Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  “Maybe you don’t. You’ve already split from your family.”

  “My family sucks and yours doesn’t.”

  “You don’t get it. I love my father. That’s the problem. I wouldn’t care about disappointing him if I didn’t love him so much. Your father made it easy for you.”

  Cole preferred hearing that he had a monopoly on problems. You could see him wrestle with his emotions and then finally put them aside. “Okay, then. Let’s go find out.”

  They ate fresh seafood at a café on Marina Boulevard and got to the Matrix at 8:30. It was bigger inside than it looked from the street, maybe 50 feet by 80, with a few widely scattered tables. The bar was by the door, and the stage, barely higher than the floor, ran along the wall to the left. At the moment, a guy who might have been a weathered 30 pounded away on a 12-string that was in dubious tune. He had a big nose, big lips, and big curly dark hair that he shook from side to side as he sang, making his voice fade in and out on the pa. His audience was almost entirely female, most of them very young. An enormous guy in a loud shirt, blazer, and dark beard sat next to the stage, evidently enjoying himself.

  Alex had expected more, somehow. He looked at Cole, but Cole was scanning the faces in the club, no doubt searching for the girl from the night before, whatever her name was.

  The woman behind the bar said, “Can I help you guys?” Her blonde hair was cut short and she wore a lot of eye makeup. She had on a man’s white shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows.

  “We heard there was a jam session,” Alex said.

  “Yeah, well, it kind of got hijacked. You guys know Dino? Dino Valente? He wrote ‘Get Together’ on the first Airplane album?”

  “Yeah, okay,” Cole said.

  “Once he gets going, that’s usually it for anybody else. And his little harem there will sit and listen to him all night.”

  “You don’t sound like one of the converted,” Alex said. He pulled up a stool and so did Cole.

  “I don’t swing that way myself, and if I did, I hope I’d have better taste.”

  “Who’s the big guy?” Cole said.

  “I see you guys are new around here. That’s ‘Big Daddy’ Tom Donahue from kmpx. He’s Dino’s biggest fan.”

  “Is it usually this slow?” Alex asked.

  “You picked the wrong week. We usually get a few big names on Monday because the auditoriums are all closed. But the Airplane and the Dead just played the Expo up in Montreal. Big Brother is on their way to Denver. Quicksilver is probably over in Marin, lying in the sunshine. Hey, did you hear about George Harrison?”

  “Did something happen to him?” Cole asked.

  “No, nothing like that. He just showed up in the Haight around six o’clock.”

  “Holy shit,” Alex said. “Is he still there?”

  “Nah, he walked around a little and then split.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Cole groaned.

  “He was in LA taking sitar lessons with Ravi Shankar and flew up to check us out. A chick I know was there, said it got a little freaky. This huge crowd following him around, you know. Trying to get him to play guitar and everything.”

  “‘Summer of Love,’” Cole said bitterly.

  “You should have been here a year ago,” she said. “There were so many positive vibes, it felt like we could do anything. Stop the war, feed the world, stay high all the time.”

  “What happened?” Alex said.

  “I guess we turned out to be a fad. Peace and love, the hula hoops of 1967.”

  *

  At the hotel, Cole sat on the floor and leaned against the bed. He had his Twin next to him, turned low, and his Strat plugged in. He thought about the way Muddy Waters had played, the slap and sting of his guitar parts. Across the room, Alex turned on the tv and collapsed on the other bed. Cole ignored him, trying various two- and three-string grips. Playing the notes he remembered, and not getting the same sound. Muddy’s guitar had a brittle quality that wasn’t a matter of bridge pickup or treble boost. It was in his hands and in the life he’d lived.

  *

  Cole pushed to go back to the Psychedelic Shop on Tuesday, this time with more cash. The crowds had shrunk to half the size of Sunday’s. Fewer tourists meant fewer panhandlers and fewer cops and less of a sense of desperation. Monday’s warmth and sunshine had proved to be an aberration, however, and cold and hungry runaways still huddled on every block. Cole kept thinking he would see Becky among them, though he wasn’t sure what he’d say if he did.

  As they walked in the store, a record full of African conga drums was playing, and a chorus of voices was singing “Jin-Go-Lo-Ba” over and over. The same balding guy was behind the counter and he showed Cole the album cover. Olatunji! Drums of Passion.

  “What are you guys looking for?” he asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” Cole said. “Something I’ve never heard before.”

  He and Alex went through the racks. Most of the records were obscure folk recordings on Folkways or Elektra or Vanguard, or they were Indian sitar music, which didn’t do much for Cole, or they were some other kind of foreign music from Africa or Asia. The rest were from local psychedelic bands.

  “What’s this?” Cole asked, holding up The Guitar Player by somebody named Davy Graham. They had multiple copies of several of his records.

  The guy reached over the counter and flipped through the albums, pulling up an open copy of Graham’s Folk, Blues, and Beyond. “This is the one you should start with,” he said, putting it on the turntable. “Check it out.”

  Two hours later, Alex had bought a dozen albums, mostly blues, and a red, white, and blue diaphanous flowered shirt with a long, pointy collar. Cole had the Olatunji, the Graham, Tim Hardin 1, and a six-album set that the guy had forced him to buy called The Anthology of American Folk Music. “You’re into Dylan? This is what Dylan is into.” He had a “lightly used” copy that had the original cover art and notes, which he insisted were important.

  They took it all to the motel and started listening, Cole with unplugged guitar in hand. He skipped around the folk anthology, liking a few of the “Ballads,” not much of the “Social Music,” and mostly intrigued by the “Songs.” The thing was a puzzle that he didn’t have the patience to solve at the moment.

  Alex played a record by Robert Johnson called King of the Delta Blues Singers. Supposedly Johnson had met the Devil at the crossroads and the Devil had tuned his guitar for him. Johnson, who had been a mediocre guitarist at best, could suddenly play better than anybody in Mississippi. The record was nothing but Johnson and his guitar recorded live in a hotel room. Old and strange, like the Anthology, except that his playing had an irresistible rhythm, like two guitars at once, and he had the voice of a much older man.

  That night they took the bus to the Fillmore again. Alex kept after him to drop acid, and Cole put him off. Clearly Alex meant to take it again, and Cole didn’t want both of them high at the same time.

  The Southside Sound System was a bunch of white guys from Chicago that Cole had seen on various liner notes—Charlie Musselwhite on harp, Harvey Mandel on guitar, Barry Goldberg on keyboards. They led off with “Wade in the Water,” which Cole knew from the Ramsey Lewis version. Before the song was half over, Alex had disappeared, dancing away with his arms in the air. Cole focused on Mandel, who had some serious guitar chops, and told himself as often as necessary that he didn’t need to go looking for Becky.

  Except between bands, he decided during the break. As he walked around, most of the people he saw made him uneasy. Hippie had become a style choice, a role anybody could play, like the pirate he’d been for Halloween as a kid. Eye patch, bandana on his head, oversized white shirt, plastic sword. Anybody who saw him knew immediately what he was supposed to be.

  More disturbing were the people who didn’t have to play at being weird. lsd had harvested a bumper crop of nutcases from the fertile soil of the repressive fifties. Here was a guy spinning faster and faster until he fell down, then
getting up and doing it again. Here was a guy with glazed eyes talking to himself under his breath. Tripping, needy, or schizo? Cole didn’t intend to find out. He did worry about it happening to Alex, that acid might flip some switch in his head from “conflicted” to “crazy.”

  He was on the verge of a black mood, and not looking forward to Moby Grape, whose debut had failed to impress him when he’d listened to it at the Melody Shop in Dallas. But then the lights went down and the band hit the stage singing, “What a difference a day has made,” and it knocked the air out of Cole’s lungs. Three guitar players—a pretty one, a manic one, and one tearing off incredible licks with great tone and sustain. A first-rate bass player and drummer. All five of them singing, all of them on fire. The manic guitar player ran in place and waved his arms and sang alternate lines on the verses, splitting them with the bass player. Then they all exploded on the chorus. The audience, in turn, went wild at the end of the song, Cole yelling and applauding along with everybody else.

  As the set progressed, Cole felt like he’d woken up after a troubled sleep. This was exactly what it was all about, these disparate parts fused into a relentless force, these multiple voices welded into a single instrument, this living proof that together was better, that we were none of us alone, that everything was irrelevant that was not music.

  At the end of the forty-minute set, he leaned against a wall and closed his eyes and replayed what he’d just heard and seen, no longer looking for Becky or Alex, his sense of purpose renewed.

  In comparison, the Electric Flag let him down. Neither the singer nor the material did much for him, though the horns had a nice punch and the rhythm section was tight. He studied Bloomfield’s playing as if he were in class, admiring his technique without being moved emotionally. When the band finished with a long version of “Killing Floor,” he considered waiting around for the second Moby Grape set, then decided he was ready to go home.

  Alex was not.

  He was tripping massively, pupils wide and shining, feet barely touching the ground. “These guys I met are going to a party in the Haight. You want to come along?”

  “I just want to go back to the motel,” Cole said.

  “Go ahead, then. I’ll catch up with you tomorrow.”

  Cole pictured Al Montoya staring at him as he tried to explain why he’d let Alex, out of his mind on lsd, go off with a pack of hippies, never to be seen again. “No,” Cole said. “I’ll come along.”

  Alex took a plastic envelope out of his pocket that held a dozen half-inch squares of construction paper. “You want to turn on first?”

  Cole shook his head. Alex gave him a sad, condescending smile and led him to a foursome near the front door. Alex was having trouble remembering names, so they all introduced themselves. Chris, tall and bearded, top hat and cape. Guy, frizzy red hair and acne. Ben, short and round-faced, straight cut bangs like a medieval page. Deb, tall and rangy, tortoise-shell glasses, sharp nose, aloof expression.

  Two blocks up Geary they turned into a side street. A black teenager in stained coveralls watched with narrowed eyes as they stopped in front of a light-green vw microbus. Chris patted his pockets and came up with a set of keys. “If you’re not tripping,” he said to Cole, “do you mind driving? It might work out better.”

  Cole considered the poverty of the two choices and finally held out his hand for the keys.

  “Oh… can you drive a stick?”

  “Sure,” Cole said. Between the truck in Tyler, Janet’s bug, and Alex’s four-on-the-floor Monza, he’d had practice enough. Chris took the shotgun seat and the four others squeezed side-by-side into the back.

  “You know where Buena Vista Park is?” Chris asked.

  “Sorry,” Cole said. “We’re new.”

  Chris directed him down Fillmore Street to Haight Street. The brakes were grabby and the weight of six passengers made it hard to get moving on an uphill slope. Cole feared a cop would see him struggling to drive a busload of costumed freaks and take it as an invitation for a bust. The lsd in Alex’s pocket had been illegal in California since the previous fall, and God knew what the others were holding. Sweat broke across his forehead.

  A steep, tree-covered hill rose precipitously on his left. “Turn left past the park,” Chris said. “Deb, do you remember the address?”

  “How should I know? I never talked to the guy.”

  “Just drive around, maybe I’ll recognize it,” Chris said.

  “Have you been there before?” Cole asked.

  “No,” Chris said.

  Deb said, “He’s going to try to pick up the vibe.” The weary sarcasm in her tone confirmed Cole’s guess that they were a couple.

  Cole made a complete circle around the park, a mile in circumference, while Chris’s internal radar remained mute. Cole saw that he could be driving all night. “Maybe we should park somewhere,” he said, as they started the second circuit. A space appeared and Cole took it without waiting for a consensus. Despite the unfamiliar vehicle, despite two of the tripping hippies trying to give him directions, despite the narrowness of the space, he eventually got parallel parked and handed the keys to Chris with relief.

  The buildings alternated between extravagant mansions and decaying or refurbished row houses. Up the street, the upstairs door of a duplex opened and light and party noises spilled out.

  “Bingo,” Deb said, with little enthusiasm.

  It took five minutes to traverse the 100 yards to the party. Everybody had a lot of difficulty deciding what to leave in the car and what to bring with them. Once they got moving, they stopped to stare at the glowing cloud cover overhead or something on the sidewalk. At one point Alex lay face down on somebody’s lawn and ran a single blade of grass between his thumb and index finger, over and over.

  Inside the house, the lights were all off in the living room. Bodies sprawled on worn couches and overstuffed chairs and the threadbare Oriental carpet on the floor. The stereo played some kind of faux country music, guitar and banjo and fiddle and a nasal vocal that couldn’t decide if it was mocking or not. They were butchering “The Cuckoo,” one of the songs Cole had liked on the folk music anthology. In the brightly-lit kitchen, more conversations seemed to be happening than there were people. Cole helped himself to a beer from the fridge and pushed through the bead curtain to the living room.

  Chris came up to him and said, “This isn’t the right party. I don’t know anybody here.”

  “Does it matter?” Cole said.

  Chris’s eyes lost focus. “Oh, wow. I hadn’t thought about it that way.”

  Leaving Chris in contemplation, Cole explored the rest of the apartment. In the first of two bedrooms, a joint went around a circle while lit candles dripped wax on all the furniture. The second bedroom was dark. As he hesitated in the open doorway, he heard snoring, and what sounded like sex. It was not a mystery he cared to unravel.

  In the living room, Alex sat cross-legged on the floor, talking earnestly to Chris. Deb had pulled an Indian bedspread aside and sprung a few Venetian blinds to look outside.

  “Having fun?” Cole asked.

  She dropped the blinds. “Chris says this isn’t even the right party. But here we are, so…”

  Cole offered his beer. She took a sip and handed it back. “Want one of your own?” She shook her head. He made one last try. “Want to sit outside for a while?”

  She shrugged and followed him out, where they settled on the top step. The air wasn’t significantly colder than it had been during the day. “How did you end up in San Francisco?” he asked.

  “I was born in Ojai, came up last fall to go to San Francisco State. Tuned in, turned on, dropped out.”

  “You don’t seem—how can I put this delicately?—very stoned.”

  “It affects everybody differently. Chris becomes one with the universe. I get a nice light show.”

  She expressed no curiosity about him, which left him with all the work. “What were you studying before you went the Tim Leary r
oute?”

  “The usual freshman shit. I was thinking of doing pre-med. But it all seemed so wrong-headed. Trying to pretend we’re all mechanisms.”

  She was wearing only an oversize T-shirt and a pair of Capri pants, and she suddenly shivered with the cold. Cole put his arm around her for warmth, and she turned to look at him, as if to check his motivation. He leaned in to try a kiss and she jerked her head away. “Don’t!”

  He dropped his arm and looked away. “Sorry.”

  “I mean, good grief, can’t we just have a friendly conversation?”

  “Sure, but you could help a little. I feel like I’m pushing this thing uphill by myself.”

  “So since the conversation wasn’t going well, you thought you’d jump my bones?”

  Cole didn’t intend to spend the rest of the night apologizing. “They are pretty nice bones.”

  “Well, I’m not into it.”

  “I divined that.”

  “I’m not mad or anything, I just…”

  “Just what?”

  “Is that what we do now? We drop acid, we go see some groups, we fuck somebody we don’t know or maybe don’t even particularly like, and then tomorrow we go out and do it again?”

  “I don’t know,” Cole said. “I just got here.”

  “You and a hundred thousand other people. They all came looking for the party, for the drugs and the free love.”

  “So what is it we should have come for?”

  She shook her head. “There isn’t a name for it yet. I wish you could have been here in January and seen what it was supposed to be.”

  “You’re talking about the Be-In?”

  “Yeah. You know in all the old war movies, before they go into battle, they always synchronize their watches? That’s what it was. The hippies, the politicos, the poets, the Diggers, the musicians, everybody, we all got in one place and we synchronized. We all understood what had to be done. Stop the war, stop discrimination, legalize psychedelics, end capitalism, free our minds, change the culture, change the world. You should have seen it. You know the Polo Fields?”