John Henry Days (14 page)

“I woke up and it was dark. I had a little more stamina than Andy, but the last night’s partying had finally caught up with me and I crawled into one of the junked cars and fell asleep. I vaguely remember doing that. I woke up and had all these seat springs digging into my back. I got out of the car and asked a kid if I’d missed the Stones and he told me that’s what they were all waiting for. People had ripped down the speedway fencing to make bonfires, so that lit things up a bit, I could see people dancing naked in the orange glow. You know, burn, baby, burn. Shit. And the film crew’s lights helped. The Maysles brothers were filming the concert—Mick was jealous that the Woodstock movie was coming out in a few weeks and he wasn’t in it, so he got the Maysles to film his own free concert. People were singing Stones songs like that would summon them out of their trailer and then an Angel would glide by and drown them out with his motorcycle. But then one time the hog sound didn’t cut out. It got louder and the sea of people parted and this wedge of Angels came driving up through the people like an arrow. And between their motorcycles came the Stones, protected from the crowd by their badass bodyguards. The screaming got massively loud. I got myself into the wake of the Harleys and pushed myself forward to the stage. I felt the thousands at my back, hungering behind me. As the Angels helped the Stones up onstage, I saw that it was full of people. Angels, hangers-on, anyone who could still stand and control their body was up there. It was ridiculous, man. I weaseled my way to the right, and got a pretty good view. At one point one of the cameramen zoomed in on me, but I never made it into the movie.

“The big banks of lights showered the stage with a hellish red light from above. There was barely enough room onstage for the band with all those fucking Angels, but the Stones took their places. I saw this German shepherd, one of the Angels’ dogs, hoof around the mikes, eyes as greedy and hungry as those of its masters. Behind me, the miles of people pushed forward. It was the moment they had all been waiting for. Deliverance time. It was night and the greatest rock and roll band in the world was going to take them to their reward. And then it broke—Keith started to drag his claws across the strings and Mick twirled his black and orange cape and they started into ‘Carol.’ The crowd surged forward all of a sudden—we were as close together as we could have been and they wanted more. More people wanted in. It all came down to this, I thought. A few yards away, this hepcat in a Nehru jacket—Nehru jacket, shit—tumbled into one of the Angel’s hogs because the crowd pushed him and of course first one then two Angels started beating him. I was pushed
forward by the shift in the crowd so I lost sight of it—the last I saw of him was a volley of pool sticks coming down on his head like lightning. The Stones must’ve known it was too violent in the crowd to play, I know for a fact they knew what was going on, but they kept playing. Thing is, it wasn’t even that great a set. Totally uninspired. All the energy they’d had in L.A. had totally dissipated by the end of the tour. They were doing the show, they were doing what they did best, but they couldn’t hide the fact that it had been a long couple of months. Maybe they didn’t take a stronger stand against the Angels because they just wanted it to be over. They just wanted to play their final set and get the fuck out of America. They’d been bullied by what the press and what the public expected, the pop had shifted and forced them into this. Or maybe they were scared of the Angels, of what they had wrought, and if that was the case then they should never have gone into ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’ It was just stupid. Mick in his Satan mode asked the crowd to please allow him to introduce himself, lit up all red against the black desert night, and the Angels took their places. The Angels brought their wrath upon the hippies, raising their baseball bats and pool sticks upon the heads of the kids. The kids all clambered and rushed up to get up to the front of the stage, they ran up to the Gates and the Angels swung down on them. Mick tried to stop it and the Stones quit the song. Mick said, cool it, cut it out. As if he were still in control. The Angels dragged away some people and things calmed down a bit. Mick joked, “Something funny always happens when we start that song,” as if he thought that you could say the words of the spell and then act surprised when you smelled brimstone.

“I was exhausted. Andy and I had been going on for too many hours before we even got there for us to enjoy the concert, no matter how it went down in the end. But to put up with this, with my body dehydrated and my head throbbing with a red wine hangover? Shit, man. It was fucking unreal. And it only got worse.

“I’d seen him before when the Stones appeared with the Angels and everybody started moving forward. Tall, skinny black cat in a lime green suit and black shirt—he stuck out. He’d waded past me and was two or three people in front of me, closer to the stage. Now there were two or three Angels right in front of that part of the stage and I’d been watching them suck back Budweiser and push people who got too close. They’d been laughing and pointing at suckers in the crowd and were definitely guys to watch out for. I had gone up as close as I wanted to get and was happy where I was; I got into
that space at a concert where you’ve staked out a spot, your legs are braced to prevent being moved, and I was glad that there was a human buffer between me and the Angels. I saw the Angels getting more and more anxious as the Stones started up. That was the most horrible thing. I saw what was going to happen. I saw them start to fixate on the black dude and choose him. I don’t know how I knew it, but I knew they had chosen him before it came to actual violence. The black dude was bobbing his head and dancing and I saw the look in the Angels’ eyes and knew.

“Up onstage, the Stones started into ‘Under My Thumb.’ After what happened with ‘Sympathy,’ I think they convinced themselves that they were going to get through this song without a hassle. So they kept playing all through what happened and later claimed that they didn’t know that anything had gone on. It was like a Vietnam GI saying he didn’t know there were children in the hut he just torched.

“What happened was an Angel touched his hair. One of the Angels came up to the black dude and laughed and grabbed a big chunk of his Afro. His dirty paw went for it once and the dude moved his head away, and then the Angel sneered and the fucker went for it again, this time getting his hand deep into the guy’s Afro. The guy jerked his head away and swung at the Angel with his right, not putting the Angel down but knocking him back a few steps. The two other Angels came up to join their buddy in his fun—it was quick—and the black guy went down, just kind of dipped and when he came back up I could see the gun in his hand, a little nickel-plated revolver he’d pulled out of his pocket or something. He kind of bounced up from the ground and had a gun in his hand. And then I saw the knife. The guy was looking at the Angels who were hassling him but didn’t see the Angel at his back who swooped out of the crowd—this greasy creep came up behind him, grabbed his arm to steady his kill and sunk the knife into his back. The Angel followed through with his thrust, pushing the black dude forward and suddenly the wolves just ate him up, they dragged him away. The girls were screaming. I rushed forward to follow them and a space had cleared where they had him on the ground, half a dozen Angels standing over him. Blood already gushing out from his clothes. He said—these were his last words—‘I wasn’t going to shoot you,’ and one of the Angels lifted a garbage can high over his head and brought it down into his face. Then the other Angels joined in and kicked his head and body with their motorcycle boots, laying into the black guy like they were going to wipe him out totally, like they were going to make him and his fucking extinct then and there. And we stood in a ring
watching. There was this kid next to me, a teenager with curly red hair and this silly suede bandito hat on his head, who started to move forward and I held his arm and told him, ‘You can’t do anything.’ The Angels would have killed him and me too if we’d dared do anything. We understood that there was nothing we could do and stood there watching this horrible event. The Angels possessed the night.

“It was horrible and we watched it. All the negativity of the day, of all that year, came down to this violence that we witnessed. And those thousands at my back who weren’t right there and didn’t see it could feel it. The Angels did what the people demanded, even if they didn’t know they demanded it. They were going with the flow. They kicked and stomped him until he was just a puddle and when he wasn’t moving anymore they stopped. He was flat on his back in the dirt, his elbows dug into the ground propping up his hands like weeds and I could see into his skull. I could see the stuff of his brain. A young guy moved forward to help him and the Angel with the knife told him to back off. He was going to die, it’s too late, the Angel said, and there wasn’t anything you can do about it. We stood there like that for a minute, the Angel defending his kill, and then the Angels took off. Two guys came up and took the man’s body to the Red Cross tent. His girlfriend, a blond from Berkeley, followed them, sobbing hysterically. She was wearing a crocheted dress. You don’t see crocheted dresses anymore. And onstage the Stones played ‘Under My Thumb,’ a song about getting over on your girlfriend, to hundreds of thousands while the Angels performed their sacrifice.”

“Sacrifice to what?”

“To the culture. The kids had brought a new thing into the world, but they hadn’t paid for it yet. It had to be paid for.”

“Why did he have a gun?”

“For protection, I guess. And he needed it. He died in the Red Cross tent. He’d lost too much blood and there was no way they were going to get him to a hospital in time anyway. The Rolling Stones flew away in the helicopter and left us in the desert. And we found our way back to our cars and went home.”

“So this guy is like the Crispus Attucks of the seventies.”

“That’s a new spin.”

“Alas, who cries for the lost counterculture?”

“Who indeed.”

“What was his name?”

“His name? I can’t remember.”

“What about Andy?”

“I didn’t see him until the next day. I caught a ride with some HaightAshbury kids.”

“And what about the Angels?” “The Angels split.”

S
ometimes it happens. Nothing he can put his finger on, an effect maybe like the reverse of dynamite: noise and fire, white light, these elements flying not apart but together into a compact thing. Him, an afternoon. Putting the ruin back together to what it was. Looking over the past few hours, what does he see: an extra ribbon of bacon at breakfast, half an hour less sleep, a portion of seconds considering the dead robin next to the birch tree at the side of the road he walked here. Nothing really and yet he feels different. The peculiarities of this morning collect, they persist, stand at odd attention on his self like iron shavings on a magnet, drawn by invisible forces. Charged, attracting this day and life to him he sits on a stump and writes his song.

A drying puddle bristling with gnats; twigs like lizard legs, all knees; a cobweb on his brow. A breeze.

He’s on the top of the hill. He has to let out the tune he’s been humming under his mind for the last few days now. Try a line and let it hang in the air. The last word of the next line comes first, it shines, obvious, newly there, and the rest of the line creeps up on it. That’s half a verse right there. Like picking a pocket. Sometimes he thinks rhyming is cheating. First man to rhyme building a whole new world should take his place with the man who invented brick. He’s practically stealing the song today; it’s not his but he’s got his fingers on it and that’s half the battle.

Where’s that chord from. Some man like him hundreds of years ago sitting on a rock, arthritis not so bad today, a wind came out of nowhere and knocked the clouds away, then this chord on his fingers, been in his fingertips all night: plucks the chord on his mandolin, something else, whatever instrument the man favors. Zebra sinew stretched tight across a torso of wood that makes sound. Sounds good. So good he thinks he invented it, he’s the first person in history to do this thing.

Feeling like today he’s just nothing but himself. Nothing but a man.

He can only go so far before he has to go back to the beginning. Memorize
it, chase after that lost word in the verse he just thought up, got it, sing it again and again. Verse, verse, verse, taking the story of the man farther and getting it down this afternoon before he forgets it.

Add the love of a good woman. A hero needs a woman. Name her Polly Ann, after her.

He holds out his hat in taverns after he sings, the coins waterfall, silver down. He’ll try this song out tonight. Somewhere he stopped feeling east. He’s been following the rails, seeing what he can get out of this town before the next calls him on. The rails lead west. But now the air has changed and he has to face it: he’s more west than east now, he’s in the Western territory. He doesn’t think he wants to go that much farther. Some fellow told him once that there’s a whole country of songs out there, the guy passing him the jug after they traded tunes. That may be true. But there’s something today about this song, about how easy it is, that maybe there’s just this song. Taps his foot along to keep the beat.

Weight of suspenders on his shoulders, where his shadow falls away from him and the leaf half in the shade. Nothing really and yet.

Maybe it’s the
Lord, Lord
that makes it work today. Sitting there in the verse, an anchor. Forget Big Bend.
Lord, Lord
is the real mountain in this song, thrown up from his bedrock and looming. It reminds him of something he knows about himself. And if he took the time, maybe he could take each of his words today and link it back to something that happened to him. His father or mother, something that happened one day. Some of the words he wouldn’t know where they came from. Might take years, might take his deathbed. To figure it all out. Or maybe it’s the whole thing together that makes it all important.

Then. Everything that collected on him has fallen away. What happened anyway? It’s like that. Exhausted half the feeling, used up half the magic and didn’t know he was closer to the end than he was to the beginning. Too busy to mourn. And now the day is no longer charged and all he has is his creation. Twigs just twigs, puddles just puddles. Spent.