by Lewis Shiner
“It’s going to be okay,” I told her.
“He would not wake up,” she said, staring the road. Her German accent was fairly thick, and she seemed uncertain of her words. “I am very frightened.”
“As long as they keep him upright he’ll be okay. I promise you.”
We took Campden Hill Road to Kensington High Street, then turned on Wright’s Lane. The hospital is on Marloes Road, only a few blocks from where we were. They would pump his stomach, I figured, and keep him overnight for observation. Jimi believed in flying saucers and spirit beings. I didn’t think he’d have a problem with me being from the future. I would wait around until Monika and I could get in to see him, then he and I would talk.
The ambulance pulled up to the emergency entrance and Monika stopped there in the driveway with the engine running. The place looked dingy and dark, red bricks and soot instead of the American pretense of sterility. I realized that Monika was freaked out badly. “It’s okay,” I said again. “Turn off the car, we’ll go inside.”
I helped her out of the car. She still seemed pretty dazed so I took hold of one arm. She smelled of expensive perfume and nervous sweat. There were deep circles under the mascara and I remembered she hadn’t slept much the night before. I left her in the waiting room and talked to the nurses, who promised to find me as soon as they had word.
I sat down with Monika. She had a piece of sketchbook paper in one hand and she was crying. I took the paper away from her and saw a drawing of nine nines, each larger than the last, with the circle parts concentric.
“What is this?”
“Jimi was drawing that yesterday. He said it was very important. Over and over he was telling me. Very important.”
I gave it back to her. “If Six Was Nine” was the cut on his second album where he said, “I’m the one that’s got to die when it’s time for me to die.” Now nine nines. I had no idea what it meant.
We sat there for an hour. Every few minutes I asked for an update and the desk nurse shook her head. Monika sat with her eyes closed and didn’t seem to want to talk.
I was getting nervous.
It was just before noon when a doctor came out and one of the nurses pointed at me. I was out of my chair in a flash with Monika right behind me.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “There was nothing we could do.”
They’d put Jimi in some kind of head restraint in the ambulance. He was sitting up, but unable to lean forward. When he threw up, the vomit ran into his lungs and all he could do was sit there and strangle to death.
Monika went hysterical just as another of Jimi’s girlfriends, Alvenia Bridges, showed up. She’d stayed with Eric Burdon the night before, and she was the one Monika called when she couldn’t wake Jimi up. I left Monika with her and went into the men’s toilet.
I was dizzy, unable to concentrate. Jimi was dead. Again. My being there had made no difference at all.
I couldn’t believe it.
I splashed water on my face and looked at myself in the mirror. It was not supposed to happen this way. I was supposed to be in control. I could not accept it. I turned toward the door and then my balance went out. The floor rushed up at me.
I never felt myself hit. The next thing I knew I was on my face on the bed in my hotel in 1989.
c h a p t e r 7
JIMI
I was back in Austin for two days before I could make myself call Graham. “I tried,” I told him. “I didn’t get it.”
“Are you okay? What happened?”
“I’m all right. Jimi died.” I told him the story.
“We gave it a shot. Let it go.”
“I want to try again.”
“Ray, leave it, man. You did your best. I thought you could do it without, you know. Things getting weird. It’s not worth it. We’ve got Smile. Which, by the way, I’m going to be sending you some more money for. We just went gold! I’ve shipped fifty thousand units. Part of it is, I got to feeling guilty and scaled the price way back. Still. Fifty thousand units of a bootleg! This is absolutely incredible.”
“Graham, I…”
“You don’t sound good.”
“I’ll tell you the truth, I feel like shit. Everything is a blur. It’s like a hangover and being drunk at the same time.”
“Jet lag. It’s going to take you a couple three days. Just rest up, okay, partner? We’ll talk some more.”
“Okay,” I said. “Later.”
I finished the last of the paperwork on my repair jobs and put my tools away. Unless I changed the message on my machine the shelves would stay empty. I took down all the posters and photos and wiring diagrams on the north wall, all but the one Hendrix poster that was already there. Then I went through my books and cut out photos of Jimi and everybody else who was part of the London scene then: the Boyd sisters, Patti and Jenny, blonde fashion models who were married to George Harrison and Mick Fleetwood respectively; Marianne Faithfull, with her ties to both the Stones and the art world; John Mayall, whose bands had turned out one brilliant guitarist after another. Shots of the young and trendy on King’s Road, of fans lined up outside the Roundhouse or sprawled around Hyde Park at a free concert. A couple of Michael English’s psychedelic posters from OZ magazine. A great photo of Erika Hanover and Linda Eastman taking each other’s picture, Erika in a crouch as Linda shot down at her, European nobility meets American plutocracy.
I played my First Rays work tape and I played other music from the late summer of 1970: Eric Burdon Declares War, Fleetwood Mac’s Then Play On, Dave Mason’s Alone Together, Santana’s Abraxas, the Stone’s Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out, PG&E’s Are You Ready with the blistering vocals of Charlie Allen. I made a tape with singles on it like “Love or Let Me Be Lonely” and “Tighter, Tighter,” “Ride Captain Ride” and the Joe Cocker version of “The Letter.” I turned up a British singles chart from September of 1970 but virtually everything on it was American: Smokey and the Miracles, Elvis, Three Dog Night, the Chairmen of the Board, Bread.
I remember hearing all those songs in 1970 as I drove around Austin looking for work. Every ad I answered turned out to be a door-to-door sales job. I was so desperate I spent a day pushing Cutco knives with a borrowed sample case. My one sales pitch was to a stoned college girl who didn’t even have a piece of bread for me to demonstrate the knives on.
Meanwhile Jimi toured Europe and played the Isle of Wight. He came home to London to jam at the Speak and hang out with Monika, and with Devon Wilson, his old girlfriend from Harlem, immortalized in “Dolly Dagger,” a song that would have been on First Rays of the New Rising Sun.
Peace and love were not only losing ground, they weren’t paying the bills either. Jackson State and Kent State and the days after, when Nixon and Agnew declared open season on student protest, had left everybody I knew full of helpless anger. A lot of my friends talked about moving out to the country to start a commune or a co-op, and a few of them eventually did. I joined a new band that didn’t last a month. To go back to college for a liberal arts degree sounded like bad joke. My love life was nonexistent.
Which is how I ended up in Dallas, going to DeVry on money borrowed from my parents, living in an efficiency in Oaklawn, working Sundays on my father’s fishpond. That was the year I started to drink seriously, even though I was still underage. There was a guy in some of my classes at DeVry who was in his thirties. We would play tennis on Saturday afternoon and he would buy a couple of cases for me afterwards.
It’s hard to remember what it feels like to be that young. I could drink all night and it didn’t make any difference the next day. My relationships would last a month or two before I would get bored or she would get nervous and one or the other of us would stop calling or start to make excuses. No matter who broke it off, when it was over I always felt relief. Free again.
Freedom seemed important at the time.
Jimi had a couple of regular girlfriends—Kathy Etchingham in London, Devon Wilson in the States—but there were no str
ings. He had women on the road, women at parties. He was a guy who couldn’t say no. I wonder if that didn’t start to wear on him, the way it finally started to wear on me. In the spring of 1970 he found out Kathy had gotten married without telling him, to some guy from the Eric Clapton organization. She’d been married since November. Jimi flew to London to try to talk her out of it and after a couple of days he saw she was happy without him. Then he called Monika in Germany, who was sick and wouldn’t see him. For the first time he seemed tired of being footloose, seemed to think seriously of marriage.
Jimi was twenty-seven when he died. For that matter, so was Jim Morrison, and so were Janis Joplin and Brian Jones. When Brian Wilson was twenty-seven, his father sold the rights to all his music behind his back. After that Brian took to his bed, and that, more or less, was the end of his career.
At twenty-seven I was working nine to five in the Printed Circuit Design department of Warrex Computer Corporation, bored out of my mind. The PC draftsman, a guy from Plano named Charles Lane, helped me work on my car and took me fishing now and again. We’d become friends the year before because we were the only two people in the company who gave a damn when Elvis died. Charles told me how he got married when he was just my age. “It’s that kind of time in your life. Things start to catch up to you.”
I told him I didn’t have anybody to even think about marrying.
“That don’t matter. When the time comes it’ll happen, that’s all.”
A week or so later Elizabeth brought me a prime rib at the Lemmon Avenue Bar and Grille and I felt it happen, just like Charles said. An urgent need to move or be left behind, a sense that this was my last chance to beat the endless pattern of love and loss, the roller coaster of emotions. So I jumped, and never imagined it might one day become insupportable, without expectation of reconciliation.
It’s all so tangled together. Seeing Jimi in concert in February of 1968 and again that summer, with Alex both times. This black, long-sleeved shirt with green polka dots that I would sometimes wear when I went out with Alex, but was mostly my rock-and-roll shirt, that I wore with the band, playing Jimi’s music, that I wore until it was literally rags. My first stereo, a cheap fold-out portable from Columbia Masterworks, that my parents bought me so they wouldn’t have to listen to me play Jimi’s albums on their hi-fi anymore. My best friend Les Michaels stuck a blue-and-green vinyl flower on the top of it after we went off to Vanderbilt together, you know the ones, a blue circle with five smaller green circles around the edge to represent the petals, you used to see them everywhere and now they’re just one more example of how naïve we all used to be, to believe you could change the basic nature of something by putting a flower on it.
Was it that way for everybody, music and sex and politics and love all inextricably part of each other, or is it just me? How can you ever know how much is true for everyone and how much is only true for you?
It took me a week to feel like I was ready to try again.
I put on the same clothes I’d worn in London, as if they were part of the magic. I’d bought some pre-1970 pounds from a coin dealer, enough to get around for a day or so, and I had a few hundred US dollars in my wallet. I was cold and deliberate, like somebody laying out the implements for suicide. It was 3:10 in the afternoon. I went up to my workshop and put on my First Rays work tape, and then I sat on my leather couch and closed my eyes.
Charlie Murray had described the Speakeasy to me and I tried to make the images come alive in my head. You went downstairs at 48 Margaret Street and through a set of double doors. On the left as you come in is a cigarette machine and a couple of what Charlie called “fruit machines,” slot machines. He said there’s always somebody there risking the last of their coins in hopes of paying off their dinner bill. Straight ahead, at the far end of the club, is a tiny stage with a tinier dressing room behind it. There are booths along the walls, a few tables and chairs. Everything very dark and moody. On the right is the restaurant area, walled off, with windows so you could still see the stage, but where the volume of the music—I mean, think about Hendrix playing in a nightclub—is cut down enough that people can actually talk. The cuisine is basic Italian, so you can probably smell the garlic, even over the smoke and beer residue of the club.
Things are going to hell in England just like they are in the States. The underground paper OZ has been busted for obscenity; investors have figured out there’s real money to be made, everywhere from the Roundhouse to Carnaby Street; the cops have hounded Brian Jones into alcoholism and death; the Isle of Wight festival is inundated by half a million kids, driven by a desperate longing to be part of the scene, the moment, to at least brush against it or maybe rip a small piece of it loose for themselves before it’s gone.
Hendrix could turn it around. I could make him see. Instead of going with Monika that Friday night he could come to my hotel and talk, crash in the spare bed, get up in plenty of time for his court date. After the hearings we could go to the Speak to celebrate.
It felt real, more real than my empty house and the endless Texas afternoon outside. Somewhere that was how it really happened. Somewhere it was the truth. I let the music take me and I was there.
I crossed Margaret Street in the last of the early September daylight. I heard music by the time I hit the stairs and it made me light-headed. It was like every Saturday night party I’d ever been to in high school, every major gig I’d ever played. Anything could happen: romance or enlightenment, friendship or heartbreak.
Inside it was smaller than I’d expected, low-ceilinged and English and old-fashioned. There was a strange heart-shaped pattern on the wallpaper and a framed poster of a 1920s vintage nude woman. Near the stage several of the little three-foot-square tables had been pushed together and abandoned. The booths were full and a few of the other tables too, everyone talking, the men all with thick sideburns, their hair parted low and combed straight across their foreheads, the women with long straight hair parted in the middle. Everyone had flared trousers and squared-off shoes, and they were all smoking. Nobody paid attention to the guy with the acoustic guitar on stage, who I thought might be Long John Baldry. I didn’t see Jimi.
I found a table in a dark corner and ordered a lemonade when the waitress came by. I counted on Jimi to show up, to let me get next to him. I didn’t have the right to count on anything, not since I sat in that hospital waiting room and let him die, but I couldn’t help it. I felt lucky.
I took a longer look around and this time I hesitated at a tall, graceful woman with long red hair who sat in a booth by the stage. I knew her from somewhere. The guy she was with had black wavy hair past his collar, bangs, and sunglasses. He wore a black shirt and striped tie and white pointed shoes, like a gangster. He seemed to be arguing with her. When the couple in the next booth left, I took over their empty table.
“…killing yourself, Erika,” the man said. “I love you and I’m not going to help.”
Christ, I thought. It’s Erika Hanover.
“It’s my life,” Erika said, “and it’s not worth a damn to me right now.” Her voice was low and husky, her accent strictly British upper class, no trace of the Continent left. “For God’s sake, Tony. Please.”
“No,” the man said, and stood up. I glanced over and saw him kiss the top of her head. “I have to get back to the tour. Mick is bonking some beauty queen from Texas and I’ve got to get him to Paris for the Olympia on Sunday. It’s going to be a madhouse.”
“If you loved me…”
“I do love you. And that’s why I’m not going to be an accomplice to this.” He let out a long sigh. “Take care of yourself. Please. Get some help.” He passed my table, headed for the door.
I sat for a while and listened to Erika cry. I thought about Jimi and about lost opportunities. Then I moved to the seat across from her.
“Go away,” she said. She had her face in her hands and didn’t look up at me.
“I don’t want anything from you. I want to help.”<
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Now she did look at me. “Are you holding?” I hadn’t heard the expression in so long it confused me for a second. “Have you got any drugs?” she said.
“No.” She was recognizable as Erika Hanover, high forehead and brilliant dark red hair, penetrating gray eyes. Tonight her broad face was puffy and her eyes had dark circles underneath. She would be close to forty at this point, at the height of her notoriety. She was almost as tall as me, languid and sensual, full-bodied but not heavy. She wore jeans, a white T-shirt, and a denim jacket. There were streaks of grime on the shirt.
“Then you can’t help me and you should please go away.”
After a long minute I said, “I really admire your work.”
“You can’t possibly know me.”
“There’s a picture of Mick Jagger at Hyde Park, at the free concert that was supposed to be a memorial for Brian Jones. He’s covered with dozens of dying butterflies.” She nodded slowly, as if it was somebody else’s work. “John Lennon, with Yoko reflected in his round mirrored sunglasses, she’s in black, he’s in white. Hendrix, with this half-eaten meal and a cigarette…”
“You surprise me. Most people never look to see who took the picture.”
“If I like something, I want to know who’s responsible.”
“What’s your name?”
“Ray.”
“I’m Erika.” She held out her hand, palm down, and I gave it a gentle squeeze. “Where in America are you from, Ray?”
“Texas. Austin.”
“I’ve been to Austin. It was lovely. Not what you’d think Texas would be like, is it? With the trees and lakes and such.”
“No, I guess not.”
“Would you be a love and get me a drink? Anything, I don’t really care.”
At the bar I ordered her a rum and Coke. When I took the drink back to the booth I half expected her to be gone. Instead she’d calmed down and lit a cigarette. Baldry finished his set to a quick flurry of applause as I sat down. Erika left the drink by her right hand, untouched.