by John Lawton
He’d be about seventy-five feet away from me when he turned to look back at me with that cockeyed look.
‘I had a dream,’ he said in a voice almost lost in its own hoarseness, less than a yell, louder than speech, as though it swelled up from deep within and never quite surfaced. ‘I had a dream.’
And I still say he did not know me from Adam.
§
Do I need to say that I did not, could not, would not sleep? No matter. I got kicked out of the tent anyway. Huey had picked up two girls, two more runaway waifs, one for him and two for him. They had kept his place in the human sea for him. He had dragged me back to them, him ripped up with energy, me the walking dream, to hear Country Joe McDonald belt out his anti-war anthem one last time. I sat through the Band and Crosby, Stills and that other guy and I don’t think I heard a word or a note of any of them. And at the end of the day, as a thousand private frenzies thrashed out around us, Huey zipped up the tent and told me he wouldn’t be long.
‘Get him,’ said the first girl to the second. ‘Won’t be long. Who does he think he is, Johnny Come Quickly?’
I heard sotto voce placation from Huey, no words, just a sort of sexual susurrus. Then, ‘Who is he, your old man?’ Huey laughed. ‘My father? Good fuckin’ grief no—he’s my big brother. He’s just a tad uptight tonight.’
So I was uptight. Nice to have the definition. Then the girls broke out into giggles and giggles turned to moans, and I turned off to it. I wrapped Huey’s poncho around my head and shoulders. It was still raining. No matter. It was raining on earth, somewhere upstate New York in the summer of ’69. I was somewhere else entirely. I was uptight not upstate.
I felt like the town fool in an ass-kicking contest. How many times could I kick my own ass? Why had I not stopped Billy in his rant and said ‘Look, Billy, it’s me, little Johnnie.’ Why had I let Huey lead me by the hand back into the musical oblivion, why had I sat cocooned in it and done and said nothing? Why? Because he did not know me, and the half of me that wanted to scream ‘Biiiilllllyyyyy!’ was in thrall to the half that said he still wouldn’t know me after I’d done it. But there was more. Oh yes, there was more. Beyond, beneath, whatever, down to the belly of the beast . . . beyond the broken heart there was the broken dream. Billy had been . . . what? . . . the best of me . . . no, more than that, the best of us, the best of my generation. What was it Ginsberg wrote about the best minds of his generation? That he’d seen them rot? No . . . it was something about madness . . . being destroyed by madness. Billy had been the kid who’d put on the seven league boots and strode past us kids and Mom and Pop Amerika as well. Billy had dreamed, as he’d put it himself to me all those years ago, he had dared to dream. And was this how the dream ended? A half-blind, half-naked, bumbling, shabby, scabby madman? A Mr Natural of doom and despair?
Well, know thyself—as some fool in Hamlet put it, be true to thyself. Well, truth is the bigger part of me has always been a coward. I’ve known that since I was a kid. The coward would never have faced Billy, would never have sought him out among the shards of his dream. So who was that guy who girded up his poncho and set off through the fields of Woodstock that night in search of his long-lost brother?
I came across a group of dopeheads sitting around, passing a joint the size of a Havana cigar between them.
‘I’m looking for someone. I’m looking for my brother.’
They were too stoned to understand a word I said. One of them just pointed off a ways to where a fat guy was humping some girl by lantern light. They were watching like it was TV. I bumbled over. The fat guy had fallen asleep on her. He was snoring. She smiled up at me—a sweet, friendly smile. An unselfconscious smile. She didn’t mind the fat guy, lying there buzzing in her ear while his cock slackened off inside her—she didn’t seem to mind me.
‘Excuse me.’
‘Sure thing, man.’
‘I was looking for someone.’
‘You found her. Just get Sluggo off me and you can have sloppy seconds.’
‘No. I mean I was looking for a guy.’
‘Really isn’t my night, is it? Those heads are too stoned to do more than look on and giggle, Sluggo’s fast asleep and you’re looking for a guy. God, if I’d known it was just a spectator sport I’d of stayed a virgin.’
I gently rolled Sluggo off her.
‘Actually I was looking for my brother.’
She held out a hand. I pulled her to her feet. She turned her back on me. Picked up a wraparound skirt, twisted it on and turned to face me. I could see now. She wasn’t some horny teenager, she was my age. Another ’50s leftover deciding, in the words of J. Joplin, to get it while she can. She tilted her head a little and looked up at me. Topless, pretty, inviting.
‘You sure? You not lookin’ for me?’
‘He’s a big guy. Shorter than me. But big. About forty but he looks older.’
‘Tell me, do the words needle and haystack have any meaning for you? There must be hundreds of thousands of people here.’
‘This guy looks like Mr Natural. He gets up on the stump and preaches.’
‘Oh him. Gahd—everybody’s seen him. And you say he’s your brother?’
‘Yes.’
‘Weird.’
She came with me all the same. A posse of two picking our way through the sleeping bodies, the thrashing bodies, through the far from silent night.
She thought she’d seen Mr Natural camped out over here. I relied on her for ‘here’. God knows how I’d find my way back to my own tent. There was no landmark to go by, just an inner compass of some sort. It led us to a lone, hairy freak, gently strumming a dobro and singing some sort of Hindu mantra over and over again in Donald Duck’s voice—‘Hawe Kwishna, Hawe Wama, Kwishna Kwishna, Wama Wama, quack, quack, quack’ and so on. He too had seen Mr Natural. But not over here, over there. And so it went on. Hours, I guess. Not far off dawn. Pillar to post. Camp to camp. And freak to freak.
And by the dawn’s early light I could see a great white T-shirt up ahead of us, on the stump of a tree, back to us, flapping gently in the breeze like a dirty white flag.
‘That’s him,’ she said softly.
Maybe it was. Up on the stump ready for the first sermon of the day. But as we drew closer I could see. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t Billy. It was just his shirt. His shirt fixed up on two poles tied like a crucifix. A hollow symbol of the hollow man.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Maybe he’ll come back for it.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He won’t.’
Because I knew he wouldn’t. He’d gone naked into the world, dragging himself ‘through negro streets at dawn’ looking for . . . ?
She led me back to where I’d found her. I stood and turned a full circle. Lost again. Then her inner compass kicked in, she took me by the hand, led me back to my own tent. I could hear Huey snore twenty feet off.
‘So, are we going in?’
‘We can’t. My brother’s in there with two girls.’
‘So—maybe we could share your poncho. It’s kinda cold out here. I’m freezing my tits off.’
We sat facing the tent, wrapped up like two Cherokee Indians on the Trail of Tears. Me and a half-naked woman I had met two or three hours ago and did not know.
‘If your brother’s in there how come we spent half the night looking for him?’
‘Not him. My other brother.’
‘You have two brothers?’
Well. No. I didn’t.
I said, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Grace.’
‘No, Grace. I don’t have two brothers. The kid in the tent is really my nephew. He just thinks he’s my brother. Mr Natural’s my brother. Mr Natural’s the kid’s father.’
‘Weird,’ she said, and weird it was. So I told her the whole story. The whole unh
oly trinity of Billy and Lois . . . and me. And she fell asleep. I’m damn certain she fell asleep before I was halfway through. So I told my secrets to a sleeping Grace. The perfect stranger. Just when I needed one.
A few hours later, one of Huey’s girls emerged from the tent. Buck naked. Pulled on her clothes. Smiled at me without a hint of embarrassment—hippie kids seemed to do that all the time—and said, ‘Your brother’s quite something.’
I said, ‘I’m sure he is.’
Because I knew he had been.
Naked into the world . . . dragging himself . . . brain bared to heaven.
§
Bob Dylan didn’t show—which disappointed Huey, but then I’d never thought he would. I didn’t think Dylan would ever perform live again. What did I know?
I was rolling up Rose’s sleeping bag. Three days of me unwashed and still it smelt of Rose. Huey had packed his tent and his gear and stood like a grunt, overloaded and anxious, watching the human tide, slouching back. I wondered if he’d ever tell me, whatever it was.
‘You know that bumper sticker you see sometimes?’
‘What bumper sticker?’
‘America—Love it or Leave it.’
‘Oh—that one.’
‘I’m leaving it.’
‘You’re not going home?’
‘I’m not going back to Texas. If I go back I get drafted. They already sent for Gabe.’
‘So you’re skipping out?’
‘I guess so. I mean. What choices do I have?’
The kid could make me spit fire sometimes.
‘I tried to tell you what the choices were more than a month ago in Lubbock. You didn’t want to know. Told me I talked like a lawyer.’
‘Maybe it’s now I need you to talk like a lawyer.’
‘Then maybe it’s time to hightail it to Canada, ’cause you used up most of your options. College, National Guard, C.O.—you wasted more’n a month when you could have done something. Though I’ll tell you now it was late even then.’
‘So what else is left? Why are you giving me a hard time about Canada?’
‘I’m not. It may well be the right thing for you to do. There is only one alternative.’
‘So?’
‘You don’t want to hear it. Really you don’t.’
‘Try me.’
‘You report when they send for you. At which point you are still technically a civilian. They cannot give you a binding order. So when they ask you to step forward it is a request not an order. Don’t do it. Don’t step forward. Stay where you are.’
‘And? What next?’
‘Well, if enough of you do it, you’ll have started a revolution.’
‘And if it’s just me?’
‘You’ll go to jail.’
‘Jeezus, Johnnie. I might have known you were leading up to the catch.’
‘Time to talk like a lawyer. You said so yourself. But . . . as you will still be a civilian it’s civil disobedience not insubordination—it will be jail not the stockade.’
‘That is the best you can come up with?’
‘Huey—it’s all I can come up with. Now, I suggest you take the car and go to Canada.’
‘You mean like, just drive across?’
‘What the fuck did you expect? Checkpoint Charlie?’
‘No . . . I guess I expected something like the underground railroad. Like slaves being smuggled to the north. I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know because you haven’t thought about it. This whole draft issue has been one long rant between you and the old man. You never really thought it would happen though, did you? No—nobody will stop you. You’re not a wanted man. Not yet. In a few weeks when it’s obvious you’ve skipped out the draft board will tell the FBI, and from then on I strongly advise you not to try and cross back. They’ll be watching. They even read the death notices in local papers just to see who might make a break for home to bury Mom or Pop. Whatever—don’t do it.’
I zipped up my backpack, reached into my pocket.
‘You’ll need these.’
I tossed down the car keys. He bent down for them and I grabbed his hand.
‘I see you already tried to chop off a finger.’
He pulled the hand back, rubbed at a reddish scar on the fourth finger of his left hand. Suddenly he was sheepish, shy and my little brother again, not the hard-assed brat.
‘Chop would not be the word. Saw more like. Took a blunt knife to it one night when I was tripping. Couldn’t even make a good job of that, eh?’
I said nothing. I could not have done it either. Huey scooped up the keys and said ‘Canada’ softly, more to himself than to me, as though the prospect were at last a reality and not another verbal weapon in his private battle with family and country.
‘You wouldn’t happen to know anyone in Canada, would you, Johnnie?’
We’d finally reached a kind of pragmatism. Maybe now I could talk to the boy without getting chewed out. I rattled it all off like catechism. It was second nature to me. Some guys up in Toronto had written a Dodger’s Handbook. Could have written it myself. Huey listened and nodded a lot. He even wrote down Mike Koscuiscko’s address. But I didn’t want him being a leech on Mike.
I asked if he had any money.
‘’Bout five hundred in cash, but I got my bankbook too. Must be close to twenty-five grand in there.’
He hiked up his T-shirt, showed me a money belt wrapped tightly around his waist. Such foresight from a kid who up to now had struck me as having none. Twenty-five grand? Maybe I should make him pay me for the car?
‘Whatever else there is to say about the old man, he’s no tightwad. Johnnie, you’re the only one says no to his money.’
‘Maybe that’s because I never was a rich kid.’
‘What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’
‘’Zackly what it says. Now how good’s your French? That could count with the Canadians.’
‘OK. OK to good I’d say. Mom made me learn, her mom was from New Orleans. French gets sort of passed down.’
Jeez—the things I did not know about my own family.
‘Then I think you’ll be fine. Don’t mess around. Ask to become a landed immigrant as soon as the Canadians look at your passport. “Landed Immigrant” is the term—get it right.’
‘Sure—supposing they ask about the draft.’
‘Won’t happen—they’re not allowed to.’
‘And if I don’t do the landed immigrant thing?’
The kid would drive me nuts.
‘Aw shit, Huey—then buy a goddam fishing rod and tell ’em you’re on a fishing trip!’
I’ll be damned—the kid was actually thinking about it. I never should have given him the choice.
§
Thinking about it, I never should have given him the car. But it was traditional. A brother walks out on you—he gets to keep the car. How many cars did I have to lose this trip?—the Buick, my old VW, now the Studebaker. I’d lost more cars than brothers lately.
I found myself walking. It felt stupid, and I hadn’t done it in years, but I stuck out my thumb. First car to pass me with a spare seat pulled up. Three zonked out guys heading back to Boston. Dropped me in Palenville. How . . . how handy. I hadn’t seen Tsu-Lin in weeks, hadn’t spoken to her since the day I phoned up to tell her Mel was dead. I owed Tsu-Lin Shin $229. Courtesy of Joey DiMarco. I’d’ve paid that for a shower and a shave.
I handed the money over. I got the shower and the shave. As it happens I got lunch too. Another hand-made Chinese flurry of herbs and . . . well . . . rice . . . and stuff . . . whatever it was Chinese people ate.
After lunch Tsu-Lin took me into her studio.
The little canvas of Bosch-ish faces had
given way to an eight- by twelve-foot monster. And it had lost the touch of Bosch. It reminded me of nothing quite so much as a latter day Guernica. The central image was a pig rather than a bull, and the backdrop wasn’t a cubist rendition of the Basque town, was all made up of bits of the USA. I thought I saw the sweep of the Golden Gate Bridge—I knew damn well I was seeing a panorama of Chicago—and wasn’t that composite skyscraper made up of bits of the Empire State building and bits of Wall Street? Whatever it was it was gruesome, it was bloody, and if this had been three or more years in the evolution I hoped she thought it was worth it.
She stood beside me, looking at me as I looked at ‘Chicagonica’.
‘Year of the pig,’ she said.
‘Is that like something in the Chinese calendar?’
‘No—stupid. It’s the painting’s title. Don’t you think last year was the year of the pig?’
‘Oh,’ I said feeling bewildered rather than stupid. ‘It’s last year?’
‘Gimme a break.’
We sat on that flaking verandah. It seemed symbolic. If Tsu-Lin had ever bothered to top out the trees that had grown up we’d have been looking right down at the Hudson Valley—the view that drew all those Vanderbilts and Rockefellers up here a couple of generations ago in the glory days of the first American Empire. Now, we sat here in the waning days of the last. Tsu-Lin served up tea—the green stuff so favored by Notley Chapin. I made tea-time conversation, something as banal as ‘What a summer it’s been’—and I was referring to nothing more than the weather by it—and unleashed a small tornado. Maybe I’d annoyed her by having so little to say about her magnum opus. Maybe it was another bee in her bonnet just waiting for me to poke it with a stick.
‘The summer Mel died,’ she said.