Passing Through the Flame (22 page)

“Okay, Jango,” Taub said. “You’ve got a deal.”

He realized that his stomach was sweet, his jitters were gone, and the world was beginning to look rosy. He went to the bar, took out two crystal brandy snifters, filled them from his oldest and mustiest bottle of VSOP cognac, unbranded stuff that he had picked up from the bankruptcy proceedings of a seedy French nobleman. He handed Beck his drink, warmed his own snifter with his hands. The aroma of the cognac filled his body with energy and good vibes as he inhaled it, like good cocaine.

He clinked glasses with Beck. “Confusion to our enemies!”

“Whoever they may be.”

Surrounded by ceiling-high piles of back issues of paper, yellowing stacks of manuscripts, polyurethane coffee cups filled with cigarette butts, promotional copies of record albums and books, and underground newspapers from all over the country, Barry Stein sat behind his desk in his office at the Los Angeles
Flash
waiting for a phone call from somewhere that would either finally sink the paper or bring it back from the lip of the grave one more time.

Stein had several good ideas as to where the kiss of death might come from. The Internal Revenue Service might conceivably close the paper down for his own personal back taxes, though his lawyer thought it unlikely. More likely, an injunction would be handed down forbidding the
Flash
to publish another issue until he posted the twenty-thousand-dollar bond against loss of the invasion of privacy suit that the Federal Bureau of Narcotics had slapped on the paper. Or the government might “persuade” the three previous printers, whom Stein owed a total of seventeen thousand dollars, to force the paper into bankruptcy.

Capital and government form a tight web of power, Stein thought, and when they want you out of business, they work together. And there was no doubt that blowing the cover of thirty-three high-level undercover narcs in the United States and Mexico had made the Establishment see red when it came to the
Flash,
in more ways than one.

Stein lit yet another cigarette and stared at his paint-splattered phone, unable to concentrate on putting this week’s issue together, with the chances of the paper being printed at all being so slim. Either he had to unearth a printer who would print the paper without an antilawsuit bond, or some fairy godmother of the underground would have to drop thirty thousand dollars in his lap—ten thousand dollars for the printer’s bond and twenty thousand dollars for the invasion of privacy bond. Although if I can get twenty thousand in one big piece from somewhere so I can guarantee continued publication, I should be able to scrounge up another ten in bits and pieces. I’ve done it often enough in the past eight years.

But without that initial twenty thousand dollars within the next two days, the oldest and largest underground newspaper in the United States would never bring out another issue, and Stein knew he had just about used up every money connection he had with eight years’ worth of crisis financing. Ivan Blue claims to have a pipeline to Apple, but every heavy Movement figure is trying to suck money out of John Lennon these days. Still, Ivan is persuasive as hell, and twenty thousand wouldn’t be much bread to John and Yoko if Ivan can turn them on to the importance of this issue.

And important issues
were
involved—freedom of the press and the right of the counterculture to defend its own way of life. Although it might well end up killing the
Flash,
Stein had no regrets about publishing the names, locations, descriptions, and functions of the thirty-three narcotics agents who had formed the most important anti-dope-smuggling unit in the Southwest before the
Flash
blew
the whistle. Narcs had no legal or moral right to anonymity. Surely John and Yoko would see that. Surely Jango Beck should see it even more clearly.

Stein sighed cigarette smoke. It was a measure of how desperate things had become that his only other major hope was Jango Beck, capitalist rip-off artist par excellence. Beck is the antithesis of everything that the
Flash
stands for, Stein thought. He’s got all the social consciousness of a ghetto pawnbroker. His whole fortune is based on one rip-off of the people after another, and not a dime of it has ever come back to the community.

Yet Stein had to admit to himself that Jango Beck fascinated him. Beck has power, he understands it, he uses it, and the son of a bitch
is
an outlaw; no one could ever accuse him of being part of any establishment but his own. Power is what shapes social reality, and Beck’s power is enormous. If only I could convince him to use at least some of it to help the Movement, we could turn everything around. Saving the paper would only be the beginning.

There has to be a lever with which to move Jango Beck.

An ash from Stein’s unheeded cigarette fell off onto one of the record albums on his desk:
Purple Midnight
, a collection of the Velvet Cloud’s greatest hits. Stein flicked the ash off onto the grimy floor. Jango Beck is everywhere! We must review two or three Dark Star albums a week, and what do we get out of it, two or three lousy half-page ads a month....

An idea suddenly clicked into Barry Stein’s mind. A dirty idea. Artie Dugan’s column means something in the record industry. What if he started slamming the shit out of everything that Dark Star puts out? What if we redid the record reviews this issue to cream Dark Star products? What if we hinted about a big expose of Dark Star? And then went to Beck and asked him to commit himself to a color full-page ad every week for a year. And to pony up the money in advance. In return for which we push his product. A corrupt capitalist game, sure, but all the
Flash
has to save itself with
is
itself. When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.

But it’s got to come out of a communal decision. It’s too heavy a trip to run on my people as a boss.

Stein left his office and walked rapidly down a long hallway covered with posters, old
Flash
covers, obscene photographs, and graffiti, and into the paper’s makeup room. Two long tables filled the center of the room. On these tables, Hal Jonas, the managing editor, along with whoever was around to assist him, dummied the pages of the paper. Typeset stories hung in long strips from clips on the wall, headlines were run off on the machine in the far corner, and stacks of pictures were piled haphazardly around the room. These raw materials were cut up and pasted onto large layout sheets taped to wooden boards, which were then hung on hooks around the room in order. When all the pages were dummied, they would be taken to the printer and photo-offset, and the
Flash
would be run off. That is, the unlikely event that a printer could be found.

Jonas—a thin man in black jeans and a Hush Puppy T-shirt from Eden—was bent over a layout board pasting in the strips of a story. Next to him, Betty, the part-time receptionist, was trimming headlines with an X-acto knife. Across the table, the photo editor, Doug Kent, was leafing through a stack of pictures, and Dick O’Brian, reporter and Movement heavy, was pasting up another story. At the other table, Artie Dugan, a huge fat man in a Velvet Cloud T-shirt, was reading some copy, while Laura, Toby King, and Zip did paste-ups.

Rock music was playing in the background from an old FM radio, but it couldn’t conceal the low energy level. The paper was being dummied because it was always dummied on Tuesday, but Stein saw no soul in the work, no sense of purpose. His people knew they were dummying a paper that probably wouldn’t come out, and so they were working like Disneyland automatons of themselves. Nobody was talking to anyone else, arguing about the placement of stories or ads or pictures. They were like the human robots in the Establishment print shops Stein had worked in in Chicago two decades ago. Just doing a job of work.

It made Stein feel like a boss, and he didn’t like it.

No one said anything as he entered the room; you could cut the gloom with a knife. “How’s it coming, Hal?” Stein finally said, forced to break the silence himself.

“Okay,” Jonas said, not looking up from his work. “We’ve got enough ads for a fifty-page issue. Good piece on Camarillo. A transcript of that Leary interview. I’ll have a good issue to take down to the printer—if there is one.” With Stein spending most of his time fighting lawsuits and trying to keep the paper alive, Jonas had become
de facto
editor, and Stein realized that he was beginning to think of the
Flash
as
his
paper. He had seen this happen before with other managing editors—any managing editor who wouldn’t get on such a trip in this situation wouldn’t be worth anything as managing editor.

But Stein didn’t like feeling like an outsider in the community of his own makeup room. He had to get away from continually
saving
the paper and get back to really
running
it.

“
Are
we going to have a printer?” O’Brian asked.

“I don’t know I’m working on a couple of things.”

“Like what?” Jonas said, his nose still buried in his layout sheets.

“Ivan Blue is talking to Apple—”

“Ivan Blue is full of shit,”O’Brian said. “He’s just ego-tripping because he’s been on Cavett a couple of times. Do you really see John Lennon laying twenty thousand on Ivan?”

“Well, I’m working on an alternative, that’s why—”

“Like what?”

Betty shot Jonas a poisonous look. Stein appreciated her giving him moral support, but he didn’t like the growing factionalism it seemed to imply. Well, if I save the paper, everyone will come together again, and if I don’t it won’t really matter.

“Like Jango Beck,” Stein said. “I saw him over the—”

“Jango Beck?” O’Brian sneered. “That capitalist prick?”

“Jango is an outlaw in this society, just like us.”

“So is a junkie who knifes you for a dollar,” Jonas said. “Besides, Beck is a
cheap
capitalist prick,” O’Brian pointed out. “When have you ever heard of him laying bread on the Movement?”

“I think I have a way of getting the money out of Beck,” Stein said. “But it’s a heavy scene, and I want a vote on it.” Then, loudly: “Everyone please come over here and somebody go get the guys in the ad department, the subscription people, and Fat Jack. We’ve got an important decision to make.”

In a few minutes, Stein’s people were gathered around him; the editorial staff, the advertising department, the two girls who took care of subscriptions, the receptionist, even Fat Jack, the janitor. Only the contributing writers and photographers were missing, scattered as they were around the city and even the nation.

Barry Stein sat on the edge of one of the makeup tables, looking down on his family. Through the years, there had been a slow turnover on the paper, to the point where Stein himself was the only one of the original crew left, but the continuity, the sense of community, had always remained. Stein had had six old ladies during the paper’s eight years of life, children by three of them whom he hardly ever saw. The
Flash
became my life when I wasn’t looking, he realized. These people are the only family I’ve got, this paper is my whole world. I’m not going to let the Establishment snuff us.

Not even if I have to play just as dirty as they do.

“I don’t have to tell you that we’re really up against the wall,” he said. “In order to survive, the
Flash
must have twenty thousand dollars and someone who will print us by Thursday. Anybody have a rich uncle who also owns a printing plant?”

The dead silence that greeted this pitiful attempt at gallows humor was a bad sign. Stein found himself staring at two dozen grim faces. Worse than grim, resigned.

“We’ve been in this place before,” he went on, “and we’ve survived. And we’ll survive this too, because we have to. We’re fighting for more than just our jobs. When O’Brian came to me with that narc information that was laid on him, I could’ve played it safe and sat on it, and we’d be in the black today. But the business of the
Flash
has never been business. We exist to serve the community, and because we are the strongest voice of the counterculture, we
must
survive. At almost any cost.”

Not a flicker, not a rise out of a single face. Stein’s attempt at rousing rhetoric had gone over like Lenny Bruce at a Baptist funeral. Well, there’s nothing left to do but get down to it.

“All right,” he said, “I’ve been pursuing two lines into some bread, Ivan Blue is trying to talk Apple or John Lennon personally into—”

“Oh, wow.”

“—ego-tripping superjerk—”

“—don’t hold your breath, Barry—”

“—best you can do?—”

“—might as well talk to Mick Jagger, too—”

The hostility dismayed and suprised Stein. In the old days, there was more solidarity, the old crew had been made of harder stuff. The community spirit used to grow stronger in the face of challenges, not fall apart. These kids had no long-range sense of revolutionary struggle.

Sighing, Stein decided to turn the sullen mood to whatever advantage he could. “Okay, so I see we all agree that we can’t sit around and wait for John Lennon to drop out of the sky and save us. We’ve got to try the other approach, which is at least something we can act on. We’ve got to try to get the money out of Jango Beck.”

“—Jango Beck—”

“—somebody been dipping your cigarettes in DMT—”

“—heartless fucker—”

Stein held his hand up for quiet. “I’m under no illusions about the motivations of Jango Beck,” he said. “But Beck is in the record business, and he sells his records to our readership, so we’ve got some leverage with him if we’ve got the guts to use it.”

That shut them up. Even Jonas was looking at him intently now, wondering what old Barry was about to pull out of the hat. It was one thing to put a newspaper out, and another to run it, to be the man responsible for its continued existence.

“What do we draw in monthly ad revenue out of Dark Star?” he asked the head of the advertising department.

“Maybe a thousand.”

“Well, that sucks. We give Dark Star records an awful lot of coverage, and most of it’s been favorable this year. Quotes from Artie’s column have been plastered all over Beck’s album covers. I think that should be worth a full-page color ad in the
Flash
every week. And I think that as a gesture of solidarity, Beck should pay us for a year’s worth of ads in advance.”