Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  Dave still had a question in his mind about whether they would need a session guitarist. Shaw quickly laid it to rest, putting thoughtful, melodic leads on all three tracks by 11:30. Skip wanted to keep going, so Dave made a pot of coffee and pressed on for the sake of getting the ordeal over with. At three am Dave and Skip stood at a boom mike and added harmony vocals and handclaps to “South of the Line” and they were done.

  “I’ll mix it down next week,” Dave said. “But I think this is a salable product.”

  “Can we mix it tomorrow?”

  “No,” Dave said. “Monday.”

  Shaw turned solemn and shook Dave’s hand. “I don’t ever want to work with another producer than you.”

  My God, Dave thought, what have I done?

  •*

  His name was Lenny. Taller than Cole, six-three and skinny, two years older, reddish brown hair, mutton-chop sideburns, big, tortoise-shell rectangular glasses. If Lenny had been female, Cole would have described his feelings as love at first sight. Nothing sexual about it, just an instantaneous pleasure in Lenny’s company that felt immediately reciprocated, a recognition of a common sense of humor before the first joke was told.

  Without that sudden and mysterious bond, things might have been awkward. The spidery lettering on the index card had read, “the austin blues group. Up-and-coming Chicago-style blues outfit seeks competent rhythm guitarist and outstanding lead singer.”

  Cole had talked to Marc, the bass player, on the phone, mentioning only that he sang, played guitar, and had his own gear. Marc had thrown him a couple of questions to make sure he actually knew something about the blues—what was the name of Howlin’ Wolf’s guitar player, who did Robert Johnson meet at the crossroads—and then they’d set up an audition for the next night in a communal dorm across from Eastwoods Park.

  At the audition, Cole sang, “So Many Roads, So Many Trains” by Otis Rush, sticking to the chords while Lenny played a searing lead on his gold-top Les Paul. Marc was not as creative a bassist as Alex, but he played low on the neck, with no treble, to produce a booming tone that Cole liked a lot, more of a presence than a set of notes. Tommy, the drummer, had a kind of loose, rattling style à la Ginger Baker, busy and musical.

  Cole suggested they stretch out on “Stormy Monday.” He sang two verses and let Lenny do a nice, trebly lead in the T-Bone Walker style. Then, for kicks, he turned and made eye contact with the drummer, who quickly figured out that Cole had taken the volume down and began to do something quiet with only the snare, floor tom, and bass drum. Cole opened with a few soft trills and slowly built up to a nice frenzy. Lenny, grinning by this point, waited for Cole to nod him in, then switched from chords to lead and proceeded to weave their parts in a way that Farmer Frank would have envied. Probably nine-tenths of it didn’t work. The tenth that did made Cole’s heart beat fast.

  They tortured the song for thirty minutes before they finally put it out of its misery in a big finish. Cole and Lenny were laughing with the pleasure of it even as Marc looked troubled. He was the earnest sort, blue work shirt and round, wire-rimmed glasses, and he told Cole, “You’re a great guitarist. But… we’ve already got a lead player, and I don’t know…”

  “Cole, is it?” Lenny interrupted. Cole nodded. “Can you give us five minutes?”

  Cole sat outside on the steps. February 19th. The day had been a preview of spring, even now, at eight in the evening, hovering in the high 50s. Winter was on the run, and Cole knew he was on the brink of something. When Lenny came out and sat next to him, Cole wondered if he’d misread the signs.

  Lenny lit a Marlboro and said, “We’ve been together a year. We lost our lead singer over Christmas. He’d been out of school since last summer and he got drafted, poor bastard. Anyway, we had the idea that we were going to get another singer and keep doing what we were doing, a poor man’s Butterfield. Marc, he’s got good traction, but he doesn’t corner all that well. Whereas I can see some real possibilities here.”

  “Me too,” Cole said.

  “Most of what we just played was crap,” Lenny said.

  “Yep.”

  Lenny laughed and it infected Cole. “Why don’t we go back in there,” Lenny said, “and see where this goes?”

  *

  Madelyn had watched as the Castle evolved a communal spirit over the course of the winter. The boys took turns cooking for the whole house, and even Sunny came out to sit with them most nights, though of course he refused anything with meat in it. On Friday nights they gathered in the living room to watch Star Trek together. The stray orange cat that Joe had been feeding ended up with the name Spock and the run of the house. Cole put up a blackboard next to the kitchen phone for messages, which was quickly subverted for insults, running jokes, and amateur art.

  Lenny dropped into the scene in late February without a ripple; Madelyn got used to finding him on the foldout sofa, fully clothed under a blanket, curled up against his guitar. As likeable as Lenny was, something about him made Madelyn anxious from the first. She wanted to believe that she wasn’t jealous of the private jokes between him and Cole that she didn’t get, or the complete absence of tension between the two of them, even when Cole was tense with her and everyone else. Most of all she wanted to believe she wasn’t jealous of the new band. She hadn’t believed, after all, that his leaving The Other Side was the end of his musical ambitions. Cole was not to blame if she’d gotten used to having him around, used to their schedule of sleeping apart most Monday through Thursday nights and being together all weekend—making love, studying, going to movies or live music, driving to San Antonio one Thursday in mid-February to see Jimi Hendrix, which had made her reevaluate what electric music could be.

  Before Lenny, everything had been perfect. She felt at home at the university in a way she never had at high school, loved the challenge of Russian, took pride in her straight As, was grateful for the way her personal life dovetailed so seamlessly with school. After Lenny, her perfect life began to slip through her fingers.

  For a couple of months they’d been going to a new place called The Vulcan Gas Company, and that had added to her anxiety. Only a year before, she’d been at the Studio Club, with its dress codes and tightly rehearsed bands playing three-minute pop songs. At the Vulcan, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators featured an electric jug hiccupping behind lyrics about transcendent mental states and a singer so intense he looked like he might break down on stage; Shiva’s Headband put an electric violin to sprawling songs that twisted the blues together with country-western and disdained any pretense of commerciality. This, Alex and Cole both assured her, was exactly what was happening in San Francisco, a city they both claimed to dislike, and whose spell they could not seem to escape.

  The audience for those shows mixed ut students with members of the growing street culture, former students who had graduated or dropped out and remained in Austin working at menial jobs or no jobs at all, panhandling, selling drugs, showing up for occasional shifts at Manpower. And while these people—the men often bearded or with finger-in-the-socket hair, the women often braless, matriarchal in muumuus or waiflike in jeans—were interesting from a sociological point of view, something in them frightened her, a sense of idealism without a clear agenda, the feeling that they had not merely dropped out of straight society but also cut themselves adrift from common sense.

  The drugs scared her too. Cole had taken lsd once and suffered no apparent harm. Alex still took it on occasion and now Denise was joining him. Madelyn couldn’t help but wonder if the acid had contributed to Alex’s emotional distance.

  As for Denise, she’d initially been part of the communal scene in the role of Alex’s girlfriend; between Thanksgiving and Christmas, as Alex had increasingly withdrawn from her, she had ended up in the living room watching tv with Tupelo Joe or practicing Russian with Madelyn at the dining room table. After Alex finally dumped her over Christmas, Madelyn only saw her at the dorm. That lasted a month or so and then, to everyone’s surpris
e, and with Alex’s presumed blessing, she was back, this time under the auspices of Tupelo Joe.

  As weird as the situation appeared to Madelyn, none of the principals seemed to mind. “He’s sweet,” Denise told her. “He’s so grateful for sex. It’s nice not to be taken for granted.”

  They had created, Madelyn thought, a haven from a world that was growing increasingly chaotic.

  In January the Viet Cong launched a surprise offensive across South Vietnam. In response, strikes and protests ramped up in Poland and France and the UK as well as the US. LBJ pulled out of the presidential race because of the war and Bobby Kennedy jumped in.

  Then, last week, Martin Luther King had been murdered in Memphis, and Madelyn had stayed on the phone with her father, who was inconsolable, until after midnight. She woke up the next day to news of riots across the country and around the world.

  Cole was not insensitive, exactly. He understood the tragedy and injustice of it; he understood why Madelyn felt the way she did. He just didn’t feel it himself.

  He was focused on the band’s debut at the Vulcan, Friday, April 12, which had somehow suddenly arrived. She spent the day trying to replace her anxiety and mourning with feelings more appropriate to the excesses of the spring erupting outside, dogwoods and redbuds dropping their blossoms to reveal tender new leaves, dandelions blowing, cloud shadows racing across warm lawns.

  Cole and the rest of the band had left early for sound check. Madelyn caught a ride with Alex and Joe and Denise. It was the first night of a two-weekend run, at the bottom of a bill with Shiva’s, Rubaiyat, and Conqueroo.

  The club occupied an empty retail space on Congress Avenue downtown, three blocks from the river. Painted mandalas filled the display windows, and the glass front door was papered over with handbills for the show. Inside, church pews and crude benches provided the only seating; the high stage was at the opposite end of the long, narrow room from the entrance. Exposed pipes crisscrossed the high ceiling, barely visible in the gloom.

  Cole, wearing his gig clothes, wandered out from the side of the stage. He enveloped her in a hug and kissed her enthusiastically. She tried to remember the last time she’d seen him this radiant. With one arm still around Madelyn, he put the other around Alex’s neck. “I wish it was you up there with us tonight. Don’t you miss it?”

  “Nah, man, it’s cool. I’d rather dance.”

  The place had no liquor license, part of an ongoing struggle with the Austin political establishment that was symptomatic of the birth struggles of the new culture. That same conflict had led to the owners pleading with the audience not to smoke pot on the premises. So people brought their own drinks, from bottles of Coke to surreptitious beer and wine and flasks of hard liquor, all of which they freely shared. And, because lsd was technically no longer in one’s possession once it was in the bloodstream, a substantial portion of the crowd had chosen that option.

  The Austin Blues Group hit the stage at 8:15. Madelyn realized that she was seeing Cole on stage for only the third time; despite her meager statistical sample, she saw immediately that this band was of another order of magnitude than The Chevelles or The Other Side.

  They started with something that Cole had taught her was called a shuffle, syncopated 4/4 with a triplet feel. The energy was ferocious and was augmented by the dizzying light show. Cole looked like he’d been waiting his entire life for this moment, only to discover that it was more fun than he’d imagined. After a couple of minutes of rising tension, Cole took the microphone and sang about Automatic Slim and Fast-Talking Fanny, and then Lenny and the bass player came in on harmony and threatened to pitch a Wang Dang Doodle all night long.

  A couple of minutes further into the song, it became unstable, apparently on purpose, and began to shake itself apart. Lenny, who seemed nervous, especially compared to Cole and the other two, faced the drummer and together they steadied the music into a straight 4/4 beat, and Cole sang “Get Out of My Life, Woman.” From there they segued into “Sunshine of Your Love,” to Lenny’s apparent surprise, though he’d been the first to throw out the guitar line. When the lead came around, he and Cole played it together, Lenny off the record, Cole straying into harmony. The audience loved it, waving their arms as they danced, reacting, Madelyn thought, as much to the joy that poured off the stage as to the music. Lenny’s awkwardness notwithstanding, it reminded her of The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, charm and enthusiasm and finely-honed technique, minus the innocence.

  She’d been standing with Alex since the set began, watching him sway and shift his feet, and finally he said, “C’mon, let’s dance.” She followed him into the growing throng in front of the stage, surprised, as she had been on previous Vulcan trips, at the way this poised, well-scrubbed young man, shaped by money and prep school in a way Cole had not been, was able to lose himself so completely in movement, undulating, spinning Durga-armed, bending and leaning and weaving. Madelyn tried to follow, knowing she was stiff and self-conscious, trying to relax into it as Alex smiled encouragement.

  The music from the stage never stopped, instead shifting in form like the spheres of colored oil projected onto the musicians, speeding and slowing, dropping into one song or another and then moving on. Half an hour into their set they gradually quieted until Madelyn could hear the bodies around her, their breath slowing, footsteps slowing, along with the music. The drummer barely touched his cymbal; Lenny held one long note. Madelyn turned to look as Cole stepped up to the microphone and said, “This is for somebody special.” He started to sing a song she’d never heard before:

  Golden light comes streaming in

  On golden hair and molten skin

  Gold can’t buy the gift she brings

  A love that glides on golden wings

  She saw that he’d written it for her. She didn’t doubt that he loved her and that he meant every word he sang. But now, in the midst of her country coming apart, the fact that the band was this good meant another coming apart, and the tears that she’d been holding back broke and ran down her face, not because the music tore at her heart, though it did, but because she knew he was telling her goodbye.

  *

  The crowd didn’t want to let them go. Madelyn didn’t either. She clapped and screamed along. The band charged back onstage and Cole said, “Just one more,” and they played a breakneck reading of “Fire” from the Jimi Hendrix album that Cole had played until he wore it out. After that came the anticlimax of clearing their equipment off the stage, and then Cole was pushing through the crowd to get to her, and she wondered if she could survive the heartbreak of looking at him.

  He swept her up in an embrace, crushing her to his sweat-soaked shirt and saying, “Did you like your song?”

  “Yes, baby, of course I loved it, you idiot, it’s beautiful.”

  “Why are you crying?”

  “Just shut up and hold me.”

  Over the next four hours, Cole came and went, sometimes standing with her to watch the band onstage, an arm around her waist, then excusing himself to talk with Lenny or guys from the other bands, or disappearing backstage for half an hour, always returning to her with love shining in his eyes.

  Sometime after one, after Shiva’s was well into their headline set, Alex caught up with her and said, “We’re going to blow. Are you coming?”

  “Give me a minute,” she said.

  She found Cole and Lenny in a comparatively quiet corner by the front door. “Am I going home with you or with Alex?”

  He kissed her and said, “You should probably go with Alex. I don’t know how long we’ll be.”

  She tried to hide her disappointment. “Okay.”

  “But you’ll stay with me tonight, right? You’ll be there when I get home?”

  “Okay,” she said, wanting to make some gesture of independence, unable to find the will.

  Though it was terribly late when she got back, she needed to shower; she ended up in bed with her hair still damp. She lay for an endless time with the entir
e world inside her head, too numb to sort it out, and only realized she’d fallen asleep when Cole woke her.

  He was on fire. He’d brushed his teeth, though she could still taste the beer and marijuana on his breath. His skin smelled of smoke and sweat, not altogether unpleasantly, and he was lobotomized by desire, hands all over her, capable of only minimally coherent speech, telling her how beautiful she was, how much he loved her. The magnitude of his desire was exciting, and also impersonal in its urgency. When he was done, he made a halfhearted effort to pleasure her as he kept nodding off. “Shhh,” she told him. “Go to sleep now. It’s been a big day for you.”

  “I love you,” he said, and then he was asleep.

  She was up before him in the morning. She got dressed and made coffee. Though she was hungry, her stomach was in turmoil and she couldn’t imagine keeping food down. She pretended to read the Sunday Statesman while Denise, then Alex, then Joe, then finally Cole wandered downstairs, fixed something to eat, and sat down with a section of the paper. She waited until Cole had finished eating and then, as unobtrusively as possible, she slipped upstairs.

  Cole joined her a few minutes later. “Are you okay? I’m sorry I passed out on you last night, I was just…”

  “I know, sweetie.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand. “Something’s wrong.”

  Having been handed the opportunity, she couldn’t find the words. Eventually she let him worm it out of her. “You’ve gotten too good for Austin. You’re going to have to go on the road.”

  “Where did you get that idea?”

  “Are you going to tell me you haven’t talked about it?”

  He looked guilty. “It’s… come up.”

  “And what did you decide?”

  “We haven’t decided anything yet. But we were talking last night—it was so cool.” The embarrassment vanished. “Guys from Shiva’s and Conqueroo. Jim Franklin—he’s the guy that draws all the posters with the armadillos on them, he’s one of the owners. Powell St. John, you know who he is? He wrote songs with the Elevators and started Conqueroo. All anybody could talk about was San Francisco. Jim went to art school there. Powell is there now, playing with Mother Earth. Conqueroo is moving out there, like, this summer. Shiva’s and the Elevators are talking about it too.”