by Lewis Shiner
At some point music came on above them, Country Joe playing an acoustic guitar. Joe was finished before Cole and Laramie were, when Cole, after coming twice, finally collapsed in exhaustion.
Cole lay on his back, Laramie tucked into one armpit, stroking his chest. The air felt cool now, without his internal fires raging, and he pulled her close for warmth. Desire had filled his entire world, and now that he had emptied himself of desire, the world was empty too, devoid of meaning. Laramie’s face was pressed against his neck and he felt her tears run down his collarbone, as if she’d read his thoughts. “Hey,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, nuzzling him. “Everything is groovy and wonderful and amazing.”
“You’re crying,” he pointed out.
“It’s all a little too much,” she said. “All these feelings. Leaving school, changing my life, meeting you. I don’t know who I am anymore.”
Cole had heard the expression countless times and never understood it. “How can you not know who you are?”
“I don’t have anything like your guitar. I just have all these things I know I’m not. I’m not grocery lists and polyester dresses from Sears and hospital corners like my mother. I’m not one of the eager-beaver kids headed for J-school who are going to rip the lid off the maggot-ridden Daley administration. I’m not a back-to-the-land visionary who’s going to build a utopia with her calloused hands. I’m not your wife or your girlfriend, I’m just some crazy chick who balled your brains out at a festival.”
“You’re more than that,” Cole said, hugging her. “Way more than that.”
After a few seconds she pulled away. “It’s chilly down here. We should get dressed.”
*
A haze of clouds had lightened the early afternoon sky to the palest of blues. As she and Cole stumbled blinking into daylight, Laramie said, “I need to go to the tepee for a while. If I don’t shower and clean up, I’m going to get a yeast infection.”
“That’s cool. I could use a shower too.”
She shook her head. “I’ll meet you here in a couple of hours. Okay?”
“You’ll need a pass to get in.”
She smiled. “No I won’t. And if they give me any trouble, I’ll have them come get you.”
“Laramie…” He didn’t like the sudden darkness that had come over her mood and he didn’t want them to separate. At the same time, if she needed space, he had to give it to her.
She leaned into him and kissed him sweetly. “I’ll see you in a while.”
As she walked away, he waited for her to turn and look at him one more time, telling himself that if she did, everything would be okay. She just kept walking, past the guard at the fence, disappearing into the crowd at the side of the stage.
Cole wandered over to the performers’ pavilion and froze when he saw Lenny fishing out a Coke by the buffet table. Lenny saw him and waved him over.
Lenny was like Cole, verbal and not a fighter, but the day had already proved that all bets were off. Cole approached him warily.
“I was looking for you,” Lenny said.
Cole nodded.
“I don’t know what happened out there this morning,” Lenny said. “I only know that I hated being up there, as much as I ever hated anything. Small clubs are okay, but even at the Fillmore I was really scared. I’ve been fighting this for a long time and today… today it blew up in my face.”
Cole had no idea what to say, so he nodded again.
“Being in the studio, man, that was great. If I fucked up, I could do it over, I could make it perfect. I loved that. It only made it worse playing for big crowds. So…” He took a deep breath. “So I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too,” Cole said. “I was really shitty to you out there.”
“It doesn’t matter. Because I’ve been thinking, and I need to quit the group.”
“You can’t quit,” Cole said. “There is no group without you.” During the set, the idea of firing Lenny had passed through Cole’s head and he had immediately dismissed it. Lenny had started the band, Lenny was the better guitarist, Lenny was the one who never lost his cool. “You don’t want to make this kind of decision on the spur of the moment anyway. When we get back, we’ll talk it over—”
Lenny shook his head. “As soon as I decided, it was like one minute I was drowning and the next I was standing up on dry land and I could breathe again. I know it’s right.” Unexpectedly, Lenny hugged him. “I’m sorry,” he said again, and he walked, almost running, toward the helicopter landing zone.
Cole took one step after him, then another, and then a devastating weakness took hold of him and he sat in a folding chair. He looked down at his stomach, expecting to see himself sliced open and gushing blood onto the bark floor. Instead there was only himself, physically and emotionally exhausted, alone in a crowd of half a million.
*
A band started up onstage. Conga drums and a bass, nothing else. The sound was riveting, the drums simultaneously primitive and melodic. As the music poured into Cole’s empty head, it sounded familiar and brand new, sounded like it was being played for him alone. It sounded like the Olatunji album he’d bought in San Francisco and the mambo and cha-cha-cha records his father had played in the fifties.
The music drew him over the bridge and into a chair on stage right. The organ and guitar and trap set had joined in by then, playing a series of descending chords that gave way to bursts of furious guitar work. The guitarist, he saw, was the guy Carlos that he’d met at the Airplane house. The organist and the shorter of the two conga players were the two guys who’d hit on Laramie that morning. Finally Cole realized that this was the Santana band that Bill Graham had pushed him to see.
They went from the conga piece into a smooth cha-cha-cha, the short conga player moving to timbales. The organ player sang lead and Carlos sang harmony and the rock instruments fused perfectly with the Latin rhythms. The band was set up in a semicircle instead of a line, able to watch and listen to each other, to push each other to take risks, and to watch each other’s backs in case somebody slipped.
Cole was devastated. He’d held all the pieces of what they were doing in his hands and failed to see the possibilities. Instead he’d opted for the same whey-faced versions of black blues that half the bands at Woodstock traded in, from Canned Heat to Joplin to Johnny Winter to Keef Hartley to Ten Years After. He wanted Carlos’s job, though he knew he was not guitarist enough to fill it. More than that, he wanted to go back in time, to the fall of his freshman year at ut, to forget about The Other Side and The Austin Blues Group, to instead invent electric mariachi music with Alex and take it to the Vulcan, where the crowd would have eaten it up.
Two songs later, as Santana swung into “Jingo” from the Olatunji album, Cole felt even worse. He was an idiot, inspiration-deaf, a failure before he turned 20. And the audience loved it. Most of them had never heard of Santana before, yet they were on their feet, dancing and clapping along. Sitting through the rest of the set was torture for Cole, and he stayed there to teach himself a lesson. As his father would have said.
When it was over, the crowd still screaming for them after their encore, Carlos saw him and came over to shake hands. “Hey,” Carlos said, “I saw you at the Airplane house that time. You guys were good this morning. I love that you did ‘Cielito lindo.’”
“We were terrible,” Cole said. “But you guys were amazing. I never heard you before today. I couldn’t believe how good you were.”
“Really?” Carlos said. “They lied to us about when we were going to go on, said it was going to be like two in the morning, so I took some mescaline. I was so high when we got up there, I had no idea what I was playing.”
“It was one of the best performances I’ve ever seen.” Cole was afraid he was going to cry.
“Aw, thanks, man. Hey, you guys are with Graham too, right? He should put us on tour together or something.”
“Sure,” Cole said, unwilling to say out lo
ud that The Quirq was done. “That would be cool.”
“I got to split. I’ll catch you around, okay?”
“Okay,” Cole said.
As soon as Carlos walked away, John Morris came over and crouched in front of him. “Uh, listen, man, I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
Cole stared, wondering how things could get any worse.
“It appears that the film people had some kind of problem,” Morris said. “I’m not an expert or anything, but apparently they use the eighth track of the sound recording to sync up with the film, and somehow that track didn’t get recorded during your set. They found the problem and fixed it before Joe came on, but…”
“But we’re not going to be in the movie.”
“Yeah, I’m afraid not. I’m really sorry. With everything else we’re dealing with, it’s pretty amazing that we haven’t had more fuckups than that.”
“Yeah,” Cole said. “Thanks for telling me.”
Morris nodded and touched him gently on the shoulder as he straightened up.
Cole waited a couple of minutes and then went to the performers’ pavilion and chugged a Budweiser. He didn’t want to get falling-down drunk in case Laramie came back, still, a second can was required to get any anesthetic effect at all. He sat down at an empty table to finish it, where exhaustion and an empty stomach let him doze off.
When he roused himself, it was 3:30. Chip Monck was saying something not quite intelligible onstage. Cole’s head hurt and his mouth tasted bad. He was still tired and the pain of the day lurked in easy reach, threatening to knock him down again if he stuck his head up too far.
He ate some cheese and vegetables and washed them down with club soda. When he looked outside, he saw that it had rained again, turning more of the ground to mud. He used one of the somewhat less foul portable toilets reserved for the performers, then washed his face with a double handful of ice water from the soft drink barrel.
There, he thought. I’m a new man.
He wandered onto the side of the stage, where the crew swept standing water off the plywood with push brooms and John Sebastian had come to the microphone. “I don’t know if you can really tell how amazing you look,” he told the crowd. He was still in his tie-dyed suit of lights, stoned and immensely peaceful. “But you’re truly amazing, you’re a whole city. And somehow you’re something that an awful lot of us talked about, eight and ten years ago, in little living rooms…” He trailed off as he got his guitar in tune. “I have a song for you.”
He began to sing something Cole had never heard, about bringing back odd mementos from all over the world, and went on to play for half an hour, a handful of gentle songs with great melodies. He charmed the crowd and made them feel good about themselves, as Cole struggled to get on their wavelength.
Before his encore, Sebastian said, “Just love everybody all around you and clean up a little garbage on your way out and everything gonna be all right.” In spite of himself, Cole found himself choked up. Could it really be as simple as that?
Laramie had been gone two hours. Not long enough for him to go after her. He was restless and anxious and wished he hadn’t sent his guitar away with Gordo. Backstage again, he paced the cage of six-foot-high chain-link fences, past the helicopter landing zone, past the portable toilets, past the U-Haul and Ryder trucks, finally along a deserted stretch that looked into the woods, some other farmer’s land where only a few reckless tents had been pitched. He sat for a while on a damp, grassy mound and watched branches move in the wind.
Eventually the sound of music lured him to the stage. He watched Keef Hartley for a while, a basic blues three-piece with a trumpet and sax added that gave them a sweet, jazzy sound. The drummer was the guy he’d seen earlier, with the reddish beard and flat cowboy hat. Tight and melodic as they were, in the end it was more white-boy blues and Cole was not in the mood.
At five he gave up and headed for the tepee, anxious and excited in equal parts. Maybe it was a test. Maybe she’d just wanted to know if he would come looking for her.
At the free stage, some guy had set up dozens of cymbals and gongs and walked around from one to another, creating tidal waves of sound that crashed and ebbed and swelled again. Cole hurried past and arrived at the tepee out of breath. He paused for a second outside the door and then ducked inside.
Before his eyes fully adjusted to the dimness, he knew Laramie wasn’t there. The interior was practically deserted and her sleeping bag lay empty where they’d left it that morning. Three young guys passed a joint near the ashes of the fire.
“You guys seen Laramie?”
“Who?” one of them said.
“What about Sugarfoot?”
One of the others said, “Free kitchen.”
Cole followed the smoke to a big orange and yellow striped awning where giant pots of food simmered. A long line snaked away from the serving area. Cole followed it until he found Sugarfoot, standing on one leg with his eyes closed.
“Sugarfoot,” Cole said.
A man behind him said, “No cutting in line, asshole.”
Cole wondered if he would ever grasp the fine points of Yankee hospitality. “I’m not cutting,” he said. “I just need to talk to my friend for a second.”
“I’m watching you,” the guy said. He was short and thick and looked like an ex-sailor.
“What’s up, Cole?” Sugarfoot said, opening his eyes and settling on both feet.
“Have you seen Laramie?”
“She was around earlier. We all took a shower in the downpour, passed around some Dr. Bronner’s. It was amazing.”
Cole felt a stab of jealousy, involuntarily imagining her naked body in the rain. “You didn’t see her after that?”
“Sorry, man.”
The ex-sailor said, “You done?”
Sugarfoot turned to the guy and said, “Be cool, man, we’re not messing with your trip.”
“I been waiting in this line for an hour and I’m not going to wait even longer because of assholes cutting in. I’m fucking starving.”
“Maybe you should bring your own food next time,” Cole said, and walked away.
“Fuck you!” the guy yelled after him. “Come back here and say that, motherfucker!”
Peace and love, the cowboy clown had said. Cole was trembling from anger and the sick panic of not knowing where Laramie was. He took a detour into the forest to try and calm down. He had known Laramie less than 24 hours. He had no claims on her. He could find another band, or start something new from the ashes of The Quirq. And would anyone pay to see a movie of what he’d witnessed here so far? He looked at his watch. Maybe he and Laramie had passed each other. Maybe she was waiting for him at the main stage even now.
Over the next hour he made the circuit twice more, from stage to tepee and back, his feet beginning to seriously ache. On his last trip to the stage he thought, okay, this is it. She’d stood him up, for reasons beyond his understanding. He would get some food backstage, drink a couple of beers, maybe go back to the hotel for a hot shower and some sleep in a real bed.
That was when a voice behind him said, “Jeff!” His parents were the only ones who had called him that in years. He didn’t fully register it until the voice said, “Jeff! Jeff Cole!”
A shirtless guy around Cole’s age, six-two and beefy, with shaggy brown hair and a patchy beard, grinned at him. “You don’t have the vaguest idea who the fuck I am, do you?”
Cole smiled reflexively. “Sorry, no.”
“It’s Pauley, man. Pauley from Mountain Lakes.”
Cole shook his head a couple of times to clear it and looked again. The last time he’d seen Pauley, Cole had been 9 years old. It was the summer after third grade and the moving van had already taken all their furniture off to storage and a man in overalls had bought their high-mileage station wagon and driven it away. He and his parents would spend the night in a motel, and in the morning they would fly out of Idlewild Airport to Villahermosa.
Cole’s best fri
end Glen had held a desultory going away party, and Pauley had been there, along with Glen’s little sister Sharon and a couple of the other neighborhood kids. The party was Glen’s parents’ idea, and it had ended with everyone out on the lawn to watch Cole’s parents take him away in a taxi. Cole remembered standing awkwardly in the grassy ground between his friends and his parents, feeling like he didn’t belong to either one. “Hurry up!” his father had yelled. “The meter’s running.”
“Holy shit,” Cole said. He could see faint traces of a skinny, belligerent little kid in the older Pauley’s eyes and the angle of his head.
Pauley laughed and gave him a bear hug that knocked the wind out of him. “Glen’s here too, and Sharon and Tony. Come on, we got some blankets and some cheap Chianti and some dope.” “Chianti” rhymed with “panty,” taking Cole back to 1950s New Jersey.
They began to pick their way through the bodies on the hillside that faced the stage. The air was thick with the odors of sweat, urine, mud and smoke.
“I can’t believe this,” Cole said. “How did you recognize me?”
“We seen you on stage this morning. When that Quirq record came out, Sharon figured out it was you and we told everybody we know. Then somebody saw you was going to be here, and we thought, what the fuck. See Jimi, see Janis, see Jeff, what have we got better to do?”
Up ahead, Cole saw three people sitting on green garbage bags on top of wet, muddy blankets. He would never have recognized them without Pauley’s warning. Tony now had a massive forelock of black hair that eclipsed the upper-right third of his face. Glen’s reddish-brown hair had gone frizzy and was receding at the temples above his fighter-pilot shades. And Sharon had simply grown up. She was only a year younger than Cole and she had gone tall and willowy, flashing a white-toothed smile when they made eye contact.
