Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  A girl’s voice behind Cole said, “Hey, man, would you sit the fuck down, please?”

  Cole sat, and the people on either side made room. Against the haunting minor chords in 3/4 time, Hardin sang about his lover walking away from all they had. He wasn’t fooling anybody. The loss was bigger than one relationship, one life. It was written all over his cracked, vulnerable voice and his precarious piano playing, both of which threatened to tumble at any moment into the abyss. The question was purely rhetorical. There was no way to hang on, it was already slipping away. Cole remembered standing outside a Victorian mansion in the Haight, listening to a woman named Deb tell him, “We thought it was the beginning, but it was already the end.”

  *

  From the side of the stage, Dave watched Tim Hardin, vastly the worse for drug wear, wander through the chords of “Hang on to a Dream” on the piano. His band looked on with no attempt to follow.

  Sallie sat with him, gripping his hand in an excess of nerves. “My God,” she whispered in his ear, “was he like this in the studio?”

  “On a good day,” Dave whispered back. He knew she didn’t mean anything by holding his hand. Timmy had that effect on people. It was like watching a runaway roller coaster ride.

  After Tim Hardin 1, Timmy had gone to Los Angeles for good, taking the demos he’d recorded for Jake with him. Jake’s erstwhile partners, Charles Koppelman and Don Rubin, who Zally always called Koppelthief and Robberman, recorded a few more songs, overdubbed some instruments, and took production credit for Tim Hardin 2. And that, in terms of legacy, was it for Timmy Hardin.

  Since then he’d released a live album, a set of early demos on Atlantic, a selection—incredibly—of the Columbia sessions that Dave had worked on a lifetime ago, and a “Best of” package that took songs from Tim Hardin 1 and 2 only. Those were the songs he was now singing at Woodstock, his band struggling to follow his pauses and odd phrasing and turnarounds.

  If Timmy had stayed with Jake, could Jake have saved him, kept the songs flowing? Most likely not. Timmy had been stuffed head to toe with combustible material and it had all gone up at once. It left Dave wondering whether Sallie was destined to burn out too. If so, did he have the power to delay it, to coax a few more songs out of her that might not otherwise have existed? The responsibility was crushing.

  Timmy was winding down. He started “Simple Song of Freedom,” a song Bobby Darin gave him as payback for Bobby’s huge success with “Carpenter.” It had gotten enough airplay to provoke a smattering of applause as the band fell in. Sallie kissed his cheek and said, “I can’t take any more of this. I’m on in an hour and I need to get my head in a better place.”

  “Knock ’em dead,” Dave said. And, as she had so many times before, she walked away and left him to watch her go.

  *

  Cole sat motionless as Hardin managed to walk a tightrope through an entire short set. The emotion he provoked was as much nervousness as melancholy. “Reason to Believe” and the encore, “Misty Roses,” both had the ring of stammered confessions under torture.

  As soon as Hardin left the stage, a cool, steady drizzle began to fall. It was pleasant enough at first, coming after the dry heat of the day, but it showed no sign of letting up. Cole briefly considered catching a ride to the motel on one of the helicopters that continuously rattled over the site, but the Holiday Inn and even the performers’ pavilion seemed unreal to him. He had passed through a one-way membrane when he left backstage. The thought of being on that stage tomorrow, the stage that Tim Hardin had just vacated, felt absurd.

  He found himself walking back to the free stage. Somebody had strung Christmas lights in the trees along the path, and he saw that the lights were no more than lights now, that the acid had peaked and faded, leaving him achy and dissatisfied.

  At the campsite, he was drawn to a glowing tepee. He hunkered outside the door and saw that a fire was burning inside, with an opening at the top that pulled at least some of the sweet smoke up and out. A hand reached out to him. Cole blinked and saw that it belonged to Sugarfoot, the guy from the Baez performance. He took it and let Sugarfoot pull him in.

  The space inside was larger than he had imagined, holding twenty people, some of them sprawled on sleeping bags, some roasting hot dogs and marshmallows. Cole found a spot where he could feel the warmth of the fire. He declined the food, but did accept a warm beer, and when a Sears Silvertone acoustic guitar made its way to him, he tuned it up and sang “Cielito lindo.” The act of playing anchored him to the moment, let him accept that Alex was no longer there to sing with him, that Madelyn was not waiting for him to return. Nothing existed beyond the here and the now.

  He carried on into “Bésame mucho.” Most everybody sang along, at least on the choruses, humming where they didn’t know the words, and he threw in some fancy guitar work that earned him a few indrawn breaths.

  Ten feet away, a brown-eyed blonde watched him fixedly. An inch or so of dark roots, a white T-shirt with nothing underneath, green Chinese vest with gold embroidery, low-slung jeans. He knew he was at a turning point. He’d resisted more temptations than a dozen Buddhist monks, and holding the high moral ground had earned him nothing. He was ready to let it go, let everything go. The decision left him sad and reckless.

  He made eye contact with the blonde as he sang the word “Bésame” and gave her a smile to go with it. She squirmed with pleasure and smiled back.

  He let the tide pick him up and take him out to sea.

  *

  Dave had always admired grace under pressure. As the rain came down, Sallie quietly made half a million people fall in love with her. Alone on stage with her guitar, she sang every song of hers that had rain in the lyrics, and where there was no rain she added it, or riffed on wet clothes or wet kisses and generally made it clear that nobody could possibly want to be anywhere in the world other than there in the rain with Sallie Rachel. The construction crew had hung a couple of tarps from the girders over the stage that didn’t do much. Every gust of wind blew rain in her face and on her guitar, and throughout the entire set he had a sick fear in his gut that she would touch her lip to the vocal mike and be electrocuted.

  Counting her encore, she played ten songs and left them wanting more. A small crowd formed around her at the bridge, everyone talking at once, happy and excited. Somebody handed her a towel and she saw to her 12-string first, getting it dried and in its case before she patted quickly at her face and hair. Dave hung back and followed her across the bridge to the performers’ tepee, where she dug a can of ginger ale out of the ice and turned and saw him and waved.

  “I did good, huh?” she said.

  “You did fantastic.”

  “Hopefully I can catch a chopper to the hotel tonight.”

  “I’ll come with.”

  “Really?” she said, tilting her head flirtatiously.

  Dave was too tired to kid around. “Are you coming back tomorrow?”

  She shook her head. “I want to get home to New York. I’m too old for this.”

  “Tell me about it. I was too old for this ten years ago.”

  “It’s weird, though, isn’t it? All these kids. They have some kind of built-in sense of belonging. You do have to wonder if this really is the start of something.”

  Did he? Dave thought. He couldn’t pinpoint why he was in such a lousy mood. He was certainly tired of hearing how wonderful these kids were. What had they accomplished, after all, other than to show up for a weekend-long party so woefully unprepared that they turned it into a disaster area? This was not heroism, it was middle-class privilege, the belief that somebody would surely take care of them because they were so precious and special. That the somebody had turned out to be hundreds of struggling local farmers, the financially ruined festival promoters, and the US Army did not, to Dave’s mind, speak well of them. “It’s a spoiled generation. They had everything handed to them.”

  “Including assassinations of their heroes, the threat of nuclear annihila
tion, and one-way tickets to Vietnam. I don’t think I’d want to be one of them.” She touched his arm to soften the slap. “What about you, are you coming back tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got The Quirq opening the show. As soon as they’re done, I’ll be on the next flight to San Francisco.”

  After a silence she said, “Are you doing okay out there?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not the Village in sixty-four…”

  “… but what is, right? And you’ve got an endless supply of hippie chicks to see to your needs.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Right.” He took a step backward. “I’ll go see what I can find for transport.”

  “Dave? I’m sorry for teasing you. It’s only because I love you, you know.”

  It was one more thing to blame the hippies for, the way love had become such a devalued currency. “I love you too,” he said, putting the words on the tracks without hooking up the emotional freight cars that went with them.

  “Seeing all those kids tonight, I feel like my time has come and gone.”

  “What are you talking about? They went nuts for you.”

  “That was just… the chemistry of the moment. Long term, I’m scared that I’m about to be a relic.”

  “Not going to happen. Your voice is for real, not some Vegas caricature. You write great songs with great hooks. That never goes out of date.”

  She hugged him and pressed her head against his shirt. “You’re always there for me,” she said.

  “That’s right,” he said, and as soon as her arms loosened he stepped away. “And now I’m going to go get us a helicopter.”

  *

  Her parents had named her Laramie, she told Cole, in honor of the town where she was conceived. She had quit dyeing her hair after her first acid trip in June, and at the moment it felt right to be carrying her old life and her new life together growing out of her head, though eventually the time would come to cut the old life off. She had decided not to go back for her senior year at Northwestern, and instead to throw in with the commune people, who had picked her up near Toledo as she was hitching her way east to the fair.

  She wanted to know where Cole had learned to play guitar like that, and said, “You should be on the main stage,” and he told her that he would be, in the morning. “You are bullshitting me,” she said, and she made him pinky swear. He used their linked fingers to draw her forward into a kiss and she kissed him back with eager intent. Then they were lying on top of her sleeping bag and then he was pulling his boots off and crawling inside it with her. Cole was shaking with excitement. Her mouth tasted of hot dogs and mustard, her neck of salt and woodsmoke. He couldn’t get enough. When she started to unbutton his shirt, he said, “Uh, you don’t care about all these other people?”

  “In Japan,” she said, “you’re never alone. So you have to make your own privacy. In your head.”

  “How do you know about Japan?”

  “Army brat,” she said, and bit his nipple. He had no further questions.

  They worked their way out of most of their clothes and then he was inside her. It made her crazy. She writhed against him and made little noises in his ear, clawed at his back, and came repeatedly. Cole hoped the rest of the tent understood Japanese privacy. At the moment he was past caring. He held out as long as he could and then the force of his climax felt like it was turning him inside out. As his last spasms finished, she was panting as if she’d run a mile.

  Cole lay on top of her, still connected. In a moment of post-coital clarity, he realized he’d done something irrevocable, and he felt a premonition of guilt to come. To drive the feeling back into the darkness, he kissed Laramie again, and kept kissing her and touching her skin and her hair and then they were moving together again, more slowly this time, and she came twice more, arms and legs wrapped around him tight, and he thought, how could I not accept this gift, this sublime pleasure, what in this world is better than this?

  Despite Cole’s exhaustion they stayed up past two am, when the music from the main stage, which had faded in an out like a radio playing in another room, finally stopped.

  Cole was smitten and felt jealous and protective of her in a way he knew he wasn’t entitled to feel. She asked him about the band and apologized for not having heard of them. She said she wanted to know everything there was to know about him, and he told her that he too had been around the world against his will, that he had seen Dylan and been transformed, that he had left home at sixteen and college after a year. She asked if he had somebody in San Francisco, which made him think she was more than a little smitten herself. He told her he was married but separated, the first time he’d spoken those words. They were deceptively easy to say.

  “It’s cool,” she said. “Eskimos, when they travel, they expect to receive sexual hospitality wherever they stay.”

  “Eskimos,” he said fuzzily, and that was the last thing he remembered.

  When he woke, desperately needing to pee, the sun was well up. His watch said it was a few minutes past nine. He found his jeans and underwear stuffed down in the bottom of the sleeping bag and managed to extricate them and himself without waking Laramie. The tent smelled of wet ashes and, from the contents of some of the sleeping bags, he surmised that he and Laramie were not the only ones to have counted on Japanese privacy.

  Outside he found a drizzly Saturday morning. The badly scuffed ground had turned to mud, and puddles of rain water dotted the clearing, reflecting the clouds overhead. His hands smelled of sex. Probably his whole body did. Thinking about it made him want Laramie again, at the same time that he thought briefly and guiltily of Madelyn.

  At the moment he had more urgent needs. He considered making for the woods again, then multiplied that by half a million and decided to do the responsible thing and find a portable toilet. The line was mercifully short. Despite the smell and mess inside, it did function, and there was toilet paper, and a makeshift hydrant nearby where he could wash his hands and face.

  The next order of business was to find out when he was supposed to play, and maybe score some breakfast. He walked back to the tepee, where the first thing he saw was Laramie sitting hunched over in the sleeping bag. Her face lit up at the sight of him and she held out her arms. He knelt beside her and she embraced him fiercely. “I thought you’d gone,” she said, her breath hot against his neck.

  She loaned him her toothbrush and made her own trip to the toilet and then they headed out together for the main stage. The rain had finally let up. Laramie walked with one arm around Cole’s waist, leaning into him as if they were in a three-legged race, intoxicating Cole with her touch.

  Most of the crowd had spent the night in the same place they’d spent the previous day, some with blankets or sleeping bags, many of them without and curled up together for warmth, many of them still asleep. The concave field, while making a perfect natural amphitheater, also collected rainwater. The individual differences between the audience members were fading as they all began to take on the color of dried mud. An acrid urine smell hovered in the air, telling Cole that some had not bothered to go as far as the woods to relieve themselves.

  They arrived at the gate to the backstage area at 9:45. Once they were inside, Cole saw the mc from the night before at the back of the stage and crossed the wooden bridge to him.

  “I’m Jeff Cole with The Quirq. Do you know when we’re supposed to go on?”

  “John Morris,” the guy said, and they did the soul brother handshake. “There’s a chopper on the way with the rest of your guys. You’re on first, it’s just that we’re not too sure right now when that’s going to be. It might surprise you to learn we’re a little disorganized this morning.”

  “It’s cool,” Cole said. “I’ll be down at the performers’ tent.”

  As they walked back down the bridge, Laramie squeezed his arm with both hands and said, “This is so amazing.” Her excitement made Cole realize how blasé he’d let himself become. He tried to picture himself four years ago,
listening to Dylan for the first time in Alex’s room.

  The performers’ pavilion was crowded. A cluster of British guys sat off by themselves, one of them in an old-west-style flat-brimmed hat over long brown hair and a beard. Another group took up two tables, talking excitedly. Cole recognized one of them, a skinny Chicano who’d been at the Airplane house the night they found Gordo. Carlos, his name was, supposedly a guitar player. John Sebastian was at a table with a couple of girls. Paul and Grace from the Airplane were at the buffet table and Laramie said, “Oh my God, is that…?”

  “Yep,” Cole said. He led her over and said, “Hey, Grace, how’s it going?”

  “Morning, Cole.” Then, living up to her name as she occasionally did, Grace smiled at the sight of Laramie, mouth half-open and eyes as wide as if she’d had a bad shock. “Who’s your friend?”

  “Grace, this is Laramie.” Laramie stared at Grace’s extended hand for several seconds before gingerly reaching out to shake it.

  Cole said, “The punch was spiked yesterday, so you might want to be careful.”

  “Was it good stuff, at least?” Grace asked.

  “Distinctly mediocre.”

  “We’ve got some Orange Sunshine that’s outstanding,” Paul said. “If you’re interested.”

  “Maybe later,” Cole said. “We’re on first this morning.”

  “All the more reason,” Grace said.

  The food was the same as the day before. Cole was starving and not inclined to be fussy. Neither, evidently, was Laramie, who was eating with both hands as she filled her plate. Cole had just built an exact replica of the previous day’s bologna and cheese sandwich when he heard Lenny say, “Well, well, look who’s here.”

  Cole turned to see Lenny with his hands on his hips, wearing an artificial smile. Gordo and Tommy were a few yards away, talking to Carlos. “Hey, Lenny,” Cole said. “This is Laramie. Lenny’s the other lead player in the band.”