“Come on, old buddy. We got work to do,” he said, ribbing Tinker from his reverie with an elbow.
Blue confided nothing to his friend as he led him back along the street, rushing past potters and leather workers, silversmiths and street artists, reaching the end of the hippie population and heading toward the skid row familiarity of their hotel.
In the room, Blue stood in front of the cracked bureau mirror running his comb in unfamiliar directions through his hair until it hung in the style Karma had once imposed; he had returned it to its customery ducktail upon departure from the Human Rainbow Commune. Picking up his guitar he turned to Tinker.
“Come on, buddy. We’re going to infiltrate the enemy, to quote the other fellow.”
12
“Cripes, Tinker, I wish people would stop dropping drugs into my hat,” Blue complained as he shifted aside a couple of purple cigarettes and a small rabbitturd of hashish to count out a dollar and seventy-three cents in very small change. For three days, they had been propped against the brick wall of a building teaching Sgt. Pepper and Bob Dylan a few things about music. Blue, studying the trickle of change into his blue hat, read the tide of its ebb and flow, noting that Tinker’s songs took in revenue at a rate of ten to one to his own singing. He finally settled back like what’s-his-name, Brian Epstein, to chord and plot the course of their partnership which would take them all the way from their meagre beginnings in hippie Heaven to the golden halo of spotlight that fell on the stage of Ryman Hall. Destiny. Sometimes a man can feel it against all the odds.
Occasionally, Blue left Tinker to sing a cappella while he did a reconnaissance of the competition and concluded that they weren’t doing any better or worse than most, except for a classical violinist who at his sidewalk location introduced Bach to the Beatles, where the two got along famously. The violinist had the unfair advantage of possessing only one arm, managing the bow with an ingenious contraption which he operated with his teeth. Why a guy who would have no trouble getting himself a disability pension would go through all the trouble of learning to play the violin with one arm and thirty-two teeth was a mystery to Blue, and he resented the pisspot full of money the fiddler’s top hat was taking in. Despite the unfairness of that competition, Tinker and Blue averaged enough to eat, buy Blue’s cigarettes, and put a few dollars toward another week of luxury in their home-sweet-home away from home. The profit margin beyond those immediate needs was assigned to their gas-money-home account, current balance: zero.
Tinker’s repertoire didn’t include a lot of the popular stuff sung in this particular corner of the planet. His renditions of Irish rebel songs, Scottish ballads, Cape Breton classics and select choices from the country and western charts disoriented those who stopped to listen. They said, “Wow!” a lot and walked away befuddled by this crack in their Universe where old wars were celebrated while the people on the street were trying to stop a current one. It broke the symmetry of this make-love-not-war neighbourhood.
To please his audience, Tinker pulled out of the air around him the melodies and words that appealed to him, practising what he could remember back in their room. “Pretty heavy into this love and peace business there, aren’t you, Tinker?” Blue said in his review of Tinker’s new material while acknowledging that it made them more money than “Molly Bawn.”
Tinker, as usual, chose the words he sang carefully. He didn’t care if a song was sentimental or rowdy or filled with rage or warm with love so long as he believed the story. Unlike Blue, he had written no songs of his own that he needed to sing; they had already been written for him. What appealed to him here in San Francisco, and what he found in common with Cape Breton, was that music ran through the core of what newspapers called the counter culture just like it ran through the culture back home. People defined themselves with it, recognized each other through it. Music was really the only way into this counter culture, he realized. His hair hid all but his lobes now, and his red polka-dot handkerchief was tied around his thigh instead of poking a small pennant of itself from his back pocket, but without the music he wouldn’t learn much at all about where he was.
Hoping he wouldn’t offend the well-meaning gestures that rained drugs into his hat, Blue told the monied people who stopped to listen, “Thanks for the quarter, Mac, and listen, for another one you can have your choice of those purple cigarettes there.” It turned out to be a brisk trade once Tinker and Blue discussed its ethical implications, reasoning, like the hippie in the back seat of the Plymouth, that the quicker they got rid of the drugs the less chance they would have of getting arrested for them. According to Blue’s high-school Economics class, they were simply unloading an inventory of commodities that their company had no interest in carrying. That argument carried them through a couple of days until Tinker woke up sweating from a nightmare of being arrested as a drug pusher, a profession which, unlike its first cousin, bootlegging, was universally scorned in Cape Breton. Blue had to call upon all his theological and business knowledge to assure his friend that there was nothing wrong with bartering the products that fell by chance into his hat.
“Listen, Tinker, you know a lot about motors but you don’t know anything about running a business. I studied all about it in Economics and here’s how it works. I have something and you want it. We make a deal. Transaction completed. Sure, sometimes it might be a little illegal but in business, if you don’t get caught everything’s okay. Even the Church will tell you that. Look at the Mafia, for God’s sake. They’re all Catholics right from Italy and you can’t get any more Catholic than that, and the Mafia makes the most perfect Catholics of all because they’re organized just like the Church. They go around cementing people to the bottom of rivers and all that, but it’s just business, Tinker, because they still go to church every Sunday and give gobs of money to the priests and get forgiven.
“The Church understands this because when they used to go off on crusades and kill a couple of million pagans, well, it was just Church business. It had nothing to do with Jesus Christ or the Mass or anything the Church believes in. It was just business, buddy, looting and pillaging to build cathedrals to the greater Glory of God. They tell you to love your fellow man, but if you can’t, they’ll forgive you. That’s what the priests are there for, to make everything all right.”
Tinker went back to sleep praying not to get caught and reminding himself that if he had to confess to being a drug pusher he had better do it here in San Francisco before he went back home where the priest always recognized his voice, called him Tinker, and told him to say three Hail Marys every night for the strength to stop indecently assaulting himself.
The next morning they went back to business as usual.
—
“According to Article One, Section Two, Paragraph Three of our union contract with this city, there will be no singing in the rain, Tinker,” Blue announced as he emptied the contents of his blue hat into his pocket, placed the hat on his head and snapped close the buckles of his guitar case while a scattering of rain peppered the sidewalk. Warm and refreshing in itself, they recognized it as a prelude to a more dismal downpour.
Tinker and Blue stood wondering about the nearest shelter when they saw her coming, carrying her own canopy of sky, twirling her umbrella into a dazzling swirl of meaningless colours. The abstractly painted umbrella was a living thing covering its semi-globe with joyfully unpredictable movements. The hypnotic spin of oranges and blues, greens and whites, flowing through each other like phantoms, was oddly beautiful in a city gone damp and dreary.
“Let’s follow her,” Tinker said. A curiosity he couldn’t explain rose like a road one will wonder about for a long time if it isn’t followed.
Blue knew that it was a foolish idea to walk around in the rain following an umbrella, but he couldn’t find enough conviction in himself to argue against his own curiosity. He decided this was as good a time as any to pamper Tinker’s infatuation with hippies.
“All roads lead home, as the other feller says,” Tinker said with a Blue-mimicking shrug that started them off, re-enacting the boyhood pleasures they took in following the town’s fire truck, or the First of July parade or some mumbling drunk, amusing themselves with mimicry. Fire trucks and parades were predictable fun, but following drunks was an unscripted adventure because the whole world was an obstacle to them. Sometimes they wore shoes, sometimes they went in the sock feet of a man who had just escaped from his wife through the bedroom window. Sometimes they pissed on the sidewalk, oblivious to the mid-afternoon audience shopping along the main street, sometimes they pissed in their pants. Sometimes they hummed to themselves, sometimes they snarled at the world. Always, it proved to be worth the effort because it usually ended with a story for them to tell their buddies.
They trailed the maddened rainbow past a cluster of hippies communing with the damper side of nature, along empty blocks vacated by the more sensible freaks, meeting nine-to-fivers scurrying for a roof to put over their heads. Soon they were beyond the influence of Haight-Ashbury and the world began to look more like it was supposed to look, streets and cars and people dressed liked people.
13
“What did she look like?” Blue asked, trying to recall the features of the umbrella person they were following.
“I don’t know. I just saw the umbrella.”
“Vision time!”
The psychedelic umbrella revived Blue’s interest in a game that they had laid aside years ago, a game he had created himself, one in which he and Tinker took turns creating a “vision” by choosing the most attractive features of all the girls and women they knew in town, composing an imaginary perfection of beauty. It made them virginal connoisseurs of the town’s beauty, an expertise that never got them very far, not even when they threw in the Plymouth as added bait, but walking along wondering about the girl under the umbrella, Tinker asked the first question.
“Eyes?” Tinker asked.
“Karma’s,” Blue replied.
“Smile?”
“Karma’s.”
“Hair?”
“Karma’s.”
“This isn’t working very well, Blue.”
“If I’d of known I was going to have to live with her anyway, I’d of stayed in Colorado. Do you know how many times I’ve seen her since we got to this city? Every time I see a girl with long hair, that’s how many times. She’s like Danny Danny Dan’s funeral, gone just when I think I see her. If I don’t get my best song out of this, Tinker, I never will.”
The rain had stopped as they followed the umbrella around a corner, slowing as they watched it hurry toward, then disappear into, a forest of placard and peace signs demonstrating in front of an army recruitment centre. A denim brigade was hurling slogans at the Pentagon outpost, indicting it for crimes against humanity. Beyond them, an assembly of America the Beautiful gathered, disturbed, restless and angry with the criticism.
Tinker and Blue stood at a detached distance, polite visitors not interfering with domestic tensions. News cameras really didn’t make this stuff up, they realized.
“Maybe we should get out of here. This thing is going to blow and if we get caught in it we could get deported,” Tinker warned, watching the crowd of roughly two hundred, totalling both sides.
“That’s one way to get home, I suppose,” Blue jibed back, “but we got to see this. We never had a riot back home. These hippies are going to get the shit kicked out of them.”
“I know, but I wish somebody would tell me why,” Tinker remarked.
“If that’s all you want to know, buddy, I’ll tell you. It’s about freedom. It’s about the moth and the butterfly, as the other fellow says. The butterfly just flies around enjoying the heat from the sun, but the moth is foolish and flies into the flame. They’re both free, right? But there’s a right and a wrong way to be free.
“Look, it’s like going to a dance in Glencoe and the fiddler is playing and there are five or six sets on the floor. Now, everybody is dancing to the same music or trying to. But down in the corner of the hall you get a hippie set and they’re stomping and screeching and hollering. Nobody says much about it, but it’s a piss-off. They don’t have enough respect for the music to learn how to dance to it. Well, it’s the same thing here in the States. These hippies are pissing a lot of people off because if they get control ... well, imagine six or seven sets of them in Glencoe. It wouldn’t be a dance, it would be chaos and the Communists love chaos. They set the fire then suck the moths into it.”
While Blue argued eloquently for the rights of man according to established theories of “Them and Us” as expressed in Modern World Problems and confirmed by Farmer’s wartime experiences, the protest in front of the recruitment centre rose to new tensions. The civilian militia, composed of rained-out construction workers and men old enough to have fought in the nation’s earlier wars began heckling the hippies who were heckling two soldiers with stoic faces who stood watching from inside the recruitment centre door. The shouting became a mishmash of indistinguishable noise as accusations from both sides collided in mid-air like fighter planes in Battle of Britain movies. Hippies with fingers raised in a mockery of Churchill’s Victory “V” provoked a response of closed and threatening fists from their unhappy audience.
A crewcut workman stepped into the DMZ between the two sides and began walking back and forth in front of the long-hairs affecting a limp wrist and swivelling his hips in an effeminate exaggeration of what he figured was the protesters’ sexual orientation. A roar of hilarious approval rose from his supporters, encouraging him on. Suddenly he grabbed one of the protesters whose hair fell almost to his waist and threatened to kiss him with heavily pursed-lips. The protester, unable to wriggle free of the loving arms that enfolded him, exploded in a rage completely out of sync with the purpose of his non-violent mission in front of the recruitment centre and shoved his undesired suitor away from him. The man stumbled backwards, almost falling. Enraged by embarrassment over the hippie’s surprising strength and the laughter rising from his own supporters, he charged the hippie, connecting with a right hook that sent the younger man sprawling into a protesting mass of his peers. Other hippies moved to the front line to protect their wounded warrior, a movement mistaken for an attack by the anti-protesters who swarmed toward them.
Within seconds, the demonstrators were surrounded by a pushing and shoving, punching and kicking mob of angry people who were not afraid to stand up for their country and be counted while they dropped hippie after hippie for the count. But within the time it takes for four police cars and a wagon to wail its way across two city blocks where they had been discreetly parked, the law enforcement agents arrived like the U.S. Calvary to the rescue.
While most of the hippies broke from the melee and ran in whatever direction they hoped freedom might be waiting for them, the uniforms moved with billy clubs among the long-hairs and the short-hairs, arresting and dragging people off to the wagon, tapping with their clubs those who offered passive resistence. Not one ally of the State found himself among the stack of protesters piled on top of each other in the police wagon as peace was restored to a San Francisco street. Policemen spoke and laughed with the men who glowed with pride over their courage and with the two recruitment soldiers, and within minutes the street was as empty as any heavy rain could have accomplished.
Tinker and Blue had attracted no attention at all, and with the street to themselves they walked along surveying the spoils of war; soggy cardboard signs, a sandal, a hundred shiny beads from a broken necklace, dark smudges of blood. Blue picked up a twisted umbrella and examined it. It was an ordinary umbrella, black nylon, its surface hand-painted with the colours he and Tinker had followed. Up close, it wasn’t nearly as impressive, the lines not particularly straight, the colours not particularly true. He didn’t know what had happened to the girl under it, whether she had fled t
o freedom or had been carted off in the paddy wagon. He turned to show it to Tinker who had picked up a beaded bandana, examined it, then put it on his head to keep the clumps of wet hair out of his eyes. Blue shook his head and shoved the umbrella into a trash can.
—
Tinker sat in the Plymouth behind their hotel, examining his new headband in the rearview mirror. He liked it. He turned his attention to the sound of the engine, listening for any sound that called out for his assistance. They had not moved the Plymouth for several days to save on gas money. He had worried that the Plymouth, left unattended in a parking lot filled mainly with over-flowing dumpsters, would become too much of a temptation for skid-row bandits. The Plymouth couldn’t tell him how many times it had been examined by such creatures and judged to have been stripped and abandoned already. The only vestige of self-esteem the Plymouth possessed anymore was Tinker’s uncompromising appreciation for it. Salty Cape Breton winters had devoured dark holes around its doors, through the trunk floor, around the headlights. Bitter winter temperatures had cracked its padded dash and seats. But Tinker loved it in sickness and in health, saw only its undying determination to go on despite the ravages of time and weather. He had promised the Plymouth that when they got back home he would spend a week at Charlie’s garage removing its acne of rust with body work and fresh paint.
Tinker and Blue Page 7