by John Lawton
‘No, it’s not. I don’t like spooks. They lie for a living. You tell me I can close it, maybe I can. I figure you’re not likely to quit on your little buddy just because the suits tell you.’
How little he knew me.
‘Then close it, Nate. Mel’s killer got iced by the spooks. I saw it happen.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Sure, I’m sure.’
‘Motive?’
‘Something Mel was working on. A story one bunch of spooks wanted suppressed and another didn’t. Mel just got in the middle.’
Nate didn’t ask me what—I’d already passed the bounds of what interested him.
‘I’m not happy.’
‘You’re not happy? I’m totally bummed out. I been pistol-whipped, shot at, kicked about and now I got you thumping the shit out of me.’
‘No apologies for that, Raines. And you ever pull a stunt like this on me again I’ll beat the bejasus out of you.’
He got up, headed for his car, skewed across the end of the street, door open.
‘Nate,’ I called. ‘Does this mean I get to keep my license?’
‘What do you think, dummy? All I can say is you might like to consider a less dangerous line of work.’
I climbed the stairs back to the apartment. Watched Nate drive off from the living-room window. I felt two hands creep up my chest, two breasts pressed into my back.
‘Were you telling him the truth? It’s over?’
‘Yes. It’s over. I’m not a good liar.’
She squeezed me tight.
‘Don’t tell me anymore. I don’t want to know.’
Tighter. Then she turned me in her arms, pulled away the blanket, stripped me naked as she was herself, kissed me deep and long. I had a split second to wonder, to work out that this might not be the one-night stand I had assumed it to be, before my cock came up and she took me by the hand, pulled me back into the bed and said, ‘Do it to me one more time.’ Sunday was sweet.
§
It was a couple of days before we rolled out of bed and back to some passing semblance of reality. I had priorities, just.
I typed up all my notes, packaged everything I’d collected since the end of June, stuck it all in a padded envelope and posted it to the New York Times. I signed the accompanying note ‘Mel Kissing’.
Then I went in search of a car. Not liking driving is not the same thing as not liking cars. Whilst I never much felt I needed a car in New York, the Texan in me hated the idea of being without one. And I could not face another Bug. It had been like watching an old friend blown to pieces. I’ve no idea why, but all my instincts told me to buy American. And I did. An act of faith in Detroit perhaps? I could scarcely believe Amerika deserved any.
I got lucky. Guy over in Queens sold me a 1963 Studebaker. Lots of fins and a silly shade of pink, but a good price. Mileage a little high, and a few dents in the front end, but a good price for the year all the same. I drove over to New Jersey, stuck it in the same high rise stacker in Hoboken. It would probably be weeks before I had any use for it, but it was strangely reassuring to know it was there.
I caught the PATH train back to Manhattan, cut across Broadway and Nassau to Fulton, dropped by the market and picked up a couple of live lobsters. I got back to Front Street to find a backpack, complete with tent and bedroll, dumped in the hallway.
‘Raines?’
Rose calling to me from inside the apartment.
‘You’ll never guess who’s here.’
All I could see was some guy’s head across the back of the couch. Short-cropped hair, a ring through one ear, the shoulders of a crazily embroidered Levi’s jacket—and I was none the wiser. The head turned. It was my little brother Huey. Huey with short hair. Huey in New York. Huey where he’d never been before—ripped right out of context.
‘You didn’t tell me you were coming.’
‘Not a lot of time,’ he said. ‘Just sort of . . . y’know . . . did it.’
‘Why d’you get your hair cut?’
Rose intervened. ‘Turner, for fuck’s sake. Does he need an invitation? He’s your kid brother. Just say hello and stop asking silly fucking questions.’
Huey got up and clapped me in both arms. Felt fake. The little bastard was up to something and I knew it.
Over dinner he produced a flier for a rock festival upstate—place called Woodstock. Near where Bob Dylan had lived as some kind of recluse ever since his motorbike accident.
‘You wanna come?’
He was looking at both of us. From me to Rose and back again.
‘Dylan’s gonna be there.’
Right.
Rose said, ‘I can’t. I’ve had half of July off as it is. It’s really nice of you, Huey but . . .’
Huey fixed his attention on me.
‘It’s gonna be big. Maybe 20,000 people. Janis Joplin, Hendrix, The Who . . .’
‘It doesn’t sound like me,’ I said.
Rose said, ‘Well, there’s nothing to stop you. You like Janis Joplin, don’t you? And you haven’t any work at the moment, have you?’
Hadn’t any work? For all I knew it was piling up behind my office door. I hadn’t been there in weeks.
‘Why don’t you go with Huey? A day out. It’ll do you good.’
‘Er . . . it’s more like four days,’ Huey said.
I said nothing. Rose said, ‘Don’t you worry, Huey. The old grouch will go with you.’
The old grouch pointed out that he knew nothing about any damned festival in Woodstock. Rose picked up last week’s Voice and found the music ads.
‘So? It’s been all over the Voice for weeks. Masses of publicity. Here it is. And it’s not in Woodstock anymore, it’s in Bethel. They had to move it. No idea why. But it’s now at a place called . . . hang on . . . Yasgur’s Farm. Silly bloody name. Who the fuck has a name like Yasgur?’
She folded the paper open at the ad and stuck it in front of me.
‘Go with your brother, Turner . . . stop being a total prick and go with him.’
I tried procrastinating a little longer. I didn’t have a sleeping bag. I’d left that somewhere in Lincoln Park last year. Rose went to the closet, pulled hers off the top shelf and threw it at me.
Was I being a prick? Absofuckinlutely, darling, as my late wife used to say.
§
So it was, Huey and I joined a human tide slouching towards Bethel. Here I was driving upstate, along the banks of the Hudson yet again, only days after I swore I never wanted to see these hills again. I might reiterate that it wasn’t me, exactly, that I did it for the kid, but truth to tell I almost enjoyed it. It was a small step back into the recent past. Abbie Hoffman buzzed around, seemed to be in a dozen places at once. I got ‘Hey man, haven’t see you since—’ and he was gone. Wavy Gravy appeared to be playing court jester for the whole week—big, floppy hat, no front teeth, and what seemed to be a pig’s bladder on a stick. He was greeting anyone that passed like he was Woodstock’s host. Wavy always struck me as the gentle, practical side of the hippies. Brown rice and stuff like that. He was someone I thought Huey should meet. I’d just got it lined up and I looked back to find Huey had drifted off and when I looked back the other way Wavy was greeting a bunch of kids who looked pretty much like the runaways I’d met in Chicago—the universal American girl-waif.
God knows how I ever found Huey again.
It began to rain on the first night. Richie Havens was a few bars into I forget what song and the rains came down. I don’t recall it stopping for long. I’d’ve given up and gone home. Huey would not hear of it and nor, it seemed, would hundreds of thousands of other kids. They stayed, had to admire them for that. Wavy Gravy’s Hog Farmers fed as many as they could and looked after the bum trips. It worked. A gathering of—what was it?—400,
000 people camped in the shadow of Chicago ’68 and it worked. I have since heard Woodstock referred to as the ‘birth of a generation’. I doubt that. Chicago was the funeral. Woodstock the wake.
It was the third day. Early evening, we were drifting. Slithering from nowhere to nowhere on a sheet of mud. A bunch of freaks had made the most of the weather and started a mud slide—running at full tilt to the crest of a slope and ass-surfing down it for as long as mud and momentum would carry them. Huey just had to try. I passed.
‘What’s to lose?’ he said. ‘We’re soaked already.’
I watched him skid down that slope whooping his head off. We have all kinds of crazies now, I thought, and if I have to choose between the acid-tripping, mud-caked, brown rice-eating freaks and the Kill-for-Peace Crazies I last saw Mel lost in then there’s no contest. All kinds of crazies—hippies, yippies, hogfarmers—but nothing, nothing I’d seen in three days in the Woodstock Nation or three months in the imploding politics of New York had prepared me for what I saw next.
A guy resembling Mr Natural, spiraling hair, bushy beard, Moses’ staff, all in white—dirty, mudded white—not so much a robe as a gigantic, outsize XXXL shirt—but skinny, painfully skinny, where Mr Natural was plump and round—got up on the stump to speak. A real stump, a sawn-off tree not thirty yards from where Huey was slippin’ an’ a slidin’.
‘I have seen the face of God.’
He wasn’t shouting. All the same his voice rang out. Seemed to cut through the hullaballoo. Half a dozen freaks turned to look.
‘I have looked to the heavens and I have seen the face of God.’
Now, anyone could draw a crowd for a while. I’d seen that a dozen times in the last few days. No one could keep one—at best the best were sideshows unable to compete with the endorphin surge of being one in quarter of a million—like minds among like bodies, the endless, infinite curiosity of the other—or the direct appeal of Janis Joplin, or the fanciful anticipation that Dylan might still appear out of nowhere like Jeanie from the lamp. But they got heard. I saw no one booed off—at worst a gentle mockery of folly. This guy quickly drew about two dozen of us.
‘Bad trip,’ said a short kid in front of me.
‘Nah,’ said the girl he was with. ‘Every guy with a bad trip thinks he’s seen the devil. You ever heard one say he’s seen God? This’ll make a change.’
‘I am a seeker,’ Natural said.
‘Score ten to me,’ whispered the kid in front. ‘For sheer cliché.’
‘I have been a seeker after truth since I was as young as you are now.’
It was hard to make him out, but I’d’ve put him at sixty-ish. Forty years of seeking.
‘I left my home, I left my family in search of truth.’
Someone with freshman English under his belt now yelled back, ‘Truth is beauty, man, beauty is truth!’
I had not thought Natural was wholly aware of us, his audience. His eyes were locked onto those same heavens in which he had seen God. But he looked down at the boy, said, ‘This is all ye know on earth.’ Uttered more as though it were our limitation than our simple necessity. The kid had no comeback line, so I figured he’d shot his bolt with one line of Keats. And for the first time I could see Natural’s face clearly. One eye glittered bright and blue—the kind of clarity you might think could see into your heart. One eye was scarred and vacant like egg-white. Cut from brow to cheek in a savage line that had split the lid and healed into a ridge years ago for want of proper sutures.
‘I have seen the face of God, and I am come to tell you there is no God.’
‘You still think he’s not tripping?’ I heard the short kid say.
His girlfriend shrugged and walked away. ‘I read this already. It’s Flannery O’Connor. Wise Blood. The Church of Christ without Christ.’ The short kid followed and I stepped forward. Slipped to the second row. Closer to that hideous face.
‘God was our dream. God was our mainstay and our anchor in another age than this. When that age died our God died with it. I have seen the face of God. There is no God. God is dead. I looked to the firmament, to the stars in the furthest heaven, and I found no light that would not one day go out. I found no God, I saw the face of God and God was gone.’
A few dozen had dwindled rapidly to about six of us. This line was probably going nowhere. This amount of self-contradiction wouldn’t keep anyone’s attention. Just mine.
‘It is four light years to Alpha Centauri. A distance so great as to defy numerical calculation. Four years at the speed of light. A speed unattainable for at the speed of light mass becomes infinite.’
Just when I thought he might have got himself back on the rails of a good argument, the word seemed to stop him in his tracks—‘Infinite . . . infinite . . . ’—he pondered it as though another voice had said it to him, shaking the straggly white hair, head down, then head up. A momentary stare into the nothingness of his heaven and he was off again.
‘And I looked beyond Alpha Centauri . . . I looked to the end of space and time. I looked to life. And I found none. In the arc of heaven there shines only this blue light of earth. A billion galaxies, twisting in space. Half a billion stars in our galaxy. Burning rock, cold rock. The rocks keep their secret, because they have none. The stars burn out only to burn again. We are life, there is no other. The earth spins alone in darkness. We live in darkness. We die in darkness. We die alone. The stars burn out. We are Man. And Man is all. In the midst of infinite space are stars so dense they devour their own light. Time and space invert. And another universe is born. The same as this. The same black vault of night. The same blinding nothingness of endless night. New stars burn. New gods abdicate meaning. New stars burn to dust. There is no God among the stars. We are life. We are all. We are everything. We are the dust of a thousand suns, a million stars, a billion universes drained of light. Turned inside out. Burned to dust. Alone in the vast canopy of space. The same old sheepshead pattern scrawled out into eternity. The world created, cracked, blown apart and re-created a thousand times. How do we not know that this is so? The stars go out. They burn to dust. We are stardust. There is no God. I have seen the face of God. God is dead. The age of God has gone. We are stardust. We are carbon.’
By the time he got to this we were alone. He was just another crazy. Kids had drifted off. What’s another crazy? He rambled on—I’ve no idea how long. It just went round in the same half dozen loops over and over again. I felt a hand tugging at my shirt. Huey plastered with mud, looking like he’d just scrambled loose from some aboriginal initiation rite.
‘Johnnie, Johnnie. Country Joe’s up next. You know? “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die”.’
‘You go. I have to hear this guy out.’
‘Jesus, Johnnie, you think we’d ever find each other again in all this if we split up? C’mon man. He’s just another crazy.’
But he wasn’t just another crazy. He was my brother Billy.
‘I have seen the face of God!’ he boomed out. Yelling with the full force of his lungs now.
Huey let go, as though this was more than he could take.
‘Five minutes, man. I’ll be over there.’ Huey pointed to the nearest tree and walked away. Billy got down off the stump and came closer to me. He was shorter than me. I’d outgrown him. His good eye scanned my face. I found myself fixed on the poached-egg eye. Wondering how this had come to be. How Billy had come to this.
He spoke. The mouth opened. He had fewer teeth than Wavy Gravy and what he had were blackened stumps. His breath foul upon my face.
‘In a trench of the Atlantic ocean beyond the light of any sun, there lives a mollusc in darkness so dense, in pressure so great the oxygen in the water is unbreathable. So the mollusc has learnt to live in darkness and in cold without oxygen, to respire anaerobically. And at the bottom of this trench, where perpetual night reigns, where God’s
creature has learnt to live without light or oxygen, there lives another of his creatures that has learnt to live without light or air and to eat the shit of this mollusc. We are stardust, we are carbon, we are mollusc shit.’
I glanced at Huey, back against the tree putting a match to yet another joint. I was still not sure how much Billy was aware of me, close as he was. Was I animate or inanimate to him? Real or a made up necessity, as the recipient of his rant? I had thought he might have gone on talking if I walked off, but in the second it took to look back he had thrust his face into mine, an inch or so away from me, talking to me and me only.
‘You see this eye?’
He brought up a bent, scabbed, near-nailless finger to point at his poached egg.
‘With this eye I looked beyond Alpha Centauri. With this eye I saw God. I saw the truth that God is dead. The eye offended. Matthew 18:9. “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out”!’
He might as well have stuck a hand through my ribs and wrapped it around my heart. I could scarcely believe it. He had done this to himself. Taken a knife to his own eye.
‘I had sought truth my whole life. And when my eye showed me that there was no truth, no beauty, no God—I plucked out that eye!’
He roared. Blasting me. The good eye roved. God knows what he was looking at, what he was seeing. He didn’t know me from Adam.
His voice dropped, his shoulders hunched. I had never seen the man look so small. He was thirty-seven, doubled up into a blind, toothless sixty-year old. He seemed to vanish before my eyes. Bent over his stick, creeping away from me at a snail’s pace. I could hear him muttering for minutes after he left me.
‘Stardust, carbon, mollusc shit.’
Creeping away in search of the next transfixed fool who would listen to his revelation of the banality of life on earth and for a brief span of eternity lift the albatross from his neck. I wanted to weep. I could not. Rain provided tears enough for me. I wanted to run after him. I could not. He left me. Again. I felt as though twenty years of my life had risen up to fall on me like a weight. Billy made a great Mr Natural. He’d got his message home to me with the accuracy of a sharpshooter. I had never felt my life so hollow. I had never felt the years so hollow. Truth and beauty had shrivelled up and died in an instant. There I stood, nothing more than this temporarily animate lump of carbon, stripped of meaning, and wanting to die. I felt as though someone had taken all that had been good and great in my childhood and trashed it. I didn’t have a dream left. The dreamer had left me. History repeats. The dreamer would always leave me.