It was during the thirty-third verse, as Blue’s voice reached up in an effort to assault higher octaves and bring renewed vigour to his epic work, that the screaming started, along with a sudden shuffling of tables and chairs and the frantic movements of people in panic. The external discord became so pronounced that it disrupted the reverie of Blue’s internal one, drawing the singer to the surface of his song to see where his unexpected competition was coming from. It was at the moment, with his eyes barely able to adjust to the candle-lit darkness, that Blue saw people leaping up from their tipping-over tables, and saw, at the last moment, the reason for their terror. The huge, black bulk leapt from the darkness and hurled itself at Blue whose scream, the audience noted, was surprisingly in tune.
The maddened intruder hit Blue with the impact of a football tackle, tipping the singer and his stool to the floor and pinning him there. Fangs bared, the beast lunged at Blue’s throat and wiped his face with a long swipe of its tongue.
“Barney!” Blue shouted once he realized that his throat hadn’t been ripped out and that it was saliva, not blood, on his face. Throwing his arms around the German shepherd’s neck, he buried his face in the dog’s fur. “Barney! My old buddy Barney!” he yelled, the words muffled by the dog’s neck. Next came the realization that if Barney was here in the Aquarius Café smothering him with dog kisses then—
“Hi, Blue. Are you surprised? We read about you in Rolling Stone and then saw the poster for tonight’s show. Barney, let Blue up.”
While Blue gazed up at the silhouette, back-lit by an aura of candle light, standing over him, he could hear Tinker’s voice reassuring everyone that the dog was not rabid, just an old friend of the family who dropped by to say hello.
—
For a variety of reasons, most of the audience chose the unexpected intermission provided by Barney to tiptoe out of the Aquarius Café, leaving in their wake Tinker and Blue, the hippies from Colorado and their friends from the street. Two tables were shoved together and Tinker and Blue introduced Karma, Kathy and (without a great deal of enthusiasm from Blue) Capricorn to Peter?, Doc Silver, Gerry and Nathan.
Looking around him, Blue was really beginning to enjoy his fate among what he had begun to call the gentiles, to whom he brought word of Cape Breton. Tinker was lost to him already, he and Kathy carrying on a shy courtship of glances and blushes. Blue felt no such certainty. Karma was with Capricorn again. The jealousy of it kept Blue off balance about where he belonged in this picture. That he belonged was a given, but he deeply dreaded the thought that some cosmic prankster had written another one of those awful songs where he winds up as the best friend. No more demoralizing a role can befall a fellow, Blue always thought, than to be trusted by a girl. It was one of the world’s more effective forms of castration, but that fear was only a distant ripple in the joy Blue felt about this night, which belonged so strongly to him that he didn’t even try to control it, just let it happen. Together, he and Tinker told Karma about how Blue rose from the cracked concrete sidewalk to become a story in Rolling Stone and the first star ever featured at the Aquarius Café, which never pays anybody to appear, anybody, that is, but Blue and his Pre-primitive sound. The best part was that he could see she was really interested, and tried to interpret what that meant. And when Tinker and Blue, assisted by Peter? and Nathan, had filled in the missing months, it was Karma and Kathy and Capricorn’s turn to catch up.
Taking Barney with them, they explained, Capricorn, Kathy and Karma had driven the van down the mountain to get supplies. Actually, Capricorn said, they ran out of gas on their way down the mountain and had to coast all the way to town. On their way back to the commune, they found themselves following a strange convoy of police cars, squad and ghost. When the traffic turned up the mountain trail leading to the Human Rainbow Commune Capricorn simply drove past and continued along the main road. After a few minutes, they returned, concealing the van and sat in it, watching and waiting. It was more than two hours before the cars descended, Tulip and Cory seated side by side in the back seat of the first squad car. The rest of the commune population was carried away, one or two to a car like princesses in a small-town summer parade. When the police were out of sight they drove their van up the mountain.
“The place was a shambles,” Capricorn told them. “Furniture tipped over and ripped apart. Holes broken through the walls. Clothes thrown around. They were looking for drugs, of course, but found nothing. A few seeds and twigs, but nothing to justify arresting everyone in Colorado. But you could tell that they had a good time. They enjoyed destroying the commune. You could feel that sort of sick pleasure people get out of destroying things. It’s what’s most attractive about war, I suppose.
“What they didn’t get was our crop of grass, thanks to Cory’s foresight. We were always cautious about a cop raid so we never kept much smoke on hand. We weren’t into pushing it, anyway, just personal use. Cory made a small paddock around where we planted it, but never let the horses in there, of course. But the moment he heard the police cars arriving, he took the horses from the pasture and opened the gate to the paddock. By the time the cops finished wrecking the buildings and began looking elsewhere the horses had already taken care of the grass.”
“We had to stay there for three days,” Karma said, continuing where Capricorn left off. “The horses couldn’t do anything but stand under a tree, staring at sunsets and sunrises like animal Buddhas. We couldn’t move them for days, then Kathy and I walked them down to the farmer who sold them to us and asked him to look after them until we got back. Then we drove here.”
“Well,” Blue stated firmly, “we got to get Cory and Tulip out of jail. It’s not fair locking a girl up like that. You must miss her something awful, Cap, old buddy. God meant you two to be together. I could see that way back in Colorado. Ask Tinker if I didn’t say that! So let’s bail her out. I got fifty bucks right here in my pocket that should cover it. There’s no way you two should be apart.”
“She’s out,” Capricorn said. “She and Cory were the last to be let go. The FBI kept them a week, but they really had nothing to charge them with. It was me they were looking for. There’s a federal agent, Bud Wise, who is obsessed with me, but we won’t go into that. The important thing is that Tulip is back at our pad, and Cory—”
“Tulip’s free! Wow! That’s the best news I’ve heard since I left Cape Breton. You hear the man, Tinker? Tulip’s free!”
—
“There’s a God, Tinker! There’s a God and my mother’s got Him lassoed inside her rosary and He works just for her, doing nothing but looking after her bouncing baby boy Blue.”
“You think that’s what your mother’s been praying for, Blue? For you to move in with a hippie in San Francisco? Dare you to phone her and tell her that her prayers have been answered,” Tinker nodded with feigned innocence.
“The Lord works in mysterious ways, as the other fellow says, Tink. Take my mother’s prayers, for example. Did I ever tell you about the time I shot the flaming arrow through Sandy Malcolm’s parlour window? They got the fire out before it did much more than scorch the couch in the parlour. It was an accident anyway. I was trying to shoot the arrow into his coal shed but the wind must of took it or something because it takes this weird curve toward the house and goes through the open window and sticks in the couch. My bad luck was that Sandy Malcolm’s mother was lying on the couch and she was like two hundred years old and what does she do but goes and takes a stroke. You’d of thought I shot her through the heart the way Sandy Malcolm went on after the fire department got the fire out and the doctor got his mother to the hospital. I was about eight, I guess, but Sandy Malcolm was swearing to my mother that I was born to hang by the neck until I was dead; I could see it in my mother’s face that she was scared he might be right. She took after me with Dad’s pit belt that night, and then hung this rosary around my neck,” Blue said, fingering the rosary. “I guess she figu
res as long as I’m wearing the rosary nobody will loop a noose around it. It’s worked so far.”
Tinker and Blue were in their hotel room gathering their belongings. Blue told Karma and Kathy they would load up the Plymouth in the evening and move into the Human Rainbow Commune, San Francisco branch, first thing in the morning.
“I don’t get it, Blue. Why didn’t we just pack up and get out of here tonight? They asked us to move in, for Christ’s sake! When you said, ‘in the morning,’ like you were going to think about it first or something, I pretty near punched you. What if they change their minds tonight?”
“Tinker, I had to buy us a little time. We’re moving into a hippie commune. I know that. You know that. But what both of us know, too, is that these hippies eat like birds, and I don’t mean carrion crows, to quote the other fellow. We need to have signals, like if I say, ‘Let’s go hunting, Tinker,’ then you know that we are going after some meat that comes from that delicious animal called the hamburg. If we work out a few codes like that, then we’ll be able to talk to each other in a crowded room without telling anybody else anything.”
Tinker walked over to the window and looked down into the parking lot at the back of the hotel. The shape of the rusty Plymouth was a ghostly presence in the unlit alley. Behind him, Blue picked up his guitar, flicking notes into the silence that had fallen in the room, the fragments of music revealing a glimpse of Blue that Tinker saw far too seldom. He believed that Blue was neither a poet nor a songwriter but a mellow, bluesy musician. He never brought it up anymore because Blue never heard him when Tinker used to try to encourage him.
“Blue,” Tinker said, turning around to look at his friend propped against the pillows of his bed, strumming his guitar, “I wish we had gone there tonight. I don’t like having time to think about stuff like this. It makes me scared. Christ, it makes me lonely. Explain that to me if you can. I’m about to move in with a girl I think I love and it makes me lonely and scared. Do you ever get scared, Blue?”
For a moment, he thought Blue hadn’t heard him. He never glanced up at Tinker’s confession or question, never missed a note of the piece he was quietly exploring.
“Sometimes,” he said finally, watching his fingers work the strings as if they mattered more than what he was saying, “but the way I look at it, Tinker, loneliness and fear are like a couple of nuns at a high school dance, grim chaperons there to make sure we don’t have a good time while we’re alive. We have to say to hell with them or we’d be still back in Cape Breton wishing we had gone to San Francisco.”
20
“Know what these hippie pads remind me of, Tinker? Those McDonald hamburger joints we were eating at all the way out here. Every one exactly the same. Same beaded curtains, same incense, same posters, same music blasting from the record player. Looks just like Peter?’s place and every other we’ve been in since we got here.”
Blue was lying on a mattress which was on the floor of the room he had just moved into with Karma. He stroked Barney lying on the floor beside him and studied the walls and ceiling. Tinker’s eyes toured the room, as well. The walls were papered with posters celebrating rock music and criticizing war, posters of seaside sunsets complete with quotes from “Desiderata” or Kahlil Gibran, and psychedelic posters that gave Blue a headache. The posters occupied three walls but the fourth puzzled Blue. Karma had clearly begun blocking out a painting, using all of the 16-foot-wide, 12-foot-high plaster wall. Its early stages didn’t make a lot of sense to him.
“Know what I think, Tink?” he said to his friend who had dropped in from the room next door. “I think we’re at the beginning of a brand new story. ‘Once upon a time’ time, to quote the other fellow. With a little luck we’ll live happily ever after, old buddy.”
“Or wind up in jail, Blue. I’ve been thinking about the fact that the cops are looking for these people. I know Kathy and Karma wouldn’t do anything wrong but who knows why Capricorn is on the run. What happens if we get caught with them?”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too, Tinker, and our best bet is the ‘dumb Canadians’ routine. You know, we’re just a couple of nice guys who fell in among thieves, to quote the other fella. One of the best things Farmer ever showed me was the weasel path. Farmer says that no matter what situation a guy gets in, even if it’s a good one, he’d better figure out what he’ll do if something goes wrong. Even a good situation might turn out to have a husband in it, he says. If a guy can’t find a noble way out, then he better find a way to weasel out of it. That’s what he calls his weasel path. It’s a good idea, Tinker. Says he learned it in the war where it came in real handy while he was trying to stay alive.”
Tinker nodded.
“So how do you think you’re going to like living like a married man?”
“It’s awful real, Blue.”
“What’s real is relative,” Peter? said, pushing the bead curtain aside, allowing Gerry and Nathan to enter the room ahead of him, then followed them carrying several newspapers. “So what awful reality awaits you, Tinker?”
“A job in a garage, I hope,” Tinker said.
“I don’t know about you getting a job in a garage, Tinker, but it looks like there might be a job in the music business for you, Blue,” Peter? said flipping through the papers. “The Herald called you ‘a cacophony of horrid sounds and meaningless words,’ but that’s the mainstream papers for you. The important point here, Blue, before you become upset, is that the paper bothered to mention your performance at all. People who don’t trust this reviewer will want to hear you for themselves. The Voice is considerably more insightful.
Blue Anti-voice has developed a sound that, while many were snickering and laughing behind raised hands, attracted, not unlike Saint Francis of Assisi, an audience of animals. A German shepherd from off the street wandered in at the sound of the music and proceeded to affectionately maul the musician. Such omens should not be dismissed lightly.
“But I’ve saved the best for last. The Subterranean reviewer, a close personal friend, I might add, has written that
Blue Anti-voice has discovered a new dimension to music comparable to the discovery of the sub-atomic world in physics. Like quantum physics, that dimension’s value and reality will be lost on most people, but its influences will affect our daily lives for eons to come.
“So is all this good or bad?” Blue wondered aloud.
“Good, Blue. Any note written about an artist is good, isn’t that right, fellows?”
Gerry and Nathan agreed that they would consider killing to get that much press coverage from a single performance.
“How would you like to be on the cutting edge of a brand new sound,” Peter? asked suddenly. “I’ve been thinking about it all night. You’ve got something special, man. You just need some musicians and a manager, a manager that knows the city, and musicians that are as uncontaminated by success as yourself. So, presto! as the magician says, we’ve come to offer you both.”
Blue evaluated Peter?’s proposal, noting especially Peter?’s insight that Blue possessed something special. He could modestly blush at the observation, but not honestly deny it. He looked at the others. “What do you guys think?”
“I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t think I can play that bad,” Gerry confessed sadly.
“Sure we can,” Nathan said. “We’ll just tune our instruments to Blue’s voice then play it for real.”
“Can I be part of this?” Tinker asked.
Gerry, Nathan and Peter? looked at him, their faces filled with the bad news. “Sorry, Tinker, but we’ve heard you. You couldn’t sing a bad note if you tried. But there are lots of garages in ’Frisco,” Peter? assured him. “What we need now is a name that will announce our arrival. Blue Anti-voice is too much of a portrayal of a single personality. We’re a group now, a movement.”
“What did that guy in the Herald call me? That word....”
“Cacophony?”
“Right. I like the sound of that. Ca-co-phon-y! How about Blue Cacophony?”
“Perfect!” Peter? said with the others nodding agreement.
“What does cacophony mean, anyway?” Blue asked.
“You can look it up later,” Peter? replied. “What we need now is a place to practice.”
“A secret place,” Blue cautioned. “We don’t want someone coming around and stealing our sound before we get it out there. In the meantime,” he said to his band members, “Don’t quit your day job, to quote the other fellow, but on the other hand be ready to join me on the stage of Ryman Hall. We are on our way, gentlemen.”
—
“You know what the other fellow says, Tinker, love begins when she sinks into his arms and ends with her arms in the sink. Only trouble is, buddy, it’s us with our arms in the sink.”
Blue was fussily trying to fish dishes from the sudsy water in the kitchen sink without getting his hands wet. Tinker was drying whatever cups and plates Blue caught in the hot, greasy pool.
The rules of the Human Rainbow Commune (San Francisco branch) were simple enough. Capricorn had convened a meeting of the population to welcome Tinker and Blue to the commune and to inform them of the rules. There was no mention of what Blue called “our expulsion from Colorado.”
Tinker and Blue Page 11