by Lewis Shiner
“Look what the cat drug in,” Pauley said.
Tony, whom he hadn’t known that well, stuck out a hand to shake. Glen got up to give him a one-armed hug, the other hand holding a cigarette, and Sharon, turned shy, looked down at her lap and said, “Hi, Jeff.”
Cole sat down and accepted a swig of wine from a jug in a straw basket. As soon as he passed the wine on, a fat joint arrived from the kids next to them. Cole took a substantial hit and sent it on its way. Tony sat on the sidelines as Pauley and Glen caught him up on the last 11 years. Sharon contributed a word here and there, hugging her knees, watching all of them, looking away and blushing whenever Cole met her gaze.
Pauley was at ccm, County College of Morris, trying to keep his ii-s deferment without giving up nightly parties. Glen was home for the summer from Rutgers in Newark, and Sharon, who’d just graduated high school, would join him there in the fall. Both had jobs to help pay for school, Glen at a construction site, Sharon in a hospital. Glen and Sharon’s dad had finally made it to the day shift. Tony had gone straight from high school to working in his father’s chain of pizza parlors. “Which I fucking hate,” he said, the first words he’d spoken since Cole arrived. “My father makes me wear a fucking hair net.” Two kids Cole knew had been drafted right out of high school and sent to Vietnam, both still alive as of last report. Phil Donleavy, who had lived down the street, had been struck by lightning while on a Boy Scout camping trip to Pyramid Mountain. The scoutmaster had revived him with artificial respiration, but his brain was damaged and he was now stuck at a fourth-grade level. Cindy Roper, whom Cole had had a crush on in third grade, had been high school valedictorian and gone off to Radcliffe.
Cole couldn’t explain why it seemed so odd that all of these people had gone on in his absence to grow up and have their own lives. The world became impossibly complex because of it, three and a half billion people, all of them with pasts and aspirations, struggling forward in the darkness toward their own individual ideas of dawn.
Beneath the constant roar of the helicopters, someone on stage was reading a poem: “I make a pact with you… I make peace with you…” The wind and helicopters carried most of the rest away. Odd music followed, plucking and tinkling and singing not quite in key, and Pauley said, “Ah, the Unlistenable String Band. Whose genius idea was this?”
Cole remembered something he’d heard backstage. “They didn’t want to play in the rain yesterday.”
“Pussies,” Pauley said, and the others laughed.
“When did you start playing guitar?” Sharon asked politely, and Cole told his story, zigzagging to pick up Villahermosa and Midland and Suez. In third grade, Cole had been picked last and exiled to right field. He’d been teased about his jeans, bought extra-large to keep up with his growth spurts, and the iron-on patches on their knees. He’d been tolerated more than liked, though Glen had eventually warmed to his ability to make wooden toy guns in his father’s shop. Now Glen and Pauley looked at each other in disbelief when he talked about touring with the Airplane, playing the Fillmore, getting wined and dined by Atlantic Records.
“Man,” Pauley said, “you must be getting more ass than a toilet seat.”
Cole felt Sharon’s eyes on him. “No, it’s not like that. I mean, there are opportunities, sure, but being married and all…”
“What are you,” Pauley said, “fucking nuts?”
No, Cole thought, just a hypocrite.
“We’ve got some peanut butter,” Sharon said, breaking the tension, “and some jelly and a loaf of bread. If you’re hungry.”
“You guys go ahead,” Cole said. “There’s food backstage whenever I want it.”
She made sandwiches and cut them into triangles, then handed them off to Glen and Pauley and Tony and put one aside for herself. Then she made four more and passed them to their immediate neighbors. A steady stream of food, drink, and drugs had passed through their hands as they talked, a hip recreation of the loaves and fishes that included a bag of Fritos, a bottle of Pagan Pink Ripple, a paper cup of cream of tomato soup, two joints, some cold French fries, and a quart of warm beer.
The Incredible String Band had taken some heckling, and at the end of one song the guitar player abruptly said, “We have to leave now. I’d like to say goodbye to you and thank you very much. Goodbye.”
“Good riddance!” Pauley shouted toward the stage and a few people around them applauded him.
Cole shifted around until he was leaning back on his elbows, his legs stretched out partway into a neighbor’s blanket, who looked around at Cole and nodded an okay. Sharon, after cleaning up, ended up on his left, facing him instead of the stage. Glen had turned toward him too, leaving Pauley and Tony symbolically cut off on the far edge of the blanket.
“When I graduated high school,” Glen said, “I still thought one hit of marijuana would instantly make you a heroin addict. When Sergeant Pepper came out, I thought it was scary. Now look at us.” He held both arms straight out. Due to the curvature of the ground, Cole couldn’t see anything but other people in all directions. “Everybody smokes dope. Everybody digs the same music. Being here all in one place like this, we can all see that. It’s going to change the world.”
Cole remembered having the same thought as the helicopter brought him in. The Quirq’s lame performance and subsequent demise had cost him that feeling of consensus and put him on the outside looking in. As failure had a way of doing.
“Well,” Cole said, not wanting to spoil the mood, “the world is ripe for changing.”
In the silence, Sharon said, “I need to use the toilets. Jeff, would you walk over there with me?”
“Sure,” Cole said. “I’ll take you backstage. They’re not as gross.”
When they stood up, Pauley said, “Glen, you going to let your sister go off with this pervert guitar player?”
“Shut up, Pauley,” Sharon said tiredly.
As they walked away, Pauley shouted, “For God’s sake, wear a rubber!”
“Jealous, is he?” Cole asked.
“He thinks because he’s Glen’s friend and we all grew up together that he’s got dibs on me. I try to put up with him for Glen’s sake, only sometimes I wish… I don’t think he’s a good influence on Glen. He got him smoking dope, and now they’re both taking lsd too.”
“Glen’ll be all right.”
“Glen’s all excited about the way everything’s changing. He thinks we’re going to end the war and impeach Nixon and legalize drugs and it’s going to be one long party after that.”
“And you don’t?”
“I just want a normal life. I want to meet a nice guy and get married and have a couple of kids. A nice house and a big yard and a dog.”
As they approached the backstage fence, Sharon picked up on Cole’s anxiety. “Looking for somebody?”
“I, uh, was supposed to meet a friend earlier, and they didn’t show up.”
“Female friend?” Cole’s discomfort answered the question for him. “Don’t worry, Jeff. Your secret is safe with me.”
While Sharon used the facilities, Cole grabbed a plate of lunch meat and a cold six-pack. The sun had just set as they started back. Darkness settled in and candles began to sparkle on the hillside. Canned Heat played one loud, distorted blues shuffle after another, to Pauley’s evident satisfaction, as he periodically cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Boogie!” at the stage.
Cole’s usual sunset melancholy was particularly acute. He made a point of drinking from every wine bottle and taking a hit of every joint that came his way. Canned Heat gave way to Mountain, then the rain started to fall again. He ended up huddled under an umbrella with Sharon. He was pretty sure she wanted him to kiss her, an idea that struck Cole as bad in more ways than he could count.
The Grateful Dead came on, then stopped after two songs to completely rewire the stage, which seemed to take forever as various band members babbled into the microphones. They noodled at “Dark Star” for a while, then w
ent into an interminable “Turn on Your Love Light.” Cole had begun to nod off. He came to in the middle of Creedence playing “Proud Mary.” It was one in the morning and surely, Cole thought, Laramie would be at the tepee.
He stood up and said, “It was great seeing you guys. Maybe I’ll come by tomorrow.”
“No you won’t,” Sharon said softly.
They all hugged him except Tony, who was passed out cold. Glen said, “We’ll always remember our brush with fame.”
“Cut it out,” Cole said.
Sharon held him tightly and kissed his cheek and whispered, “I hope you find her.”
He made his slow, careful way through the sprawled bodies to the road, then hurried through the woods to the campground. Despite his best efforts, he discovered that he had not adequately prepared himself for the disappointment of finding Laramie’s empty sleeping bag. He pulled his boots off and got inside, and, with the smell of their lovemaking in his nose, he fled from unhappiness into sleep.
He woke up each time a new band took the stage, and around four in the morning some acoustic anomaly brought him the sound of Sly Stone exhorting the audience to sing “Higher” with him. By the time the Airplane came on at eight am, every lump under the tent floor had a matching bruise on his body. He dragged himself onto his feet and watched the Airplane from the top of the hill by the concession stands, two of which had apparently burned down during the night.
He went backstage to find some breakfast and saw Grace sitting at one of the tables. “Great set,” he said as he passed.
“Cole?” she said sternly. He turned back. “Cole, you have clearly gone native and lost your mind. You smell even worse than you look. You are going to the hotel, where you will dispose of those clothes and clean yourself. You do have a room there, yes?”
“Yes,” Cole said.
“Do you need me to find you a helicopter, or are you capable of doing that on your own?”
“I’ll do it,” Cole said.
He wandered out to the landing zone and caught a ride. The lobby of the Holiday Inn could have been on another planet—clean, dry, and comparatively quiet, though he could hear the party still going on in the lounge. He went to his room and saw that the others had checked out and the rollaway beds were gone. He took a long, hot shower and lay down for a few minutes to get his strength back.
When he woke up it was two in the afternoon. He dressed in fresh blue jeans, a clean white T-shirt, and a plaid flannel shirt. He’d adopted the uniform in Mountain Lakes because of the Hardy Boys serials on the Mickey Mouse Club. He cleaned the worst of the mud off his boots and put two pairs of socks on underneath.
The kitchen was still serving breakfast, so Cole had three eggs and hash browns and toast and coffee and juice. The plastic bag in his room that held his filthy clothes was the only evidence that what he’d lived through for the past two days was real. He could easily get a ride into the city and exchange his plane ticket and be on a flight to San Francisco by that evening.
The idea filled him with despair.
Whatever it was that had hold of him, it was more than Laramie, more than the music, more than just another gig, more than mud and cold and bad smells and crowds.
He went to his room, brushed his teeth, and put the toothbrush and travel size toothpaste in his jeans pocket. He packed his suitcase, checked it at the front desk, and told them he was through with the room.
Outside the skies had gone black and the trees at the edge of the parking lot whipped from side to side. He saw a pilot tying down the rotors of his helicopter. “You’re not going back to the fair?” Cole asked. He had to shout over the wind.
“Are you crazy?” the pilot said, and pointed at the sky. At that moment lightning flickered nearby, followed immediately by booming thunder and the first drops of rain.
Cole waited out the storm in the lounge. It lasted more than two hours, a relentless, pounding deluge, with curtains of water like tidal waves slamming into the windows of the dining room. At one point a balding guy in a Holiday Inn green staff smock came in and talked to Hendrix, who was holed up in a corner with his entourage. “They may cancel the rest of the fair,” the man said, and Cole felt a surge of helpless panic. “They want you to stay put for a while longer while they decide.”
“Oh, man,” Hendrix said. “God does not love this festival.”
By 5:30 the rain had slacked off and the guy in the smock returned. “They’re going ahead, but everything’s delayed. You’re going to come on late. Like really, really late.”
“How late?”
“They don’t know yet. There’s like seven or eight acts still to go before you.”
At the desk Cole learned that thousands and thousands of people had left during the rain and that the roads were negotiable again. Shortly after six he caught a ride in a limo with guys from the Butterfield band, none of whom had played on the first two records that Cole owned.
The limo dropped them off at the performers’ pavilion. Crew members were once again sweeping water off the stage. Small lakes had formed in every concavity, and everything glistened and shone in the setting sun. The crowd near the stage looked the same, but high on the hillside it had thinned considerably. At the edges, kids had made the most of the situation and were sliding in the mud while bystanders beat out rhythms on cans and bottles. Dozens, maybe hundreds of people had turned completely brown with mud from head to foot.
Below stage right, Cole saw a bearded guy in a straw cowboy hat, white shirt, and vest. Embarrassed, unable to stop himself, he said, “Levon? Levon Helm?”
“That’s right.”
Cole introduced himself and they shook hands. Levon introduced him to the man next to him, who turned out to be Richard Manuel. Cole registered little more than bad posture and a lot of black curly hair. Cole said, “I saw you guys back in 1965 in Dallas, touring with Dylan.”
“Some kind of basketball arena, wasn’t it?” Levon said. “That was a good show. Bob always said y’all in Texas were the only ones that understood what he was trying to do.”
“It changed my life,” Cole said. “I started playing guitar because of you guys.”
That flustered Levon as much as it did Cole. “Y’all on tonight?” Levon finally asked.
“We were yesterday morning,” Cole said. “We were terrible.”
Levon and Manuel both laughed and Manuel said, “I know what that’s like.”
“Amen,” Levon said. “It happens to the best of us.”
Cole went out the gate and struck off for the free stage area. The roads were full of people leaving and Cole heard them complain in tired voices, “… be so glad to get home…”, “… what a fucking disaster…”, “… believe I have to be at work in the morning?” Cole wanted to plead with them not to go, not to give up, that it wasn’t over yet.
He had nowhere to walk where the ground didn’t suck at his boots. The trees were soaked and dripping, and the open areas were strewn with bottles and shoes and bits of paper and plastic wrap and blankets and sleeping bags, all coated in homogenous brown mud.
When he got to the site where the tepee had been, he tried to convince himself that he was in the wrong place. But the circle it had left behind was the only visible grass in a sea of mud, and Cole recognized the stones that had held the campfire.
He had not, he realized, had much hope of finding her. No point now in his last ditch plan to have Chip page her from the stage.
He retraced his steps toward the main stage for what felt like the hundredth time. A drummer began playing rapid cut time over the pa and Chip introduced Country Joe and the Fish. Cole had retreated into numbness, like a man who had gambled away his life savings yet was unable to leave the casino. He was no longer hungry or thirsty, sleepy or angry or anything else. He only wanted the music to keep going, because when it finally stopped he would have nowhere to go.
He sat on the side of the stage through the Fish show, and, after sunset, through more blues from Ten Years A
fter. Levon gave him a thumbs-up as the Band took their places around ten pm. Robbie Robertson’s guitar was high in the mix and Cole admired the complexity of his work at the same time that the very idea of guitar playing laid him low, as if The Quirq’s failure and Laramie’s disappearance were part of the same loss.
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young finished around four am. During the lull afterward, Cole slept for a while on his corner of the stage. The Butterfield Blues Band woke him at dawn. His muscles ached from sleeping on the bare wood floor, so he walked out into the audience. A steady exodus through the night had left only a few thousand people to hear Sha Na Na and the opening of Hendrix’s set.
Cole found an abandoned camp stool and set it up at the edge of the crowd where he wasn’t blocking anyone’s view. It was nine in the morning by the time Hendrix came out, dressed in a red scarf, white fringed jacket, blue jeans. He had two conga players, a second guitarist, a bass player Cole didn’t know, and Mitch Mitchell from the Experience on drums. He remembered seeing Hendrix in San Antonio with Madelyn and Denise and Alex, only a year and a half ago in calendar time.
Hendrix himself radiated the same melancholy that pulled at Cole. He played a few of the expected hits, some new material, and a couple of slow numbers where his new guitarist sang lead, including Curtis Mayfield’s “Gypsy Woman.” The new songs lacked the verve and wit of Hendrix’s early albums, as if he’d emptied himself in one sustained burst of pyrotechnics.
After an hour and a half, and an extended version of “Voodoo Child,” he stepped up to the mike and said, “Thank you again, you can leave if you want to, we’re just jamming, that’s all, okay? You can leave or you can…” The rest was inaudible as Hendrix turned to his guitar. The jam wrapped up and out of the chaos Hendrix began to play “The Star-Spangled Banner,” an unaccompanied, exploding, blood-soaked version straight out of Vietnam and Watts. From there he played a perfunctory “Purple Haze” that ended with Hendrix alone on guitar again for five solid minutes of tortured screams and howls, and Cole saw that Hendrix didn’t have any answers either, that he was tired and frustrated and maybe disappointed that the new band hadn’t changed things.
