Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  “Oh, yeah,” Lenny said, “that’s right. We’ve got two guitar players. I kind of forgot there for a bit.”

  “Want some food?” Cole said.

  “We had breakfast at the hotel. Fresh eggs. Really fresh.” Lenny looked at Laramie, then Cole. “Like they’d just been laid.”

  “Something troubling you, Lenny?” Cole asked.

  “Nah, not really. I like getting a phone call that we’re about to be on, asking me where the hell you were.”

  “I’m right here, Lenny.”

  “It’s just that this is a pretty important gig. Half a million people, for Christ’s sake. Movie cameras.”

  “You’ll have to excuse my friend Lenny,” Cole said to Laramie. “He’s not usually this much of an asshole.”

  “How much of an asshole am I?” Lenny asked. “Usually?”

  “Tell you what,” Cole said, “let’s finish this conversation later. I’d really like to eat before we go on.” He turned his back on Lenny and fished around for a Coke in the mostly melted ice. The closer he let someone get, the more power they had to piss him off. His stomach had clenched up and now he wasn’t sure he would be able to eat.

  Lenny was gone when he turned around again. Cole and Laramie sat at a table by themselves. “I apologize for Lenny,” he said. “I don’t know what’s bugging him.”

  “Nerves, I bet,” Laramie said. “I’m terrified, and I’m not even going on stage.”

  “Maybe he’s jealous,” Cole said, and leaned over to kiss her. She sighed into the kiss and put her arms around his neck. He’d never been with a woman before who was so deeply into sex. He knew intellectually that sex was not the only thing he wanted out of life, though at the moment everything else seemed trivial. He offered her half his sandwich, and she scarfed it down eagerly.

  On stage, a guy led the crowd in something he called “Breath of Fire” that was like rapid panting, through the nose instead of the mouth. The crazy Hog Farm guy, Hugh something, had also been making announcements, calling this “the first free city of the world in the Aquarian Age.” Cole was unable to say why he found the words so moving and why he was unable to laugh them off as hippie bullshit, the way he would have 24 hours before. He felt like he was in an after-the-bomb science fiction novel where the human race, reduced to savagery, tried to make sense of the technology that had been left behind, a technology consisting of guitars and amplifiers and microphones.

  He drained his Coke and said, “Come on, let’s go introduce you to John Sebastian.”

  Sebastian was decked out in an orange tie-dyed jacket and blue and white tie-dyed jeans. He kissed Laramie on the cheek and escorted Cole to the vw camper. His Strat, Cole was relieved to see, was not only there but clean and dry. Sebastian was radiant. He waved off Cole’s thanks and said, “We’re all doing for each other now. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

  Cole carried the guitar over the bridge, Laramie tucked under his other arm. She paused at the back of the stage and said, “I can’t go out there.”

  “Why not?” Lenny was already moving their amps around with one of the stage crew, a guy in a crumpled cowboy hat with dark hair hanging down his shirtless back. Tommy pulled drums and chrome-plated stands out of black fiberboard cases and piled them up. The yoga guy, also bare-chested, with a dark blond braid, finished and raised his hand as he walked away, accompanied by whistles and applause. Another dozen or so groupies, stagehands, and performers milled around the stage.

  “You’re not nervous?” she asked.

  “I wish they had another million of them out there.”

  “You go on. I’ll stay here.”

  Cole found his amp among the drum cases. A guy in a ragged Hawaiian shirt, sporting a horseshoe mustache with long, dangling ends, said, “You with The Quirq?”

  “That’s me. We supposed to load up this giant turntable thing?”

  “Don’t bother, just put it wherever the fuck you want it to end up. I don’t know how much life the cheap-ass casters on that motherfucker got left in ’em. Like everything else around here, good idea, execution entirely for shit. You need anything?”

  “Nah,” Cole said, pushing his amp in the direction of the audience. “The casters on this motherfucker are still good.”

  The guy laughed and went to help Tommy.

  The front of the stage, Cole saw as he got closer, did not drop ten feet straight down to ground level, but only four feet to a ledge where the film crews and still photographers were setting up for the day’s shooting. On the far side of the ledge, a board fence separated them from the crowd. The top of the fence was festooned with clothes drying out from the rain of the night before.

  The sky had cleared to a deep blue with a few puffy clouds, temperature around 70, the sun warm on his skin. Once again Cole felt a benevolence that emanated from the very landscape, unlike the deserts he’d known in Mexico and Egypt and West Texas. He closed his eyes and drank in a sense of calm and rightness. As he stood there, somebody put side one of Music from Big Pink on the pa system, the slow moan of “Tears of Rage.”

  When he opened his eyes again, he saw a stack of equipment at the back of stage left that included a Hammond B-3 and so many conga drums that they were lined up like bowling pins. Laramie had wandered over to investigate and a couple of rough-looking guys had come to check her out, one a short Chicano in high-heeled boots, the other a gringo in a sleeveless black T-shirt, both with huge Afros. Cole felt a pang of jealousy until she said something to the short one, pointed to Cole, and smiled and blew him a kiss.

  Cole waved back and set to work. He plugged his amp into the ac supply, then laid out his pedals and patched them all in line. When he switched his amp on and tried an experimental chord, a small cheer went up from the crowd. It was good, Cole thought, to be the first band of the day, to catch the audience when it was hungry.

  He saw that Lenny had set up at the other end of the stage, 50 feet away, far enough for the sound from his amp to be delayed. Tommy, meanwhile, had placed his bass drum to stage right of Cole’s amp and was nailing the pedal to the stage. “What’s up with Lenny?” Cole asked him.

  “Fuck if I know. On the rag for some reason.”

  Gordo pushed his tuck-and-rolled Kustom cabinet to the other side of the drums, far enough back for Tommy to be able to hear him. “You guys discussing la cabrona?” He tilted his head toward Lenny, whose back was to them, playing his Les Paul with the sound off. Cole couldn’t remember Gordo showing hostility toward anyone before, certainly not calling anyone a bitch.

  “I’ve never seen him like this before,” Cole said.

  “Yes you have,” Gordo said. “Every time there’s an important gig, he freaks out, directly proportional to how important it is. Half a million people, he’s mega-freaking. I been feeling like I was gonna echar la pota myself, ever since I got up.”

  “If that means what I think it means,” Tommy said, “please do it off the back of the stage.”

  Two stagehands converged on Lenny. One of them, with glasses, blond muttonchop sideburns, and handlebar mustache, squatted in front of him and pointed to the crowd, to the towers that held the speakers, to the rest of the band. Finally he smiled and squeezed Lenny’s shoulder and together they rolled his Marshall stack to within a few feet of Gordo’s Kustom.

  The guy with the sideburns came over and shook hands all around. “I’m Chip Monck,” he said in a deep baritone.

  “Oh, hey,” Cole said. “You work with Bill Graham.”

  “Yeah, some carpentry, some lights, some this and that. I think your friend is experiencing an episode of nerves.”

  “Thanks for talking to him,” Cole said, though in truth he was out of patience. Neither Gordo nor Tommy seemed particularly sympathetic either.

  “Glad to help,” Chip said. “Have a good show.”

  Cole bit the bullet and walked over to Lenny. “You want to tune up?”

  “You must think I’m an idiot,” Lenny said.

  “I
’ve always known you were an idiot,” Cole said, “but I don’t see what that has to do with tuning guitars.”

  In terms of lightening the mood, Cole’s quip was about as successful as LBJ’s Vietnam policy. “Fuck you,” Lenny said, and started to take off his guitar.

  “Hey, take it easy.” Cole felt the first thrill of panic. He searched for an idea that Lenny could relate to. “Do you have any idea how many women out there are going to want to fuck you after you get offstage? Thousands. You have never had odds like this in your life. Let’s tune up, let them make their announcements, play for forty minutes, and the rest is sex. Okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, fine, let’s get it over with.” Between his nerves and the Band blasting through the speakers, Lenny’s perfect pitch had shorted out. Cole fetched the miniature tuning fork from his guitar case and waved Gordo over, and between the three of them they managed a rough consensus.

  “Oh, man,” Lenny said, “this is really going to suck.”

  They put their amps on standby and their guitars on stands and Tommy put his sticks in one of the tension rods of his bass drum. Cole collected Laramie, getting a “who the fuck are you?” look from the short guy in heels, and they all went back to the performers’ tent.

  Eleven-fifteen. Cole, ready to go, watched the minutes drag by in awkward silence or fumbling conversation. Lenny wandered off again and Cole decided that somebody else could go after him this time. No one did.

  The constant drone of helicopters reached a fever pitch around noon. John Morris announced from the stage that the US Army was flying in medical teams. “They are with us, man!”

  Chip Monck stuck his head in the tent and made eye contact with Cole. “Quirq? You guys are on.” Cole couldn’t get over his buttery smooth voice. “Aren’t you missing a guitar player?”

  “Evidently,” Cole said.

  They all crossed the bridge again, Cole wondering if the flimsy railing would last all three days. Lenny sat with his legs hanging off the back of the stage, looking at a 20 foot drop to the road below and leaning against another flimsy 2 ✕ 4 railing. “Órale, cabrona,” Gordo said. “Let’s go play.”

  Lenny got miserably to his feet. Cole wanted to slap him. Laramie grabbed Cole by the hair and kissed him thoroughly. As she ran to the side of the stage, Cole saw a grand piano there, covered in green oilcloth, with Dave Fisher sitting on the bench and smiling at him. Dave, who’d been to dinner with him and Madelyn in San Francisco, and who couldn’t have missed that kiss. Cole felt himself blush.

  “I’m proud of you guys,” Dave said, getting up to put one hand on Lenny’s shoulder. “You’ve come so far in such a short time. This is going to put you on the map.”

  The words hit the band’s negative energy and fizzled out. “Thanks,” Cole said.

  John Morris was still talking as they strapped on their guitars, the audience already whistling and clapping for them. “Insulin and all other drugs are available in the medical centers. If you need something, for God’s sake don’t sit there. You can always come back, we’re going to be here.”

  Cole switched his amp off standby and heard a nasty 60-cycle hum, followed by radio transmissions from a nearby airport. Switching the ground made no difference. Oh well, he thought, nothing to do about it now. He touched the switch on his mike to make sure it was on. A blue spark flashed and knocked Cole back a step, the electric shock numbing his hand and traveling all the way up his arm to his jaw. “Fuck!” he said reflexively, and the mike picked it up, blasting it from the speaker towers. The crowd laughed.

  Cole, his temper about to boil over, switched the ground on his amp again. Then, gingerly, he touched the mike like he would a burner on a stove. It still hummed with ungrounded power, not quite as badly.

  He looked at Morris. “Can you do anything about that?”

  Morris shrugged. “We’re working on it.”

  He glanced to make sure Lenny had seen. Lenny was staring at his feet. Fuck it, Cole thought, let him get shocked.

  Off mike, Morris said, “You guys ready?”

  Tommy and Gordo were watching Cole. Cole nodded.

  Morris got back on the microphone. “Okay, I guess the reason we’re here is music. So let’s have some music.”

  Suddenly Cole felt like he’d stepped on ice and his feet had flown out from under him. He’d been thinking about Laramie and then pissed off at Lenny and embarrassed for Dave, and then the shock had wiped his brain. He’d missed his chance to stop and get his bearings.

  “Ladies and gentlemen… The Quirq.”

  Tommy counted off “Wang Dang Doodle,” and three out of four of them started the song. Lenny was lost somewhere in his own brain. Cole had had enough. He crossed the stage, and at the end of a measure, he kicked Lenny in the ass, hard. Lenny jumped forward a couple of feet and turned on Cole with an enraged expression while the kids near the front of the stage laughed.

  “Play, cabrona,” Cole said.

  “Quit calling me that,” Lenny said, as he turned up the volume on his guitar and fell in.

  Back on his side of the stage, Cole started to sing, keeping a respectful distance from the spherical head of the mike. This was where they always won the crowd over, at the top of the set, hitting them with a burst of joyous energy, and today the notes fluttered off the stage and lay twitching in the dirt. Everything that was supposed to feel relaxed and spontaneous came out forced and artificial. Cole struck a few poses when his leads came around and managed to coax a little audience response that way. He got them all clapping along for “Get Out of My Life, Woman,” but when he got up next to Gordo and got him to dance a few steps, Gordo stepped on his own cord and unplugged the bass.

  They were almost at the end, having built some momentum in spite of themselves, about to go into their final medley, when John Morris came on stage and held up one hand. For a terrible moment Cole thought they were about to get the hook. Morris said, “Hold it just a second,” and then took the mike. “I apologize to all of you for doing this, but Hugh has something he’s got to talk to us about, so let Hugh talk.”

  Hugh was the clown guy with the missing teeth and the white jumpsuit and trashed cowboy hat. He took the mike and said, “Listen, we are all different parts of the same revolution.” Cole looked at Lenny, who stared back at him. Was this really the reason they’d interrupted the set? Hugh said something about people trying to get violent, and if that happened, “let’s all just jump up and kiss ’em. And lick ’em.” Then, in what was apparently the real issue, he asked for someone named Patty’s asthma medicine to be brought to the information booth near stage right because she was having an attack.

  As soon as he finished, Cole started the riff to “Smokestack Lightning.” It was too late. The energy they’d manage to build had evaporated. They struggled through the usual segue to “Cielito lindo” and back without it ever catching fire, wrapped it up, and unplugged and huddled at the rear of the stage.

  Laramie was ten feet away, leaning forward in a folding chair, squeezing her arms between her thighs, looking at Cole with awe. Cole was disappointed that she could be so easily impressed. He gave her a flash of a smile and held up one finger for her to stay put.

  To Cole’s surprise, they got a decent amount of applause. Chip had taken over for John Morris and his mellow voice was saying, “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Quirq. I don’t think you’ve convinced them. Come on, you’ll have to do better than that.”

  “We going with ‘Mariner’ for the encore?” Tommy said.

  “Too slow,” Cole said. “‘Seventh Son.’”

  “We hardly did any originals,” Lenny complained. “We need to do ‘Mariner.’”

  “Listen,” Cole said, “we sucked so bad, we’re lucky they didn’t kick us off the stage. This is our last chance to make some kind of positive impression.”

  Chip was waving them back on stage.

  “I say ‘Mariner,’” Lenny said.

  “Gordo?” Cole said.

  “Fuck, I
don’t know. ‘Mariner,’ I guess.”

  “Fine,” Cole said. “For Christ’s sake keep it short.”

  “Fuck you,” Lenny said.

  The spacey, echoing guitars and moody lyrics were, as Cole anticipated, exactly the wrong tone, and when they faded it out after five minutes the applause was barely polite.

  As they walked off stage, Gordo said, “Okay, bad idea. You were right.”

  Cole wiped down his guitar and put it in its case. “Can you do me a favor? Can you make sure my gear gets back to San Francisco?”

  Gordo looked at Laramie, loitering by the bridge. “Give her one for me, primo.”

  “Gracias, vato,” Cole said. He started toward Laramie and she ran across the stage and climbed him like a ladder, wrapping her legs around his waist and putting her tongue deep in his mouth. “You have no idea,” she said, when she came up for air, “how sexy it was to watch you.”

  “We were terrible,” Cole said, though at that moment he couldn’t remember why. He couldn’t think of anything, in fact, beyond the girl in his arms.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “The rest of the band was messing up, but you were fantastic. I want you. Now.”

  “Here? On stage?”

  “Come with me.”

  She led him over the bridge, then through a gap in the chain link fence where a guy checked his performer’s pass, across the road behind the stage, and then under the stage itself.

  “One of the girls told me about this,” Laramie said.

  “The girls?”

  “You know. One of the ones that goes with musicians.”

  The underside of the stage was remarkably crowded. Piles of lighting instruments that never got used because the roof of the stage never got built. Women changing 16 mm film reels. Stagehands sharing a joint. Somebody had hung blankets on the scaffolding to create four cubicles with at least the illusion of privacy. Cole heard voices from behind one of the blankets as Laramie pulled him toward a vacant space next to it. He was as aroused as he could ever remember being, reduced to a brainstem and a few square yards of eroticized skin. Laramie pulled the blanket in place behind them and went to her knees, unbuckling Cole’s pants and tugging them to his ankles. She took him in her mouth and worked him with her tongue and Cole heard himself make a lowing sound like a cow. She kissed his stomach and pushed up his shirt and said, “You taste like us.” They undressed each other and spread their clothes out on the grass to make a pallet. Laramie pushed him onto his back and straddled him. At first Cole was aware of the roughness of the ground under him and then he wasn’t.