Summer of '69 Page 26

  Karl’s unending horror loop continues: “They tied my wrists behind my back to my ankles and left me lying on the ground for days. Burned me with cigarettes.” He pulls up his sleeve to show us the burn scars — round pink craters in the skin of his gaunt wrist. But there are also dark scabby marks inside his forearm.

  “What’s with the wig?” I ask Barry later. We’re alone. Karl had been in the middle of his rap a few minutes ago, then suddenly stood up and wandered away.

  “Wants to fit in. Probably just got out of the army and hasn’t had time to grow it.”

  The rain collects in the branches and drips with loud plops onto the tarp over our heads. We talk about what’s been going on back on Long Island, about me working on a way to stay out of the army, about Alan going to camp. Barry and I have never shared deep confidences about our families beyond the routine, but here in the woods, in this damp, strange atmosphere that feels so disconnected from everyday life, I tell him that my father asked me how I’d feel if he divorced my mother.

  Hippies and freaks tromp past, hair plastered to their heads, clothes soaked. A baby cries somewhere in the clammy mist. Barry takes a drag off a Camel. “About time.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He’s been messing around forever. You think your mom never told my mom?”

  “And your mom told you?” I ask, surprised.

  “Come on, man, all you had to do was be in a room with them to see how much they can’t stand each other. I mean, separate bedrooms? If it wasn’t for Alan, he would have been out of there years ago. Couldn’t you see that?”

  What I saw was Mom’s stoic silence and Musclini’s anger. Was I wrong about where that anger came from? Was it not from the frustrations of business as much as the crappy state of their marriage?

  “You know where it all started, right?” Barry asks.

  I frown uncertainly.

  “Your mom taking the baby out in the cold?”

  Brett was born in December. One school of thought suggested keeping babies inside for the first six weeks. Others maintained that as long as the infant was properly clothed, taking him outside was fine. On a cold and sunny day in January, Mom bundled Brett up and took him out in the carriage. A week later, he died of pneumonia.

  Taking him outside might not have had anything to do with it, but they’ll never know.

  “Guess your old man’s finally got the money to move out,” Barry says.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That school Alan goes to? It’s like a college tuition. And your father’s been paying it since, what? Since Alan was four? And your mom’s Park Avenue shrink? Two times a week? How much do you think that costs?”

  Alan is fourteen. The paterfamilias has been paying for that school for ten years. But Mom has a shrink? I knew she’d gone to see someone at some point. I didn’t think she was still . . .

  Barry must see the surprise in my eyes. “Man, you don’t know anything, do you? All these years that your mom’s been taking Alan to the city twice a week? What do you think she does all day while she waits for him?”

  I thought she shopped and went to galleries and museums.

  Do I have blind spots? Or am I completely blind? All these years, all the paterfamilias’s schemes. Was that what being golden meant to him? Being able to make enough money to buy his freedom? Was the frustration of having to wait until he had enough money the source of his anger? But if all he’d wanted to do was get out, then why didn’t he? It’s not like he has expensive tastes. How much could it cost to play tennis, exercise, and buy natural peanut butter?

  So why didn’t he cut out years ago?

  And it hits me. Maybe because that’s what his father did to him?

  So he stayed . . . because he felt obligated to pay for Alan’s school and Mom’s shrink (not to mention my tennis lessons and giving us a comfortable home), even though he probably felt that he wasn’t responsible for the crappy way things turned out.

  Holy shit. Is that why, even when she knew about his cheating, Mom continued to defend him? Because despite all the wrong things he did, he also did the one right thing that she, Alan, and I needed more than anything else?

  Raindrops plop onto the tarp over us. The sound of a guitar drifts over from one of the hippie school buses. I feel Barry’s eyes.

  “Man, I don’t know what you were just thinking,” he says with a grin, “but I do believe I watched a mind get completely blown right before my very eyes.”

  That you did, dear cousin. That you did.

  “License and registration.”

  In a service station in Wayne, I can see two miniatures of myself in the reflective shades of a New Jersey state trooper.

  “All I’m doing is fixing a flat tire.” I’m amazed by the audacity of my answer, but since I don’t have a motorcycle license, what’s there to lose? I suspect hunger, weariness, and aggravation also contribute to my confrontational response.

  The trooper’s jaw tightens. I know he came in here looking for me. This is the second gas station I’ve been to since the BSA’s rear tire went flat. At the first, they took one look at my long hair and jeans stained with dried reddish mud and told me to get lost. I pushed the cycle across Route 17 to this station, where they’re not only friendlier but lent me some tools to take the tire off so they can patch the inner tube. (I didn’t have enough money left for the labor and a patch job.) There’s no doubt in my mind that the guys at the first gas station told this trooper that some long-haired hippie from the festival was here. There must be cops all over the Northeast hunting us like migratory fowl.

  Last night, when the rain let up and the music started again, I left Barry in the woods with my knapsack and sleeping bag and caught an outstanding set by Ten Years After. Later, when I headed back into the trees in the dark, it took a long time to find the clearing and the hippie school buses. When I finally did, Barry was gone and there were two couples under the tarp. The wooden crate of food, the camp stove, my gear, and Barry’s sleeping bag were still there. The yellow-and-orange butterfly kite on the pole was leaning against a tree trunk.

  It started to rain again. Expecting Barry to return, I asked the couples if I could lie down while I waited.

  When I woke this morning, Barry hadn’t come back. There was no sign of Zach and Eva, either. The others under the tarp were still asleep. The rain had stopped and music was playing. I wandered back down to the concert, now a muddy wasteland of soggy paper plates; empty cans and bottles; abandoned, soaked sleeping bags and clothes; and plastic sheets, some with freaks sleeping under or on them. The relatively small crowd — compared to the days before — that remained was watching Sha Na Na. A girl wrapped in a mud-spattered blanket told me that Hendrix would play next. I knew he was the closing act. Had Dylan ever shown up? I asked, thinking that he might have played while I’d slept last night. She shook her head.

  “What’s in the knapsack?” the trooper asks now.

  I suspect that I’m under no legal obligation to show him, but I dump the contents on the garage floor anyway. With the shiny tip of his black trooper shoe, he nudges the dirty underwear and socks, a crumpled jacket. Meanwhile, I squat and finish fitting the patched inner tube inside the BSA’s rear tire. My hands are nearly black with road grit and chain grease. Stomach growling hungrily, I’m dirty, sweaty, and profoundly tired.

  Without another word, the trooper leaves. A jagged-edged sense of reprieve spreads through me, along with a reminder that, the festival over, I’ve returned to the real world, where drugs are illegal, I’m a member of a despised minority, and no one over thirty can be trusted. I need to get home and see if there’s news from San Francisco about my physical.

  And, maybe, a reply from Robin to my last letter.

  But I know that, after what Barry laid on me last night, I won’t ever be able to look at my tiny sliver of the universe in quite the same way again.

  “Where’s Tinsley?” Arno asks. It’s late afternoon and
he, Milton, and I are in the GTO. The BSA’s rear tire went flat again on the Cross Bronx Expressway near the old school for the deaf that looms up from the marshes like something out of The Addams Family. There were no gas stations around there, only a diner. I called Arno and then settled down to enjoy the most delicious cheeseburger and fries I think I ever ate.

  When Arno and Milton got to the diner, they looked at me like I’d just returned from the moon. Turns out that the festival dominated the national news over the weekend. Did I know that New York State had declared the festival a disaster area, and several newspapers suggested it be quarantined as a public health hazard? Or that by the end, a local police chief was quoted as saying the attendees were the most courteous, considerate, and well-behaved group of kids he’d ever encountered? Or that the commander of the state troopers said he was shocked that a crowd that size could go three days with insufficient food and water, and yet not a single act of violence or theft was reported?

  Maybe if I weren’t quite so wiped out, I’d find that interesting. I tell them that Dylan never showed and Tinsley went off with Bernard, but that she was pretty decent about how she did it, and maybe it was just as well, because I managed to find Barry. Then I ask Arno what happened to his acid.

  “Two thousand hits down the drain. The sewer system’s full of tripping turds.”

  “They punish you?”

  “You don’t think that’s punishment enough? I had a chance to get rich, man.”

  “Uh, probably not. People were sharing what they had. Anyone selling acid was asking a buck a tab.”

  “It wasn’t Owsley.”

  “They didn’t care. To them, acid was acid. Except the brown acid. They made an announcement that it was bad stuff.”

  “Announcement?” Milton perks up. “How?”

  “On the PA.”

  “What about sex?” Arno asks.

  “No announcements about that on the PA.”

  “You’re a riot, Lucas.”

  “Someone had a baby.” I yawn, barely able to keep my eyes open. Probably got less than a dozen hours of sleep since Friday at 4:30 a.m., when I left my house to get Tinsley. Wonder where she is now.

  “Was everyone doing it?” Arno asks.

  “Sure, Arno, all over the place. You couldn’t take a step without stumbling over some balling couple.”

  “Really?’

  “No. It was a music festival, not a giant orgy. If people were doing it, it wasn’t where everyone could see.”

  “You said people were getting high where everyone could see,” Milton points out.

  I yawn again. “I think there’s a slight difference.” Using my knapsack as a pillow, I lie down on the GTO’s back seat. Eyes close and refuse to open.

  At home, my weary spirits sink when I sort through the latest pile of mail and find there’s still no reply from Robin. But there is a letter from the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Thank God! I rip open the envelope. Inside is another envelope, this one from the Great Neck draft board addressed to me care of a San Francisco address. Holding my breath, I tear that letter open.

  Dear Mr. Baker:

  We have received your request to have your induction physical moved to San Francisco. Before your request can be considered, we require additional information regarding your change of residence. This must include the following:

  1. A photocopy of either:

  A valid driver’s license from the state of residence.

  or

  The signature page of a valid lease. (You must include the name, address and phone number of the landlord.)

  2. An original of one of the following:

  A phone bill with your name and address.

  or

  A utility bill with your name and address.

  My innards seize up. I have none of the above. Thanks to the paterfamilias, my legal address is in Bay Shore.

  I am completely, inalterably fucked.

  “Charles isn’t here anymore,” someone named Mary Ellen tells me over the phone. She’s a draft counselor at the American Friends office. “I’ve taken over his cases.”

  “Know where he went?”

  “No. He just stopped coming in one day. We called Creedmoor and he hadn’t shown up there, either. We found some Black Panther literature in his desk, but that’s all.”

  I’ll bet anything that he’s in Oakland helping to feed hungry children before school.

  I catch Mary Ellen up on my case and tell her I’ve got eleven days until my induction physical. What does she think of smoking cigarettes dipped in ink?

  “Forget it,” she says. “The army doctors are wise to that one. The last guy who tried it was sent to a military hospital for three days. When they x-rayed him again, the spots had disappeared and he was inducted.”

  Shit! “So what’s my best shot for failing the physical?”

  She tells me to hold while she consults the other counselors. I wait, my insides in turmoil, my thoughts going back to Karl, the Vietnam vet. How many more are there like him? There is no fucking way I’m going over there. None.

  Mary Ellen gets back on the phone and asks how tall I am and what I weigh.

  I tell her, then wait while she does the calculations: “Lose forty pounds between now and your physical. You’ll be exempted as severely underweight.”

  Four pounds a day.

  Okay, Lucas, it’s time to suck it up and start starving.

  It’s a hot, breezy August day. Gusts blow small clouds of fine particles off the mound beside the open grave. This is the first funeral Lucas has ever attended. He is not stoned; he is in disbelief. Or what did Charles call it? Dissociation? And like so many other things he’s heard about and thought he could imagine, it’s something that must be experienced to truly comprehend. The stunning sadness. The wretched emptiness and loss. The simultaneous disbelief and inescapable reality. He is here, but he can’t be here.

  Several dozen people have gathered around the grave, Tinsley among them. Lucas is surprised when he sees her but guesses that he shouldn’t be. It’s the first time since the music festival, which the press is now calling Woodstock and treating like a momentous history-changing cultural event.

  Particles blow into Lucas’s eyes. People sob. Tinsley’s short diaphanous dress flutters around her thighs. The ends of her long blond hair dance in the breeze. She lifts her gaze to meet his and then looks away.

  One day about a year ago, when I hadn’t seen him for a long stretch, Barry turned up unannounced at our front door with Zach and a skinny girl who looked oddly familiar. I was shocked by my cousin’s appearance. He’d lost weight, and his skin had a grayish cast. All three of them were disheveled, their clothes looking like they’d been slept in. They were chain-smoking and jittery.

  With a grin that looked more like a grimace, Barry said, “Hey, man, spare some bread?”

  When I gave him the ten dollars in my wallet, he showed it to Zach, who made a face. The girl tapped her foot impatiently and gazed off, dragging hard on her cigarette. Her brown hair hung limp and unkempt. Her cheeks were hollow. Our eyes met for an instant.

  “Adriana?” I said.

  Adriana Fox may have been two grades ahead of me, but she was someone every guy in school was aware of. Pretty, sexy, haughty, loud, she hung out with the jocks and was at the red-hot center of the social solar system. She’d probably weighed twenty pounds more back then, but not an ounce had been superfluous. Now she was a walking skeleton.

  “Do I know you?” she asked.

  “You were two years ahead of me.”

  She looked away as if she didn’t want to be reminded of the person she’d once been. Meanwhile, Barry’s forced attempt at cheerfulness had devolved into groveling. “You couldn’t spare some more money? Maybe a twenty?”

  It had to kill him to beg. He’d always been the cooler, stronger, more dominant one. But by then I’d completed junior year, a grade further than he’d managed to go. I was at the tail
end of the Semi-Miraculous Transformation — taller, probably stronger, surely in a better place mentally.

  I went to my room and came back with a twenty. It was a given that the money was for drugs, but I was naive. The suburban scene was dominated by grass, hash, acid, sometimes pills. Now and then someone might score some opium or speed, but there was never enough around to imagine that anyone could get hooked on either.

  And heroin? Forget it. That was strictly a ghetto drug.

  Last night I managed to track down Adriana Fox and get Zach’s number in Canada. On the phone he sounded distraught as he told me that on Sunday night at the festival, after I left the woods to see Ten Years After, Karl came back, and he and Barry went off together. It started to rain again and Eva was cold. She and Zach talked their way into one of the hippie school buses to crash. That’s why they weren’t under the tarp when I came back. They spent most of Monday searching for Barry, and when they couldn’t find him, they left a message for him with the festival organizers that they’d gone back to the farm in Ontario.

  Late in the day, my aunt got a call from a hospital in Monticello, New York. Two men had brought Barry into the emergency room and left before anyone could question them. An hour later, Barry was dead of a heroin overdose.

  “I’m so fuckin’ sorry, man.” Zach sounded close to tears. “We didn’t know what happened to him. We figured he and Karl must’ve taken off or something. And we had to get back to the farm.”

  “Was he doing heroin up there?” I asked.

  “Here? No, never. Not in a million years. I swear on my mother’s grave, Lucas. We were done with that shit. I mean, grass? Sure. But no more smack. Man, I’m telling you, I was totally blown away when I heard it was smack. But you saw how it was at the festival. All the dope that was around. And all that craziness. Best I can figure is it was just once for old times’ sake. It’s fucked up, man, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.”