Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  And then Cole, as he hit the carpeted floor, saw his parents sitting in the tenth row. They were in aisle seats and he would have to walk right past them. His father looked impassive and his mother’s eyes glittered. She held a box, wrapped in white paper and tied with a silver bow.

  Their presence felt like a reproach. Cole broke into a run, passing the two boys in front of him, who immediately began to run after him. It turned into a stampede, the boys yelling over the nervous laughter of their parents. Cole slammed open the door to the lobby and ran out to the street, leaving the others to jump and shout and slap each other’s backs. Cole never wanted to stop, not until St. Mark’s and Janet and his parents and Susan and everyone else he’d ever known was so far behind him that even his memories of them had faded to sepia.

  He ran until he got to the hearse, the stiff leather lace-up shoes burning his feet, his breath coming hard. He got in and started the engine and then, in the fullness of his freedom, realized that he had nowhere to go.

  He drove through downtown and turned north on Central Expressway, windows down, radio cranked, holding a steady 5 miles an hour over the limit. Maybe his original intention had been to exit somewhere. He blew past the suburbs of Richardson and Plano and McKinney, finally reaching the open countryside of US 75 about the time the radio signal began to break up. He switched the radio off and watched the flat farmland and parched grass and heat-stunted trees flash by in the silent circle of his headlights. He had the road nearly to himself, the darkness broken only by a waning half-moon and a million stars.

  He stopped for gas in Sherman, 15 miles from Lake Texoma and the Oklahoma border.

  “You sure are dressed up,” the attendant said. Lanky kid, greased-back hair, stained white T-shirt. “Where’s the party at?”

  “Dallas,” Cole said. “I must have taken a wrong turn.”

  “Sure as hell did. Everything the way you’re headed is Oklahoma.”

  Oklahoma. Susan’s future home, his mother’s birthplace. He’d turned four in Tulsa and had vague memories of prairie grass and tornado warnings. North of Oklahoma it only got worse. Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas. The Badlands. The guy was right. If he’d had any sense he’d have headed south. He’d have been halfway to Austin by now. San Antonio, Laredo, Mexico. He handed the guy a five. Easy enough to fill the gas tank, harder to recharge his motivation.

  He checked his watch. Eleven-fifteen. He could make it to Potter’s house in an hour, where things would just be getting interesting. If Janet didn’t want him anymore, somebody else would. And if not, there was sure to be booze.

  *

  The hippies in Haight-Ashbury were advertising it as the Summer of Love. As far as Dave could tell, no one had bothered to confirm that with Biafra, engaged in a bloody war of independence from Nigeria, or with the Arabs and Israelis, or with the Communist Chinese, who had exploded their first hydrogen bomb, or with the unemployed and desperate in Detroit or here in Spanish Harlem.

  It was certainly not going to be the Summer of The Lovin’ Spoonful. Word had gotten out that Zally had narked on Bill Love to keep from being deported, and the underground had lashed back. Flyers showed up telling people to boycott their records and concerts and asking girls not to have sex with them. Jake claimed that everything had been arranged, that the Spoonful had a lawyer who was going to get Love off, except that Love had gotten indignant and refused to cooperate. Then the band fired Zally, supposedly over the bust, but really because of the rift with Sebastian. When Jake complained, they fired him too. Dave turned down the chance to replace him, partly out of loyalty to Jake and partly because a Spoonful without Zally, though it did mean no more Fischel jokes, was unthinkable.

  It didn’t look like it was going to be Dave’s summer either. He’d quit Columbia at the end of 1966 to focus on Sallie Rachel, and he’d been unable to find the freelance engineering jobs that he’d been counting on. His savings were melting away.

  It had taken three months to get from that table in the Kettle of Fish back in October to the half-dozen acetates of “Daughters of the Moon,” co-written with Ellie Greenwich, that Dave had shopped to the majors. Tom Dowd had come through with a couple of hours with his best players: Bernard Purdie on drums, Chuck Rainey on bass, Cornell Dupree on guitar, Richard Tee on piano. Sallie had charmed them and Dave had let them follow their instincts, and the result was a cross between Ramsey Lewis jazz-funk, Julie London sensuality, and Judy Collins folk-art-rock. After Atlantic signed her, Dave hired the same guys to finish an album’s worth of tunes, then dubbed in a horn section for added punch.

  The “Daughters” single cracked the Billboard Top 40 and got Atlantic behind the lp, which hit the racks on the first day of spring, March 21, 1967. Atlantic had always been a singles house, and they were thrilled when the album sold well and kept on selling.

  Sallie had never stopped flirting with him. There had been three am cab rides after the studio, giddy with exhaustion and high on their own creative juices, when it had been all Dave could do not to call her bluff, not to lean in and kiss that amazing mouth from which such wondrous things emerged, not to put his hands all over that supple body. Mostly it was fear that held him back, fear that she was only teasing, or that she might give in for the wrong reasons. Most of all he was afraid it might jeopardize the work.

  Albert Grossman had signed on to manage her, and he had her opening for Peter, Paul and Mary within a week of the album release. Dave took her to La Guardia, and at the gate she threw her arms around him. The last time she’d hugged him had been outside the Kettle of Fish on the night they’d met, and he told her not to do it again. Just as then, she smelled of shampoo and peppermint soap and her body was warm and soft.

  “I’m scared,” she said, holding on tight. “You made this whole thing happen for me and I don’t know what I’m going to do without you.”

  “You’ll be fine,” he said. He had trouble breathing.

  “Can I call you? And write you?”

  “Any time you want.”

  “Thank you. Thank you for everything.” One of her tears ran down his neck.

  “You earned this,” he said.

  That had been three months ago. Now it was the end of June, and having not heard from her in those three months, he flew to Minneapolis to see her open for the Butterfield Blues Band. He thought he would surprise her after the show. The minute she came on stage with her 12-string and said, “Hey there, everybody,” dressed in tight jeans and a low-cut spaghetti-strap top, glowing with relaxed energy and confidence and charisma, he realized, in quick succession, three things: that she didn’t need him at all, that coming to see her was a terrible mistake, and that he was in love with her in the same desperate, hopeless way he’d been in love with the other Rachel when he first met her in high school. The largely male crowd went crazy for her and she egged them on while Dave, in agony, barely noticed what she sang. As soon as Sallie left the stage, Dave took a cab to the airport, changed his flight, and was home before dawn.

  *

  The last hurrah for The Chevelles was inscribed on the band calendar on Alex’s bedroom wall, July 29, a Saturday night at the Studio Club, and Alex had been staring at it all month. Both Gary and Mike wanted time off before they went east to college. The band had gotten as far as you could go without a single on the radio that might hook you onto a package tour.

  Lying beside the pool on the 24th, Alex put the thing he’d been thinking into words. “Let’s go to San Francisco.”

  Cole, face-down on an aluminum lounge chair, said, “What, right now?”

  “Next week, after the band breaks up.”

  Cole turned on his side to face him. “Are you serious?”

  “Sure, why not? I want to drop acid. I want to see the Jefferson Airplane. I want to ball some hippie chicks. I want to be able to say I was there when it all went down.”

  “If it’s been in Life magazine,” Cole said, “it’s already happened.”

  “What else are we goin
g to do for the next four weeks? You going to just sit around and moon over Janet?”

  “No,” Cole said. “That’s over.”

  Alex had learned when to back off. After a while Cole said, “Let me think about it.”

  *

  They left on Monday the 31st. Alex couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so up for something. He’d convinced Cole to bring the hearse and their guitars and amps, which were crucial to the half-assed dream that he was nursing. Anything could happen, he’d told Cole. What if they got a chance to jam with fellow Marksmen Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs, who were in a band together out there? What if Grace Slick wanted to check them out?

  Cole had built a plywood platform that fit over the gear when it was laid flat. The air mattress and blankets lay on top, so that from the outside it looked like there was nothing there you’d want to steal. They’d scraped the Chevelles’ name from the back window and now it could pass for one more hippie wagon, nothing to see here, move on along.

  In homage to the song and the tv show, they drove to Amarillo to pick up Route 66. In the middle of nowhere, you would suddenly find yourself on a stretch of Interstate 40 and then, as you approached a town, you’d be on 66 again. They stopped for the night at the Royal Palacio Motel in Tucumcari, a long, low expanse of floor to ceiling windows, overlooked by a juniper-studded butte. The man behind the desk explained, “It’s the lawsuits. Towns along the highway are suing the federal government for bypassing them with this Interstate swindle. The only place they can do any construction is out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Swindle?” Alex asked.

  “You betcha.” He was in his 60s, losing most of his white hair, his skin overcooked by the sun. He put his elbows on the counter and leaned forward, lowering his voice. “They got deals with all your big chains, your Howard Johnsons, your Best Westerns, to get the franchises on the exit ramps. You know they made some money on that one. Cut the local businesses right out of it. There’s lawsuits over that too, not that it’ll do any good. How far are you boys going?”

  “All the way,” Cole said. “California.”

  The man nodded. “Well, good for you. Enjoy it, because what you’re seeing are the last days of the Mother Road. Another few years, won’t be a mile of it left.”

  That night, as they watched tv, Cole noodling away on his Mexican acoustic, Alex said, “What about that guy at the desk? Flipped out over the Interstate Highway System.”

  “I don’t know,” Cole said. “I thought it was kind of sad. It’s like getting old means watching everything you ever cared about get fucked up.”

  “That’s us,” Alex said. “We’re the fucker-uppers.” He switched to his Smokey Robinson falsetto and sang, “Get ready, ’cause here we come.”

  *

  They drove all day Tuesday, spent the night in Flagstaff, and detoured Wednesday for a look at the Grand Canyon. By the time they were pointed west again, the sun was setting. They agreed to keep on through the night to Barstow, since the hearse’s air conditioner didn’t do much more than put a strain on the engine. Besides, the radio reception was better.

  After Barstow, 66 turned south for 150 miles to San Bernardino. They followed it anyway, having already decided to take the scenic route, through Los Angeles and then up the Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco.

  They spent their single allotted day in LA at Disneyland. As hokey as the place was, as overrun with fat tourists in Madras shirts and Bermuda shorts and camera cases, Alex had grown up with the Mickey Mouse Club, Davy Crockett, Spin and Marty, and all the rest. If you didn’t look too hard, you could ignore the chicken wire and stucco and still see the fantasy. The fantasies took another direction after they picked up a couple of local girls in New Orleans Square at lunchtime. They were both 16, with a tendency to giggle, lots of mascara, and short shorts and bikini tops. The four of them took the Submarine Voyage and rode the Skyway to Tomorrowland. They saw the House of the Future and drank Cokes and ate hamburgers and cotton candy. On Tom Sawyer Island at dusk, Alex got his date behind a tree for kisses and a handful of bikini, but then at 9:00 the girls suddenly said they had to meet their parents at the main exit.

  The next morning Cole got them up at dawn and they didn’t stop for breakfast until Oxnard. Afterward Cole dozed in the passenger seat while Alex followed the highway to the sea. The ocean was half-hidden in fog and the brownish-gray cliffs that towered over them were speckled with green-gray ice plant, stretching upward on his right as the land to his left fell away. The road had only two lanes, leading into one blind curve after another, in the midst of scenery too beautiful to ignore. Alex felt a wave of contentment so powerful that he knew his brain chemistry had been jazzed by something in the salt air that blew through the open windows. Which was perfectly fine with him.

  In the course of the day, the stunted trees of southern California mutated into giant redwoods, the air turned appreciably colder every few miles, the red tile and stucco architecture gave way to wooden houses with shingled sides, and deserts gave way to moss and wildflowers. They stopped for dinner in Monterrey for Cole to see the original Cannery Row that his hero Steinbeck had written about. The literary history didn’t matter to Alex, who was happy enough to be in a place that was nothing like anyplace he’d ever been in his life, all weathered wood and fish smells and row upon row of shacks rising uphill from the sea. They’d heard reports of an amazing music festival there in June, all traces of which were long gone.

  They were both exhausted, so they cut inland from Monterrey to 101 for the last two hours of the trip. They already had a motel reservation, thanks to his father’s aaa, at the Great Highway Inn, where Golden Gate Park met Ocean Beach, only three miles from the epicenter of Haight-Ashbury. Cole, paranoid as usual, made Alex help him carry in the amps and guitars before they crawled into their individual queen-size beds and slept for twelve hours.

  *

  Alex was the first one up. He’d slept hard enough to be disoriented, then a faint tidepool smell reminded him where he was. Rather than open the drapes and risk waking Cole, he slipped behind them for a look. Through encrusted salt on the windows and heavy fog, he saw the Great Highway and 20-foot dunes on the far side. The ocean, he assumed, could be found from there.

  He slipped into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and eased the door open, then quickly closed it again. The air was cold and damp as a Texas November.

  “Alex?” Cole said.

  “Drop your rocks and grab your socks. You might want two pair.”

  They’d brought long sleeved dress shirts and sport coats just in case, and with those over T-shirts and jeans, and thick white athletic socks under their Jack Purcells, they were almost warm enough.

  The woman at the office recommended a diner named Louis’, a mile north on the Great Highway. As the road climbed uphill, they passed gray beach and gray ocean, and steep islands a few yards offshore that swarmed with seal and gulls. From their booth in the restaurant they looked down on broken concrete walls and flooded pools at the edge of the ocean. The ruins were part of the Sutro Baths, their waitress explained, the world’s largest swimming pool complex back at the turn of the century. It had burned down only the year before. Alex visualized portly men in tank tops and women in ruffled skirts and leggings to their knees, passing around bootleg gin in monogrammed flasks, driving home in roadsters to heavy meals of stuffed grouse and beef Wellington. He was still high from yesterday’s drive, from being in a city, unlike Dallas, that had an authentic history, from the Spanish conquest to the gold rush to the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  “Is it always this cold?” Cole asked the waitress. She was their age, with pigtails and freckles.

  “Well, you know what Mark Twain said. ‘The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.’”

  “Is there like a Goodwill or something where we can get some warmer clothes?”

  “Everthing’s picked over because of all the kids. And nothing’s open on Sund
ay. If you go down to the Mission District tomorrow, there’s some thrift stores there. Where’re you from?”

  “Dallas,” Alex said.

  She couldn’t quite keep herself from recoiling. “Oh.”

  “We didn’t actually kill Kennedy ourselves,” Alex pointed out.

  “I wasn’t even there in sixty-three,” Cole said.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m sure when you hear ‘San Francisco’ you think earthquake.”

  “Not anymore,” Cole said. “Now it’s ‘wear some flowers in your hair.’”

  “I appreciate that you didn’t,” she said. “Have you been to the Haight yet?”

  “We’re headed there now,” Alex said.

  “I don’t imagine I can talk you out of it. But be careful. Leave your wallets locked in your car. Don’t eat or drink anything anybody hands you on the street. Are either of you claustrophobic? Problems with crowds?”

  Alex and Cole looked at each other. “Is it really that bad?” Alex asked.

  “You’ll see for yourselves. Also, there were two murders last week, both of them dealers. ‘Shob’ Carter and a guy they called ‘Superspade.’ They’re all dealing speed now and it’s getting ugly.”

  After a short, stunned silence, Cole said, “There’s still music, right?”

  “They passed an ordinance against music in the park. There’s still, like, the Fillmore and the Avalon. Though they’re not in the Haight.”

  “Is the Fillmore open tonight?” Alex asked.

  “Every night except Monday, all summer long.”

  “Are you going to be there?” Cole asked.

  She was not taking Cole’s bait, Alex noted with pleasure. “Not a chance. My parents won’t let me near the place. The drugs, for one thing, and any minute that whole neighborhood could go up like Detroit.”

  She left to put their order in. Cole collapsed in his seat. “Wow. Not what I was expecting.”

  “Wait and see, okay? She’s pretty straight. She might be exaggerating.”