When they got back to England, the band would either go on or it wouldn’t. Brian would either look after himself or he wouldn’t. He and Keith would either spend ten years in prison or they would make another record. When he was onstage, things went fast and he solved each problem in the same moment that it arose, building momentum, forgetting himself. But in ordinary life, even with the others around, there were times when there was nothing to say or do and everyone looked aimless and false.
He remembered the morning before the bust at Keith’s house, the way the bare trees had started to shine like aluminum, the way the rocky beach had aligned itself all at once into endless ranks of perfectly situated debris. It was strange how the past was still there, even after all this time of pretending that it didn’t matter. He realized that Keith was the only person he trusted.
They were walking through the Jemaa el Fna, Keith and Anita, buoyant and laughing and stoned, feeling free of everything that had happened the night before. Her hair was disheveled and greasy, and her mascara was smudged. Both of her eyes were bruised, but they were holding hands, determined to push things further, if only for the sake of pushing things further. He had no idea how long this was going to last and he didn’t care.
A band of gnaoua musicians were shaking their iron castanets in the center of a circled crowd. They leered and stuck out their tongues, or suddenly froze in a suspicious, sideways glare, but it was daytime and there was no menace in their poses. They wore bright silk tunics and high-crowned, tasseled fezzes studded with cowrie shells.
“Lovely country,” Keith said.
He reached down for the cheap Kodak camera that dangled from his neck. At the last second, Anita leaned into the picture from the side, almost stumbling, smiling at her own clumsiness as she pressed her hand to the crown of her floppy white hat.
“Greetings from Morocco,” she said.
“Right. I’ll send it home to Mum.”
“Dear Mum, this is my friend, the Whore of Babylon. Note the damaged look in her eyes.”
“Yes, please send money. Care of Scotland Yard.”
In four months, Keith would appear in court for his drug trial, and some remnant of the feeling he had now would come back to him then. He would tell the court what he thought of five policemen invading his house, peering into his privacy. He would wear one of Anita’s scarves around his neck. During the recesses, he would order expensive lunches from his cell and get drunk on wine. When they asked him about the naked girl in the upstairs bedroom, he would say that he was not an old man and did not share their petty moral outrage, that the girl had just been taking a nap and that in any case she was his friend. When it was over, he would emerge from the trial transformed, a swaggering outlaw figure, no longer a lone misfit, no longer the shy dreamer who had been preyed upon at school by older boys who called him a faggot and a girl. He didn’t know that the next night the police would raid Brian’s flat, the flat in Earl’s Court he had shared with Anita, and frame him for possession of cocaine. When he thought of Brian now — leaving Brian by himself in the hotel — he couldn’t picture Brian himself, only the empty room.
LUV N’ HAIGHT, 1966–1967
THE BOY’S NAME was Bobby Beausoleil. His last name meant “Beautiful Sun,” he’d told Anger. He had the kind of cheekbones that formed triangular shadows beneath his eyes, and the eyes themselves were an unlikely, almost violet shade of blue.
“This is like a test,” Anger said, crouching behind the camera. “I just need to see what you look like on film.”
Bobby was looking not above Anger’s head, as some people would have, but right into the lens, his hands clasped behind his back. He wore a kind of swashbuckler’s shirt with puffy sleeves and a set of crossed laces at the collar.
“I’ve never seen your films,” he said.
“No. But this has nothing to do with my other films.”
“I was just saying, I’d like to see them.”
Anger moved around him with the light meter in his hand, checking the levels near his face. It was a slightly intrusive process, but Bobby did not seem bothered by it. He tilted his head a little, determined not to falter, determined to make the most of what he was already thinking of as his chance.
“My last film was very black,” said Anger. “Motorcycles. People falling in love with death, that sort of thing. I’m trying to make the opposite of that now. What I was talking to you about before.”
“The Lucifer idea.”
“Something about San Francisco. The whole thing of peace and flowers. I want to understand what that’s about.”
They were in the bedroom of Anger’s new apartment, on the ground floor of a crumbling Victorian house in the Haight-Ashbury district. He had painted the walls purple, and with black and silver paint he had transformed the egg-and-dart molding into what looked like a runner of studded leather. The result was calming, occult, dreamlike. The windows were recessed in high alcoves, and at the top of each, still intact, were frescoes of women’s faces, windblown and ethereal.
“People falling in love with death,” said Bobby. He gave a little sniff of something like laughter, then looked at the purple wall. “I’ve known some people like that.”
“I suppose there were lots of them in high school,” Anger joked.
“I was kicked out of high school.”
“So what does that mean? Reform school? Juvenile hall?”
“Are you filming this?”
“What?”
“I’m just wondering if you’re filming all this. How much of this anyone is going to see.”
It was spring, 1966. Anger would go for walks in his new neighborhood, a slum taken over by young people, and try to make sense of the odd mishmash of deterioration and adornment: broken stairways with freshly painted railings, run-down porches crawling with morning glories or draped with a faded American flag. He saw young people holding hands and whispering to each other, or sitting on the sidewalk playing guitars, barefoot, the muscles moving solemnly in their shoulders and arms. In Golden Gate Park, he saw streams of soap bubbles drifting over the lawn, flashing prisms of light, and in the distance behind them there might be anything: a group of truant schoolkids, a girl with a German shepherd, a cross-eyed boy in black body paint juggling a set of knives. Everyone under thirty had decided to be an exception: a musician, a runaway, an artist, a star. They seemed unaware of any past that was not as safe or malleable as this present.
He had met Bobby last week at a concert in an old church that was now a community center. LSD was still legal, and it sent tight cords of tension up Anger’s legs and his spine, his skull nothing more than a diaphanous veil. In the darkened building, Bobby’s band was playing in front of a movie screen that showed otherworldly scenes from nature: the blue and red membranes of dividing cells, the pink torrent of corpuscles rushing through a vein, the solar glow of an embryo in the black ink of its amniotic sac. Onstage were conga players, trumpeters, guitarists, violinists, five girls dressed only in harem pants, circling their naked breasts with their outstretched fingers. At the side of the stage was Bobby, playing guitar in front of one of these girls, dressed in a purple cape and a black top hat that shone in alternating bands of white and blue. The song he played had no chorus, no verse, no recognizable structure at all. Perhaps it was a new kind of music, or perhaps it was just noise. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the way his hair fell all the way down to his shoulders, beneath his top hat, like a woman’s hair. He went into a gradual crouch before the girl, bending the knees of his fringed buckskin pants, and she trailed her silk scarf over his shoulders. For a brief moment they both appeared to be framed inside the red and gold border of an antique playing card that buckled and threw off motes of light. Then the image melted into a neon impression of Times Square. Anger could see the revolving red lights as Bobby tilted his head and, in another aspect of his showmanship, ran the tip of his tongue over the girl’s sweat-glistening breast.
Afterward, Anger tracked h
im down in the parking lot, where he and his girlfriend were loading equipment into a van. He was a filmmaker, he said, he was making a film, would the boy have any interest in playing a part in his next film?
His girlfriend put her fingers on Bobby’s cheek and whispered something into his ear. He turned to her and whispered something back. Then the girl looked at Anger with a furtive smile, a smile that echoed and expanded and gleamed.
He was eighteen, Bobby told Anger that afternoon. Most people thought he was older because he’d been living on his own for the past year and a half, first in L.A, then in San Francisco. His parents in Santa Barbara had kicked him out, because he was out of their control. He would disappear for a couple of days, sometimes more, not even realizing it, just forgetting to call home, forgetting why it mattered. It was his dreaminess that his father never understood. It was what they fought about day after day, for as long as he could remember.
When he was sixteen, they’d sent him to a reform school north of Sacramento, where he’d lived in a barracks with thirty other boys, digging ditches, moving rocks, cleaning bathrooms, loading sacks of potatoes onto flatbed trucks and then riding with the trucks to the grader to unload them. For a year, he’d worn the same uniform as everyone else. Like everyone else’s, his hair had been shorn with an electric clipper, so that the curve of his skull shone like a knob beneath the taut gray skin. Eventually he lost his real name and was called by a nickname chosen by the others, a way of being told all over again that he would be perceived in a way that had nothing to do with who he was. There were fights almost every day — fights behind the mess hall, fights in the showers, fights with bare fists or with plungers or with brooms or with knives from the kitchen. He learned to fight with a joyless focus that made his opponents lose interest, until eventually his friendship became coveted and he didn’t have to fight at all anymore.
When he got out of reform school, he was seventeen. He lived with his parents for an abortive month, then he lived for a while in a trailer with a thirty-six-year-old woman. In the meantime, he’d started playing with a rock band in L.A., a band who had a recording contract now — who were on their way to becoming famous — but who had told Bobby he was too young, too pretty-looking, that they were serious musicians and he had to leave.
Anger couldn’t stop looking at him that afternoon. He could feel the faint tension as Bobby paced the room, wondering perhaps if Anger was even listening. At times, it was like looking at a beautiful girl, a diffuse desire that he wasn’t quite sure what to do with. At other times, the desire was so blatant that he could feel his face burn.
“There’s this thing about women,” Bobby told him. “You get to a point with them where they can’t say no without hurting themselves, some idea they have about themselves. I used to go to nightclubs in this very straight outfit, suit and tie, my hair all combed and watered. I would have a Coke or a ginger ale. It was like, ‘Oh, I’m just this lost little boy. So shy I can barely talk to you. Maybe you could take me home.’ ”
“A good act,” said Anger.
“But it wasn’t an act. I never thought it was an act. If I did, I never would have been able to do it.”
He was making a film about Lucifer, yes, but it was not the devil he was talking about, not the pitchfork and the horns, not the spooky thing from the movies. Lucifer was a god of light, a child god, the fallen angel who after two thousand years of repression was finally coming back. He was the god of desire, illicit desire, the liberator, the revelator. How could he explain it to someone like Bobby, whom Anger could not look at without seeing the angel’s wholly unknowing embodiment? He’d said that it was just a way of naming or looking at things that were happening in the world right now, a kind of mythology he liked to play around with sometimes, a way of describing how the world was changing, opening it up to deeper meanings. Yes, he’d told Bobby, Lucifer was the role he would play in the film, but it wasn’t worth thinking about very much. All he would really be doing was just playing himself. At first, it would just be a matter of watching him, watching him and seeing what happened.
They started by making little films around town: at Golden Gate Park, in front of the Diggers’ “free store” on Frederick Street. One day they went for a drive north of the city toward Bolinas, the camera and the equipment in the back of the station wagon, Bobby at the wheel, Anger in the passenger seat. Through the windows, the hills were a pale brown, like wheat, and the ocean, when they glimpsed it, was gray beneath the fog.
“I’m going down to L.A. for a while,” Bobby said.
Anger looked down at his hands on his legs.
“We have to get something going,” Bobby said. “The band. All the record companies are down there.” The road flattened and rose into a gradual incline, and he gripped the lever on the steering column, forcing it into lower gear.
“I thought we were making a film,” said Anger.
“Well, there’s that too. That’s obviously a priority. But the band is about to go somewhere. I can feel that.”
Anger nodded slowly. At the end of the hill, on their left, they saw the beginnings of the event they were about to attend. Beyond a row of picnic tables and a pair of outhouses, someone had erected a kind of pavilion made of different-colored bedsheets. Around it were people in costume — a boy with a flute and a leather vest, a boy in a painted cape and a wizard’s hat. It was a style that mostly eluded Anger, an irreverent humor that never settled on innocence or sarcasm but wavered between them. Bobby was already smiling in the strange, coded way that Anger had learned to recognize, the smile of people who were younger than he was.
“How long will you be gone?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe a few months? It’s up in the air.”
“A few months.”
“Like I said, it’s not set in stone. We’re going to be lining things up once we get there. Showcases and things.”
“It sounds like maybe it’s not set at all.”
Bobby stared straight ahead through the windshield. “We won’t know until we get there,” he said. “That’s all I know for now. I told you from the very beginning that the band was what I was about. I would think that you of all people would understand that.”
Anger immersed himself in work, just like his father, who had spent all his spare time in his garage, fixated on his machines. After Bobby left, he did an elaborate reediting of a film he now saw could be called “psychedelic,” a film called Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. He added superimpositions, doubling and tripling the images so that the action seemed to take place in a vast, floating darkness. He synced each cut to the music, jumbling the separate tableaux until they began to build a rhythm, finessing tension and drama out of nothing but images. Outside it was June. The streets were lined with sycamores whose leaves were yellow-green and full of the strange, quasi-tropical succulence that reminded him of the trees of his childhood in Santa Monica. He stayed inside the editing room; he tried not to think about why he was there. The work was time-consuming, and for ten or twelve hours he would lose himself in its intricacies.
It was fine, until a package arrived, three days after Bobby left. It was an overstuffed manila envelope containing a motorcycle T-shirt and an anonymous note, a quotation from The Sephiroth: “Look into the sightless Eye of the Moon and see what Light glows there. There is no Life without Death. You have been sleepwalking. Now go back to bed and dream of the Sun.”
The T-shirt was ripped and covered with brownish stains, obviously bloodstains. It was silk-screened with a picture of a BSA motorcycle. Anger guessed right away who it was from, because a month ago Bruce Byron had sent a telegram, the latest in a series, congratulating him on the success of Scorpio Rising, its interesting ideas, and leaving the implication that he was somehow owed money.
Bobby was gone for six days when there was a phone call. Less than an hour later, he showed up in front of the crumbling Victorian house with his guitar wrapped in an army blanket against the rain. His hair was
wet and his white buccaneer’s shirt hung from his body like a soaked, transparent rag. Someone had stolen his money, or he had lost his money — it would never be clear when Bobby talked about money. From what he’d told Anger on the phone, he had slept the night before in an abandoned car.
The two of them stood in the front hall, Bobby in a puddle of water that was absolutely clear, like new varnish on the pine floor.
“He just turned on me,” he said. “That’s how it is with people like that.”
“Who?” said Anger.
“I don’t know. This spade cat, Donald, it’s not important.”
Anger bowed his head as Bobby came farther inside, hugging his guitar to his chest.
“I’ll have to go back later,” he said. “I just need to cool out for a while. They have my clothes, everything.”
They went past the kitchen and into the apartment’s extra bedroom. It was an old ballroom with molded ceilings and high windows that looked out on the sycamores below. It was cluttered with boxes. Bobby peeled off his shirt, dropping it on the floor, his back to Anger. He roughed up his hair with his fingers. He bent over and let its ends fall to his knees, then stood up straight and flipped his head up so that the wet black strands shot back over his shoulders.
“I appreciate this,” he said, looking into Anger’s eyes.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“No, really. I appreciate it.”
His face was younger and plainer without all of his hair falling over his forehead. Bare-chested, his white skin taut with goose pimples, he looked like a high school boy damp from the shower after gym.
Anger moved some of his boxes and trunks into the closet and stacked some others against the two far walls. He plugged a desk lamp into the socket by the window, trying not to look at him.
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