Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  “No, thanks,” Dave said, “I’m trying to quit.” What was the word for a society where everyone was in charge? “How are you taking tickets?”

  Romney laughed again. “There were twenty thousand people here this morning. They wanted me and my buddy Tom Law from the Hog Farm to clear them off the field and make them line up to show their tickets. Tom knew they’d made a big-money deal for the film rights and so he said, ‘You want a good movie or a bad movie?’”

  “Are you saying there’s no fences?”

  “They had to change the venue at the last minute, and they ran out of time. They could either finish the stage or finish the fences. No stage, no music, there would have been riots. No fences, no money, the investors take a bath. Some choice, huh? Fortunately they made the right one.”

  Dave looked out at the crowd and was suddenly, deeply afraid. “Are you sure this is safe?”

  “Compared to what? Crossing the street in New York City? Being in Vietnam? Close your eyes.”

  Romney waited, apparently meaning it literally. Dave reluctantly closed them.

  “Can you feel it?” Romney said. “Just feel the vibe. It’s very mellow. All we have to do is keep reinforcing that.”

  Dave opened his eyes, not convinced. “The Hog Farm, that’s that commune you were in back in LA?”

  “Yeah, only we’re in New Mexico now, when we’re not on the road. First they hired us to set up some camp sites, blaze some trails and stuff, and we talked them into letting us do a free kitchen. Then this whole security thing happened.”

  “I can’t get over how different you look.”

  “When you knew me, I was a comedian. Now I’m a clown. I found out it was a much safer identity if you’re going head-to-head with the cops. It tends to defuse the violence.”

  A dark-haired, slender woman in a halter top and shorts took Romney aside to ask him something, and when he came back he said, “I got to go. It appears we need to set up a tent for acid casualties. If you want to find me later, we’re directly over thataway.” He pointed off stage right. “On the other side of the trees. Just ask anybody for the Hog Farm.”

  Romney hugged him again and walked away. Dave felt precarious. He was too old to believe in vibes and karma and auras and the rest, yet he feared his mental turmoil would communicate itself to the mob beyond the stage, toppling their emotional balance and turning the field into the last reel of Lord of the Flies. He fled down the wooden bridge to the performer’s compound.

  Almost immediately he saw another familiar face. Tim Hardin, strapped to an acoustic guitar, staggered around the field in a long-sleeved shirt and corduroy trousers. Dave had heard that Hardin was on methadone, but at the moment he looked to have fallen off the wagon. He was playing snatches of song and calling out to the various clumps of people who passed him by, hurrying to some emergency or another. Dave had decided to turn away and avoid him if possible when Hardin recognized him.

  “Dave! Fancy meeting you here.”

  Dave barely heard him over the helicopters, the motorcycles, the members of the crew shouting to each other, the Crosby, Stills & Nash album blasting over the pa. Hardin started toward him, tripped, recovered, and stumbled on again.

  “Hi, Timmy.”

  “They wanted me to open the show. I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ Did you see them?” He flung one arm out in the general direction of the audience. His stage fright was legendary, and if ever a crowd was going to provoke it, this was the one. No wonder he’d gotten high.

  “It’s unbelievable,” Hardin said. His eyes clouded over. “What are they all doing here? Where did they come from? I mean, I used to play for a hundred, two hundred people, maybe sometimes for a thousand, two thousand. But this, this is crazy.”

  “What are they doing here?” Dave said, in anger and despair. “These are all the Black Sheep Boys, who grew up on Desolation Row. They’re here searching for the dolphins, because that’s what you guys told them to do, and they listened to you. And what are you going to tell them now? Now that you called them and they came? Nothing. You’re not going to tell them anything because you’re too fucked up.”

  Hardin’s mood turned penitent. “You’re right,” he nodded. “I am fucked up. I’m always fucked up or fucking up.” He looked like he might start pummeling himself and once again, against his better judgment, Dave felt sorry for him.

  “No, Timmy,” Dave said. “You’re one of the greatest singers and songwriters that ever lived. I wish that was enough for you.”

  Dave walked away. Hardin, after a moment of silence, struck a minor chord and sang, “I’m the family’s unowned boy…”

  A massive white helicopter settled on the grass and Richie Havens climbed out, carrying the open-tuned guitar whose top he’d nearly worn through with the violence of his strumming. Dave knew him from their days in the Village and Havens paused to wave and give him a gap-toothed smile as he headed toward the stage.

  It occurred to Dave that most of the opening night acts came from those Village folk days—Hardin, Havens, Sallie Rachel, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie—as if to remind people where this thing, this movement, this quest had started.

  If it was a quest, he thought, it had so far failed to find any answers. All it had found was more and more people asking the same questions in louder and louder voices. Now he was at the epicenter and all he wanted was to get out before it fell apart.

  *

  Cole’s helicopter landed in a clearing behind the stage and a guy with a long braid down his back ran over to meet them. “Michael’s got a kind of command post off stage right, check in with him when you get a chance. Do you guys need anything?”

  Hoping to impress Joe, Cole said, “An end to capitalist imperialism?”

  “Working on it,” the guy said, and turned to Joe. “How about you?”

  “A sandwich would be nice,” Joe said.

  Cole realized the hotel booze was sloshing around in an empty stomach. The guy with the braid pointed to the giant tepee and Joe, ever polite, thanked him.

  Apparently the organizers had prevailed on Richie Havens to open. His voice blasted through the pa, singing “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Over the top of the board fence, a crush of humanity extended to infinity, and Cole wondered how much the ones at the back could see and hear of the stage.

  The sides of the tepee were open and the floor was a layer of shredded bark. The inside might have held 80 people. Oblong tables, covered with paper tablecloths, were scattered randomly and each had a complement of wooden folding chairs. A banquet table was stacked with paper plates and Dixie cups alongside the standard backstage food—fruit and cheese and lunchmeat, bread and pork and beans and iceberg lettuce salad, Fritos and potato chips, a pot of brown rice and a lentil stew. Bottles of fruit juice stood next to a bowl of punch. At one end of the table were trash cans that kept beer, sodas, and wine on ice.

  They filled their plates and as Cole looked for somewhere to sit he saw Dave Fisher at a table with John Sebastian and a very tall, stunning woman with auburn hair. Dave caught his eye and waved him over.

  “My producer,” Cole said to Joe. “Come join us.”

  “Thanks, I’ll catch you later.”

  Cole left his guitar and his plate of food at an empty place next to Dave and returned to the punchbowl. He drank two cups of it standing by the bowl because it tasted so good.

  The woman turned out to be Sallie Rachel, whose songs he’d heard on the radio and liked well enough, but had not taken seriously. He saw that he would have to reconsider. She smoldered like coals in a fireplace, full of light and heat and positive energy.

  Dave said to Sebastian, “I didn’t know you were on the bill.”

  “I’m not!” Sebastian said, and laughed. “Paul Rothchild told me I absolutely should not miss this, so I went to the Albany airport, where I happened to see Walter Grundy—you remember him, Dave, he was a Spoonful roadie—loading the Incredible String Band’s instruments into a helicopter. He s
aid if I wanted to go to Woodstock, he was my only chance.”

  Cole assembled the ingredients on his plate into a bologna and cheese sandwich, cut it into triangles with a plastic knife, and offered it around before he dove in.

  “They wanted to put the instruments in this yellow Volkswagen bus tent,” Sebastian said, “and they couldn’t quite figure it out. Now, it happens that I have been living in an identical tent in California, so I ended up in charge. Which means,” he said to Cole, “if you get tired of schlepping that guitar around, I can take care of it for you.”

  “Thanks,” Cole said. Sebastian’s easy affability had immediately disarmed him.

  “Dave was telling us about your band,” Sallie said. “He says you’re really good.”

  “The record doesn’t do them justice,” Dave said. “They’re a great live act, and I got carried away in the studio doing overdubs and potchkying around when I should have left it alone. Which is what Cole wanted to do all along.”

  Though Cole appreciated Dave’s apology, it sounded like he was writing the album off, after they’d put so much work into it. He looked down at his food, unable to summon a witty response.

  “They’re first up tomorrow,” Dave said. “Once people see how good they are live, it could break them wide open.”

  Havens finished to huge applause and Sallie said, “Listen to that. It’s like thunder. You can feel the earth shake. I have to go up in front of that?”

  “You’ll be wonderful,” Dave said, and Cole suddenly saw that Dave was in love with her. And why not? With the slightest encouragement, Cole thought that he could fall in love with her too. She and Sebastian both projected a tremendous warmth and accessibility that made Cole feel like they’d been his friends for years. This, Cole thought, is what real stars have.

  And I don’t.

  Somebody was making announcements on stage, apologizing for the noise of the helicopters.

  It’s why they call them stars, he thought. Because of the way they shine. The thought seemed terribly profound, and it made him see constellations in the way the sunlight glinted on the cars parked alongside the tepee.

  The announcer said it was a free festival now, that the promoters were going to take a bath. His voice began to echo strangely, like it was getting sucked down a hole into caves under the earth.

  “Oh, shit,” Cole said. “I’ve been dosed.” The others turned to look at him. Their faces had swollen like balloons, turned waxy and unconvincing. “They spiked the punch with lsd.”

  “Sorry, man,” Sebastian said. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, fine,” Cole said. He stood up. “I just need to walk around.” Mostly he didn’t want to do something stupid in front of Sallie. “Can you take care of my guitar? I really love it a lot.”

  “Don’t worry,” Sebastian said. “I’ve got it.”

  “At least you don’t have to play tonight,” Sallie said. She sounded sympathetic, though he could no longer read her puffed-up features.

  He felt like a kid who’d pissed his pants in front of the grownups. His need to escape became urgent. “It was nice to meet you guys,” he managed. “I’ll check you later.”

  As the drug continued to come on, he felt himself pop in and out of reality, like in the Superman comics where people got sent to the Phantom Zone, only the Phantom Zone was inside his own head. The next time he was back in the world, there was a Swami with an Indian-from-India accent on the pa, talking about how sound energy was the most powerful energy in the world and how the sacred art of music would lead to peace that would “pervade all over the globe.”

  Really? Cole thought. Maybe it was possible. It certainly felt peaceful where he was, still in the backstage area, behind the organizers’ trailers and out of sight of the performers’ pavilion. The sun was pleasantly warm and in the distance the clumps of forest were cool and inviting, leafy green and flickering, thanks to the acid, with a deep and calming blue. The countryside did feel magical, nurturing, timeless, resistant to ambition and possessiveness. He shifted into a cross-legged posture and pushed his hands against the dirt, imagining his fingers rooting deep in the soil. His annoyance at having been dosed melted away and he decided that fate had led him to this moment, to be tripping here at this event that was already taking on historic and symbolic weight like a ship taking on water.

  He heard a band playing, flute and electric piano and a sassy chick singer. Not the music, he thought, that would bring world peace like the Swami had predicted. Restless and uncomfortable, he got up and made his way to a gate that opened onto the road behind the stage. A guy in a yellow armband verified that Cole had his performer’s pass and said, “I’d think twice about going out there if I was you. There’s half a million people out there.”

  “I’ll be okay,” Cole said, surprised to find that he believed it. He tucked the pass into his pants pocket and went out the gate. He made his way to the main north-south road, where people were continuing to arrive by the thousands. To his left was the stage. Ahead of him, at the top of the gentle rise that faced the stage, stood the M-shaped awnings of the concession stands. To his right was the official information booth and the woods and the main campground.

  As Cole circled around toward the front of the stage he saw that any idea he had of walking out into the audience and sitting down was hopeless. Down front they had squeezed themselves in as tightly as possible, their knees planted in the backs of the people in front of them, their backs resting on the knees of the people behind. What happens when somebody has to take a leak? he wondered.

  He realized that he needed to go himself. Long lines had already formed for the portable toilets, so he made his way into the woods and pissed against a tree. After that he wandered for a while, sometimes forgetting where he was, fascinated by the intricacy of the layers of leaves, branch after branch and tree after tree. Eventually he stumbled onto a trail and followed it toward a cluster of booths selling hippie crafts. Candles, tie-dyed T-shirts, jewelry. Beyond them was a clearing full of tents and school buses painted in wild colors and slogans. One of them was the famous Merry Pranksters bus with the destination “Further” above the windshield. He wondered if Ken Kesey was around. Madelyn loved both of his novels…

  The memory of Madelyn was not bearable in his present state.

  Next to the Prankster bus sat a bare wooden stage, three lengths of plywood across by three widths of plywood deep, no higher off the ground than the 2 ✕ 6s that supported it. A commotion was going on at the side of the stage, and Joan Baez emerged from it in jeans and a patchwork jacket, carrying a guitar and conspicuously pregnant, trailing a small entourage. Cole had never liked the polish and vibrato in her voice, but at the moment he badly needed to put Madelyn out of his thoughts. He sat in the short grass with a few dozen others as Baez adjusted the microphones and then started to sing “Poor Wayfaring Stranger.”

  Cole managed to make his Daliesque watch solidify long enough to figure out that it was around seven pm. The sun, retreating down the sky, had turned the trees blue. Or maybe that was the acid. The guy next to him, early thirties, ragged beard, leather hat and no shirt, tapped Cole on the arm and offered him a lit joint. “You tripping?” the man asked. Cole nodded and the man said, “Your pupils are as big as a deer’s.” He laughed, and together they smoked the joint down to the roach.

  The guy called himself Sugarfoot. He was from Champaign-Urbana, where he’d spent the last ten years failing to write his dissertation at the University of Illinois Agriculture school. He was “custodian” of a giant tepee, and he, and the people who were crashing in it, were going to start a commune on 50 acres near Wytheville, Virginia. Cole, for his part, admitted to being a performer and Sugarfoot politely pretended he’d heard of The Quirq.

  Baez was charming and had a dry, self-effacing humor that melted Cole’s resistance. She played “House of the Rising Sun” and “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “There but for Fortune,” along with some ballads that sounded like the American F
olk Music records. At one point a skinny, bearded, naked man got up on the stage and danced. He didn’t approach Baez and she didn’t acknowledge him, and after a while he wandered away again.

  “Did you see that?” Cole asked.

  “You mean the naked guy on stage?” Sugarfoot said. “Nope, you must have hallucinated it.”

  When Baez was done and the applause died down, a long discussion ensued. At the end of it, some more guys with no shirts filled the stage with amps and a drum set and began to play a meandering blues. Sugarfoot had disappeared and twilight had arrived. The air looked misty, maybe from fog, maybe from campfire smoke, maybe from Cole’s altered perceptions. Cole’s emotions always ran high at sunset, and he was feeling lost and lonely. He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to find his way to the main stage in the dark, so he got unsteadily to his feet and followed Baez and her entourage as far as the main road. Then he turned right and climbed toward the top of the hill.

  They were between acts on the main stage. The mc read the names of people who needed to call home, of somebody with a broken arm, of somebody proposing to his girlfriend. By the time Cole got to the concession area, the sky was completely dark and his stomach was rumbling. The islands of light inside the hamburger stands were yellow, the rest of the world deep brown, creating a stark and depressing contrast that Madelyn would have called chiaroscuro. The thought of Madelyn kindled feelings of desperation that he fought to push aside. Even if he could find a phone, he was in no state to talk to her. He bought a hamburger and ate it standing up, licking his fingers when he was done, and then the mc said, “Tim Hardin!”

  Cole moved closer, picking his way between clusters of people in the near darkness. He could make out the stage and the people on it, but no faces. Apparently they hadn’t had time to set up overhead stage lights and were trying to get by with follow spots mounted on the speaker towers. Hardin sat hunched at the piano, alone in a pool of deep blue light. He played a few random-sounding arpeggios and partial chords, then, suddenly, he broke into the opening notes to “How Can We Hang on to a Dream,” Cole’s favorite song from Tim Hardin 1.