Passing Through the Flame (73 page)

Paul started shooting on the opening notes; then a single white spot hit the stage access hatch, and Star slowly ascended to the stage, already singing.

Take this body, ease your pain,

Let me take you on a trip

Back to yourself again....

She wore what seemed like layers of diaphanous veils—blue, green, purple, yellow pastel mists that clung and floated like cloud. They began to change colors again and again and again as a filter wheel revolved in front of the single spotlight, becoming a flickering, drifting rainbow cloak. Her black hair flashed with overtones of ever-changing color like oil on waves in the sun.

A strange low moaning filled the meadow, a sigh straight from the audience’s soul: joy, welcome, and nostalgic sadness for things lost. Star closed her eyes as it washed over her, seemed to dissolve into the sound, the music, the complexly warped time locus of the moment. She stepped all the way up onto the stage. In the surrounding darkness, she seemed to float in time and space in her own circle of light.

Take this body, I am yours

I will warm you, I will love you

I will flash you through the fire of my flame....

On the last line, all the stage lights came on with blinding brilliance, and around her the other four members of the Velvet Cloud were suddenly visible in simple jeans, vests, and flowered shirts.

The huge crowd shouted. It roared. It cheered. Then with a rustle of flesh and clothing of geological massiveness, a quarter of a million people rose to their feet applauding and shouting, drowning out the music and the song.

Paul felt like a mote in a hurricane, a flea clinging to some lightning rod of the gods. The crowd was applauding more than the group or Star or the music; it was applauding a lost memory of its own golden age that she had magically called up, a time and a place and a feeling that had seemed lost forever. Star had made them love and applaud themselves once more. Paul shuddered, filled with the collective emotion of the moment, humming with the soul-stirring note of lost dreams magically regained.

Trembling, he looked through the viewfinder of the camera and zoomed in for a close-up on Star. She was whirling around in half-circles, dancing in the love for her that filled the world and shook the hills, her veils whipping through the air in lagging slow motion around her, laughing and glowing like a little girl in the rain.

Around and around and around she whirled, and the applause and cheers began to dissolve into happy laughter, into swirls of motion in the crowd, and then the band picked up the rolling rhythm and began to move it, and the whole crowd was swaying to the music, to Star’s dancing. And somehow the motion of her body fluidly transmuted itself into the sound of her voice without skipping a beat, and she spun to a stop singing out into the night.

Running through the fire, Lord

Passing through the flame

The whole world is on fire,

Lord Passing through the flame....

The first notes silenced the crowd, and now a worldful of people seemed to sway in unison to the music; she was the voice, they were the body. A wailing guitar riff curled itself around her voice, merged with it, drove it onward and upward, filling the meadow, and the crowd moved to the song like the waves of the sea moving to the wind.

Weep not for this maya,

Lord, you are not to blame

We are laughing children, Lord

Passing through the flame.

Clinging to his frail tower, Paul felt the steel hum through the soles of his feet, the bones of his arms; his consciousness funneled itself through the viewfinder of the camera into the image of Star that had become his visual universe.

Her arms outflung, her breasts bobbing under the layers of foglike gauze, her voice filling the world, her eyes seemed to stare straight up at him in close-up, through the camera and into his soul. Green pools in which he yearned to dive and lose himself forever.

Star sang, and with utter certainty, Paul felt the magic flowing through the lens of the camera, through his own being, and onto the film. He felt as one with the universe, with Star, with the multitude, with himself, and with the chemical transformation recording the moment forever on the emulsion of the film. He was passing through a moment of greatness beyond his power to create or control. He was as alive as he could ever be, and everything he had done before seemed like mechanical hackwork, sleepwalking. The power was moving through Star, through the moment, through the camera, and he was a part of it.

For each of us is destiny

Passing through the flame

And each of us is ecstasy

Laughing in the rain....

“We might as well start this thing,” Barry Stein said glumly, peeking out the tent flap and counting the house one more time. “This crowd isn’t going to get any bigger, and if we wait much longer, it’ll start to shrink.”

The People’s Forum area was only half full, and those who didn’t look like Movement regulars seemed to be mainly spaced-out types just looking for a place to sit. Even as Stein watched, a thin girl whispered something to the bearded man next to her, and the two of them walked out together.

Stein turned to face the people in the Action Coordination tent. Ivan, in a clean American flag T-shirt, was sharing a joint with a good-looking little dark-haired girl he had acquired, bouncing on the balls of his feet like a fighter eager to get in the ring. O’Brian and his girl, Linda, sat side by side looking very down. Ory Battenburg paced nervously. McAllister drummed his fingers on the card table. Ruby was chewing on her lower lip, looking angry at the world in general.

Only Chris Sargent, sitting silently in a corner of the tent, seemed calm, unconcerned, and cool.

“How many people out there?” Ivan asked.

“Maybe a hundred.”

“Shit.” Ivan’s groupie looked at him with narrower eyes.

“This is a disaster,” McAllister said. “What went wrong?”

“Crappy timing,” Ruby said. “It was stupid to schedule this meeting while performances are still going on.”

“What were we supposed to do, try to get people here after one A.M.?” Ivan snapped.

Ruby whirled on him. “Let’s face it,” Stein said soothingly, “there’s just too much going on at this thing for a protest meeting like this to draw. It’s no one’s fault.”

“Barry’s right,” McAllister said. “Let’s just get this bummer over with. It’s only the first day of the festival, right?”

“Right.”

Ivan handed the joint to his girl and gave a mock Roman salute. “We who are about to bomb salute you,” he said and walked through the tent flap into the People’s Forum area. The others started filing out, except for Sargent, who sat on his chair, not moving.

“Aren’t you coming, Chris?” Ruby said.

“All this bullshit is a waste of time and effort. Besides, I see no point in making myself conspicuous. Goddamn amateurs.”

“We’ve got to try, Chris.”

“So go try. Play your little revolutionary game. Sunday, me and my boys will have to do the dirty work anyway.”

“So why did you come here?”

Sargent leered at her. “You know why.”

Ruby flushed. Her lips curled back from her teeth. She turned, taking Stein’s arm on the way out. A surge of satisfaction went through Stein. In the final analysis, Sargent was just a thug, a strong-arm boy. If Ruby stayed around him long enough, she’d see that for herself. It looked as if she were wising up to his sexist trip already. He was a walking focus of bad vibes, and the wolf pack around him was even worse. Only this afternoon, his gorillas had almost precipitated a confrontation with the security cops that could’ve blown everything. Too bad Ruby hadn’t been around to see
that!

Stein had left the People’s Forum area with Dick O’Brian to get a bite to eat. They walked back around their camp, skirted the Ecoenvironment Dome, and came out on one of the radial corridors leading through the campgrounds up to the lip of the performance area.

Stands lined both sides of the earthen pathway, selling hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza, sausages, health foods, soft drinks, cheap wine, and exotic specialties like felafel and souvlaki. The hot air was heavy with the smells of grease, meat, wine, and pot smoke, and the street was crowded with people, many of them eating the carry-away food, and most of them pretty ripped. Carnival games had been set up among the food stands—ring tosses, darts-and-balloons, baseballs-and-bottles—and there was a small Ferris wheel as well as a tacky little merry-go-round. With all the long hair, bare flesh, and dope walking around this midway reality, the place had the feel of a bizarre crossbreed between a small-time traveling carnival and the Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love.

They stopped at a little stand and bought some hot buttered corn on the cob from two black kids who couldn’t have been older than ten and twelve, then continued north looking for some beer. About twenty yards up the path, a crowd was gathering around one of the stands, and they could hear angry, shouting voices.

“Something going on,” O’Brian said. “Might be an opportunity to do a little consciousness raising. Let’s take a look.”

They trotted up to the scene of the fracas: a little stand selling bottles of cheap iced wine—Ripple, Thunderbird, Boone’s Farm—real wino fuel, about a half cut above Sterno. Bottles of the stuff sat behind the counter in tubs of cracked ice. Two large greasy-looking bozos in grimy white T-shirts stood behind the counter brandishing baseball bats at four red-eyed freaks whom Stein recognized as Sargent’s recruits.

“Man, you’re just pissing into those bottles!” one of the freaks shouted.

“Pig piss!”

“A dollar fifty a bottle for fucking
pig piss!”

One of the freaks was holding an open bottle of Ripple, and to the appreciative roars of the little crowd who had gathered around the stand, he spit a mouthful of the stuff in the general direction of the proprietors.

“A buck fifty, or I split your head open,” said the bigger of the two men behind the counter, raising his bat menacingly.

“Fuck you, pig!”

The other three freaks crowded up to the counter, their hands balled into fists. They were obviously totally ripped and just as obviously spoiling for a fight.

“What I think is that you pigs oughta donate all your wine to the people!”

“Right on!”

“I’ll donate this baseball bat up your ass, hippie, if you come any closer!”

The crowd oohed in mock terror, a sound with ominous overtones.

“You better give us the wine now, or you’re gonna be a sorry pig, come the revolution!”

“Right on!”

“Revolution up your ass!”

The four freaks lurched forward, the crowd surging behind them, and all of a sudden the two men behind the counter weren’t so belligerent anymore as they realized that they were really in physical danger. A bad scene, a really bad scene, but Stein couldn’t see anything he could do about it except maybe get his head split open.

“What’s going on here?”

Three security guards pushed their way through the crowd, using their billy clubs as prods, and neatly surrounded the four troublemakers, left, right, and rear, herding them up against the front of the stand. Two of the guards were large, beefy, and white; the third was wiry and black. All three of them wore pistols in unflapped holsters.

“These creeps got some idea of robbing us,” said one of the men behind the counter.

“Is that right?” said the biggest of the guards, a ruddy, overweight type with short blond hair who fulfilled Stein’s ideal image of a redneck Southern sheriff. He loomed over the thin longhair who had been doing most of the talking. “I’m talkin’ to you, boy.”

“Well, I’m not talking to you, pig.”

The crowd cheered, pressed closer. The other two guards turned slowly around, brandishing their clubs, and the circle of people faded back.

“Maybe we oughta take a little walk together,
boy,”
the rentacop said, grabbing the thin freak’s right arm.

“You better take your hands off our brother.”

“We’re gonna remember your face, pig.”

“We got a date on Sunday.”

The crowd grew silent. The three guards eyed their four prisoners more closely, and hands began to drift down toward holsters.

“What did you say?”

A black man in an old army shirt with corporal’s stripes elbowed his way through the crowd, holding a half-eaten hot dog. Stein recognized him as Bellows, one of Sargent’s lieutenants.

“What’s happening here, Cochrane?” Bellows asked sharply. He turned to the beefy blond security cop. “These boys causing you some trouble chief?” he smiled fatuously.

“You know these guys?”

“They’re buddies of mine, chief. They don’t mean you no harm.”

“Your partners have big mouths, boy.”

Bellows seemed to look right through the security guard, the fatuous smile still plastered across his face. “I’ve noticed that myself, chief. Happens when they get stoned. Ripped. Out of their trees. Bombed, y’know what I mean? We don’t want any trouble, and neither do you, isn’t that right, chief? Cochrane, tell the chief here you don’t want no trouble.”

Cochrane glowered at Bellows.

“I said tell the man you don’t want no trouble
,” Bellows hissed. “Yeah, well we don’t want any trouble,”Cochrane muttered. “I guess I’m a little loaded.”

“It’s a hot day, chief, and a lot of people are walking around stoned in the sun,” Bellows said. “So let’s forget it, okay?” He grinned, slapped the palm of the guard’s free hand. “Peace, brother.”

“Well, I’ll let it pass this time. But we’re gonna be watching for you boys.” The security guards disengaged and moved off through the crowd. “Have a nice day,” Bellows called after them. He turned on his men, his face abruptly twisted with rage. “Get your stupid asses out of here and back to camp!” he snarled. “Christ, what a gang of fuck-ups you are!”

Bad, bad vibes. A few minutes more of that this afternoon, and they might’ve blown everything. Stein glanced over his shoulder back into the tent at Sargent. Sargent gave him the same kind of hard-eyed stare that Bellows had hours ago, when their eyes had chanced to meet as he herded his men through the crowd. There was no warmth in that look, no sense of comradeship, not a human inkling that they were partners in the same enterprise. In fact, now as then, Stein felt he was being regarded with contempt. Sooner or later Ruby will see what he is, he thought. He turned, and with Ruby on his arm, followed the others out into the People’s Forum area.