by Tim Weed
Red Rocks is one of the Dead’s favorite venues. The setting is spectacular, like one of those ancient cultures transplanted to a distant galaxy on Star Trek. Two red-sandstone monoliths jut out of a rugged hillside, and a three-thousand-seat amphitheater fills the gap between the rocks, spilling down the slope to present a panoramic view of the sprawl of Denver and the vast, empty prairie beyond.
The red-dirt parking lots are full of cars with license plates from all over the country: Volvos and BMWs with Steal Your Face or Skull and Roses stickers on the rear windows; rusty old station wagons; dozens of creatively painted VW buses like Josh’s incinerated one. As we drive in through the lots, my heart leaps because I catch the scent of burning pinewood. I crane my neck around, trying to detect its source. On the tailgate of a battered Toyota pickup, I spot a girl whose pretty oval face I recognize from the crowd at Portland. She’s wearing an old-fashioned calico sundress like the ones in my vision, and she smiles at me as we pass. My heart pounds in my chest, but by the time I think to raise my hand in greeting, we’ve already left her behind.
At our parking spot, Jack Straw doles out tickets and tabs of cartoon acid. Transient Deadheads line the walkway up to the amphitheater, holding up fingers to signify the numbers of tickets they lack. From their wide-eyed, inward expressions, it’s clear that acid is a good deal easier to get. There’s no assigned seating inside the amphitheater. We stay together until we’ve established a base as close as we can possibly get to the stage. Amber spreads out blankets, and Josh passes around a jug of Tang. Taking a sip of the sugary drink, I feel the first kick of the acid, a tiny oscillation at the back of my throat.
And in the next moment I’m tripping. The murmur of the crowd vibrates in my body as a generalized hum, bringing with it an acute sense of precision and control. Josh raises his eyebrows questioningly, and I give him the thumbs-up sign. My perception goes into pause/play mode, and for a moment I seem to have gained control over the flow of time. I can stop it, make it go forward, or play it in slow motion. But then I start to worry that it will get stuck in fast-forward mode, so I knock it off. Jerry sings something about headlights shining through the cool Colorado rain, the crowd cheers like thunder, and I catch another whiff of the burning pine. The vision of the riverbank in the pine forest fills my mind, clearer and more detailed than ever. I can pick out individual cliffs and crevasses in the mountains. I can see the boughs of the forest swaying in the wind. I can hear the dull roar of the river. I walk toward the snapping calico dresses and the laughing female voices, but I can’t quite reach them. At a certain point my feet seem to lose contact with the ground on the riverbank, and a column of pure white light beams me back to the concrete steps of the amphitheater, leaving me gasping in frustration.
The next morning I fend off Jack Straw’s bong hits so I can walk down to the 7-Eleven and call Otter with a relatively clear mind. No one’s home. I assume she and her family have gone to Silver Lake; they have a powerboat there and like to go water skiing. For the rest of the day, though, I can’t stop thinking about her. I picture her in a black party dress, in jeans and a tank top, in nothing but a bra and underwear. I picture her naked, standing beside me in front of the bathroom mirror at her house; her breasts, with their large, dark nipples and inquisitive upward tilt. Her image is so vivid it makes my chest ache.
Later that day, I walk down to the 7-Eleven again, but no one answers the phone. In the VW on the way to the second show, I sit in the far back, watching the foothills of the Rocky Mountains roll by, long, yellow-green ridges draped with mist from the afternoon thunder-showers. Maybe I’ve died without knowing it, I think. That would explain why I can’t seem to get in touch with Otter.
I awake at dawn, with a racing pulse and a premonition of rapidly approaching doom. None of the housemates is up, so I don’t bother with the 7-Eleven; I just dial direct from the phone in the kitchen. Otter’s little sister Gwen answers. Once again, Otter isn’t home.
I take a deep breath. “Where is she?” Silence. I can feel the twelve-year-old thinking on the other end. “It’s not even noon there, Gwen. Is she working?”
“Don’t worry, Bones.” Gwen calls me Bones; I have no idea why. But I know she sincerely likes me, and I don’t like what I’m hearing in her voice. She sounds like she’s about to cry.
I slide off the stool and go into a fetal crouch on the kitchen floor. The roots of my teeth throb. I feel like I could loosen them with my tongue if I wanted to, and spit them out on the floor. “Who’s she with, Gwen?”
“Oh, Bones. It’s the baseball coach.”
“Rick Morgan?”
“Oh, Bones, I’m so sorry. I know Otter’s feeling terrible. She’s been crying a lot . . .” Gwen trails off, but it doesn’t matter. There’s no mistaking the pity in her voice, and my situation is clear enough. I’ve been gone for a week. The only girl I’ve ever loved has traded me in for a thirty-year-old man with glittering eyes and a moustache like the reincarnation of George Armstrong Custer. I’m eighteen, an apprentice Deadhead and increasingly frequent drug abuser who looks like the young Ichabod Crane. Even a twelve-year-old can see the problem.
We’ve run out of real tickets; we resort to fakes. We spend the whole day making them: scissoring up manila folders and painting them with watercolors to just the right shade of lavender, using a pizza cutter to make the perforations, painting on a coat of nail polish for the glossy finish. The fakes look good. Everyone agrees.
In the parking lot before the show, Jack Straw gives me a tab of acid. I put it on my tongue and hold out my hand for another. Jack Straw glances at Josh, who raises his eyebrows and then nods his consent. On the way up the ramp, I try to clear my head to make way for the vision, but my imagination goes off on its own track: Otter sniffing and wiping her eyes as she motions to Gwen at the phone; Otter naked, on her knees, crying out as the leering baseball coach takes her from behind.
At the top of the ramp, we wait until there’s a bottleneck, and insinuate ourselves into the line of concert-goers holding out tickets for the uniformed gatekeepers. Jack Straw and another hairy amigo get through on their fakes. Josh and Amber get through on theirs. But when my turn comes, the way is blocked by a hamlike forearm. With a surge of panic I find myself looking up into the ticket-taker’s unkind face. He holds my forgery between his thumb and forefinger and shakes his clean-shaven head with a look of extreme distaste. “Jesus Christ, kid. Do you think we’re stupid?” He grips my arm and signals his partner on the other side of the gate. “Counterfeiter. Call security.”
Josh catches my eye from the other side of the gate. “Run,” he mouths. I twist out of the ticket-taker’s grasp and sprint down the ramp, pirouetting through the tie-dyed crowd. My heart pounds, not so much from fear as from exhilaration.
I find the key under the driver’s seat, start the bus, and drive slowly out through the parking lots. The acid hums in my chest and throat, and I feel the familiar sense of godlike clearheadedness. We have a contingency plan. It involves parking at the end of a dirt road a few miles away, the surface of which turns out to be barely passable, pitted and deeply grooved by intermittent washouts. I drive relentlessly, the bus bobbing and rocking and sometimes bottoming out on ruts and exposed bedrock. The road ends at an abandoned mine, a ruined edifice of decaying timbers with a caved-in roof of rusting tin. I experience a strong feeling of déjà vu. There’s no river nearby that I can see, and the pine forest begins a little farther up in the mountains, but suddenly I have the sense that I’m closer to the place the vision has shown me than I’ve ever been before.
I step out into the red evening, the bus sighing and clicking its disapproval at such rough treatment. Alert and purposeful, I begin climbing the hillside in the direction of the amphitheater, each step loosening a glassy chorus of scree.
When I gain the ridge top the back of the theater rears up gloriously before me, the twin monoliths pulsating to the rhythm of my heartbeat in the golden predusk light. Linking the two ro
cks is a high brick wall, and beyond this wall is my goal. I can already hear the thumping of the bass.
I take off my shoes to scale the wall. My hands and feet cling to the brick surface like the suction toes of a gecko. There’s a guard pacing the wall; I slither over the top just as he turns away and melt into the dancing audience, laughing aloud at my own bold skill. The band is playing “Shakedown Street.” Jerry’s guitar notes are like basketball-sized raindrops splattering on the concrete steps all around me. I make a little game of dodging them. In the distance, the lights of Denver wink conspiratorially.
Things start to go wrong when I see the policemen. There are two of them, shoving their way up through the crowded amphitheater. One keeps scanning the crowd, looking for someone, and of course I assume he’s looking for me, so I duck down beneath the head-level of the bobbing dancers, take off my shirt, and tie a blue bandana around my head. “Shakedown Street” is reaching a crescendo; the crowd whirls in synchronous fury. I forget about the policemen, but the feeling of unease has entered my bloodstream like a virus. Worrying that one of Jerry’s huge guitar-note raindrops is going to hit me, I drop into a crouch, covering my head with my arms and scuttling this way and that like a sand crab searching for a hole. Then I worry that my lungs are going to collapse. I turn to the person next to me for help, but his face is distorted: sickly green, reptilian, devoid of any warmth or sympathy.
Overcome by an inescapable sense of calamity, I shoulder my way through the crowd up to the back wall. I consider making a swan dive over the edge, to end my pitiful existence on the same sharp rocks I’d scrambled up a short time before. But then the music changes. The band is easing into a rendition of “Mississippi Half Step,” another of my favorites.
I take a deep breath and turn away from the wall. The crowd is blotted out in a flash of white light, and suddenly I’m back in the vision, and I mean really in it. I’m standing on the bank of a murmuring tea-colored river. On the far side of the river the forest rears up steeply, a dark mantle of conifers giving way to a high mountain cirque, a forbidding wall of white bowls broken by cliff bands and jagged granite spires. The wind peels fresh snow off the summits, long white meteor-tails backed by a sky of the deepest blue imaginable. Under my bare feet, smooth cobbles grind gently against one another, and my nostrils burn with the scent of pine smoke. I see the clothesline, with the snapping of its three bright calico dresses clearly audible over the low roar of the river. Faintly, beneath the other noises, is the female laughter and singing. It’s the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.
I walk along the riverbank toward the clothesline, which is strung up between two small pines at the edge of the forest. My heart pounds with anticipation, and it occurs to me—not for the first time—that with their sundresses flapping in the wind, the three women will surely be naked. Out of consideration for their modesty, I take off my own shorts and underwear. Meanwhile, the wind has picked up, howling around my naked body. I lean into it, focusing all my energy on putting one foot in front of the other.
Finally I get to the clothesline and duck under the snapping dresses. The singing stops, and there are no women. There’s an old campfire in a circle of blackened river cobbles, but the flames have long ago been snuffed out, and the wind has scattered the dead ashes. I sit on the ground with my bare back up against a boulder beside the fire pit. The wind seems to have reached hurricane force. From across the river comes the sharp crack of splintering tree trunks.
THE MONEY PILL
SUPPOSE A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN catches your eye on the street. A complete stranger, you understand, but unbelievably attractive, like a starlet, or one of those women you glimpse maybe half a dozen times a year and you say “damn” under your breath, and for the rest of the day your heart just aches. When she has your attention she gives you this smile, a smile meant only for you, and so full of meaning that it stops you in your tracks.
Or maybe she touches you on the arm as you pass on the crowded sidewalk. A little guitar pluck, somewhere between a caress and a grab, and she purses her lips as she does it. So again you stop, and you turn to watch the elegant sway of her hips as she walks away into the crowd. But just before you lose sight of her she turns and gives you this mocking look over her shoulder that says, Well? Why aren’t you following?
My first Cuban girlfriend was only nineteen, slender and pretty, a student of accounting at the University of Santiago. She caught my eye across a mobbed cathedral terrace overlooking the annual Burning of the Devil in the main square. A few minutes later—magical coincidence—she appeared at my side. We gazed down on the crowd filling the plaza: bare chests and shoulders shaking to the conga, black umbrellas bobbing like voodoo talismans to the rhythm of whistles and drums and old hubcaps. We talked about America, the embargo, politics. She professed to be astonished by the fluency of my Spanish. Her fingers brushed my forearm, then came to rest there, as if we were already lovers.
Down in the plaza, they set fire to the effigy. Yellow flames licked delicately around the sides of the horned straw man, tasting it, then leapt explosively, consuming the Devil in a roaring conflagration that illuminated the walls of the square and the faces of the crowd in flickering, orange light.
I told the girl I had to go. Her pretty mouth formed a pout. “Truly? You’re leaving me?”
I leaned in and raised my voice over the loud drumming that had resumed down in the plaza. “I have a tour group coming in tomorrow. I need to be at the airport first thing. Otherwise, I’d stay.”
“I thought we were going to be friends.” She appeared deeply crestfallen. I hesitated.
“We can be friends. Give me your number.”
She didn’t have a phone, but she wrote down her name and address on one of my business cards: Lisbet Romero Morales, Calle Alfred Zamora No. 51, entre 5 y 6, reparto Santa Bárbara. “Ask anyone where is Santa Bárbara,” she said, gazing deeply into my eyes. “And if you come, don’t bring the tour group.”
I couldn’t get Lisbet out of my thoughts. Why not pay her a visit? I asked myself. What harm could it do?
So two nights after the Burning of the Devil, once the exhausted retirees were tucked in at the hotel, I stuffed a roll of convertible pesos into my pocket and stepped out onto the teeming street. It didn’t take me long to locate a car to commandeer as a taxi, a red and white ’57 Buick. The driver was a hulking criollo with a brushy Joe Stalin moustache. I told him to take me to Santa Bárbara.
“I don’t know the address,” I lied. “Just take me to the neighborhood, and I’ll walk.”
The driver nodded, gazing at me in the rearview. The fact is, he made me feel uncomfortable from the beginning. He kept glancing at me in the mirror, his eyes full of some vaguely unpleasant emotion, sadness or envy or anger.
Through the rolled-down windows the street noise was as jarring as ever, loud salsa music and cracked mufflers and the rattling undercarriages of decrepit trucks and recycled Canadian school buses. Santiago was a hilly city, like a disintegrating San Francisco. French-style colonial townhouses and slumping hardwood bungalows from the city’s heyday as a pirate capital in the 1700’s mingled with teetering, post-1959 cinder-block monstrosities. An old man in a beret and an olive drab uniform, sweat-stained and threadbare from half a century of use, hawked newspapers for the equivalent of a penny. The stagnant air smelled of diesel and urine and cigar smoke.
The driver let me out on a quiet street. I asked him to wait two hours. He grunted in assent, watching me with resentful eyes.
There were no working streetlights in the neighborhood, and it had a menacing flavor at night. Man-shaped shadows prowled the alleyways, and there were no police or soldiers on patrol. I concentrated on making my stride purposeful, unassailable. Images of Lisbet kept appearing in my mind. Long, slim fingers. The taut arc of her thigh and buttock pressing against my thigh on the crowded cathedral terrace.
The address written in my daybook matched that of a small wooden bungalow—not, I was reliev
ed to find, one of the crowded cinderblock buildings or subdivided mansions. The pale-blue light of a television seeped out through gaps in the ancient hardwood planking.
I climbed the steps to the porch. I hesitated a moment, then knocked.
Lisbet answered the door wearing purple Lycra shorts and a faded military tank top with no bra. Long-legged and barefoot, she appeared both surprised and pleased to see me. Three small children craned their heads around to peer up at me for a moment before returning their gaze to the television. The whole room was bathed in that ghostly blue light.
Lisbet took my hand and led me down the hall to a back room lit by a naked bulb. A younger girl, whom I later came to know as her sister, was sprawled out on the bed reading a dog-eared novel. Lisbet got the sister up and shooed her out. As she was leaving, the younger girl paused in the doorway to favor me with a very lewd wink.
“Maybe this isn’t the best idea,” I said when the sister was gone.
Lisbet shook her head, smiling. “Qué va. I’m glad you came. I didn’t know if you would.” She placed her hands on my shoulders and pushed me down onto the foam-rubber mattress. The bed was a sheet of plywood propped up on cinderblocks. I attempted to keep my breath even to slow down my racing heart. You might not believe it, but this was the first time I’d done anything remotely like this.