White Summer Chap. 3
"We should send some flowers." It was Hunter. He pulled out his wallet to help pay for the cab as we climbed out in front of McNutt.
"Yeah, that’s a good idea. I’ll chip in," I added.
"Could you order them?" Hunter looked in Verlaine’s direction.
"Me, I guess so. How much do you want to spend?"
Hunter unsheathed a fifty and pressed it into her hand.
"Wow. Maybe I misjudged you." A salvo of silver needles flashed from Verlaine’s eyes. "You must be on some guilt trip."
I added a ten of my own. "Lay off," I said.
He threw his arm around me. "It’s the least we could do. Right buddy?"
I shrugged his hand off. "It’s something we can do."
"Well, I really do need to go." Hunter responded. "My paper’s waiting. Good seeing you two. Sorry for the circumstances." He disappeared around the limestone corner of the main building .
"Shouldn’t you be studying too," Verlaine asked.
"Do you want me to work more on your portrait?"
"Jase, I don’t think it’s an appropriate time."
"You’re right. I just want to put things behind me. Move away."
"Vous peint ses seins voluminex." Ingrid cradled her elbow in her hand. In the V of her fingers pressed to her lips she held a cigarette. The morning breeze veiled her face with her hair. When she saw she had my attention she translated, "You painted her breasts too big."
"Ignore her," Verlaine smiled.
"You can correct next time, Qui?"
"Yeah, sure. Verlaine? Do you think so? I didn’t mean to. I--"
"Don’t get hung up about it, Jase. You can fix them, can’t you? It should be easy, right? Paint over them or whatever you do."
"Yeah, sure. I’m sorry."
"Don’t be." She touched my arm. " But I want my portrait to be as true as you can make it. No enhancements. Okay?"
Ingrid slipped behind me and leaned her head next to mine. "Vous etes si mauvais." A thin stream of smoke fumed in front of my face. "I think you study." She playfully mussed my hair and squeezed my shoulder. Then she was with Verlaine and they started walking .
"Listen to her, Jase," Verlaine said looking over her shoulder at me . "We don’t want you flunking out, becoming fodder for LBJ’s war machine!" They continued toward Briscoe.
When I reached our room, Hunter was clacking away, a sheaf of papers spread out on his study desk, the metal neck of his tensor lamp knotted above his typewriter, his left leg jiggling. He looked up, his blonde hair haloed in the light.
"This paper is a bitch!"
"Don’t mind me. I’m just going to grab something to study and go to Warlock’s room."
His leg still pumping, he hunched over the keys. "Later," he said, his fingers punching their sporadic tattoo as I pulled the door closed.
Someone on the hall was playing the Association’s, ‘Along Comes Mary’, but mostly it was Sunday morning quiet; guys sleeping off Saturday night hangovers, or sleeping elsewhere or up early cramming for Monday after blowing off assignments all weekend.
I knocked on Warlock’s door.
"Open!"
Warlock actually had his nose stuck in a book. He sat in his bed in his bell-bottom jeans knees pulled up, his pillow wedged between his bare back and the cream colored wall.
"Mind if I study with you, Hunter’s in our room pounding away on his typewriter."
He set his book aside. "Man, that’s a switch, he’s usually pounding his meat." He grinned. " Sure, toss some shit on the floor and sit."
"Where’s Wolfman hiding out these days?" I pushed a well-abused copy of Playboy and some rumpled socks off his chair and sat down.
"Andmoreagain."
"Yeah, the blonde chick. Okay. We’ve met. Pretty spacey."
"That’s her natural state. You know she’s fifteen?"
"Shit! What’s Wolf thinking? That’s prison time."
"That’s just it, he’s not. He’s been keeping to himself lately. I hear she’s the daughter of one of the professors."
I just shook my head. "You hear about, Suzy?"
"Yeah, Seth from down the hall clued me in. I wondered what was going down with the sirens this morning. She really try to kill herself?"
"Close enough."
"Bummer. You took her out. What happened? Get any, or was she too wigged out?"
"God, you’re crass. Listen, I’d rather not get into it. It was just a bad scene."
"I dig."
"You seeing anybody?"
"You could say that."
"Who is she? Do I know her."
"I seriously doubt it."
" Okay, fine. Keep her to yourself, what the Hell. What’re you reading?"
"Folklore." He sat up crossing his legs.
"Folklore? I didn’t even know that was a course offering. I have to study Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ for Brit. Lit. I think we’re having a test soon."
" Folklore is cool, man. There are some far out creation myths, pussies with teeth and all kinds of mind-blowing shit."
"What?! You’ve got to be kidding me," I laughed.
"No, honest. The San Carlos Apaches believed that, other cultures too."
" British literature is just boring." I sprung my hefty tome open to a folded down page. "Listen to this: ‘Of Man’s first disobedience,’" I mock intoned, " ‘and the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste...’"
Warlock upturned his hands on either side of his face as if supporting invisible thighs and waggled his pink tongue up and down. This sent me crashing to the floor, howling in uncontrollable laughter, purging the apprehension and stress of the morning . I managed to retrieve my sprawled out book and after several deep lung- fulls of air continued.
"‘Brought death into the world and all our woe,’" This is deep stuff. "‘That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed...’"
"Spurt, spurt, spurt!" Warlock’s fist worked up and down in front of his crotch. I was debilitated by laughter once more.
"Okay, okay, quit, quit." I fought for breath like a man in a gale, peeling myself off the floor. "I need to study, seriously."
"Say, you know the Airplane’s coming," Warlock said, stuffing a Ritz cracker in his mouth from the box on his desk.
"Jefferson Airplane, here? How?"
"The student Union board finally got their shit together. After all that Four Seasons, Lettermen crap they’ve been peddling, they finally booked some heavy groups. Dig, not only the Airplane, but The Byrds and B.B. King."
"Far out! I can not believe."
"It’s going to be open air too. They’re holding it on the Little 5' field."
"Where’d you hear all this?"
"Just a little bird, man, just a little bird."
"Yeah, sure, all right. You’re not dating this ‘little bird’ are you?"
A grin sliced across his face."You know who Jorma Kaukonen is, don’t you,"he continued.
"The Airplane’s lead guitarist, so."
"So, man, somebody I know is going to get me a private audition so I can play for him."
"You’ve got to be– that is fantastic! Maybe he can get you a record deal!"
"That’s my plan." Warlock leaned over and shucked his guitar from it’s soft vinyl case.
"Put ‘Surrealistic Pillow’ on and cue it up to ‘Embryonic Journey’."
I found it in a stack with other sleeveless lps on the floor.
"You need to take care of your records."
"Screw it. If it’s scratched I’ll get another. Just put it on the turntable."
When the first chords resonated from the speaker cabinets Warlock joined in, playing along with Kaukonen’s guitar line. It was a complex little instrumental and damn, if Warlock wasn’t dead on. It was eerie. His fingers were like high wire acrobats sliding across the vibrating strings. When the song ended Warlock’s shy smile bloomed. I fell over. He could really do it.
"That was amazing Warlock!"
"Thanks. Want to see my calluses?" He slid the neck into the case. " Who do you think is the best guitar player living? Excluding me of course," he laughed.
"I dig Hendrix," I replied.
"Groovy. What about Clapton?"
And that started the ball rolling. We found ourselves on our backs on the floor staring at the blank slab of ceiling, the round light overhead like a big white pill, debating the merits of rock guitarists and their guitar solos all afternoon; comparing and contrasting Eric Clapton to Jeff Beck, his replacement in the Yardbirds, whether the guitar break on ‘For Your Love’ was as good as the one in ‘Mister You’re a Better Man Than I’. Robbie Kreiger’s guitar improvisation in the middle of ‘Light My Fire’ was weighed against Jerry Garcia’s work on ‘Viola Lee Blues’. We each took turns leaping up to set the tone arm down on the album cut under discussion, then once more assuming our contemplative positions. Pete Townshend versus Keith Richards, Alvin Lee and Ten Years After going against Arthur Lee and Love. They were all discussed, even Neil Young . He thought his guitar playing sounded like he plucked the strings with his toes. Warlock even gave me a preview of some of the numbers he was going to play at the McCarthy rally.
As the afternoon mellowed into evening he changed to a new subject.
"I want to show you something, Jase." He locked the door, then dropped to the floor rummaging around in his closet. A second later, on his knees, he was holding a little black box before me. "Looky, looky, what I scored."
" You scored a pair of cuff links? I won’t tell a soul, cross my heart."
"No, man, heavy stuff," he shook it and betrayed nothing of it’s contents. "Just between you and me, okay? You swear?"
"All right, I swear."
He crawled closer and snapped open the box, holding it level with my eyes. Inside, clear plastic wrap carefully folded around tiny pale blue squares .
"Blue Cheer," he said.
"What?"
"Blue Cheer, man, you know like the group, acid, LSD. Finest kind! I’ll share it with you. We can trip together. What do you say?"
I looked into his expectant eyes, his conspiratory grin. "Wow, I don’t know, Warlock.. How come you’re not sharing with Wolf?"
"Man, he’s out of it. That chick has him all screwed-up."
"I’ve never dropped acid before. I – don’t know whether I’m together enough. What if I freak out ?"
"Bullshit, man!" He snapped the box closed and stood up. "You’re the most together dude I know. I’ll be with you, man." He kneeled down, his face close to mine, his eyes searching. " I won’t let anything bad happen to you. It’ll be groovy. It’ll help you with your art. It’ll open your mind so you can be more creative."
"I think it’s just too heavy for me." I bore that night as vivid now as then. The blanket of oil slick on the grass. The contents of a car spilled. How did I find Karen in that anthracite night. She was there, yet not there. So still. Too still.
"C’mon, Jase don’t cop out! I don’t mean right now this minute. But when it’s groovy, you know, when the vibes are right. We could drink some wine, mellow out, put on some Segovia or Grateful Dead. Think about it for a few days, okay? I know you’d dig it if you tried it."
" Okay. I’ll think about it."
Warlock locked his hand around my forearm and we shook."Righteous," he grinned.
He hid the box in his fist and squirreled it away in his closet, then unlocked the door and pounced back on his bed, sending his folklore book crashing to the floor.
"You want to order out for pizza?"
"That sounds great!" I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until he asked . I stood up.
"Everything?" Warlock was beside me already dialing the phone.
"Yeah, sure. Hell, I’ll even go anchovies. Get pop, too."
While waiting for the pizza, Warlock slapped Love’s ‘Forever Changes’ on the turntable and we shared a doobie.
"I could listen to this ‘till I croak and never get tired of it. It’s better than ‘Sargent Pepper’s’," Warlock remarked. Then later, holding the bobby-pinned roach out to me as he rose, "It’s such a drag having to turn the record over."
I had now officially lost the book I had brought to study. And I didn’t care.
A kid wearing wire rimmed glasses like Lennon, his hair curling over his ears, delivered our pizza. We were ravenous. But no sooner had we paid the delivery boy, cracked the cardboard lid open on Wolf’s bed, and let the aroma of hot Mozzarella waft up to our eager nostrils, than Wolfman flung the door open and swooped down on the pie, grabbing a hot slice in his claw.
"My timing is fucking genius, I swear," he growled as he shoveled the pizza into his mouth. He plopped down on his bed almost capsizing the box. Flipping his sandals off, they made a soft thwack against the closet door. He let his books drop where they may. Warlock and I quick grabbed slices and chowed down now that the unexpected Wolfman had a head start. I pitched a pop top into a corner.
"Where have you been laying your bones these days," I asked.
"Wouldn’t you like to know," he answered in-between gulps of Coke.
"Andmoreagain?"
He took another bite. A contented sound escaped his lips, his mouth crammed with pizza. He held up an index finger, hurriedly chewing and wiped his hands on his pants. He dug into his left jean pocket and pulled out a carefully folded sheet of lined notebook paper.
"She wrote a Haiku for me, can you dig it? It’s going to be published in the Spectator. Listen."
He unfolded it and read:
My orbit, your heart
In your arms my universe
In your kiss my truth.
Warlock snickered, "Spare us, man."
"You’re a cretin, you know that." He refolded the paper.
"Wolf, she’s fifteen, and she’s a professor’s daughter."
"Who told you that?" He shot a glance at Warlock.. "No she’s not. She’s a runaway. She’s crashing at the apartment of one of the chick’s that works at the Spectator."
"Out of the frying pan and into the inferno," Warlock said.
" Everything’s cool. I’m careful."
"That’s not the point," I said. "The cops catch you with her--"
"Or her parents," Warlock chimed in.
" Right. They’ll bust you so fast."
" We’ll take-off, drop out. I’ve got connections."
" Wolf, you’re living in a fantasy world."
"Don’t bug me! Do you know the administration is trying to throw the Spectator off campus? They’ve given them 48 hours to vacate their office before they confiscate all of their equipment. They’ve threatened to padlock the doors."
"What, that tin Quonset hut by the field house? How is that a threat?"
"The Spectator prints the truth, that’s how. The University is in the back pocket of Dow Chemical and Lockheed. They can’t tolerate that we know that. We’re living in a fascist state! Can’t you guys see?!"
I used my finger to lift a sagging strand of Mozzarella into my mouth. " I can see you’re hung up on Andmoreagain. Dig her poetry, go ahead and ball her even, but don’t get mixed up in any confrontation between the university and the Spectator. I’ve heard the campus police are getting patrol cars reinforced with wire mesh. They’re expecting riots here like Berkeley. Some of those dudes at the Spectator are hot heads. Skulls are going to get cracked. Don’t be one of them."
"You don’t understand."
" I understand that Warlock and I want to keep you out of trouble. You making grade point?"
"Toss me a Coke roomie." He scooted to the top of his bunk, digging into the mattress with his elbows, and bunched the pillow beneath his head of anarchic hair. "You’ve got room to talk," he said, as he popped the top.
"You really know how to hurt a guy." That jogged my memory. I launched a search party for my Brit. Lit. Book. Warlock was the one who excavated it from the debris.
" I’ll leave you two to devour the rest of the pizza." Hopefully, Hunter was through typing his paper. " It’s good catching up to you Wolf."
"You too, Jase. Tell, Hunter, hi."
"Will do, man. Peace."
"Don’t forget, Jase, what we talked about," Warlock called.
There was the commotion of late Sunday now as I walked down the hall. Everything around me was getting too heavy.
I opened our dorm room door. The air was foul with smoke. Hunter looked up from his typewriter in mid-key stroke, his eyes red-rimmed. He was sitting in his boxers at his desk, his fine hair looked like a wheat field a cyclone had hopped through; a half-smoked cigarette dangled from his lips. The cafeteria ash tray next to his elbow overflowed with crumpled butts.
"Just about through buddy. Want to order out?"
"Warlock and I already did. Why don’t you stop down there and grab a bite before it’s all gone."
"Just might do that." He continued typing.
"Wolf’s back so I wouldn’t wait too long. I’m going to the lounge to catch the Smothers Brothers."
In the dark recesses of the T.V. room I slumped across one of the chairs in the back as if it were shaped like a spoon and watched the remainder of the Ed Sullivan Show. The color smeared across the the screen made some of the performers look like Martians, others like carrots. Sporadically one of the lounge denizens would walk up to the set and fiddle with the color tint knobs on the back to little or no effect.
When the Smother Brothers show started all the seats filled . Tommy Smothers, with his naughty boy grin, and his brother Dick knew exactly what they were doing pushing the edges of the status quo with their hip, funny jokes and sketches. Their show was a thumb to the nose dressed up in a song and dance, a figurative flip of the finger to their network, the government, and any prevailing institution that was in their sights that week. Laughter ricocheted around the room as the brothers ran through their bits. I joined in, something I needed.
Hunter was not in our room when I got back. I brushed my teeth, pulled a sheet on top of me and set the alarm clock for my Monday morning Brit. Lit. class. Later a plank of hall light swept the room as the door opened and closed. I heard Hunter pad across the floor and cough, shuffle papers and finally collapse on his bed.
The buzzer slapped me like a sock stuffed with nickels. Now shackled to the day, I staggered into the hall, seeking walls for handles, falling into the shower open mouthed . Still wet, I pulled on clothes and wolfed down a semblance of breakfast. The morning was cool and overcast. With my text in hand I joined the thin stream of students headed to class. At the beginning of the semester if you were unlucky in the draw and had to register in the field house late in the afternoon, by that time the air stale, clogged with smoke and dust, you walked out with a card for a M.W.F. class at 6:45 A.M. as well as a hacking cough and a possible future case of emphysema.
I was running late as I pushed the dark oak door to the auditorium open. It heaved shut behind me with a resonant sigh. Several students in the back of the hall turned and gazed at me with mock pity in their eyes, smirks stapled to their faces. The hundred or so others remained hunched over scribbling thoughtfully in their open blue books. My legs felt weak. I looked down and noticed the little table beside me where the sheets of questions were neatly stacked next to the blue covered booklets, daunting in their blankness. My mouth went dry as I picked up one of each and sidled down a row of glares to find an empty seat. I swivelled the wooden arm rest into position, trying to make as little noise as possible. I humbly wrote my name and section number on the cover, then looked at the white sheet with the test questions.
BOOK ONE
1. Examine the narrator’s invocation (lines 1-25) and his epic question and answer (lines 26-49).
A.) What is the source of the narrator’s authority?
B.) What kind of persona would you say is established when one puts all three elements–the invocations, question, and answer– together? Characterize this poet-narrator–comparing him to the narrator’s of Spenser and Chaucer would be helpful.
I suppose my face went as white as that paper. I wanted to cry. And there were two more questions, equally involved. My shirt already damp, began to cling to my back. I felt a rivulet of sweat from my arm pit trickle down my left side. There was nothing to do but write. I held the tip of my pencil an inch above the page then wrote THE. THE. Sure! Simple. It could be the prow of a majestic ship constructed of reasoned argument and sound ideas--- if only I had the skills and knowledge to build it. More words followed under the grinding friction of the graphite point of my pencil as it pressed to the paper. Slowly, tortuously it meandered across each page through the loops of so many letters. My answers came in sentences stacked like dominoes ready to topple, not thoughts, words shoved ass end to ass end like box cars in a train yard with no engine. My words broke down into nothing more than letters strung together like common clay beads. It was all bullshit. Enough to get me possibly a D if a T. A. was in a forgiving mood, an F if they were less so.
A girl two rows down, three seats over, coughed. A pencil clattered to the concrete floor. Across the auditorium with a dry rasp, pages were relentlessly being turned. When the professor finally declaimed, "Ladies and gentlemen put down your writing implements and close your books." I felt as if I had just committed some vile act and, at the last minute, received a reprieve. I stumbled from the dim cave of my shame, dazed.
Outside sheets of rain were sweeping across the campus, the day gone dark as the clouds. I turned my collar up and tucked my head and ran through the streaming green world. Ran trying to stay dry. Ran from the academic disaster I had just participated in. It was all futile. How had it happened. I blew off last Friday’s lecture. It required too much effort to get out of bed that morning. Certainly the test was announced then. I should have studied on Sunday when I had the chance. Deciding to duck into the Union Building to shake off, I ran smack into the massive plaster sculpture of Ugolino and his Sons sitting in the vestibule just inside the doors. I halted, dripping. I had passed it many times. I even read the card once. The tableau was inspired by lines from Dante’s Inferno. The muscled youths nude in utter despair crowded around, clutching their father’s contorted limbs, his face agonized in hunger, condemned to eat his own children or die of starvation. I knew how they felt.
Part. 4
After the Brit. Lit. debacle, I actually knuckled down in my studies for the next few days. In my art history class I did okay on a quiz on Cimabue and wrote a good paper, I thought, juxtaposing Shakespeare’s and Jean Anouille’s interpretations of Julius Caesar for my comparative lit. class. Then Verlaine called.
"Jase, my class was cancelled. I have free time! I can pose for you! You can paint me. " I was headed to a class when the phone rang. "Did you hear me?" My Soash. book was under my arm. "You can finish my portrait!"
I didn’t have the will that Ulysses had, to be lashed to the mast of my academics, to shout above the beckoning sirens. She wasn’t a siren of course. She had made that clear. We were friends. And I would never betray that. But seeing her in the nude... I was an artist.
"Sure," I answered. "I’ll be right over."
"We should send some flowers." It was Hunter. He pulled out his wallet to help pay for the cab as we climbed out in front of McNutt.
"Yeah, that’s a good idea. I’ll chip in," I added.
"Could you order them?" Hunter looked in Verlaine’s direction.
"Me, I guess so. How much do you want to spend?"
Hunter unsheathed a fifty and pressed it into her hand.
"Wow. Maybe I misjudged you." A salvo of silver needles flashed from Verlaine’s eyes. "You must be on some guilt trip."
I added a ten of my own. "Lay off," I said.
He threw his arm around me. "It’s the least we could do. Right buddy?"
I shrugged his hand off. "It’s something we can do."
"Well, I really do need to go." Hunter responded. "My paper’s waiting. Good seeing you two. Sorry for the circumstances." He disappeared around the limestone corner of the main building .
"Shouldn’t you be studying too," Verlaine asked.
"Do you want me to work more on your portrait?"
"Jase, I don’t think it’s an appropriate time."
"You’re right. I just want to put things behind me. Move away."
"Vous peint ses seins voluminex." Ingrid cradled her elbow in her hand. In the V of her fingers pressed to her lips she held a cigarette. The morning breeze veiled her face with her hair. When she saw she had my attention she translated, "You painted her breasts too big."
"Ignore her," Verlaine smiled.
"You can correct next time, Qui?"
"Yeah, sure. Verlaine? Do you think so? I didn’t mean to. I--"
"Don’t get hung up about it, Jase. You can fix them, can’t you? It should be easy, right? Paint over them or whatever you do."
"Yeah, sure. I’m sorry."
"Don’t be." She touched my arm. " But I want my portrait to be as true as you can make it. No enhancements. Okay?"
Ingrid slipped behind me and leaned her head next to mine. "Vous etes si mauvais." A thin stream of smoke fumed in front of my face. "I think you study." She playfully mussed my hair and squeezed my shoulder. Then she was with Verlaine and they started walking .
"Listen to her, Jase," Verlaine said looking over her shoulder at me . "We don’t want you flunking out, becoming fodder for LBJ’s war machine!" They continued toward Briscoe.
When I reached our room, Hunter was clacking away, a sheaf of papers spread out on his study desk, the metal neck of his tensor lamp knotted above his typewriter, his left leg jiggling. He looked up, his blonde hair haloed in the light.
"This paper is a bitch!"
"Don’t mind me. I’m just going to grab something to study and go to Warlock’s room."
His leg still pumping, he hunched over the keys. "Later," he said, his fingers punching their sporadic tattoo as I pulled the door closed.
Someone on the hall was playing the Association’s, ‘Along Comes Mary’, but mostly it was Sunday morning quiet; guys sleeping off Saturday night hangovers, or sleeping elsewhere or up early cramming for Monday after blowing off assignments all weekend.
I knocked on Warlock’s door.
"Open!"
Warlock actually had his nose stuck in a book. He sat in his bed in his bell-bottom jeans knees pulled up, his pillow wedged between his bare back and the cream colored wall.
"Mind if I study with you, Hunter’s in our room pounding away on his typewriter."
He set his book aside. "Man, that’s a switch, he’s usually pounding his meat." He grinned. " Sure, toss some shit on the floor and sit."
"Where’s Wolfman hiding out these days?" I pushed a well-abused copy of Playboy and some rumpled socks off his chair and sat down.
"Andmoreagain."
"Yeah, the blonde chick. Okay. We’ve met. Pretty spacey."
"That’s her natural state. You know she’s fifteen?"
"Shit! What’s Wolf thinking? That’s prison time."
"That’s just it, he’s not. He’s been keeping to himself lately. I hear she’s the daughter of one of the professors."
I just shook my head. "You hear about, Suzy?"
"Yeah, Seth from down the hall clued me in. I wondered what was going down with the sirens this morning. She really try to kill herself?"
"Close enough."
"Bummer. You took her out. What happened? Get any, or was she too wigged out?"
"God, you’re crass. Listen, I’d rather not get into it. It was just a bad scene."
"I dig."
"You seeing anybody?"
"You could say that."
"Who is she? Do I know her."
"I seriously doubt it."
" Okay, fine. Keep her to yourself, what the Hell. What’re you reading?"
"Folklore." He sat up crossing his legs.
"Folklore? I didn’t even know that was a course offering. I have to study Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ for Brit. Lit. I think we’re having a test soon."
" Folklore is cool, man. There are some far out creation myths, pussies with teeth and all kinds of mind-blowing shit."
"What?! You’ve got to be kidding me," I laughed.
"No, honest. The San Carlos Apaches believed that, other cultures too."
" British literature is just boring." I sprung my hefty tome open to a folded down page. "Listen to this: ‘Of Man’s first disobedience,’" I mock intoned, " ‘and the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste...’"
Warlock upturned his hands on either side of his face as if supporting invisible thighs and waggled his pink tongue up and down. This sent me crashing to the floor, howling in uncontrollable laughter, purging the apprehension and stress of the morning . I managed to retrieve my sprawled out book and after several deep lung- fulls of air continued.
"‘Brought death into the world and all our woe,’" This is deep stuff. "‘That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed...’"
"Spurt, spurt, spurt!" Warlock’s fist worked up and down in front of his crotch. I was debilitated by laughter once more.
"Okay, okay, quit, quit." I fought for breath like a man in a gale, peeling myself off the floor. "I need to study, seriously."
"Say, you know the Airplane’s coming," Warlock said, stuffing a Ritz cracker in his mouth from the box on his desk.
"Jefferson Airplane, here? How?"
"The student Union board finally got their shit together. After all that Four Seasons, Lettermen crap they’ve been peddling, they finally booked some heavy groups. Dig, not only the Airplane, but The Byrds and B.B. King."
"Far out! I can not believe."
"It’s going to be open air too. They’re holding it on the Little 5' field."
"Where’d you hear all this?"
"Just a little bird, man, just a little bird."
"Yeah, sure, all right. You’re not dating this ‘little bird’ are you?"
A grin sliced across his face."You know who Jorma Kaukonen is, don’t you,"he continued.
"The Airplane’s lead guitarist, so."
"So, man, somebody I know is going to get me a private audition so I can play for him."
"You’ve got to be– that is fantastic! Maybe he can get you a record deal!"
"That’s my plan." Warlock leaned over and shucked his guitar from it’s soft vinyl case.
"Put ‘Surrealistic Pillow’ on and cue it up to ‘Embryonic Journey’."
I found it in a stack with other sleeveless lps on the floor.
"You need to take care of your records."
"Screw it. If it’s scratched I’ll get another. Just put it on the turntable."
When the first chords resonated from the speaker cabinets Warlock joined in, playing along with Kaukonen’s guitar line. It was a complex little instrumental and damn, if Warlock wasn’t dead on. It was eerie. His fingers were like high wire acrobats sliding across the vibrating strings. When the song ended Warlock’s shy smile bloomed. I fell over. He could really do it.
"That was amazing Warlock!"
"Thanks. Want to see my calluses?" He slid the neck into the case. " Who do you think is the best guitar player living? Excluding me of course," he laughed.
"I dig Hendrix," I replied.
"Groovy. What about Clapton?"
And that started the ball rolling. We found ourselves on our backs on the floor staring at the blank slab of ceiling, the round light overhead like a big white pill, debating the merits of rock guitarists and their guitar solos all afternoon; comparing and contrasting Eric Clapton to Jeff Beck, his replacement in the Yardbirds, whether the guitar break on ‘For Your Love’ was as good as the one in ‘Mister You’re a Better Man Than I’. Robbie Kreiger’s guitar improvisation in the middle of ‘Light My Fire’ was weighed against Jerry Garcia’s work on ‘Viola Lee Blues’. We each took turns leaping up to set the tone arm down on the album cut under discussion, then once more assuming our contemplative positions. Pete Townshend versus Keith Richards, Alvin Lee and Ten Years After going against Arthur Lee and Love. They were all discussed, even Neil Young . He thought his guitar playing sounded like he plucked the strings with his toes. Warlock even gave me a preview of some of the numbers he was going to play at the McCarthy rally.
As the afternoon mellowed into evening he changed to a new subject.
"I want to show you something, Jase." He locked the door, then dropped to the floor rummaging around in his closet. A second later, on his knees, he was holding a little black box before me. "Looky, looky, what I scored."
" You scored a pair of cuff links? I won’t tell a soul, cross my heart."
"No, man, heavy stuff," he shook it and betrayed nothing of it’s contents. "Just between you and me, okay? You swear?"
"All right, I swear."
He crawled closer and snapped open the box, holding it level with my eyes. Inside, clear plastic wrap carefully folded around tiny pale blue squares .
"Blue Cheer," he said.
"What?"
"Blue Cheer, man, you know like the group, acid, LSD. Finest kind! I’ll share it with you. We can trip together. What do you say?"
I looked into his expectant eyes, his conspiratory grin. "Wow, I don’t know, Warlock.. How come you’re not sharing with Wolf?"
"Man, he’s out of it. That chick has him all screwed-up."
"I’ve never dropped acid before. I – don’t know whether I’m together enough. What if I freak out ?"
"Bullshit, man!" He snapped the box closed and stood up. "You’re the most together dude I know. I’ll be with you, man." He kneeled down, his face close to mine, his eyes searching. " I won’t let anything bad happen to you. It’ll be groovy. It’ll help you with your art. It’ll open your mind so you can be more creative."
"I think it’s just too heavy for me." I bore that night as vivid now as then. The blanket of oil slick on the grass. The contents of a car spilled. How did I find Karen in that anthracite night. She was there, yet not there. So still. Too still.
"C’mon, Jase don’t cop out! I don’t mean right now this minute. But when it’s groovy, you know, when the vibes are right. We could drink some wine, mellow out, put on some Segovia or Grateful Dead. Think about it for a few days, okay? I know you’d dig it if you tried it."
" Okay. I’ll think about it."
Warlock locked his hand around my forearm and we shook."Righteous," he grinned.
He hid the box in his fist and squirreled it away in his closet, then unlocked the door and pounced back on his bed, sending his folklore book crashing to the floor.
"You want to order out for pizza?"
"That sounds great!" I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until he asked . I stood up.
"Everything?" Warlock was beside me already dialing the phone.
"Yeah, sure. Hell, I’ll even go anchovies. Get pop, too."
While waiting for the pizza, Warlock slapped Love’s ‘Forever Changes’ on the turntable and we shared a doobie.
"I could listen to this ‘till I croak and never get tired of it. It’s better than ‘Sargent Pepper’s’," Warlock remarked. Then later, holding the bobby-pinned roach out to me as he rose, "It’s such a drag having to turn the record over."
I had now officially lost the book I had brought to study. And I didn’t care.
A kid wearing wire rimmed glasses like Lennon, his hair curling over his ears, delivered our pizza. We were ravenous. But no sooner had we paid the delivery boy, cracked the cardboard lid open on Wolf’s bed, and let the aroma of hot Mozzarella waft up to our eager nostrils, than Wolfman flung the door open and swooped down on the pie, grabbing a hot slice in his claw.
"My timing is fucking genius, I swear," he growled as he shoveled the pizza into his mouth. He plopped down on his bed almost capsizing the box. Flipping his sandals off, they made a soft thwack against the closet door. He let his books drop where they may. Warlock and I quick grabbed slices and chowed down now that the unexpected Wolfman had a head start. I pitched a pop top into a corner.
"Where have you been laying your bones these days," I asked.
"Wouldn’t you like to know," he answered in-between gulps of Coke.
"Andmoreagain?"
He took another bite. A contented sound escaped his lips, his mouth crammed with pizza. He held up an index finger, hurriedly chewing and wiped his hands on his pants. He dug into his left jean pocket and pulled out a carefully folded sheet of lined notebook paper.
"She wrote a Haiku for me, can you dig it? It’s going to be published in the Spectator. Listen."
He unfolded it and read:
My orbit, your heart
In your arms my universe
In your kiss my truth.
Warlock snickered, "Spare us, man."
"You’re a cretin, you know that." He refolded the paper.
"Wolf, she’s fifteen, and she’s a professor’s daughter."
"Who told you that?" He shot a glance at Warlock.. "No she’s not. She’s a runaway. She’s crashing at the apartment of one of the chick’s that works at the Spectator."
"Out of the frying pan and into the inferno," Warlock said.
" Everything’s cool. I’m careful."
"That’s not the point," I said. "The cops catch you with her--"
"Or her parents," Warlock chimed in.
" Right. They’ll bust you so fast."
" We’ll take-off, drop out. I’ve got connections."
" Wolf, you’re living in a fantasy world."
"Don’t bug me! Do you know the administration is trying to throw the Spectator off campus? They’ve given them 48 hours to vacate their office before they confiscate all of their equipment. They’ve threatened to padlock the doors."
"What, that tin Quonset hut by the field house? How is that a threat?"
"The Spectator prints the truth, that’s how. The University is in the back pocket of Dow Chemical and Lockheed. They can’t tolerate that we know that. We’re living in a fascist state! Can’t you guys see?!"
I used my finger to lift a sagging strand of Mozzarella into my mouth. " I can see you’re hung up on Andmoreagain. Dig her poetry, go ahead and ball her even, but don’t get mixed up in any confrontation between the university and the Spectator. I’ve heard the campus police are getting patrol cars reinforced with wire mesh. They’re expecting riots here like Berkeley. Some of those dudes at the Spectator are hot heads. Skulls are going to get cracked. Don’t be one of them."
"You don’t understand."
" I understand that Warlock and I want to keep you out of trouble. You making grade point?"
"Toss me a Coke roomie." He scooted to the top of his bunk, digging into the mattress with his elbows, and bunched the pillow beneath his head of anarchic hair. "You’ve got room to talk," he said, as he popped the top.
"You really know how to hurt a guy." That jogged my memory. I launched a search party for my Brit. Lit. Book. Warlock was the one who excavated it from the debris.
" I’ll leave you two to devour the rest of the pizza." Hopefully, Hunter was through typing his paper. " It’s good catching up to you Wolf."
"You too, Jase. Tell, Hunter, hi."
"Will do, man. Peace."
"Don’t forget, Jase, what we talked about," Warlock called.
There was the commotion of late Sunday now as I walked down the hall. Everything around me was getting too heavy.
I opened our dorm room door. The air was foul with smoke. Hunter looked up from his typewriter in mid-key stroke, his eyes red-rimmed. He was sitting in his boxers at his desk, his fine hair looked like a wheat field a cyclone had hopped through; a half-smoked cigarette dangled from his lips. The cafeteria ash tray next to his elbow overflowed with crumpled butts.
"Just about through buddy. Want to order out?"
"Warlock and I already did. Why don’t you stop down there and grab a bite before it’s all gone."
"Just might do that." He continued typing.
"Wolf’s back so I wouldn’t wait too long. I’m going to the lounge to catch the Smothers Brothers."
In the dark recesses of the T.V. room I slumped across one of the chairs in the back as if it were shaped like a spoon and watched the remainder of the Ed Sullivan Show. The color smeared across the the screen made some of the performers look like Martians, others like carrots. Sporadically one of the lounge denizens would walk up to the set and fiddle with the color tint knobs on the back to little or no effect.
When the Smother Brothers show started all the seats filled . Tommy Smothers, with his naughty boy grin, and his brother Dick knew exactly what they were doing pushing the edges of the status quo with their hip, funny jokes and sketches. Their show was a thumb to the nose dressed up in a song and dance, a figurative flip of the finger to their network, the government, and any prevailing institution that was in their sights that week. Laughter ricocheted around the room as the brothers ran through their bits. I joined in, something I needed.
Hunter was not in our room when I got back. I brushed my teeth, pulled a sheet on top of me and set the alarm clock for my Monday morning Brit. Lit. class. Later a plank of hall light swept the room as the door opened and closed. I heard Hunter pad across the floor and cough, shuffle papers and finally collapse on his bed.
The buzzer slapped me like a sock stuffed with nickels. Now shackled to the day, I staggered into the hall, seeking walls for handles, falling into the shower open mouthed . Still wet, I pulled on clothes and wolfed down a semblance of breakfast. The morning was cool and overcast. With my text in hand I joined the thin stream of students headed to class. At the beginning of the semester if you were unlucky in the draw and had to register in the field house late in the afternoon, by that time the air stale, clogged with smoke and dust, you walked out with a card for a M.W.F. class at 6:45 A.M. as well as a hacking cough and a possible future case of emphysema.
I was running late as I pushed the dark oak door to the auditorium open. It heaved shut behind me with a resonant sigh. Several students in the back of the hall turned and gazed at me with mock pity in their eyes, smirks stapled to their faces. The hundred or so others remained hunched over scribbling thoughtfully in their open blue books. My legs felt weak. I looked down and noticed the little table beside me where the sheets of questions were neatly stacked next to the blue covered booklets, daunting in their blankness. My mouth went dry as I picked up one of each and sidled down a row of glares to find an empty seat. I swivelled the wooden arm rest into position, trying to make as little noise as possible. I humbly wrote my name and section number on the cover, then looked at the white sheet with the test questions.
BOOK ONE
1. Examine the narrator’s invocation (lines 1-25) and his epic question and answer (lines 26-49).
A.) What is the source of the narrator’s authority?
B.) What kind of persona would you say is established when one puts all three elements–the invocations, question, and answer– together? Characterize this poet-narrator–comparing him to the narrator’s of Spenser and Chaucer would be helpful.
I suppose my face went as white as that paper. I wanted to cry. And there were two more questions, equally involved. My shirt already damp, began to cling to my back. I felt a rivulet of sweat from my arm pit trickle down my left side. There was nothing to do but write. I held the tip of my pencil an inch above the page then wrote THE. THE. Sure! Simple. It could be the prow of a majestic ship constructed of reasoned argument and sound ideas--- if only I had the skills and knowledge to build it. More words followed under the grinding friction of the graphite point of my pencil as it pressed to the paper. Slowly, tortuously it meandered across each page through the loops of so many letters. My answers came in sentences stacked like dominoes ready to topple, not thoughts, words shoved ass end to ass end like box cars in a train yard with no engine. My words broke down into nothing more than letters strung together like common clay beads. It was all bullshit. Enough to get me possibly a D if a T. A. was in a forgiving mood, an F if they were less so.
A girl two rows down, three seats over, coughed. A pencil clattered to the concrete floor. Across the auditorium with a dry rasp, pages were relentlessly being turned. When the professor finally declaimed, "Ladies and gentlemen put down your writing implements and close your books." I felt as if I had just committed some vile act and, at the last minute, received a reprieve. I stumbled from the dim cave of my shame, dazed.
Outside sheets of rain were sweeping across the campus, the day gone dark as the clouds. I turned my collar up and tucked my head and ran through the streaming green world. Ran trying to stay dry. Ran from the academic disaster I had just participated in. It was all futile. How had it happened. I blew off last Friday’s lecture. It required too much effort to get out of bed that morning. Certainly the test was announced then. I should have studied on Sunday when I had the chance. Deciding to duck into the Union Building to shake off, I ran smack into the massive plaster sculpture of Ugolino and his Sons sitting in the vestibule just inside the doors. I halted, dripping. I had passed it many times. I even read the card once. The tableau was inspired by lines from Dante’s Inferno. The muscled youths nude in utter despair crowded around, clutching their father’s contorted limbs, his face agonized in hunger, condemned to eat his own children or die of starvation. I knew how they felt.
Part. 4
After the Brit. Lit. debacle, I actually knuckled down in my studies for the next few days. In my art history class I did okay on a quiz on Cimabue and wrote a good paper, I thought, juxtaposing Shakespeare’s and Jean Anouille’s interpretations of Julius Caesar for my comparative lit. class. Then Verlaine called.
"Jase, my class was cancelled. I have free time! I can pose for you! You can paint me. " I was headed to a class when the phone rang. "Did you hear me?" My Soash. book was under my arm. "You can finish my portrait!"
I didn’t have the will that Ulysses had, to be lashed to the mast of my academics, to shout above the beckoning sirens. She wasn’t a siren of course. She had made that clear. We were friends. And I would never betray that. But seeing her in the nude... I was an artist.
"Sure," I answered. "I’ll be right over."
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