you know about the Pranksters?”
“I guess I’ve heard of them.”
“Buncha weirdos, do a lot of acid. Real lsd freaks. We’re all living on this hog farm and doing crazy stuff on Sundays for anybody that comes up.”
“I can’t picture you on a hog farm. You were always so debonair.”
“That’s kitchen synchronicity for you. Always making you get a new set of plots and plans. There’s change to spare these days and the Hog Farm is in the thicket of it. And the real epicenter is here in Frisco.” Hugh waved one hand at their run-down surroundings. “Not here here, not in North Beach, but over in the Haight, or at these things they’re doing at the Longshoremen’s Hall.”
Dave told him about the upcoming Spoonful gig.
“Aha! You’ll see for yourself, then. I’d be there, but I’ve got to get back to LA, back to the Farm. I got married, you know.” He seemed amazed. “She’s an actress. She’s smart and beautiful and sensible. We’ve got nothing in common.” He smiled hugely. “Except empathy. We’re having a mad, compassionate love affair.”
“Congratulations,” Dave said.
“I think the next thing that happens is that we take the show-and-tell on the road. We’re preaching to the convertibles in LA. Can you imagine what they’ll make of us in Peoria?”
When they stood up to leave, Hugh startled Dave by hugging him. “I’ve got to get back,” he said. “I’m so glad to see you again. I love surprises. They’re the proving ground for philosophy.”
*
On Sunday afternoon, a young woman from the Family Dog arrived in a 1940s pickup to carry the Spoonful’s equipment down to the Longshoremen’s Hall. She was fresh-faced and auburn-haired, wearing a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up and battered Levis. Zal immediately claimed the passenger seat, leaving Dave to ride in the back with the gear.
The sun had finally broken through, raising the temperature into the 70s, and as they barreled downhill, Dave saw the Golden Gate to his left and the Bay Bridge to his right. Straight ahead, across the deep blue of the bay, were the rugged hills of Marin County. This, then, was what Jake had fallen for, this supernatural beauty that grounded the weirdness and poetry and sexual license in an earthly paradise.
The hall itself was an octagonal concrete bunker with a high, domed roof. As the band attempted a sound check, Dave walked around the immense, echoing space without finding a single point where the acoustics were less than horrendous. They gave up and went their separate ways, Zally disappearing with the girl in the pickup.
When Dave returned at eight that night, banners painted on bedsheets announced “A Tribute to Sparkle Plenty,” with renderings of the ingénue from the Dick Tracy comic strip. What must have been a thousand kids filled the room, dressed as cowboys, soldiers, nineteenth-century aesthetes, hobos, knights, princesses, and deep-sea divers. In New York, rebel kids had hair that covered the tops of their ears and maybe spilled over their collars. Here, some of the boys had not cut their hair in years, letting it flow past their shoulders or corkscrew out in Caucasian Afros. These kids had none of the attitude that was mandatory in New York, the boasting, the strutting, the competing for attention. Instead they glided, wide-eyed and smiling, from one embrace to the next, passing around joints, wine, flowers, and fruit. The air was thick with pot and cigarette smoke, sandalwood incense, patchouli oil, English Leather.
Jake beamed as if he’d been airlifted to Valhalla. “Every one of these people,” he announced, “is stoned or tripping or both. How fantastic is that?”
“I don’t know, Jake,” Dave said. “You tell me.”
Jake had told him how he’d done acid after seeing Leary and Alpert in New York the year before, having bought some blotters in the lobby along with a copy of The Psychedelic Experience. He had gotten all he needed from a few trips, though he periodically urged Dave to try it so that he could work on the bardos of his own existence.
Jake was also excited about seeing the opening act, the Charlatans, who’d been the house band at the Red Dog in Nevada. Luria Castell had brought him photos and a cassette at The Trip in LA, and Jake had been intrigued by the looks they affected—Victorian dandies, cowboys, riverboat gamblers—the kind of old-timey clothes that Jake himself loved, taken to the extreme, to the point of wearing loaded six-guns on stage.
Things got off to a slow start. First came shtick from a local dj, followed by a lot of drug jokes from the long-faced Committee guy Dave had run into at the theater. The crowd got restless, wanting to dance, and the Committee guy got hustled off to make room for the Charlatans. Once they finally got going, their sound was so muddy that Dave couldn’t tell much about them. They switched off lead vocals, and the songs were all over the place, from blues and jug band to folk and rock, none of them memorable.
The audience didn’t share Dave’s concerns. They began to dance at the first drumbeat, a whole different kind of dancing than Dave had ever seen, more sway than bounce, with no concern for pairing one woman with one man. The point was to make a personal statement, to do something nobody else was doing. One guy in pajamas did the backstroke across the floor, pushing himself forward with his legs. The other dancers, if they noticed him, gave him room.
Jake, grinning, waded out onto the floor. A blonde girl in an Indian headband, complete with feather, beckoned Dave to join her. Blushing, he waved her off. The last time he’d danced was the Hora at his bar mitzvah.
As he watched dancers attach and detach, forming singles and couples and groups, it gradually occurred to him that this was more than a new way of dancing. More than lsd, more than a new style of music, more than a few kids in an outpost of weirdness on the west coast. Change to spare, Hugh had said. By the time Hugh and his Prankster friends got to Peoria, Dave thought, it was going to be a tidal wave.
*
Dave was paging through the in-flight magazine on the plane to New York when Jake said, “What did you think?”
“I think maybe I’m too old,” Dave said. He had in fact turned thirty a few weeks before, the age at which he was no longer to be trusted, according to the radicals at Berkeley. He’d taken himself out for a solitary dinner to celebrate.
“Bullshit,” Jake said. “You’re just uptight. You need to work on your bardos of existence.”
“You
were into it.”
“I was glad to see people loosen up. And, not to be cynical, there is money to be made with dances like that. Put them in a proper ballroom with decent acoustics, it could be gigantic.” He spread Luria’s photos of the Charlatans on his folding tray. “What did you think of these guys?”
“Not much,” Dave said. In retrospect, something about them had put him off, a smugness that bordered on sarcasm.
“The gal, Luria Castell, she wants me to produce some demos on them.”
Dave noted the first person singular. “Are you going to do it?”
“Something’s happening out there,” Jake said. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I am.”
*
Madelyn turned away from her locker to find two boys looming over her. One was Ed Wallingford, from her Civics class, and the other, whose name she didn’t remember, played football. Ed had serious acne problems and a tendency to become tongue-tied when called upon; the football player did not appear to be emotionally engaged.
“We’re supposed to give you this note,” Ed said.
Madelyn, rattled, was reluctant to accept it. “Who’s it from?”
“Billy Dixon,” Ed said. He sounded irritable, as if Madelyn should somehow have already known.
“Billy Dixon?” Madelyn said. Billy was a track star and dreamily handsome. He was too good a student and too introverted to be in the first rank of popular boys, but he was high in the second tier. “What does he want with me?”
Ed thrust the note at her again. “Why don’t you read it and find out?”
“Dear Madeline,” the note read. She noted the misspelling and didn’t take points off, being too used to it. “I think you’re really cool, but I’m shy to talk to you in person. I think maybe you might think I’m just a dumb jock and not want to know me, which is OK I would understand. But if you would like to go to the Halloween Dance on Saturday maybe you could tell Ed and he would pass it on to me. I hope you will say yes. Billy.”
Flattered, skeptical, and flummoxed, she read the note a second time and had started a third when Ed said, “Well?”
