by Lewis Shiner
“Told you,” Alex said.
Inside, Alex put on a table lamp and threw a pink T-shirt over it. He stacked some pillows on the carpet in front of the stereo and said, “Make yourself comfortable.” He cued up the first Grateful Dead album while Cole arranged himself and the pillows against the end of the bed. The objects in the room had haloes and the glow from the lamp spread through the room, turning everything a warm, friendly pink.
He felt a sudden rush of warmth for Alex. This Cole, sitting here in this motel room, this guitar-playing, hearse-driving, separated-from-his-parents, no-longer-a-virgin Cole was somebody that Alex had willed into existence. An irresistible impulse brought him to his feet and took him to where Alex was flipping through the stack of records against the wall. He pulled Alex up by his armpits and hugged him. Alex hugged back, and surprised Cole by kissing him gently on the cheek. Then Cole got distracted by the idea of human bodies, how stuffed they were with organs and blood and muscle, all of which were inhabited by bacteria and other organisms, using humans as transportation. We are all clown cars, he thought, and couldn’t stop himself from laughing.
Alex took half a step back and held him by the elbows. “You’re feeling it.”
“Oh yeah,” Cole said.
“I’m jealous. I wish I was tripping with you.”
“Next time.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Next time.”
Cole made for the pile of pillows. The carpet felt like high grass and made swishing sounds as he walked, so he took his shoes and socks off to feel it more clearly. They’d had a thick, lush lawn in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, when he was 8 years old, and it made him happy to think that he still carried that lawn with him, verdant in memory despite the deserts of Egypt and West Texas.
When he sat down, the music hit him hard. He closed his eyes and fell into an infinite space, a space very different from the one where he’d been trapped by the anesthetic, a warm and happy space. Garcia’s guitar flowed like a yellow-white waterfall of light over the mossy rocks of the bass and drums. The coals of Pigpen’s organ, on the other side of the universe, warmed from orange to bright red as the wind of the music blew over them. Golden bubbles frothed up from another direction, releasing snatches of lyrics as they burst. The rhythm guitar wound through the other instruments like the copper-colored ash from a pharaoh’s serpent on the Fourth of July. Farmer Frank’s dream of intertwining melodies had now, literally, become Cole’s vision too. The thought made him laugh again, a laugh that went inward rather than out.
Alex said something and the individual moments of time lost their cohesion and scattered like playing cards from a botched shuffle. In one of them, Alex was asking if he was okay. Cole was confused, and didn’t know where that moment belonged. Was it from an hour ago? Had it even happened yet? Here was a moment where the record side was over and he was listening to the textures of the silence, and here was another moment with music in it, maybe from before the record ended, or maybe from the other side. And here was a moment where Alex was saying, “Cole, say something, man, you’re making me nervous.”
I should say something, Cole thought. But what?
Here was Alex’s hand on his shoulder. “Cole? Can you nod your head or something?”
Over there was Cole nodding. And a moment where he said, “I’m good. Listening to the music.”
And another where he said, “Can you turn the record over?”
At some point Alex suggested a walk on the beach. At first Cole loved the waves that exploded into purple fireballs, the salt air that tasted of Cambrian, arthropod-filled seas, but soon the immensity of the water began to weigh on him. They crossed over to the park and lay down in a field. Half a moon glowed feebly behind the wall of cloud overhead.
“Remember in Texas how you could see the stars?” Cole asked.
Alex sang, “The stars at night/Are big and bright—”
Cole joined in. “Deep in the heart of Texas!”
“Da da da dee, da da da dee, shit, that’s all I know of the goddamn thing.”
“Me too.” Without conscious intent, Cole said, “I’m homesick.”
Alex was quiet a long time, and then he said, “Yeah. We can talk about it tomorrow.”
Later, Cole got out his Japanese reel-to-reel and plugged in his guitar and played through one 30-minute side of tape, reverb on full, letting the music lead him through one change after another. He felt like he understood reverb for the first time. The music made a space in your head, and then the reverb gave that space a vast, echoing size, a dimension large enough to get lost in. He was reasonably sure he had the makings of at least three new songs in what he’d recorded.
His energy began to fade after that. Alex shared a joint of Farmer Frank’s dope to take the edge off. Cole saw that he was coming down. His kidneys hurt, he was physically exhausted, and his emotions sank into a mire of deathly ordinariness that seemed to go on for hours. He and Alex lay side by side in Alex’s bed, talking fitfully. Alex fell asleep before Cole did. Eventually, as morning lightened the drapes, Cole turned away from Alex and let go.
*
Late Friday afternoon. Cole finally admitted that he was awake to stay. He rolled onto his back. Alex opened his eyes and gave him a sleepy smile. Cole, uncomfortable with the intimacy, got out of bed and said, “Need to take a shower.”
Alex shrugged and Cole took clean clothes into the bathroom. He stood motionless under the hot water, feeling the pressure of Alex’s expectations.
When they were both dressed and ready to go out, Cole knew he had to say something. “Thanks for babysitting me last night. It was… intense.”
“Yeah?”
“I mean, it was really weird and interesting and… intense.”
“But…?”
Cole made himself go on. “But I don’t know how soon I need to do it again.”
“That’s cool,” Alex said, a little stiffly.
“That’s not a put-down, it’s just…”
“Not your thing.”
“It’s not even that. It’s like going to Disneyland or something. It’s fun, but I wouldn’t want to live there.”
“To me?” Alex said. He was standing next to the dresser, and he spread his hand out on the mirror as if any second his fingers might dip below the surface. “This is not real. What I felt when I was tripping, what I felt from you when you were tripping, that’s reality.”
Cole suddenly remembered Alex kissing him on the cheek. Had that been a hallucination? “I’m not arguing with you, man. I’m not saying I’m right and you’re wrong or anything.”
“No,” Alex said. “It’s just about feelings, about your not feeling the same way I do.”
When had Alex developed such a fierce stare? Had he looked like that before lsd? “It’s not that big a deal, man.”
“To you, obviously, it isn’t.”
“What do you want me to say? Do you want me to lie and say it was the greatest experience of my life?”
Finally Alex looked away. “No,” he said. “I don’t want you to lie.” He took his hand off the mirror. “Let’s go eat.”
*
Over food, in an attempt to ease the strain, Cole said, “What do you want to do tonight? Last night was mine, tonight is yours.”
“Let’s find some women and get laid. It’s supposed to be free love around here, right? Let’s hold ’em to it.”
They took their acoustic guitars to the park and did the same act they’d done in Mexico, substituting English lyrics where available. In an hour they drew thirty kids, sitting, standing, and dancing. After they wrapped up, Alex ventured into the crowd and cut out a pair of adequately attractive girls, one with short, sandy hair and the other full-figured with henna-red curls. Cole watched from a distance as Alex got the blonde laughing, then waved Cole over. Her name was Jennifer and the redhead was Doris.
Later, after a couple of joints of Farmer Frank’s finest, after the lights went out and Alex and Jennifer began giggling un
der the covers of Alex’s bed, Doris said that she had a yeast infection that made penetration unbearably painful. Instead, she gave Cole his first blow job, and if his heart was not entirely in it, other parts were.
Saturday morning they took the girls to a late breakfast, after which Alex coolly asked, “Where can we drop you?” The answer turned out to be a crumbling Victorian on the border between the Haight and the Fillmore ghetto. As Cole drove away, Alex folded his hands behind his head and said, “My friend, we could do that every night for the rest of our lives.”
Cole didn’t know about Jennifer, but Doris had been tough sledding in the conversation department. She didn’t have much of a sense of humor, and her main pastime in her home town of Smyrna, Delaware, had been tv. She seemed as disappointed in Cole as he was in her, and he could not imagine spending the rest of his life that way.
The silence dragged on. Finally Alex said, “Yeah, okay, we’re spinning our wheels here. When do you want to leave?”
“We could pack up and be out of here in an hour,” Cole said.
Alex sighed. “Fuck it. Let’s go home.”
*
They pulled up at the house on Castle Hill on a Friday afternoon, August 18, a week and some before registration. When Alex saw that the remodeling was not done, his mood went to shit. He stayed in his car and left it to Cole to confront the contractor.
He’d enjoyed the drive down well enough, him in the Monza, Cole in the hearse, trading off the lead, goofing on each other when they passed. Whenever one of them found one of their favorite songs on the radio, he would honk and the other would search until he found the same station, so it had been “The Letter” and “Carrie Ann” and “Light My Fire” and “Higher and Higher” for the whole three and a half hours.
But now the future had arrived. What should have been four reasonably carefree years were tainted by the landlord gig his father had laid on him. The San Francisco trip, instead of giving him a ticket out, had only put a thin, invisible barrier between him and Cole over the lsd thing.
Cole came out of the house and bent over Alex’s window. “He says he can wrap it up over the weekend, which is bullshit. He hasn’t even started refinishing the floors. I’d say a week to ten days, minimum.”
Alex would have to show the place anyway. By the time school started it would be too late. One more major pain in the ass.
“Which means,” Cole said, “that on top of everything else, we’ve got no place to stay.”
“Villa Capri?”
“Órale.”
They scored the last available room at the motel, unloaded the hearse, put on swim trunks, and hit the pool. Alex let Cole swim his laps, then they stretched out side by side on aluminum lounge chairs.
“My dad is going to kill that fucking contractor, and then hang around here until everything is the way he wants it.”
“No he’s not,” Cole said, “because you’re going to call him up and tell him the situation and tell him you’re handling it. You’re going to tell him that you’ve assigned me to the work crew and instructed me to ride those guys until they get it done.”
“You’re volunteering for that?”
“Oh, hell yeah. I haven’t gotten to do any carpentry since, you know. Since I moved in with you.”
Alex looked to see if Cole was going to cop to missing his father. Apparently not.
“That’s giving him exactly what he wants.”
“You’re going to end up there anyhow. This way it’s a preemptive strike.”
“I hate it that you’re better at psyching out my father than I am.”
“I’ve got some distance.”
Alex didn’t want to think about it anymore. “What are we doing tonight?”
“We could go hear some music. If we knew where to go.”
“Susan’ll know.”
Alex went to the room to call her, leaving Cole to guard their lounge chairs. “Austin is not exactly the live music capital of the universe,” she said. “There’s the Jade Room, which is top-40 combos. The New Orleans Club, which is the same thing with an older crowd. That’s pretty much it, except for private parties. You know, since it’s Friday, what you really ought to do is go to Charlie’s Playhouse. It’s a Negro club on the East Side. They’ve got a great band on weekends.”
“Are you serious? Is it safe?”
“The weekend crowd is mostly white. Don’t worry. Jesse and I’ll go with you.”
Susan had brought Jesse to Dallas a couple of times since she’d officially announced the engagement. Alex’s father liked him, and even Cole, instead of turning jealous and sulky, played gin rummy with him for hours at a time, a penny a point, invariably losing. Alex didn’t trust him, didn’t trust anyone who would volunteer for Vietnam. He had an urge to dose him with lsd at Charlie’s Playhouse, and only the fear of blood-drenched headlines held him back.
“We can eat at the Hoffbrau first,” Susan said, “if we beat the rush. We’ll pick you up at six-thirty.”
*
The Hoffbrau had been in the same location west of downtown since the 1930s. The wood paneling and the sheet metal grill and half the patrons looked to Cole like they’d been there since it first opened. The place was an artifact, Susan explained, of the collision of German immigrant and native Mexican cultures in Central Texas, the same collision that brought accordions to rancheras and put place names like Pflugerville on the map.
Susan wore a sleeveless minidress, white with yellow daisies, matching yellow hairband, and yellow Keds. She was energetic and happy to see them, and Cole couldn’t take his eyes off her. She leaned forward in her seat and Jesse leaned back in his, a proprietary arm draped over her shoulders.
Cole had not managed to dislike Jesse, despite his best intentions. He’d been home from Nam for a year now and had let his reddish-brown hair grow over his ears and collar. Unlike Susan’s previous boyfriends, he played only touch football and was an inch shorter than Cole, with a strong, wiry build. He was laid-back, confident, handsome, and he treated Cole and Alex like favorite younger brothers.
Susan paid cash for the steaks and afterward Jesse drove her T-bird east on 11th Street, over I-35, and into a different city. Tufts of grass growing out of the cracks in the sidewalk, windows with plywood instead of glass, houses with paint that had blistered and peeled to the gray boards underneath. Jesse drove four blocks, turned into a side street, and parked.
“You’re not going to put the top up?” Alex asked.
“We come here all the time,” Susan said. “It’ll be fine.”
On the sidewalk outside the club, a black man in a white suit and Panama hat was telling a story that involved a lot of large gestures to a uniformed white cop, who had his hands in his back pockets, laughing.
Two-thirds of the people inside were white, all crowded on one side of the room. It was not yet 8:00 and the band was nowhere in sight. Jesse grabbed one of the last tables on the white side and they all sat down. “Just so you know,” Susan said, “there’s no mixing allowed. White people can’t share a table or dance with colored.”
“I thought segregation was illegal,” Cole said, and Susan shook her head and smiled like he was simpleminded.
Once the tables filled, people lined up along the walls and then around the edges of the dance floor. The band was called Blues Boy Hubbard and the Jets and they came on shortly after nine. Seven of them, counting trumpet and sax and a lead singer, all dressed in tuxedos. Hubbard, the guitar player, had a cream-colored ES-335 that he wore high on his chest. He came out swinging, playing a fast shuffle with stinging single notes, choppy chords, and flurries of speed picking. The band was tight without being dry, the horn men hitting the ensemble sections in lockstep and throwing out solo riffs with casual ease.
Cole felt like he’d muscled his way in on his white privilege. As much as he admired the musicians, the music itself tasted of bootleg gin and flop houses, pig’s feet and back alleys, dusty overalls and hoodoo, a life and a culture
completely alien to his experience.
Alex, on the other hand, was transfixed, clearly not suffering the same doubts as Cole. Gary from The Chevelles would have been in hog heaven, Cole thought.
Couples moved onto the dance floor, mostly black at first, doing a modified jitterbug that didn’t take up much room, the couples revolving in tight circles or the women turning under their partner’s arms. If Cole let his eyes go out of focus it was like clothes in a washing machine, the couples surging toward each other and away again in a rhythmic pulse.
The next number was a mid-tempo blues and Jesse and Susan squeezed their way onto the floor. They slow-danced the way the other white couples did, the way the kids at the Studio Club did, mostly standing in one place and swaying. Some of the black dancers, however, did things Cole had never seen in public before, women grinding against a man’s leg thrust between their legs, men’s hands traveling down the hourglass of armpits to waist to hips and coming to rest on the buttocks, women being dipped within inches of the floor. Cole found it disconcerting to watch, especially the lascivious looks on the men’s faces.
A few songs later another slow one came around and Susan leaned across the table. “Come on, Cole, let’s dance.” Cole looked at Jesse, who shrugged and smiled, the picture of self-assurance.
Cole, nervous as a feral cat, was not about to miss this chance. They found a few square inches of floor and Cole put his arms around her. She smelled like a summer garden, heady like flowers, with a damp, earthy scent underneath. He couldn’t get enough of it. “I don’t know how to do this,” he said in her ear.
“Sure you do.” He felt the heat of her body against his chest. She put her right foot between his feet, rested her forearms lightly on his shoulders, tickled his chin with her hair. He had one hand all the way around her back to her shoulder blade, the other halfway to her waist. The song was “Stormy Monday” and he felt the chord modulations coming, tried to shift his weight with them, one-two-three pause, one-two-three pause. All their contact was above the waist and Susan moved with him easily. He turned as he stepped in double-time at the end of the verse, following the guitar as it hammered away on the V chord.
