Passing Through the Flame (72 page)

Jango stood up, and Stein instinctively flinched at this sudden motion. Blue and Dugan took half-steps backward. Jango’s mouth hardened; the air seemed to turn black.

“Are you finished?” Jango said.

Stein stared at him, transfixed.

“I just want to make sure you’re finished before I say anything,” Jango said neutrally. “I wouldn’t want to be accused of being impolite to the representatives of the people.”

Stein blinked. “Uh... yeah... that’s all,” he said lamely. “Good,” Jango said. “Now I will confront you with reality; it’s good for the soul. This whole scene is financially dependent on the feature film that’s being shot here. If the movie stops, everything stops, and I lose mucho bread.”

“Tough shit,” Blue blurted. The guards stiffened.

“That’s right, Blue, that’s exactly what it’ll be if you’re stupid enough to fuck around with me when there’s this kind of money involved,” Jango said. “It’ll be
your
tough shit. If you assholes hassle my film crews, I’ll stop the whole festival, shut it down, blame it on your People’s Action Coalition, and tell the people that the free party is over unless they ride your asses out of here on a rail.”

He took two menacing steps toward Stein, his face reddening, contorting into a grimace of rage that Sandra was almost certain was contrived. “And if anyone tries to pull any take-over of anything, tries to picket anything, or screw around physically in any way with MY festival, their goddamn asses will be stomped into the ground. They will be given a lesson in armed love. Now get these cock-suckers outside the fence, and don’t let them in again; they’re permanently barred from the recording area.”

Artie Dugan appealed to Sandy with puppy-dog eyes; then all three of them were physically shoved out of the shack by Jango’s guards.

As soon as they were gone, Jango shook his head, laughed, and sat down on the console again—relaxed, in control of himself, a completely different man.

“You laid that on kind of thick,” Taub said. “It could cause more trouble than it stops.”

“It
was
quite a dingo act, Jango,” Sandra said. “Too bad you couldn’t manage to foam at the mouth. What did you do a thing like that for? It’s going to mean nothing but bad vibes; it’s going to make my job hell.”

Jango smiled at her in great mock innocence. “I only aim to please,” he said. “Can you deny that I gave them exactly what they wanted?”

Paul Conrad washed a Dexamyl down with a half cup of black coffee and sat down on a packing crate that lay on the ground by a line of gray portable toilets.

The sun was beginning to set, casting deep shadows across the natural amphitheater, and people were beginning to troop back in over the southern ridgeline for the night’s performances. The grass of the saucerlike meadow was torn and wounded. Bits of paper, beverage cans, food wrappers, and a thousand other species of varicolored rubbish dotted the hillsides like a vast carpet of quick-blooming wild flowers. Soon this mess would be decently covered by the massed bodies of a quarter of a million people, but this was the hour in which day transformed itself to night, the hour in which the underside of reality made itself visible. Away over the ridgelines, the day creatures were retreating to their burrows, and the first coyote sounds of night were in the air.

“Hi,” said a voice in his ear, “remember me?”

He turned and saw Sandra, looking tired and sweaty, standing next to him. “Hi. Sit down. I’m taking a breather.”

She sat down next to him. Neither of them said anything for a long time. They just sat in the shadow of the tall stage tower, watching the hills fill up with people, listening to their voices drown out the natural dusk sounds.

“How’s it going?” Sandy finally asked.

Paul took it seriously, evaluating the day’s shooting in his mind for the first time. We’ve got Velva’s arrival and Gentry’s solo footage, and it’s not bad. And we’ve got thousands of feet of color footage from the newsreel crews. “I think we’re doing pretty okay,” he said. “I’ve given everyone but the newsreel crews a couple hours off to catch their breath. Tonight we shoot the big meeting scene between Velva and Gentry.
That’s
going to be a bitch, the first time the two of them have to act in the same shot out here.”

“That’ll give you enough time off to catch the Velvet Cloud, won’t it?” Sandy said.

“When do they go on?”

“Less than an hour. Why don’t you stick around and we could watch them together? I haven’t seen much of you lately.”

“Shooting this film here is a thirty-hour-a-day job,” Paul said. Truth is, he thought, I can’t handle any relationship outside the film now. Velva and Rick are more than enough for my head to handle. Sandy
has
been drifting out of my life, but how can I help it?

“I’ll have to get my newsreel crews rolling in about twenty minutes,” he said. “I want some coverage of tonight’s performances. Tell you what, why don’t you tag along? It’s no big deal, you won’t be in the way.”

“I was hoping to have you for myself for a while,” Sandy said, putting a hand on his knee. “I’ve had a pretty rough day, too.”

I
have
been totally wrapped up in the film, Paul realized. That old creative monomania. Not so good for someone who wants to think of herself as your old lady. But we won’t be shooting all night.

“How about if we get together in the ranch house after we finish tonight?” he said, kissing her lightly on the lips, running a finger around the shell of her ear. “Your room or mine?”

She slipped her hand into the V of his pants, and kissed him openmouthed, with just a touch of tongue. “I’ll be waiting in your bed with bells on,” she said. “Nothing but bells.”

“And I’ll ring your chimes.” But he had very little sexual feeling now, his energy seemed at low ebb—burned out for the day and not yet lit for the night. He reached into a pocket, pulled out a bag of apricots and walnuts, stuffing a big handful into his mouth as he slid his free arm around Sandra’s waist.

They sat there quietly in the deepening dusk, watching the sun sink and the great meadow fill with people, thinking their own thoughts and waiting for the night.

Sandra Bayne could just about taste the static electricity in the air as the floodlights above the stage were turned on, and roadies began setting up equipment, and the noise level of the big crowd dropped an octave.

“All right, now I just want you to shoot reaction shots in the crowd,” Paul told his final camera crew. “Everything else is covered.” He gulped down the rest of his coffee as the cameraman and sound man circled around the bottom of the stage toward the gate in the high fence.

“I sure wish I could get a camera up on that damned stage,” he said, looking across the sheds and shadows of the compound up at the island of light high above them. “Or if someone would only invent a silent helicopter. From down here, we’ll get nothing but low-angle shots and extreme zooms for close-ups.”

He shook his head, not looking at her, and lines of frustration appeared under his cheekbones as he stared up at the stage tower.

“Who gets to go up on the stage, Sandy?”

“Only the performers, during the performances.”

“What about those light towers?” Paul said, pointing up at the spidery stanchions silhouetted against the purpling sky. There were four of them at ninety-degree intervals around the circumference of the stage, like miniature, elongated Eiffel Towers, each supporting a cluster of lights controlled from the lighting shack at the south end of the fenced perimeter.

“What about them?” Sandy said uneasily.

“I wouldn’t be conspicuous up there. I wouldn’t get in anybody’s way. I wouldn’t have to shoot sound; Jango’s getting plenty of that.”

“Paul, you’re not thinking of climbing up there!”

“Why not?”

“You’re not Tarzan, for chrissakes! You’re liable to get yourself killed.”

Paul stared up at the light towers. His left arm hooked a phantom girder; his right held a spectral camera to his eye. He nodded. When he finally turned to look at her, his face was set in a monomaniacal determination, his eyes were glowing like those of a kid with anew toy. He looked a little nuts, but the crazy thing was he looked
happy
.

“Where’s Jango?” he said.

“Over by the tower stairs. He’s going to introduce the Cloud himself.”

“Let’s go,” Paul said, taking her hand and just about dragging her toward the base of the tower in a double-time trot, pausing only long enough to relieve one of his cameramen of his camera. This is nuts, Sandra thought, this is all out of proportion. He’s losing his perspective; he’s risking his life for this stupid movie!

Jango was standing inside the cagework of girders supporting the stage, leaning on the first step of the wide stage access stairs, smoking a joint. He was wearing a blinding white silk suit trimmed with black piping. The jacket opened to reveal his naked chest below a red neckerchief. Roadies pushed by him carrying an amp up the metal stairs; technicians in coveralls were nodding as he lectured them.

“Now remember to kill the lights just after I finish, and don’t do anything till Star’s actually coming up on stage. I don’t want the timing—”

“Can I talk to you a second?” Paul broke in.

“Hold on a minute,” Jango told the lighting men. “What is it, Paul?”

“I want to go up onstage to shoot.”

“You know what’ll happen if you intrude on a performance again,” Jango said.

“No intrusion. I’ll climb up one of the light stanchions and be completely out of the way. No one will even notice me. I’ll be outside the stage lights, and the high contrast will keep me completely hidden.”

Jango stared at Paul curiously for a moment, then shrugged. “It’s your ass,” he said.

“Jango—” Sandra began to appeal to Jango to stop this, but he held up his hand and cut her off.

“Man’s got a movie to make, Sandy,” he said.

“I’ll be okay,” Paul said flatly, pecking her on the lips, his mind already up there hanging from thin iron in the night.

“Go kill the number two tower lights,” Jango told the light men. “I don’t want them to see Paul climbing up there, might make for bad vibes. You’re not afraid of climbing in the dark, are you, Paul?”

Paul shook his head and skipped up the stairs to the stage-access hatch as one of the technicians trotted across the grounds to the lighting shack. He stood poised there for a few minutes; then the cluster of lights atop one of the towers flickered out to the oohs and ahhs of the crowd, and he dashed across the partially lit stage, disappearing behind one of the frail-looking stanchions. A few minutes later the tower lights came back on, and Sandra thought she could make him out in the darkness just outside the bright circle of light, inside the tower framework itself, clinging to the frame members about twelve feet above the stage, his ass hanging out over a forty-foot drop.

“Why are you letting him do this, Jango?” she asked.

Jango sucked on his joint, looking up the stairway to the stage at the arena of light isolated in the growing darkness.

“Let him?” he said. “I’m not his mother, Sandy, and neither are you.”

With his left arm crooked over one crossbar, his feet on the one below, and the camera mounted on his right shoulder, Paul’s body was scrunched over uncomfortably, but securely wedged inside the structure of the light tower. Although the air was still as crystal, when he looked out over the sea of faces, heard the oceanic mutterings of tens of thousands of expectant people, looked down on the red-and-green mandala of the stage below, it seemed as if a ghost wind were blowing through his bones, a Santa Ana of the soul.

Then the main tower lights went out and the stage below was illuminated only by pink secondary lighting so diffuse as to seem almost infrared. The crowd oohed, then guttered rapidly into a preternatural silence so vast and expectant that it seemed to have tangible substance. Paul zeroed the camera in on the access hatch in the center of the stage and shot a few feet of coverage, knowing that all he was getting was near-uniform black. Have to be stingy with film, no way to reload up here.

The four famous opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony filled the night with comically portentous tones, and on each note, a spot from each tower came on, creating a progressively brighter ring of light around the still-darkened center of the stage. Then all the lights came on, and there was Jango Beck in stage center in his shining white suit, his arms outstretched in a ringmaster’s gesture, his hand mike held like a ringmaster’s whip. An inchoate roar went up—not a cheer or a howl but a pure exhalation of sound, a cresting into voice of the building silence.

Paul shut the camera down an instant later. He would’ve liked to have kept it running the whole time, but he had to be severely selective.

“Welcome to the first night of the rest of your life,” Jango said, his amplified voice coming from everywhere and nowhere, instantly silencing the crowd with an awesome demonstration of the sound system’s subtlety and power. “Welcome to the dark. Welcome to the magic hour. Welcome to what you’ve been waiting for.”

He paused, as if savoring the silence into which he spoke. “Now a legend returns from the golden days when love was ready to conquer the world. It’s the Summer of Love, and if you close your eyes, Hendrix and Joplin live, and Dylan rides again, and the Beatles are reunited. And here we go, back to those Strawberry Fields, back to Camelot rising from the ashes, back to the Haight, back to ourselves again! They’re here! They’re live! They’re ready to take you home—Dark Star Records proudly presents the Velvet Cloud!”

Everything went black, and the vast multitude sighed. For a moment or two the naked stars were visible in the navy blue sky, and the last oranges of sunset tinted the horizon. Paul was caught up in the collective suspended breath of the crowd, wishing there were some way to capture this rapt communion as image on film. Below, he could make out figures positioning themselves on the stage in the darkness. Then a celestial guitar riff pierced the night, and organs, and drums, and the Velvet Cloud, invisible, was playing “Take This Body” in full driving stride, shaking the hillsides.