by Lewis Shiner
The solo guitar rampage ended with a slow, quiet instrumental of such transcendent beauty that Cole found himself, though he’d thought himself past all that, in tears. The set was nearly over, and with it the fair and whatever hope for transcendence and meaning it had held.
The song ended on a haunting A minor seventh. Hendrix said, “Thank you,” and walked away. Of course the crowd called him back, and after some indecision he made an uninspired pass at “Hey Joe,” his first UK hit from early ’67, so long ago now. When he sang, “Where you gonna run to now?” Cole felt like he’d been shoved up against a wall, and when he answered himself, “way down south, way down to Mexico way,” Cole thought he might do that too.
When Hendrix was gone, Chip Monck came on the pa one last time, with a plea for people to fill up a garbage bag on the way out. Then he said, “May we wish you anything that the person next to you wishes for you—good wishes, good day, and a good life. Thank you.”
After a few more announcements the only sound was the clanking of cans and bottles as people tossed them into bags, and the muted roar of the last few helicopters carrying away the survivors.
Cole stood up. The first step was always the hardest. He got a garbage bag from the stage and found an abandoned pup-tent pole to stir with. He quickly mastered a technique by which he could flip trash into the open bag without having to put his hands in the foul-smelling mud. Though he took his time, all too soon the bag was full. He tied the corners together and left it and began to slowly shuffle toward the road.
“Cole!”
He was sure the voice was a hallucination, so he didn’t bother to respond.
“Cole? Cole, wait up.”
Finally he turned, and there she was, running toward him over the muddy ground, and then she was in his arms, and he still was not ready to believe she was real.
“Laramie?” he said.
“I went to the tepee and they were packing to go and Sugarfoot said you’d been looking for me and looking for me and I thought you’d gone and I was so sorry I ran away and I—”
“Shhhh,” Cole said. He felt the heat of her tears on his neck. “It’s okay now. Everything’s okay now.”
PART TWO
1971
Commencement fell on June 13, a cool, sunny Sunday. Madelyn’s parents had flown in from Dallas and brought Julia along. They were staying at the Creekside Inn on the other side of campus from Madelyn’s apartment; they would pick her up for breakfast in a matter of minutes. She had her cap and gown in a neat pile next to the door, and she waited on the balcony with a cup of black coffee, trying to find a celebratory mood.
Most days she was fine. Between schoolwork and the gallery her life was full; she’d made new friends who’d never met or even heard of Cole. For special occasions, like their anniversary, her birthday, and Christmas, she protected herself with vigilance and scheduled activity. The unexpected was what invariably tripped her up, like today’s utterly unreasonable fear that he might show up to see her graduate.
Nearly two years had passed since Lenny came back from Woodstock, exhausted and forlorn, dragging Cole’s equipment behind him. Madelyn, who’d finished her last final for the summer session the day before, had been celebrating by rereading East of Eden in her bathrobe on the couch. Lenny told her that the festival had been a disaster, their performance a shambles, that it was all Lenny’s fault and that he’d broken up the band. She asked about Cole and Lenny grudgingly admitted that he’d taken up with some groupie, an act for which Madelyn could hardly blame him. What she wasn’t prepared for was Lenny swearing to her that it was the first time, that Cole, despite Madelyn’s refusal to believe it, had been faithful to her until then.
Cole’s subsequent failure to return had brought her months of turmoil. She had a recurring vision of his undiscovered corpse rotting in the Mexican jungle, and on some days she hoped it was true; he deserved it for not having the decency to at least send her a postcard. On other days she tortured herself with the idea that she could have prevented his disappearance, that against all logic and common sense she could have kept the marriage together; after all, Cole had clearly not given up on it, not until she drove him away.
In time she chose to see the breakup as inevitable. Cole’s reaction to it had been his own decision. She only hoped that he hadn’t killed himself, and that he was all right, wherever he was.
Having learned that there was no common-law divorce for a common-law marriage, she made a serious and expensive effort to locate him over the course of a year, mostly to make sure he hadn’t ended up in a hospital somewhere. As part of that effort, she had forced herself to sit through the newly released Woodstock movie in March of 1970, straining her eyes for a glimpse of Cole that never came. Finally, on August 18, 1970, she had boxed up Cole’s belongings, including his guitars and amplifier, and shipped them to Alex in Austin, who’d agreed to store them in the basement of the Castle. Then she’d taken an Affidavit of Diligent Search to a judge and filed for Divorce by Publication. Six months after Cole’s deadline to respond to the published summonses, she was granted a Default Dissolution of Marriage. That had been two and a half months ago, on April 1, a Thursday, a day she had spent waiting for someone to leap up and cry, “April Fool.”
In the meantime, her life had gone on. She’d made straight As every semester, and would graduate with Distinction, the Stanford version of cum laude. She had never accepted Greg Baxter’s advances, but she had accepted others, with pleasure. Experimentation was the fashion, all over the world, and despite waking up alone some nights and missing Cole profoundly, she was grateful for her freedom. She’d found that on the whole she preferred clarity of thought to intoxication, though she was not averse to a joint or a glass of wine when appropriate, as it would certainly be tonight.
Her doorbell rang and her cat, Egon, bolted for the bedroom, claws skittering on the hardwood. She stood up, carefully assembled an approximation of a smile, and went to answer it.
*
The main Commencement ceremony was in Stanford Stadium, to be followed by endless diploma ceremonies. The speaker was Eric Sevareid, who did the two-minute editorial segments on the CBS Evening News. His speech was less inspiring than alarming, as he talked about unrest, dissent, repression, and the rest of “America’s present ills, so many of which are obvious to every one of you.” He ended by extolling middle-class virtues and wishing them luck.
The effect on Madelyn was both powerful and, she was sure, unintended. She hadn’t realized things were so dire. Admittedly, Stanford was an island of privileged calm, but she was aware of the marches and strikes at uc Berkeley and SF State. On those few occasions when she had time to watch tv, scenes of mayhem in Vietnam were unavoidable. Nixon was a thug; his hatchet man Agnew, with his corny alliterations and stunt vocabulary, beneath contempt. Still and all, these were merely friction points as the world moved into the new frontier that Kennedy had promised. Civil rights, Medicare, man on the moon, all checked off, with an end to the war and the passage of the era now seeming inevitable. As inevitable as her own passage into grad school, and after that into her career with Kindred’s gallery.
When she stepped up to receive her diploma, she thought she heard yelling in the stands, which she dismissed as coincidence. But no; the truth was revealed when she met her parents outside the stadium and two familiar figures came shouting and capering toward her.
“Dear God,” she said. “Denise? Alex?”
Alex got there first and wrapped her up in a hug that lifted her out of her shoes. Denise piled on from behind, both of them yelling, “Surprise!”
Eventually breath was recovered, shoes reattached, Denise introduced. Denise looked the same except for bell-bottoms, peasant blouse, and lots of beads and bracelets. Alex could have passed for a Chicano revolutionary in jeans, chambray work shirt, and black curly hair to his shoulders. He’d gone from skinny to well-built, and Julia’s face registered the impression he’d made.
They all
crammed into her parents’ rent-a-car and went for drinks, during which only the most superficial news was available for discussion. Alex and Denise had graduated a month earlier. Denise had gone home to Denton, where she planned to get a Teacher’s Certificate at North Texas State in the fall and “do something with disadvantaged kids or something.”
Alex remained in the house in Austin for the moment. Even as she had to fight off her own memories of the room she’d shared there with Cole, she understood that this was not the place or time for Alex to talk about his future.
Her parents had heard a good deal about Alex and Denise during Madelyn’s freshman year and little since, so they had to be caught up with three years’ worth of events that Madelyn knew about from their letters and phone calls. When they got to Alex’s senior thesis, however, dealing with the Situationist International and the May 1968 insurrections in Paris, her father paid unequivocal attention.
“It was all because of Madelyn,” Alex said. “One of her artists told her to read Society of the Spectacle. This was three years ago, and when she told me about it, I flipped. Only it wasn’t in English yet. So I switched from Russian to French so I could learn to read it.”
«Avez-vous lu Vaneigem?» her father asked. «Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations?»
«Bien sûr,» Alex said. «Bien que ça n’existe toujours pas en anglais.»
Denise turned to Madelyn and launched a separate conversation. “Are you still going through with it? All the way to PhD and then to work for this guy, what’s his name…”
“Kindred,” Madelyn said. She wanted to hear what Alex was saying to her father, but it was hopeless. She reassured Denise that yes, it was what she wanted, art and the occasional class in literature, that in the fall she would start her Teaching Assistantship, and within a year be teaching her own classes.
For her part, Denise had been seduced by the times. She was a work in progress, she said, and before she could change the world she had to perfect herself. “I don’t want some meaningless office job. I don’t want to be a housewife. But what am I good for?”
“You can translate Russian.”
“Not in Denton, Texas, I can’t! Maybe if I moved to New York. Or Moscow.”
“Maybe you should,” Madelyn said.
“Sure I will!” she said, and put her head back and laughed, the way she did when she’d given up on herself.
Her father ordered dinner in stages, an hour’s worth of hors d’oeuvres followed by leisurely entrees, so that it was nine pm by the time they finished dessert and a bottle of cheap champagne. “It’s eleven in Texas,” her father said. “We should turn in.”
“You’ll come over to my place,” Madelyn said to Alex and Denise, and her father agreed to drop the three of them at Alex’s own rental car.
“Can I come too?” Julia said. “Alex can bring me home after.”
“Julia!” her mother said. “You can’t just invite yourself—”
“It’s fine, Mrs. Brooks,” Alex said. “I can bring her back.”
Madelyn kicked him sharply under the table and he pretended not to notice, though with her pointed shoes it must have hurt. Then he fought with her father over the check, her father’s pride easily winning out over the Montoya family money. As they all stood up, her father hugged her and said, “I’m so proud of you.”
“I know,” Madelyn said. “I know you are.”
*
For Alex, it was like he’d spent his life in purgatory, standing motionless in a crowd of millions, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, waiting. Then a voice said, “Alex? Alex Montoya?” and a path opened up, and at the end of it was Guy Debord, who put one arm around his shoulders and talked to him earnestly about the «degradation of being into having,» followed by the sliding of «having into appearing.» We’ve become isolated and alienated, Debord said. We’ve given up our authentic lives to watch representations and buy commodities we don’t need.
Alex saw his life, and his father’s entire world, in everything Debord said. The more you studied the revolution that the Situationists had helped to inspire, the more moving it became. «Under the paving stones, the beach,» they wrote on the walls of Paris, a slogan that took on new poignancy when you understood that the sand they were talking about was exposed when they dug up cobblestones to hurl at the police.
In the fall of 1969, Alex’s junior year, as he took his first French class and struggled through La Société du spectacle, the Revolution began to seriously take hold on the ut campus. Alex’s connection was a guy named James Landon, who had taken over Cole’s room in the Castle. Landon had been to the national sds convention in Chicago, where the organization shattered into splinter groups: Weathermen, the Revolutionary Youth Movement, the Progressive Labor Party, the Worker Student Alliance, Yippies, Motherfuckers, and more. He’d returned full of activist fervor, determined to prove the former sds leaders wrong when they said that students were not a revolutionary force in the US.
Landon’s arch-enemy was Frank Erwin, Chairman of the ut Board of Regents, the most powerful man in the ut system, and a right-wing asshole who had become famous for threatening mass expulsions and saying, “We don’t need 27,000 students at this university.” In October, a week after the biggest fall mobilization ever against the war, Erwin sent bulldozers to take down a stand of old-growth trees near Waller Creek on campus. Landon and other protesters climbed the trees to save them, and Erwin responded by calling in the city cops to pull the students down, beat them, and arrest them. As the bulldozing proceeded, Erwin, with hardhat and bullhorn, applauded each tree that fell.
Alex got drawn in when Landon called him after his Waller Creek arrest and Alex drove downtown to bail him out. They got back in time for a demonstration on the Main Mall where hundreds of students had dragged limbs from the creek to block the steps to the main Tower entrance. It was Alex’s first protest and he was surprised at how much he got off on the cocktail of nerves, righteous anger, and community.
Landon’s temper had not begun to cool down when the Student Union Board voted, in the first week of November, to ban non-students from the Union’s Chuckwagon Café. The move was clearly aimed at the political groups who used the café for meetings, and a confrontation broke out when the police came in and hauled away a runaway girl, with one of the cops waving a gun. A mix of enraged students and street people threw rocks and bottles at the squad car as it drove away.
“Erwin wanted a riot,” Landon said. “He deliberately provoked it so he could take back the Union.” He talked Alex into coming to the protest the next Monday at noon.
It started with speeches on the West Mall outside the Union, then quickly escalated into an occupation of the Chuckwagon, as hundreds of students barged in without showing ids. The University called the city cops, who surrounded the building and gave the protesters until four pm to exit peacefully.
Alex had gotten separated from Landon and ended up sitting on the floor next to a table full of radicals. In chairs on either side of him were a light-skinned black man with a limp afro and a poised white woman in heavy black-framed glasses and hair pulled back in a bun. He was ashamed to admit to either one of them that he wanted to get out before the deadline, and so he stayed.
Scouts returned from the outside with increasingly ominous reports. Dozens of cops were lined up in full riot gear, wearing helmets with Plexiglass visors and gas masks, armed with Mace and teargas and billy clubs. Rows of regular uniformed cops massed behind them. An ominously unmarked panel truck sat at the curb ready to haul away bodies.
Alex tried to reassure himself that things wouldn’t turn violent. The place was full of students, and the old hands among the leadership had gone over the passive resistance tactics they’d used in their civil rights days. Still he found himself paralyzed with fear.
At 4:00 the demonstrators who’d chosen not to get arrested started for the doors. Alex couldn’t see what happened next. He heard an eruption of voice
s, screaming and cursing, and the sounds of scuffling in the hall. He stood up, along with the others at the table, and was trapped by the crush of bodies around him. He heard the glass doors of the Chuckwagon shatter and then he heard shots. A few agonizing seconds later, pale gray smoke began to fill the room.
The woman next to him said, “Teargas. Cover up.” She got a bandana out of her bag, poured a glass of water on it, and tied it over the bottom of her face like a Western outlaw. Alex did what he saw some of the others doing and pulled his T-shirt up over his mouth and nose.
The riot cops were inside the café now and kids were panicking, throwing chairs and turning over tables. Alex was immobilized by the mob as the cops drove them away from the doors. He smelled something bitter at the same moment that his eyes puffed up and began to water and snot began running from his nose. He couldn’t breathe. At the same time he was afraid to suck more gas into his lungs. His bare arms, the exposed skin of his face, and the newly revealed skin of his stomach burned. He had lost all orientation and let himself be carried along as the crowd surged through the kitchen. The floor underfoot was slippery with tears and mucus, drool and vomit, and as they stumbled into the cold outside air, Alex saw people all around him on their hands and knees, throwing up.
He was still half-blind from the gas, coughing though his throat felt shredded. Common sense kept him from rubbing his eyes with his hands, which, like all of his exposed skin, felt scorched. He staggered to a tree and leaned against it until his breath came somewhat normally and his vision mostly cleared.
In front of the Union, protesters had gone on the attack. Regular uniformed cops tried to push the bystanders aside while riot cops dragged struggling kids toward the van on Guadalupe Street. A second line of riot cops stood with their arms folded, doing nothing as enraged students screamed at them and threw anything they could find—rocks, bottles, fruit, fallen tree branches. Knots of protesters struggled with the first wave of cops, pulling victims free and hustling them away. The air was full of angry voices, and Alex heard a woman’s voice nearby cry out, “Fuck you, you fucking pig!” followed by a long scream. Alex smelled the hot pepper odor of Mace, saw a riot cop knock a kid to the sidewalk with his club, saw another cop take a blow to the helmet from a thrown Coke bottle and shrug it off. Some of the students had moved into the street, trying to slash the tires of the van.
