“Do you girls know what’s going on back home right now?” Blue asked Karma and Kathy. “Colours. You’d love the fall colours. The mountains turn all red and gold. People drive all the way from these here United States just to take pictures of it. It’s really something, isn’t it, Tink? If we were there right now we could go walking up one of the mountains and you two could stop wherever you wanted and just paint pictures and write poems and Tinker and me could spend the day picking off rabbits. Some days, it’s nothing to get ten—”
“What do you mean picking off rabbits?” Kathy asked.
“With the .22. There’s nothing like it, huh, Tink? Go walking in the woods when the colours are changing, the sunlight streaming through the leaves in these great streaks like the rays you see coming from Jesus in holy pictures, and carrying the gun and watching for rabbits. Then we could take them home, you girls could skin them and stew them up for supper. Or make pies out of them.”
“You could kill ten rabbits in a day?” Kathy said. “How could you? They’re so cute.”
“So if I shot ten rats would you feel the same way?” Blue asked.
“To kill ten of anything ... to kill anything seems so cruel. And it’s so much bad karma,” Kathy said with a shiver.
“A hippie we picked up one time told us the same thing, that we’d have bad karma from eating so much meat, remember, Blue?” Tinker recalled.
“Yeah, and know what I learned since then?” Blue said. “I learned that I like my Karma bad,” forcing a smile out of everyone in the room.
28
Blue, Gerry and Nathan had partially earned their gig at the Warehouse Gallery by helping to move Tulip’s huge canvases from the commune where they were hung on walls, stored in the basement and, in one instance, required the removal of a wall. Gerry, acting as foreman, directed with his one arm while Blue and Nathan cut the plaster and tried to release what everyone agreed was Tulip’s masterpiece. Only Blue’s opinion dissented, pointing out that Tulip’s real mastery was wine-making, recalling and recounting for those who had not been there the evenings they spent in the Colorado Rockies sipping wine.
“That wine went down a lot smoother than this chalk,” Blue said, hacking up a white cloud of plaster as he stepped back and lit a cigarette.
“This isn’t going to work,” Capricorn said entering the room, seeing the way despite their efforts to free the plaster from the wall, it was crumbling, threatening the painting itself. “There has to be another way.”
“There is,” Blue volunteered. “Why don’t we go to the paint store, buy a bunch of cans, go to the Warehouse and squirt it all over a wall? Say it was this one? Who’s going to know the difference? Bet Tulip herself wouldn’t know.”
“Your appreciation of art is astounding, Blue,” Capricorn said. “And look at the three of you, so covered in plaster that I bet I could pass anyone of you off as Michelangelo’s David at the show tonight.”
“What David would that be?” Blue asked as Nathan slapped him on the shoulder to draw him back to the problem at hand.
“Just somebody Capricorn met over in Italy, Blue.”
Capricorn’s solution met with resistence from Blue who didn’t think it was such a great idea to remove a whole wall.
“Just tear out the wall in the room behind it—”
“That’s our bedroom,” Blue reminded him.
“We can put something else there,” Capricorn said.
“What do you mean, something else? Karma and I pay good rent for that room.”
“Yes, she does,” Capricorn conceded. “I mean something else like another wall, not another room. If we tear the plaster off the other side of this wall, then we can cut the studs and lift this whole wall away with Tulip’s work intact.”
“If Tinker was here he’d come up with a better solution,” Blue muttered, but the work of art had to be at the show before Tinker got off his shift in the tunnel.
Peter?, who had taken several of Tulip’s paintings to the gallery in the commune van, returned and began helping with the dismantling of the wall. Blue watched more than he helped as part of his room was being torn down to get at the studs. Shaking his head, he wandered into the common room hoping to see the painting crumble from the pounding hammers and prying bars. Capricorn was sitting alone on the legless couch studying the wall. Blue plunked himself down beside him and did the same.
“It’s a marvellous creation,” Capricorn acknowledged. “I’m going to miss it.”
Blue looked at the smeared wall, unable to find a face or a flower, not a single recognizable moment or event, only the childish display of coloured oils that they were working hard to rescue. He kept his silence until he had examined the wall to exhaustion.
“Listen, Cap, can I ask you a serious question?”
“Sure.”
“Are you pulling my leg? I mean are you really going to miss this thing? I’ve seen a lot of Tulip’s stuff and it all looks like this wall, only smaller. I know quite a bit about art, took it from primary to grade seven, including abstract art. The nun would get us to run our pencil around the paper every which way, then colour in the shapes that got made. Even then none of it got to look this bad. I mean I like Tulip, eh. Makes great wine and everything, but I’m not so sure she’s the next Norman Rockwell. Tell me what you’re going to miss about this wall.”
“Tulip’s sense of harmony,” Capricorn explained. “It’s in all her work, but this is her masterpiece, her first real masterpiece. There isn’t a form or colour that’s out of balance with any other aspect of the painting. If you could stop judging it, Blue, and just sit with one of Tulip’s paintings I think you’d find yourself relaxing, almost meditating. It has the same effect as listening to peaceful music. Tulip’s paintings tap into the fundamental truth that the underlying nature of the Universe is harmony, not violence.”
“Well, there’s where I’d have to disagree with you, Cap. This painting looks pretty violent to me. It’s like Tulip took everything she ever saw and put it in a Mixmaster. And if that’s what she meant to do, then I don’t have to look very far to see that she’s right, people running around killing people, dropping bombs, burning them alive. We even crucified God, for Christ’s sake! So when you say harmony is the nature of the Universe, well, that’s saying a lot but it doesn’t mean anything, just like this painting. People may say they believe in harmony and all that but when you come right down to it we don’t. Not the way we act, anyway.”
“But the point Tulip is making is that harmony isn’t a human value,” Capricorn explained. “It exists in and of itself and everything else exists because of it. Whether we look at an atom or the whole Universe, the relationship of everything to everything, protons to neutrons, planets to planets, depends on balance and harmony. Violence isn’t natural, not even in humans. Blue, do you realize that less than one percent of the people in the world are at war or killing each other at this moment. The other ninety-nine per cent are just trying to get by, and most of them would just like to get along with everybody else. But that one per cent is like a drop of poison in a glass of clear water, distorting our perception of human nature out of all proportion. That’s where we need to begin, Blue, trying to transform that one per cent. Tulip’s paintings don’t leave out that one percent, they absorb it into the natural harmony. She glimpses things then recreates them on canvas.”
Blue pondered the painting.
“If she’s trying to say what you say she’s trying to say then why doesn’t she just say it? I live in a three-dimensional world here, buddy. I like my chairs to look like chairs if you know what I mean. So when artists go ahead and draw a chair that looks like a plop of cow shit then I begin to wonder, boy. You can say what you want about harmony but I’m the musician here, remember.
“Look, we got this guy back home, eh, Henry Bruce. Well, he’s an artist. Used to be a few years ahead of us in scho
ol but everybody in town knew he could draw. When he drew a bird, boy, it practically flew off the page right there in front of you. Then he goes to art college. Ears and eyes start turning up in the weirdest places. And it just gets wilder and wilder the longer he’s there, but I haven’t told you anything yet. It was like he was becoming a hippie before he knew hippies were coming.
“The last few summers he’s been holding parties out at his place. He’s got this farm in the country, hayfields and trees and mountains, all this beautiful stuff and all he wants to do is put eyes in the middle of people’s foreheads. He’d invite a few of us out there and supply us all with booze, eh, and food, lots of food. There’d be baloney and cheese and grapes, and beans on the stove and stuff like that. Tinker and I’ve been going almost every time Henry has one of his parties.
“What he does is get us all as drunk as we can get and then he wants us to eat ourselves sick along with it. He’s got this old barn that’s falling down. He’s been tearing it down actually, board by board. People really go in for barn board nowadays. All the tourist places sell barn boards, but they don’t sell Henry’s barn boards, let me tell you.
“What Henry Bruce does with his barn boards is saw them into foot-long pieces and get us to throw up on them. I mean just get drunk and vomit on the boards. Then he puts those boards in the oven and dries them out. He’d have a dozen boards going at some parties. Then he examines the results, the way the vomit forms or something. Who knows? Anyway he’d pick his favourites, okay, and shellacs them, coat them with shellac and then you know what he does? Sends them to a gallery in New York and they get up to five hundred bucks apiece for some of them. And that kind of says it for me, Capi. Vomit! Everybody’s selling horses, as the other fellow says.
“You know we’re going to have to carry this friggin’ wall all the way to the gallery, don’t you? It won’t fit in the van.”
29
Blue smoked a cigarette on the sidewalk in front of the Warehouse Gallery. The exhibit was up, Blue Cacophony’s gear was set up, and people were beginning to filter in for the opening. After a few minutes he spotted Tinker who had gone home from the tunnel, showered and was now arriving for the show. They leaned against the building trading pieces of their day, Tinker describing for Blue a mucking machine he had been working on underground while Blue relayed the details of arranging the art show.
“Let me ask you this, Tinker. You know that wall between the common room and Karma’s and my room, the one Tulip painted? Well, if you had to move that wall, say, a couple of miles, how would you go about doing it?”
“The wall! Of course! I went back to the house for a shower and I knew something was different. It just felt roomier somehow. I thought it was because the place was empty, everybody being down here, but now that you mention it the wall was missing. You mean it’s in here?” Tinker said, nodding his head toward the warehouse.
“Yeah. If you had to move it what would you do?”
Tinker thought about it for a moment. “I think you’d have to tear down the wall behind it then cut the studs and laths, otherwise the plaster would crumble all to hell. How did you do it?”
“That’s pretty well the same idea I had,” Blue said with a shrug, pushing off the building and walking toward the door.
—
Inside, the warehouse walls were hung with Tulip’s collection, while in the middle of the floor stood Blue’s bedroom wall. A small card stapled to the end of it said the title was Harmony. People who had received invitations, street handouts or read about the opening in the underground press were arriving in larger numbers. A collapsable table was covered with wine and cheese. Blue tested the wine, unimpressed.
“Tulip would of done better to make her own instead of buying this Naptha Valley shit.”
“I think it’s the Napa Valley, Blue,” Tinker said, pouring himself a glass.
“Whatever. Tastes like naptha to me. What do you think of this stuff, Tinker?”
“It’s okay. Leaves my mouth a little dry—”
“No, I mean Tulip’s stuff. I had a talk with Capi this afternoon about it. He really likes it so that should put you on your guard, buddy. I told him about Henry Bruce and his abstract barn boards, but he still thinks Tulip’s paintings mean something. Harmony, he said. ‘They’re filled with harmony.’ How can you know that when there’s nothing there to recognize? That’s what I’d like to know.”
“I can’t say I don’t like them, Blue. I guess I never really thought about them before. Remember when the art nun used to make us—”
“I was talking about that just this afternoon. So it’s not like we’re ignorant about abstract art or anything, huh. We know what we like.”
“I guess I’d have to say I like them, Blue.”
“Now why do we have to say that, Tink? Besides the fact that we like Tulip so we’re not going to say that we don’t like them. That would be like telling your own mother she can’t cook. I suppose that’s part of it, too. Tulip’s no spring chicken, is she? She’s got to be at least thirty. You’d think by now she’d be able to draw as well as colour.”
Kathy and Karma, holding Barney by the collar, joined them at the food table, taking a glass of wine, a nibble of cheese.
“It’s overwhelming to see Tulip’s work gathered together like this,” Karma commented, scanning the walls as she spoke, confirming her remark to herself. “We’re witnessing something important tonight.”
“You bet,” Blue assured her. “Blue Cacophony’s debut.”
“That too, Blue, but look around. Tulip’s work is affecting a lot of people here.”
“Yeah, the ones on drugs.... Just kidding,” holding up his hands to ward off the dual glares of Kathy and Karma, then he pointed across the hall to where Peter? was tacking No-Recording-Devices-of-Any-Kind posters in the wall spaces between Tulip’s paintings. Behind him, the gallery owner removed them. They argued. They compromised. Peter? took down his posters and nailed them to the outside of the gallery.
“This no-recording gimmick of Peter?’s is just about the worst idea I ever heard,” Blue mused. “I got to change their minds about that. There’s a big opportunity drifting by here and we’re just watching it float away. A musician without an album is like a ... like a ... like a parent without a child. If we recorded I bet they’d sell like crazy, at least in the Co-op back home, eh, Tinker?”
Peter? walked toward them and signalled Blue with a head gesture to get ready. The exhibit was filling up. There weren’t many people Blue didn’t already know by sight or by name. They were from the neighbourhood, from the crossroads of Haight-Ashbury which, it occurred to Blue had been turned into a small town by the people living there. All over the city, neighbourhoods had their own population and their own character and their own characters. Nobody lives in the city, Blue thought, just in a corner of it. He and Tinker had picked up a lot of knowledge about a few of the city’s streets, felt as at home in their neighbourhood now as it was possible to feel without actually being back home. That’s how everybody survives these places, Blue realized, by carving huge cities into small, manageable neighbourhoods. He stored that thought for a future song.
Except for a few unfamiliar faces, it was the people from the neighbourhood here to see Tulip’s work, to hear Blue Cacophony’s debut. It was a neighbourhood that happened to be the capital city of hippiedom, famous all over the world for reasons weird to some, wonderful to others, but a neighbourhood nonetheless, a small town inside a big city, Jonah inside the whale just trying to survive. The people from the neighbourhood were filling up the gallery the way people home would fill up a dance hall to hear the music of a Cape Breton fiddler. Everything around him, the people, the paintings, was suddenly familiar. Standing with his guitar, waiting for Nathan and Gerry to get ready for the performance, Blue located Tinker and Karma and Kathy standing together watching him, waiting. They nodded to each other wi
th an intimacy that they shared with no one else in the gallery.
The drone of Nathan’s pipes spiralled like thick smoke from his instrument, joined a moment later by an agonizing note from Gerry’s violin, signalling the introduction of Blue’s voice rising from his throat like a wounded crow. People turned toward them, some staring, some listening, a few moving toward the band to stand front and centre and sway with closed eyes to a rhythm most others had difficulty identifying.
Unexpectedly, a half-maddened chorus of moans and whines ricocheted through the gallery as Barney, unable to find any place to hide, panned Blue Cacophony’s debut. What caught everyone’s attention, however, was not the unkindness implicit in Barney’s review but the atonal harmony of these two enemies, artist and critic raising voices in some discordant choir. Barney’s canine complaint complemented Blue Cacophony’s music with a fullness that turned everyone’s ear, voluntarily or involuntarily, toward the music. It was a duet that was not lost on Peter? who immediately began coaxing Barney closer to the band, dragging him forward by the collar, fitting together a puzzle of misshapen pieces: young musicians, dog, instruments and revolutionary theory, re-forming his philosophy of music to accommodate Barney’s appearance in it.
Blue Cacophony played through its forty-minute gig, unloading Blue’s lyrics in a shatter of sound and German shepherd that confirmed for Peter? the conviction that his discovery of Blue – his creation of Blue Cacophony – was the thin edge of a wedge meant to rupture old standards, challenge human aural perception, a sound in the wilderness announcing the destruction of the martial man, the birth of a new music to which mankind could march toward the new Republic. Blue, less philosophical at the moment, caught Peter?’s eye with an eyeroll of his own. Peter? responded with a reassuring thumbs-up, ignoring the obvious plea to get the dog off the small stage where Blue Cacophony was being upstaged. With the relentless accompaniment of Barney, Blue Cacophony finished its set by providing the audience with a teasing sample of Blue’s work-in-progress, “The Red Lobster” which, Blue announced, was only seventeen verses away from completion.
Tinker and Blue Page 16