Shadow of a Singer
Cy Hill
“Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?” 19-year-old Karen Semple sang, strumming her guitar, rawhide hat with rivet-band drifting to the back of her head. “Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?”
Her ever-shrinking hippie audience, seated on folding chairs, passed the wine bottles provided by her agent in a rented room of the Riverside Inn.
“Where have all the young girls gone?” she sang, although her true question was where had her audience gone? This was only her third song. She had six more to go. The Inn’s owner had warned them the hippies who lived in the Big Sur woods were an unpredictable, disparate, and free flowing bunch. They were also the Inn’s major attraction in the summer of 1969. Tourist buses added the Inn as a stop to allow observation of the free-range hippie.
“Where have all the husbands gone?” Born with a strong voice that allowed the exploration of three octaves and an ear that kept her in tune, Karen just knew she was the voice of her generation.
The sunset bent shadows through the windows overlooking the Big Sur River. Filtered through leaves, the light became its own passing river, mirrored within the room, and as it slipped past, she knew her connection with these trendsetters, these influencers of contemporary culture, was slipping away.
“Where have all the soldiers gone?” On that lyric, a deserter from Fort Ord bolted.
“Where have all the graveyards gone?”
Karen’s live audience was down to three young men. One loitered in the entry’s doorframe, nursing the last bottle of wine. He had shoulder length hair and a ragged beard and moustache. A peace sign dangled from his neck. He smiled at her. She smiled back. He was her lifeline.
“Where have all the flowers gone?” she sang.
The second audience member was a black man with most of his Afro tucked into a Shriner’s hat. He did not return her smile because she was irrelevant to him. He was way too high on the LSD dumped into the wine and was contemplating his existence as a metaphorical folding chair.
Karen did not even bother to smile at her last remaining audience member because he was most definitely not a hippie. He was gangly, pimply, had short hair the color of straw, and stared at her like an idiot.
The hippie in the doorway, the remnant of her target audience, applauded. “Karen, I’ve heard that song a hundred times, and you sang it the prettiest. My name is Door. Door’s my name because I am an opportunity.”
The straw-haired boy, face expressionless with grainy blue eyes, walked up to her. In his flannel shirt and rope-belted faded jeans he was a scarecrow. He tapped the fringe on her rawhide jacket as if it were a chime and listened. She hurried towards Door, but the scarecrow stuck to her. He swung the fringe upon her jacket in the opposite direction, then nodded as if he not only heard, but also understood its response.
“He’s Crazy,” Door made the introduction. “We call him that because he is crazy. Tell the nice lady you’re crazy.”
The flagpole-thin youth pawed at the floor; curiously observed his feet doing so.
“Don’t take offense at everyone leaving,” Door said, welcomingly opening his arms to her. “They’re roasting a pig or three across the road. It’s a big party. Come on.”
If her audience was on the other side of the road, then that was where she needed to be. Karen’s agent brought her to Big Sur to connect with her generation.
Door captured her guitar in a swift motion, strode down the hall, and out into the night. She followed, but scanned fretfully for her agent in the milling trendy crowd. The Riverside Inn’s buildings were constructed of rough stone and painted logs. There was a store, a restaurant, bar, gift shop, gas pumps, and rooms and cabins for rent. The business was well lit in the sudden night and customers were everywhere, many dressed as she was in expensive versions of the latest hippie fashions.
Where was her agent? Door and her guitar were already out into the gravel leading to Highway One.
Then, Crazy moved in beside her; too close; staring.
“Door. Wait!”
He paused in the middle of the Highway that shone as a shiny asphalt river, allowing her to catch up. “Come on,” he smiled, “before all of the food is gone.”
“My agent won’t know where I am.”
“The uptight dude in the coat and tie? You should lose him, he’s not what this is about.”
“What – what’s about?”
“This,” Door expanded his arms, wine bottle in one hand, guitar in the other. “We are rejecting all that,” he gestured towards The Inn, “and living our way.” He pointed towards the woods. “You have to decide where you want to be. Which side of the Highway.”
“Which side of the Highway?” a voice asked in her head. The one well-lit with the sort of people with whom she was familiar? Or the other side, up there in the dark woods and didn’t that sound like a song lyric? She was just beginning to write her own music. And was that an incipient tune that she heard, or a distant running stream? She sucked in her breath. She would be adventurous. Door was her guide and her crazy shadow followed. A grooved dirt path was clear to see in the moonlight; until they passed in among the trees. They were tall; columns to the sky. Their scents penetrated her. There were no sounds ahead; behind, nothing but empty echoes.
Door tossed the empty wine bottle and took her arm. Then, his arm was around her.
“How far in are we going?” she asked. An owl hooted, she nearly screamed; and then she had the first few bars of song, rippling through her blood. But wasn’t this how girls got raped, wandering out into the woods with a couple of strange men? Stranger, the song within her grew.
“Five, ten minutes we’ll be there.” Door was tripping off the electric wine and the trees were giants alive with branched arms and footed roots. The moon shadows were foxes and rats and something unnamable. He nodded at the tree that told him to go easy with this girl or he would be back in jail -- even if the sale of her clothes and guitar would support him for a month.
“How can you have a party out here?” Karen asked, increasingly suspicious. “You can’t build a fire out here.”
“We’re going to a party!” Crazy cried, his notes turning the trees to titanic tuning forks. “It’s a gathering of the tribes, that’s what Mary says. We are the future but no one else knows it, not yet, that’s what Mary says.”
The utterly original song evolving within Karen slid into its middle bridge.
“Have you ever kissed a hippie?” Door pulled her close.
“I have a boyfriend. He is the Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man for,” and she named the record label. He was notoriously cheap and she was not certain he liked girls; but he was in the industry, and he got her in to events.
“He’s not here. You got to go with the flow, girl, loosen up. Love the one you’re with,” Door slid one accommodating hand around her waist while holding her guitar by the throat with the other.
She spun free.
“We’re here!” Standing at the crest of a knoll ahead of them, Crazy jumped up and down.
Karen caught up with her shadow.
The picture -- the scene below -- was magical. Framed on the bottom with tangled scrub, and tall black trees to the left and right, the crown was an enormous smear of stars embedded in a blue-black sky. Within this border a meadow was intermittently illuminated by small candlelike fires. Forms moved in and out of shadows that solidified into tents. Chiaroscuro men and women engaged in animated conversations. There had to be more than two hundred people packed into this rectangular oasis cloven by a glistening stream. Sleeping bags, backpacks, and tents. Children. Babies. It was like her first visit to Disneyland. Only bigger -- because this was her audience. She intuited that this night, these people, would frame her future. Her life.
The light came on fast as they descended into and then across the meadow. A riotous smorgasbord of smells, everything from roasting meat to marijuana to incense to patchouli, hit her as cross-cutting waves. At the far end, set deep in the center facing her, was a man with a Chef’s hat and bells sowed into his blue jeans, animatedly presiding over pigs roasting on spits, sides of beef, and wrapped steaming vegetables being dug up out of the ground. On both sides of this rustic kitchen, a wide variety of objects of diverse heights and shapes were wedged together to form serving tables.
She asked, “Who are all of these people?”
“They are my family,” Crazy said. She noted he said it with pride. “They take care of me. We take care of each other.”
A few steps off the beaten path and here she was, Karen Semple, lodged in the beating heart of hippiedom. Talk about dumb luck. She reached for her guitar, but with a leer Door held it back. She tried to retrieve it from him, but he played keep-away, passing it from hand to hand; laughing; mocking her impotence.
“I like this guitar.”
She realized he intended to keep it.
A voice behind her said, “Give it to me.”
“Sure, Jorma.” Door meekly surrendered the instrument to a long-haired, clean-shaven male.
She watched this Jorma disdain the guitar strap and pluck a series of tones on the strings laced over the hollowed box that was her guitar. All proximate conversation ceased. His fingers raced up and down the slender neck and it seemed to Karen to exhale with pleasure in his experienced hands. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Door fade away; his back to, and then out of, the assembled perimeter of interested observers.
Jorma said, “More and more like him every day. Grow your hair long, drop some jargon, and live off the largesse of the idea. Nietzsche wrote that a society’s strength can be judged by the number of parasites it can endure.”
“It has such a clean sound,” Crazy appraised, a hand on Jorma’s shoulder, his ear touching, and then fading into the dimming wood. “It has range.”
“There are possibilities within it,” Jorma agreed. He returned the guitar to Karen and asked, “Are you singing tonight?”
She said, “Yes, I am!”
Did Jorma look at her curiously? As if she misunderstood something – ?
There was the ringing of a triangle, and she followed the sound to the Chef with the jingle bells in his jeans.
Taking a place by the food line, Karen strummed a few chords, and belted out “ -- Cause I’m leaving on a jet plane! Don’t know when I’ll be back again – “ and a hand damped the throat of her guitar.
“People are trying to talk.” The hand belonged to a woman with dark brown hair parted in the center and calm blue eyes. She wore a paisley blouse and purple floral bellbottom jeans.
“But I am giving a gift. From a flower to the garden.”
“Really?”
Karen had hoped she would get a pass with that balladeer Donovan Leitch line.
“What is your name?”
“Karen.”
“Karen, I am Judy, and I speak for everyone here.” She spoke patiently, as if Karen was a child. “Allow us to eat and talk in peace. That is why we came here. Observe. Listen. Learn. That is what artists do. Then they perform.”
“Are you an artist?” Judy reminded her of someone who sold jewelry at a street fair.
“I try.”
“Then when can I sing?”
“In an hour. One,” she held up an index finger, “hour. And don’t sing next to the food line. But please. Eat with us.”
As if Karen would eat anything prepared in such unsanitary conditions.
“Make the most of your hour, Karen. Meet people. We have a Nobel Prize winner in Physics here, see if you can find him without asking which one of us he is.”
Physics? What did she care about that?
Using its strap, Karen slung her guitar over her back and wandered among the groups, all in animated conversation that was the same old boring stuff and had nothing to do with her mission. The only fellow musician, a bongo player, spent more time drawing little diagrams in the dirt with squiggly lines and plus and minus signs than he did playing his bongos. There had to be more marijuana in the air then there was oxygen. Men and women offered her communal wine, specifying which bottles were laced with LSD and which were not, but of course she refused both varieties. The fires dimmed to crackling embers, but their words raged on as a torrent, flooding the glen. Words words words.
Why didn’t they understand that she was their voice in song?
Concurrent with that thought, the earth shifted beneath her feet. An earthquake! Why wasn’t anyone else reacting to it? She sat down before she fell down, alone amidst dozens of separate interlocking hippie circles, cogged wheels spinning within cogged wheels. She looked up and there were stars sprayed across the dome and they were moving. She could see them move. No, the earth was moving. No. They were all moving, everything was moving. It was so confusing. She had no point of reference. The shadows, large ones cast from small figures -- and dwarfed shadows from giants – what did it all mean?
Her song, the original one within her, returned, nearly complete.
She forgot about the ticking minute hand upon her watch and the requisite hour wait before she could sing. She forgot about time.
Back at The Riverside Inn, Karen’s agent was frantic. He left her in an audience-filled room to make a few business phone calls, and when he returned, she was gone; disappeared, without a trace; precisely the kind of thing her parents had hired him to prevent.
When two policemen arrived to investigate the reported abduction, they questioned the young black man still seated in the rented room. The concerned Riverside Inn owner and manager only knew him by his hippie-name: Cisco. Cisco, a graduate student in Marine Biology from Berkeley, was one of his favorites; one of the original Riverside Inn hippies. He pumped gas, worked in the kitchen – whatever he was asked to do -- and he worked for meals. Not money.
“Do you have identification?” one of the policemen asked Cisco.
Muscle memory from his Free Speech Movement days pulled Cisco’s wallet from his back pants pocket and his driver’s license from within that.
The officer could not determine if the black face under the red Shriner’s hat with a gold tassel matched the license photo. “What is your birthday?”
“I don’t know.” Cisco did not think he had been born yet.
The policeman suspected he was holding a stolen driver’s license. “Alright. What is your name?”
The name that flashed across the screen of Cisco’s brain made him smile. “Duncan Reynaldo,” he named the actor who starred in The Cisco Kid television show.
That was not the name on the driver’s license. The policeman grabbed him by the shoulder. “Get up.”
“No,” the Inn’s manager protested. “He’s okay. He’s one of the good hippies.”
The other officer pulled the one who had been doing the questioning aside and explained that they were not going to be arresting a man the Inn’s manager vouched for.
“He doesn’t know his own name?”
“He is stoned out of his mind. Which raises the question. How is he going to tell us what happened to the girl?”
Karen’s agent got down into Cisco’s face. “Where is she, you –” and he used a chain of racial epithets. “What have you done with her, you bastard?!” He knocked off Cisco’s Shriner’s hat and grabbed him by the vest. One of the policemen intervened his body between the agent and Cisco. The Inn’s manager grabbed the agent’s tie, wrapped it once around his hand, and yanked. The other officer stepped in, and the four men thrashed among the folding chairs. Cisco retrieved his Shriner’s hat, tamped it down atop his head, and headed for the door.
“Follow him!” the agent cried. And he and the two policemen did, out the door, across Highway One, and up into the woods.
Alone amongst gathered tribes – for as tribes she now recognized them -- fires fading and stars brightening, Karen emerged from her mental meanderings, glanced at her watch, and saw that more than two hours had passed, not just the requisite one. Alright, Karen Semple. It was her time to sing, her time to shine, her time to prove how important her voice was to these hippies.
“If you miss the train I’m on,” she sang, “you will know that I am gone – ”
During her third verse, someone counter-sang with the lyrics, “There’s something going on here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Ms. Jones?”
She finished the song. She did not expect applause, but she did not expect to hear:
“Crazy! Crazy, you sing!”
From all across the glen they called his name, a field of rowdy crickets, all chirping his name.
“Yeah! Crazy! Do it, little brother!”
The scarecrow pimply boy got to his feet and took a place before the only fire that had not faded to embers. It was large and burned brightly. It was as if every disparate fire burning earlier had united into this one. Karen had the bizarre feeling of attending church. He extended his hands, his arms, embraced the air; then sang:
“Your hand is like a torch each time you touch me
“That look in your eyes pulls me apart – ”
Crazy was an escapee from a Wyoming mental hospital. At the age of ten he accidentally set fire to his home, killing his parents. Guilt overwhelmed him and he was committed, a danger to himself. For eight years he lived on medication, listening to the nurses’ records; learning to sing.
At this moment on this dark night his back was to a fire in a meadow, and he absorbed its essence, its fury. The conflagration within him raged and grew, and as his terrors engulfed him, he fought to face them down with song. The pain, the searing; it tore at him, and it was all of this that came out in his voice. His struggle. His audience’s struggle. His loneliness. And theirs. The deal that was made, that was required; required just to live.
“Ain’t no way for me to love you
“If you won’t let me
“Ain’t no way for me to give you all you need
“If you won’t let me give all of me –“
Those in the audience who loved him knew that he was getting better; this community that shielded him from all drugs because Crazy needed not to be high. They watched out for him. He was of them.
Crazy knew that singing was the only way he could repay their kindness, and as he sang, he had a vision of them all within a large cave with the moon and stars scratched and painted on the stone above them. There were paintings of creatures on the walls. As on this night, they had eaten well, but they were dressed differently, and were huddled closely about the protective fire; this fire that was the only thing that shielded them from the dread without. He sang to give them courage. He was their voice.
Judy, the woman who ordered Karen to wait an hour before she sang, sat down next to her. “Isn’t he wonderful?” she whispered, and patted her hand. “I have never heard anyone sing like this.”
Karen did not know what was wonderful about him. These people preferred him, this pimply faced boy, to her?
“No one knew he could sing,” Judy sighed, “until he started scat singing around Miles Davis’ trumpet playing on a night just like this. He sings now with everyone that comes through here. Janis – Janis Joplin -- loves him. She’s going to get him into a studio.” She patted Karen’s hand again. “Go up and join him. He would ask you himself, but for some reason he’s shy about you. He’s never been shy about creating music with anyone else.” She stood. “He asked me to come and get you. All of the people that he has performed with -- and he is too shy to ask you himself.” Judy reached down to pull the young singer to her feet.
Karen crossed her arms and legs. She would not sing with him. Not now. Not ever. She hated him.
“Just what is it that you do?” she asked the woman.
Judy placed her hands upon her hips. “What I am going to do now. Sing. With him. You have a beautiful voice, Karen, I envy its range, but you are as counterfeit as your clothes, expensive knockoffs of what is invaluable, true, and outside the realm of price.”
Crazy sang, “If your heartaches seem to hang around too long
“And your blues keep getting bluer with each song – ”
When Judy turned her back and walked towards Crazy, the song within Karen, the original one that had been growing -- died and was forgotten. What remained was the need to be a star. Whatever the cost. To prove these people wrong.
Years later, Karen Semple sought out Judy Collins at a benefit concert. She reminded her of how they had met at Big Sur. Ms. Collins said she must have her confused with someone else. They had never met.
The two policemen broke into the glen with Karen’s agent and high-powered flashlights. One beam swept across Crazy’s face, contorted in song. The beam pendulumed back, and he was gone. Half of the crowd melted into the woods. The other half went silent.
“Who is in charge here?!” the agent demanded.
“No one is in charge,” answered a voice behind him.
“Everyone is in charge,” a voice answered from the ebony thicket before him.
“I am Spartacus,” said a young mother at the agent’s feet, changing her child’s diaper.
He sniffed the air. “Do you smell that?” he called to the policemen. “There is obviously criminal activity taking place here.”
Ignoring him and moving towards the food preparation area, one of them illuminated carved spitted carcasses. “I think I know what happened to the Sauer’s missing hogs. Hold on there, Jingles,” he called to the man in a Chef’s hat, standing beside a long row of mismatched tables.
As the agent looked about, Karen came to him from out of the darkness.
“What the hell were you thinking, running off like that?” He pointed down at the mother changing her baby’s diaper, a joint hanging out of her mouth. “Out here with all of these degenerates.”
The mother blew smoke up at him. “Go fuck yourself.”
“You said that I should sing to my people.”
“These are not your people. These are not middle-class hippies. We heard that boy singing on the way in. Aretha Franklin is a negro. And Tammy Wynette songs? Do you have any idea how uncool Tammy Wynette is?” As angry as he was with Karen, he was even angrier with these Big Sur hippies. He bought these miscreants wine and this was how they repaid him? By abducting his paycheck? On the blanket by the woman who was now nursing her child was a nearly full bottle of wine with a cork shoved in its neck. They drank his wine? He would drink theirs. He plucked it off the blanket and slugged some down.
He did not do well on LSD. He ran off into the woods and was not located until the next afternoon, his behind deep in soapy water in of one of The Inn’s kitchen sinks, singing “Stand By Your Man”. By that time Karen’s parents had retrieved her and replaced him with an agent who wore an ascot, had facial hair, and said “groovy”.
Crazy shivered in the woods, terrified. He bit down upon his arm to keep from crying out. His friend Mary held him close. His great fear was of capture and return to the Wyoming sanitarium, and before the summer was over that fear would stampede him out onto the highway before an oncoming car. He would not survive the summer of 1969.
Many years later a glittery spandexed entertainer slid uninvited into a cruise liner booth occupied by two elderly women enjoying Hawaiian pizza and white wine. The Caribbean cruise featured a shipload of retro musicians who had hits in the nineteen seventies and eighties.
“Hi there. I’m Karen Semple.”
The women looked at her blankly. One asked, “What were your songs?”
“You know, ‘Ding Dong Donkey’?” Karen named the most famous of her three top-ten hits.
They did not, but one politely nodded as if she might. The other pointedly said, “No.” They wanted to go to another table where several musicians they had heard of were holding court. This was why they took the cruise, to hear stories about the old days; when they were all young.
Karen was not welcome at that table. Her peer musicians despised her. She was desperate to hold these two because she needed an audience, any audience, to impress the booking agency that she had a public. She came extra cheap and still had to beg her way onboard.
She tried a different tact. “Have you heard of Janis Joplin? Or Miles Davis?”
Both ladies nodded. Of course. They had heard of them.
“Then let me tell you about the nights I scat-sang with Miles and did duets with Janis. We were in the Big Sur woods, feasting on roast pork slow cooked over an open fire under an open sky. It was like Woodstock, only before Woodstock. Oh. And the Doors were there, in fact they were the ones who invited me out into the woods – ” and she retold the story she had told so many times about that night when she was just nineteen; recalled that Milky Way-smeared-sky with stars as infinite as possibilities. She told this story knowing it was not her story. But it was the story people wanted to hear.
Cy Hill
“Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?” 19-year-old Karen Semple sang, strumming her guitar, rawhide hat with rivet-band drifting to the back of her head. “Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?”
Her ever-shrinking hippie audience, seated on folding chairs, passed the wine bottles provided by her agent in a rented room of the Riverside Inn.
“Where have all the young girls gone?” she sang, although her true question was where had her audience gone? This was only her third song. She had six more to go. The Inn’s owner had warned them the hippies who lived in the Big Sur woods were an unpredictable, disparate, and free flowing bunch. They were also the Inn’s major attraction in the summer of 1969. Tourist buses added the Inn as a stop to allow observation of the free-range hippie.
“Where have all the husbands gone?” Born with a strong voice that allowed the exploration of three octaves and an ear that kept her in tune, Karen just knew she was the voice of her generation.
The sunset bent shadows through the windows overlooking the Big Sur River. Filtered through leaves, the light became its own passing river, mirrored within the room, and as it slipped past, she knew her connection with these trendsetters, these influencers of contemporary culture, was slipping away.
“Where have all the soldiers gone?” On that lyric, a deserter from Fort Ord bolted.
“Where have all the graveyards gone?”
Karen’s live audience was down to three young men. One loitered in the entry’s doorframe, nursing the last bottle of wine. He had shoulder length hair and a ragged beard and moustache. A peace sign dangled from his neck. He smiled at her. She smiled back. He was her lifeline.
“Where have all the flowers gone?” she sang.
The second audience member was a black man with most of his Afro tucked into a Shriner’s hat. He did not return her smile because she was irrelevant to him. He was way too high on the LSD dumped into the wine and was contemplating his existence as a metaphorical folding chair.
Karen did not even bother to smile at her last remaining audience member because he was most definitely not a hippie. He was gangly, pimply, had short hair the color of straw, and stared at her like an idiot.
The hippie in the doorway, the remnant of her target audience, applauded. “Karen, I’ve heard that song a hundred times, and you sang it the prettiest. My name is Door. Door’s my name because I am an opportunity.”
The straw-haired boy, face expressionless with grainy blue eyes, walked up to her. In his flannel shirt and rope-belted faded jeans he was a scarecrow. He tapped the fringe on her rawhide jacket as if it were a chime and listened. She hurried towards Door, but the scarecrow stuck to her. He swung the fringe upon her jacket in the opposite direction, then nodded as if he not only heard, but also understood its response.
“He’s Crazy,” Door made the introduction. “We call him that because he is crazy. Tell the nice lady you’re crazy.”
The flagpole-thin youth pawed at the floor; curiously observed his feet doing so.
“Don’t take offense at everyone leaving,” Door said, welcomingly opening his arms to her. “They’re roasting a pig or three across the road. It’s a big party. Come on.”
If her audience was on the other side of the road, then that was where she needed to be. Karen’s agent brought her to Big Sur to connect with her generation.
Door captured her guitar in a swift motion, strode down the hall, and out into the night. She followed, but scanned fretfully for her agent in the milling trendy crowd. The Riverside Inn’s buildings were constructed of rough stone and painted logs. There was a store, a restaurant, bar, gift shop, gas pumps, and rooms and cabins for rent. The business was well lit in the sudden night and customers were everywhere, many dressed as she was in expensive versions of the latest hippie fashions.
Where was her agent? Door and her guitar were already out into the gravel leading to Highway One.
Then, Crazy moved in beside her; too close; staring.
“Door. Wait!”
He paused in the middle of the Highway that shone as a shiny asphalt river, allowing her to catch up. “Come on,” he smiled, “before all of the food is gone.”
“My agent won’t know where I am.”
“The uptight dude in the coat and tie? You should lose him, he’s not what this is about.”
“What – what’s about?”
“This,” Door expanded his arms, wine bottle in one hand, guitar in the other. “We are rejecting all that,” he gestured towards The Inn, “and living our way.” He pointed towards the woods. “You have to decide where you want to be. Which side of the Highway.”
“Which side of the Highway?” a voice asked in her head. The one well-lit with the sort of people with whom she was familiar? Or the other side, up there in the dark woods and didn’t that sound like a song lyric? She was just beginning to write her own music. And was that an incipient tune that she heard, or a distant running stream? She sucked in her breath. She would be adventurous. Door was her guide and her crazy shadow followed. A grooved dirt path was clear to see in the moonlight; until they passed in among the trees. They were tall; columns to the sky. Their scents penetrated her. There were no sounds ahead; behind, nothing but empty echoes.
Door tossed the empty wine bottle and took her arm. Then, his arm was around her.
“How far in are we going?” she asked. An owl hooted, she nearly screamed; and then she had the first few bars of song, rippling through her blood. But wasn’t this how girls got raped, wandering out into the woods with a couple of strange men? Stranger, the song within her grew.
“Five, ten minutes we’ll be there.” Door was tripping off the electric wine and the trees were giants alive with branched arms and footed roots. The moon shadows were foxes and rats and something unnamable. He nodded at the tree that told him to go easy with this girl or he would be back in jail -- even if the sale of her clothes and guitar would support him for a month.
“How can you have a party out here?” Karen asked, increasingly suspicious. “You can’t build a fire out here.”
“We’re going to a party!” Crazy cried, his notes turning the trees to titanic tuning forks. “It’s a gathering of the tribes, that’s what Mary says. We are the future but no one else knows it, not yet, that’s what Mary says.”
The utterly original song evolving within Karen slid into its middle bridge.
“Have you ever kissed a hippie?” Door pulled her close.
“I have a boyfriend. He is the Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man for,” and she named the record label. He was notoriously cheap and she was not certain he liked girls; but he was in the industry, and he got her in to events.
“He’s not here. You got to go with the flow, girl, loosen up. Love the one you’re with,” Door slid one accommodating hand around her waist while holding her guitar by the throat with the other.
She spun free.
“We’re here!” Standing at the crest of a knoll ahead of them, Crazy jumped up and down.
Karen caught up with her shadow.
The picture -- the scene below -- was magical. Framed on the bottom with tangled scrub, and tall black trees to the left and right, the crown was an enormous smear of stars embedded in a blue-black sky. Within this border a meadow was intermittently illuminated by small candlelike fires. Forms moved in and out of shadows that solidified into tents. Chiaroscuro men and women engaged in animated conversations. There had to be more than two hundred people packed into this rectangular oasis cloven by a glistening stream. Sleeping bags, backpacks, and tents. Children. Babies. It was like her first visit to Disneyland. Only bigger -- because this was her audience. She intuited that this night, these people, would frame her future. Her life.
The light came on fast as they descended into and then across the meadow. A riotous smorgasbord of smells, everything from roasting meat to marijuana to incense to patchouli, hit her as cross-cutting waves. At the far end, set deep in the center facing her, was a man with a Chef’s hat and bells sowed into his blue jeans, animatedly presiding over pigs roasting on spits, sides of beef, and wrapped steaming vegetables being dug up out of the ground. On both sides of this rustic kitchen, a wide variety of objects of diverse heights and shapes were wedged together to form serving tables.
She asked, “Who are all of these people?”
“They are my family,” Crazy said. She noted he said it with pride. “They take care of me. We take care of each other.”
A few steps off the beaten path and here she was, Karen Semple, lodged in the beating heart of hippiedom. Talk about dumb luck. She reached for her guitar, but with a leer Door held it back. She tried to retrieve it from him, but he played keep-away, passing it from hand to hand; laughing; mocking her impotence.
“I like this guitar.”
She realized he intended to keep it.
A voice behind her said, “Give it to me.”
“Sure, Jorma.” Door meekly surrendered the instrument to a long-haired, clean-shaven male.
She watched this Jorma disdain the guitar strap and pluck a series of tones on the strings laced over the hollowed box that was her guitar. All proximate conversation ceased. His fingers raced up and down the slender neck and it seemed to Karen to exhale with pleasure in his experienced hands. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Door fade away; his back to, and then out of, the assembled perimeter of interested observers.
Jorma said, “More and more like him every day. Grow your hair long, drop some jargon, and live off the largesse of the idea. Nietzsche wrote that a society’s strength can be judged by the number of parasites it can endure.”
“It has such a clean sound,” Crazy appraised, a hand on Jorma’s shoulder, his ear touching, and then fading into the dimming wood. “It has range.”
“There are possibilities within it,” Jorma agreed. He returned the guitar to Karen and asked, “Are you singing tonight?”
She said, “Yes, I am!”
Did Jorma look at her curiously? As if she misunderstood something – ?
There was the ringing of a triangle, and she followed the sound to the Chef with the jingle bells in his jeans.
Taking a place by the food line, Karen strummed a few chords, and belted out “ -- Cause I’m leaving on a jet plane! Don’t know when I’ll be back again – “ and a hand damped the throat of her guitar.
“People are trying to talk.” The hand belonged to a woman with dark brown hair parted in the center and calm blue eyes. She wore a paisley blouse and purple floral bellbottom jeans.
“But I am giving a gift. From a flower to the garden.”
“Really?”
Karen had hoped she would get a pass with that balladeer Donovan Leitch line.
“What is your name?”
“Karen.”
“Karen, I am Judy, and I speak for everyone here.” She spoke patiently, as if Karen was a child. “Allow us to eat and talk in peace. That is why we came here. Observe. Listen. Learn. That is what artists do. Then they perform.”
“Are you an artist?” Judy reminded her of someone who sold jewelry at a street fair.
“I try.”
“Then when can I sing?”
“In an hour. One,” she held up an index finger, “hour. And don’t sing next to the food line. But please. Eat with us.”
As if Karen would eat anything prepared in such unsanitary conditions.
“Make the most of your hour, Karen. Meet people. We have a Nobel Prize winner in Physics here, see if you can find him without asking which one of us he is.”
Physics? What did she care about that?
Using its strap, Karen slung her guitar over her back and wandered among the groups, all in animated conversation that was the same old boring stuff and had nothing to do with her mission. The only fellow musician, a bongo player, spent more time drawing little diagrams in the dirt with squiggly lines and plus and minus signs than he did playing his bongos. There had to be more marijuana in the air then there was oxygen. Men and women offered her communal wine, specifying which bottles were laced with LSD and which were not, but of course she refused both varieties. The fires dimmed to crackling embers, but their words raged on as a torrent, flooding the glen. Words words words.
Why didn’t they understand that she was their voice in song?
Concurrent with that thought, the earth shifted beneath her feet. An earthquake! Why wasn’t anyone else reacting to it? She sat down before she fell down, alone amidst dozens of separate interlocking hippie circles, cogged wheels spinning within cogged wheels. She looked up and there were stars sprayed across the dome and they were moving. She could see them move. No, the earth was moving. No. They were all moving, everything was moving. It was so confusing. She had no point of reference. The shadows, large ones cast from small figures -- and dwarfed shadows from giants – what did it all mean?
Her song, the original one within her, returned, nearly complete.
She forgot about the ticking minute hand upon her watch and the requisite hour wait before she could sing. She forgot about time.
Back at The Riverside Inn, Karen’s agent was frantic. He left her in an audience-filled room to make a few business phone calls, and when he returned, she was gone; disappeared, without a trace; precisely the kind of thing her parents had hired him to prevent.
When two policemen arrived to investigate the reported abduction, they questioned the young black man still seated in the rented room. The concerned Riverside Inn owner and manager only knew him by his hippie-name: Cisco. Cisco, a graduate student in Marine Biology from Berkeley, was one of his favorites; one of the original Riverside Inn hippies. He pumped gas, worked in the kitchen – whatever he was asked to do -- and he worked for meals. Not money.
“Do you have identification?” one of the policemen asked Cisco.
Muscle memory from his Free Speech Movement days pulled Cisco’s wallet from his back pants pocket and his driver’s license from within that.
The officer could not determine if the black face under the red Shriner’s hat with a gold tassel matched the license photo. “What is your birthday?”
“I don’t know.” Cisco did not think he had been born yet.
The policeman suspected he was holding a stolen driver’s license. “Alright. What is your name?”
The name that flashed across the screen of Cisco’s brain made him smile. “Duncan Reynaldo,” he named the actor who starred in The Cisco Kid television show.
That was not the name on the driver’s license. The policeman grabbed him by the shoulder. “Get up.”
“No,” the Inn’s manager protested. “He’s okay. He’s one of the good hippies.”
The other officer pulled the one who had been doing the questioning aside and explained that they were not going to be arresting a man the Inn’s manager vouched for.
“He doesn’t know his own name?”
“He is stoned out of his mind. Which raises the question. How is he going to tell us what happened to the girl?”
Karen’s agent got down into Cisco’s face. “Where is she, you –” and he used a chain of racial epithets. “What have you done with her, you bastard?!” He knocked off Cisco’s Shriner’s hat and grabbed him by the vest. One of the policemen intervened his body between the agent and Cisco. The Inn’s manager grabbed the agent’s tie, wrapped it once around his hand, and yanked. The other officer stepped in, and the four men thrashed among the folding chairs. Cisco retrieved his Shriner’s hat, tamped it down atop his head, and headed for the door.
“Follow him!” the agent cried. And he and the two policemen did, out the door, across Highway One, and up into the woods.
Alone amongst gathered tribes – for as tribes she now recognized them -- fires fading and stars brightening, Karen emerged from her mental meanderings, glanced at her watch, and saw that more than two hours had passed, not just the requisite one. Alright, Karen Semple. It was her time to sing, her time to shine, her time to prove how important her voice was to these hippies.
“If you miss the train I’m on,” she sang, “you will know that I am gone – ”
During her third verse, someone counter-sang with the lyrics, “There’s something going on here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Ms. Jones?”
She finished the song. She did not expect applause, but she did not expect to hear:
“Crazy! Crazy, you sing!”
From all across the glen they called his name, a field of rowdy crickets, all chirping his name.
“Yeah! Crazy! Do it, little brother!”
The scarecrow pimply boy got to his feet and took a place before the only fire that had not faded to embers. It was large and burned brightly. It was as if every disparate fire burning earlier had united into this one. Karen had the bizarre feeling of attending church. He extended his hands, his arms, embraced the air; then sang:
“Your hand is like a torch each time you touch me
“That look in your eyes pulls me apart – ”
Crazy was an escapee from a Wyoming mental hospital. At the age of ten he accidentally set fire to his home, killing his parents. Guilt overwhelmed him and he was committed, a danger to himself. For eight years he lived on medication, listening to the nurses’ records; learning to sing.
At this moment on this dark night his back was to a fire in a meadow, and he absorbed its essence, its fury. The conflagration within him raged and grew, and as his terrors engulfed him, he fought to face them down with song. The pain, the searing; it tore at him, and it was all of this that came out in his voice. His struggle. His audience’s struggle. His loneliness. And theirs. The deal that was made, that was required; required just to live.
“Ain’t no way for me to love you
“If you won’t let me
“Ain’t no way for me to give you all you need
“If you won’t let me give all of me –“
Those in the audience who loved him knew that he was getting better; this community that shielded him from all drugs because Crazy needed not to be high. They watched out for him. He was of them.
Crazy knew that singing was the only way he could repay their kindness, and as he sang, he had a vision of them all within a large cave with the moon and stars scratched and painted on the stone above them. There were paintings of creatures on the walls. As on this night, they had eaten well, but they were dressed differently, and were huddled closely about the protective fire; this fire that was the only thing that shielded them from the dread without. He sang to give them courage. He was their voice.
Judy, the woman who ordered Karen to wait an hour before she sang, sat down next to her. “Isn’t he wonderful?” she whispered, and patted her hand. “I have never heard anyone sing like this.”
Karen did not know what was wonderful about him. These people preferred him, this pimply faced boy, to her?
“No one knew he could sing,” Judy sighed, “until he started scat singing around Miles Davis’ trumpet playing on a night just like this. He sings now with everyone that comes through here. Janis – Janis Joplin -- loves him. She’s going to get him into a studio.” She patted Karen’s hand again. “Go up and join him. He would ask you himself, but for some reason he’s shy about you. He’s never been shy about creating music with anyone else.” She stood. “He asked me to come and get you. All of the people that he has performed with -- and he is too shy to ask you himself.” Judy reached down to pull the young singer to her feet.
Karen crossed her arms and legs. She would not sing with him. Not now. Not ever. She hated him.
“Just what is it that you do?” she asked the woman.
Judy placed her hands upon her hips. “What I am going to do now. Sing. With him. You have a beautiful voice, Karen, I envy its range, but you are as counterfeit as your clothes, expensive knockoffs of what is invaluable, true, and outside the realm of price.”
Crazy sang, “If your heartaches seem to hang around too long
“And your blues keep getting bluer with each song – ”
When Judy turned her back and walked towards Crazy, the song within Karen, the original one that had been growing -- died and was forgotten. What remained was the need to be a star. Whatever the cost. To prove these people wrong.
Years later, Karen Semple sought out Judy Collins at a benefit concert. She reminded her of how they had met at Big Sur. Ms. Collins said she must have her confused with someone else. They had never met.
The two policemen broke into the glen with Karen’s agent and high-powered flashlights. One beam swept across Crazy’s face, contorted in song. The beam pendulumed back, and he was gone. Half of the crowd melted into the woods. The other half went silent.
“Who is in charge here?!” the agent demanded.
“No one is in charge,” answered a voice behind him.
“Everyone is in charge,” a voice answered from the ebony thicket before him.
“I am Spartacus,” said a young mother at the agent’s feet, changing her child’s diaper.
He sniffed the air. “Do you smell that?” he called to the policemen. “There is obviously criminal activity taking place here.”
Ignoring him and moving towards the food preparation area, one of them illuminated carved spitted carcasses. “I think I know what happened to the Sauer’s missing hogs. Hold on there, Jingles,” he called to the man in a Chef’s hat, standing beside a long row of mismatched tables.
As the agent looked about, Karen came to him from out of the darkness.
“What the hell were you thinking, running off like that?” He pointed down at the mother changing her baby’s diaper, a joint hanging out of her mouth. “Out here with all of these degenerates.”
The mother blew smoke up at him. “Go fuck yourself.”
“You said that I should sing to my people.”
“These are not your people. These are not middle-class hippies. We heard that boy singing on the way in. Aretha Franklin is a negro. And Tammy Wynette songs? Do you have any idea how uncool Tammy Wynette is?” As angry as he was with Karen, he was even angrier with these Big Sur hippies. He bought these miscreants wine and this was how they repaid him? By abducting his paycheck? On the blanket by the woman who was now nursing her child was a nearly full bottle of wine with a cork shoved in its neck. They drank his wine? He would drink theirs. He plucked it off the blanket and slugged some down.
He did not do well on LSD. He ran off into the woods and was not located until the next afternoon, his behind deep in soapy water in of one of The Inn’s kitchen sinks, singing “Stand By Your Man”. By that time Karen’s parents had retrieved her and replaced him with an agent who wore an ascot, had facial hair, and said “groovy”.
Crazy shivered in the woods, terrified. He bit down upon his arm to keep from crying out. His friend Mary held him close. His great fear was of capture and return to the Wyoming sanitarium, and before the summer was over that fear would stampede him out onto the highway before an oncoming car. He would not survive the summer of 1969.
Many years later a glittery spandexed entertainer slid uninvited into a cruise liner booth occupied by two elderly women enjoying Hawaiian pizza and white wine. The Caribbean cruise featured a shipload of retro musicians who had hits in the nineteen seventies and eighties.
“Hi there. I’m Karen Semple.”
The women looked at her blankly. One asked, “What were your songs?”
“You know, ‘Ding Dong Donkey’?” Karen named the most famous of her three top-ten hits.
They did not, but one politely nodded as if she might. The other pointedly said, “No.” They wanted to go to another table where several musicians they had heard of were holding court. This was why they took the cruise, to hear stories about the old days; when they were all young.
Karen was not welcome at that table. Her peer musicians despised her. She was desperate to hold these two because she needed an audience, any audience, to impress the booking agency that she had a public. She came extra cheap and still had to beg her way onboard.
She tried a different tact. “Have you heard of Janis Joplin? Or Miles Davis?”
Both ladies nodded. Of course. They had heard of them.
“Then let me tell you about the nights I scat-sang with Miles and did duets with Janis. We were in the Big Sur woods, feasting on roast pork slow cooked over an open fire under an open sky. It was like Woodstock, only before Woodstock. Oh. And the Doors were there, in fact they were the ones who invited me out into the woods – ” and she retold the story she had told so many times about that night when she was just nineteen; recalled that Milky Way-smeared-sky with stars as infinite as possibilities. She told this story knowing it was not her story. But it was the story people wanted to hear.