Tinker and Blue

by Frank Macdonald

  “You get hit by a truck or break up with Lee or what?” Blue asked.

  Capricorn’s efforts to examine him only resulted in having his exploring hand impatiently batted away from Peter?’s forehead. Finally, deep-breathing himself into a semblance of order, Peter? began uttering a broken brand of English. “Hear?” he asked. “Did you ... you know ... hear? The radio! Did you hear?”

  “Hear what?” asked the Greek chorus of the commune.

  “The radio! We’re ruined, Blue, ruined!”

  “Back up there and take another crack at her,” Blue advised. “Now do as the other fellow says and start from the beginning, Peter?, and, here, let me help you.... Once upon a time....” Blue began, his index finger informing Peter? that that was his cue to pick up the story from that point.

  “Our plans! Remember our plans, Blue?” Peter? moaned. “Blue Cacophony was going to remain pure, was going to establish the soundtrack of man’s next evolutionary leap, his intellectual giant step, then fade into the mythology of music with no trace left behind except its own legend? Remember how much we wanted that, all of us, you, Gerry, Nathan and myself, wanted to keep our music from being recorded for mass commercial consumption? Remember that, Blue?”

  “I remember, Peter?” Blue said, sneaking a guilty peek at the others. “And we never will, old buddy, we never will.”

  “Too late! Too late!” then dropping from the high drama of his performance, Peter? told them what had happened.

  “On my way over here to visit Karma – how is the poor girl? – waiting for a light to change, this freak walked up to the van and asked me, ‘Hey, man, wanna buy any grass, hash, acid, Blue Cacophony records?’ I thought he was indulging too much in his own wares, and the light changed before I could pursue his maddened statement. But it was the radio ... I’m listening to Janis one minute and trying to beat time to Blue Cacophony the next. It took a moment to register, but when it did, Blue, the whole world changed just like that,” Peter? said, snapping his fingers.

  “Did you hear me, Blue? Blue Cacophony on the radio! We’ve been sold out, my friend. The deejay played a Blue Cacophony number, then says it’s from the underground recording. Somewhere in this city some bastard is counting his thirty pieces of silver.”

  “We’ll find that bastard, Peter?, don’t you worry about that, and when we do, we’ll ... we’ll ...we’ll ... well, we’ll think of something then to do to him. But it was on the radio, you said. You heard Blue Cacophony on the radio? Me? Singing? On the radio?” Blue asked, making excited turn-on-the-radio signals to the others with a hand held behind his back. “What song? How’d I sound?”

  “Who cares?”

  “Well, I do, Peter?. If somebody went through all that trouble to get our sound out there, I hope it’s worth his while. I’m not saying it’s not wrong, Peter?, but you ride the horse you’re given, as the other fella says. It doesn’t have to be the end of the world, you know,” Blue offered in consolation.

  “Ah, but that’s just the point,” Peter? replied sadly. “It is not the end of the world. But it was supposed to be, this pathetic world we live in anyway,” making a global gesture with his hands. “Now we’re just an evolutionary dead end. Or a revolutionary dead end, if you can tolerate bad puns at a horrible moment like this. History’s full of grand ideas that have been melted down and moulded into golden calves, and Blue Cacophony’s just part of the herd now, Blue, nothing special at all.”

  “Maybe whoever did it just couldn’t keep it to himself,” Blue said. “Maybe he thought this world right here needs us more than the next one does. You never know what a fellow’s thinking when he does something like that. Maybe someday we’ll look back on this and drink a toast to him. It could happen, you know.”

  “No, it couldn’t. Something’s gone, Blue. It’s difficult to explain if you can’t feel it yourself, but something is gone. Maybe this is how cynics are born.”

  “Don’t waste your time trying to wear the cynic’s cloak, Peter? You’re a rock, man. Peter? the Rock. You’re the believer. Did you ever notice that people hardly ever ask each other what they believe? People ask each other how they feel or what they think, but not what they believe. Karma and me had a talk about this very thing once. Peter?, my boy, no matter how many bastards are around you, and that’s a lot more than you might imagine, you’re not interested in believing in anything but your fellow man. It’s your unfortunate fate to care. Hell, you’re such a believer, I bet I could sell you a lame horse every day if I wanted to.”

  “Don’t put my beliefs on your pedestal, Blue. Don’t assume to know me so well,” Peter? said, rising from the chair. “I’m going out to find Nathan and Gerry. Do you want to be with me when I break the news?”

  “I should be, I know, Peter?, but we’re just about to have a meeting here. Some important commune stuff just came up, you know.”

  “Your commune business is none of my business so I’ll go find them. Try not to take it too hard, Blue,” Peter? said, walking like the father of a dead child to the door, leaving in his wake the now broken silence of Blue Cacophony.

  “What’s thirty pieces of silver worth these days?” Blue wondered aloud with an uninspired smile when the door closed behind Peter?. “Will somebody turn on the radio, for the love of God?”

  42

  There was something familiar about the abstract design on the cover of Failure To Love, the Blue Cacophony members agreed, although none of them could quite put a finger on it. “Well, I wouldn‘t have it hanging on my wall, if I had a wall,” Blue said, walking along the edge of an admission that no one picked up on. Having joined the rest of the band at Peter?’s, he brought with him several copies of the album which, he explained, he had wrestled from a street pusher, describing the bloody fight that had ensued. “But when I heard the cop sirens I had to run before I could make him tell me where he got them.”

  Instead of resorting to violence, Peter? proposed that they call in the police, an idea Nathan and Gerry agreed with, but Blue opposed.

  “We can’t do that,” he reasoned. “If we do, Tinker and me’ll be deported and the commune people, especially Capricorn, will go to jail. Besides, it’s not like we're a legal band, paying taxes and all that. Capricorn says we could have the IRS all over us for tax evasion, same as Al Capone. Hell, they could re-open Alcatraz just for the four of us here. The last thing we need is the cops, believe me.”

  Blue’s reasoning altered the band’s strategy for dealing with the bootleg album. Instead, they would each use their resources to track down the illegal operation, and kill it. Nathan and Gerry were frantic to capture the master recording and burn it at the stake, then hunt down every existing copy of Failure To Love, and smash them to fading fragments of a horrible memory in their musical careers.

  —

  Blue squatted beside the radio on the bedroom window sill, tirelessly twirling the dial back and forth across the amber station numbers, scanning the San Francisco skies for the sound of his song. It was a labour that paid off fairly frequently. “Failure To Love,” aided by the bootleg romance surrounding the recording, had caught the attention of a few of the city’s deejays, and the air play created interest in the record. Commune members smuggled copies from the boxes in the basement to the distributors on the street. Explaining the series of blinds and double-blinds that he had set up to prevent the record from being traced back to the commune, Capricorn assured Blue that they were above suspicion in the pirating Blue Cacophony's music.

  While San Francisco’s radio stations squacked and squealed under Blue’s unrelenting search for the squack and squeal of “Failure To Love,” which he never failed to recognize, it was not the song’s success that occupied his mind, but Karma’s exceptional quiet. She was intensely working on another of her past-life panels, one that reminded Blue of Russia.

  The morning after the accident, Blue, who had spent the night stret
ched across three chairs in the waiting room, was allowed in to see Karma. She lay in the bed, and when Blue spoke her name, she turned her attention slowly towards him, as if reluctant to leave her thoughts, and smiled.

  “Just because Tinker and me said we enjoy a good wake every once in awhile, you didn't have to go trying to oblige us, you know. For a while there, the doctors thought you were a goner. How are you feeling?”

  “Fine, Blue. Is everyone else all right?”

  “Yup, except for Tinker. He’s not injured, just heartbroken because the Plymouth’s pretty well totalled. Kathy didn’t get a scratch. Barney bailed out the open window with a bark and a howl, and I got out alive myself, although I don’t know how. I saw what was suppose to happen to us, and it didn’t. It’s like guys in the war who stand in the middle of sixteen million bullets and never get a scratch. If I live to be fifty, I’ll never figure out how we didn’t get creamed by a transfer truck. But we didn’t. Fate foiled, as the other fellow says. Kathy and Tinker’ll be coming to get us later in the van if the doctor lets you go home.”

  Later that day, with a word of caution and a warning to get lots of rest, the doctor who attended Karma allowed her to be released. Tinker and Kathy picked them up at the hospital, and drove them back to the commune in the van. Shortly after they had returned, Blue polled the residents, casually wondering if they noticed anything different about Karma. The answers generally agreed that she was normal ... “for Karma.” Blue couldn’t explain his worry that Karma wasn’t the same after the accident as she was before it.

  “She’s not all that much fun anymore,” Blue confided in Tinker. “She just wants to meditate and paint. We talk and all that, but I don’t know, Tinker, it’s like too much of her came back from the dead or something.”

  The tuner slipped past a familiar sound and Blue eased it back, picking up the lyrics of his song. Turning up the volume, he sang along, adding the original fractures to the recording that Capricorn’s electronic skill and Tinker's voice had repaired. Karma put down her brush and turned to listen.

  “How does it feel to hear your work on the radio?” she asked when the song ended.

  “Pretty good, but they’re really your words, aren’t they, ‘the failure to love’ and all that? Maybe I should say we both wrote it instead of feeling like I stole the idea from you.”

  “Why, Blue? When you tell stories about Farmer and the people you know, you're not stealing them, are you? You’re just repeating them. And if you hear a song you like and learn to sing it, does that mean you stole the song? This is no different. You heard me say something and you took it and turned it into a song that thousands of people are hearing, and it'’ not my idea, really. It’s been around for a long, long time. It’s just that I think it’s more than an idea. I believe it’s true. Maybe someone who hears your song will believe it’s true, too. Songs and poems are the oldest way in the world for ideas and stories to travel. As your other fellow might have said, minstrels were about the very first newspapers.”

  “I almost forgot. We're back in the newspapers again, Karma. Peter? brought some clippings around today. I can’t say they all said nice things about the album, but Peter? says there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but he really hates it, though. I guess I didn’t really know how serious he was about this not recording business. He still wants the band to stay together, but it's not the same for him. When I think of what he wanted, I feel bad, but when I hear “Failure To Love” on the radio, I know what I wanted. Two people running in opposite directions can't get to the same place....”

  “...as the other fellow says,” Karma interjected. “No they can't, Blue.”

  Karma’s remark hung in a silence Blue was reluctant to explore. Instead, he turned his attention to the new panel. "Is that a Russian or what?”

  “A Tartar, actually. I have strong impressions about having been a child in that culture a long time ago. If I’m right, then I never grew up. I died very young.”

  “Your soul is kind of a song of its own, eh, travelling around the world like one of those ideas you were just talking about, India, Russia, England, all those places. So do you think a soul like yours is looking for the right place to be born or the right place to die? Because getting off the planet is what it's all about for you, right?”

  “Something like that,” Karma said, picking up her brush and turning back to the panel. “And what’s it all about for you, Blue?”

  “Staying within screaming distance of a priest when my number comes up, then once he splashes me with the sacrament of Extreme Unction it’s straight to Heaven for me. You should try being a Catholic, Karma. It’s a lot easier. But until that day comes for me, in about a hundred years time, I hope, I have a career to think about. The album is getting us lots of work. Peter? said we even have an inquiry from the Fillmore. Stick with me, girl, and you’ll be eating your sunflower seeds off gold plates with silver forks.”

  43

  All through December, Christmas bore down on Tinker and Blue like a runaway train, each day being one boxcar longer and heavier than the previous, with carols on the radio, store windows dressed with the season’s scenes and sales, and the appearance of more and more charity Santas on the city’s street corners. Being away from home was no longer a lark but a torment, one that enhanced their sentimentality, increased their beer binges, and drove them into each other’s crying jags in the sullen belief that no one in all of San Francisco was able to appreciate the sad fate to which they had been sentenced but themselves. Feeding each other a steady diet of memories, they composed daydreams in which they took a train across Canada to Cape Breton where they caught the local bus on Christmas Eve which would take them home.

  “It’s the best bus in the world,” Blue reminded Tinker. “It picks up more hitchhikers than passengers, and it delivers you right to your door if it’s raining or snowing. Greyhound won’t do that for you.”

  Talk of the bus made Tinker more mournful than ever. “If we had the Plymouth we wouldn’t have to make up stories about trains and buses and planes and hitchhiking,” he sighed to Blue, remembering the mangled condition of his car following the accident. It had been parked out back of the commune until the night it disappeared.

  Blue explained to Tinker that San Francisco had an abandoned vehicle policy, where the city paid wreckers to tow old cars away. They were taken to a salvage yard, stripped of anything valuable, and crushed into a cube of metal to be melted down and used again.

  “They must of seen the Plymouth and thought it was a write-off. Who knows, maybe someday you’ll buy a new car and feel all warm whenever you touch the front fender, and that’s because it used to be the Plymouth’s front fender,” Blue comforted Tinker.

  “Rein-CAR-nated, Blue?”

  “You never know. If my KAR-ma can do it, maybe your CAR can, too, buddy.”

  —

  On Christmas Eve homesickness reached its peak with both of them. There were no formal plans to celebrate the holiday at the commune, nor any to impede its celebration. The season’s decorating took an independent path. Someone had strung the six-foot corn plant with blinking lights. Someone else set out an array of candles that flickered around a miniature Bethlehem scene on top of the stereo. A wreath hung on the door. But for Tinker and Blue, none of it was real because none of it was home.

  They had gone shopping, wandering through stores, buying gifts for everyone at the commune. Their most delightful discovery was that there were stores where for a quarter more a woman would gift-wrap their purchases, adding ribbons and bows. “The only thing they’ll wrap for you in the Co-op back home is the meat,” Blue told the woman while watching her turn the boxes over, every corner as crisp and sharp as a hospital bed. “Merry Christmas now,” they said in parting, carrying their shopping bags out of the store, stomachs grumbling with the sudden awareness that, unescorted by vegetarians, they were free to go to any restaurant
they wanted. They walked into the first tavern they could find, ordered beer and burgers, and indulged each other’s blue Christmas.

  “I’ll be home for Christmas

  Please have some snow

  And lots of Golden Glo

  ’Cause I’ll be home for Christmas,” Blue sang, lifting his beer to Tinker. “Merry Christmas, buddy!” It was the first toast of a whole loaf as they talked themselves into deeper depths of homesickness and despair with the arrival of each fresh beer. They toasted each other, the commune, each and every person from back home who came up in their conversations or stories, and the baby Jesus, whose birthday they were celebrating.

  The burgers they had for lunch had already been digested when they noticed that it was now time for supper, ordering more burgers. “We should of taken Barney with us. He’d of had a hell of a Christmas in here,” Blue moaned. They kept checking the clock, discovering, each time they did, that they just had time for one more beer.

  Noting that it was almost too late to go home and face Karma and Kathy whom they were committed to taking out for a Christmas Eve dinner in a restaurant less bloody-minded than the one they currently occupied, Blue brought up the idea of delaying their return even longer by taking in midnight Mass.

  “If we tell them that we were in a tavern all day, they’ll get as grumpy as wives, but if we can go home and tell them we were at Mass, well, what can they say?” Blue reasoned. Tinker could find no flaw in that reasoning.

  An inquiry of the bartender told them that they would find a Catholic church five or six blocks away. Carrying their shopping bags, they set off on unsteady steps seeking spiritual sanctuary.

  “Just like home,” Blue said when they stepped inside the church, both of them inhaling deeply of the incense, noting the racks of flickering candles dedicated to the Mother of God, the manger scene in the corner of the church, the plaster saints holding vigil from a hundred nooks and crannies in the walls. Tinker elbowed Blue as they genuflected beside a pew, directing Blue’s attention with a nod of his head to the lineup outside the confessionals where lights above the doors indicated that four priests were hearing confessions.